Yet the twofold influence of the menstruating woman remains clear when we review the whole group of influences which in this state she is supposed to exert.  She by no means acts only by paralyzing social activities and destroying the powers of life, by causing flowers to fade, fruit to fall from the trees, grains to lose their germinative power, and grafts to die.  She is not accurately summed up in the old lines:—­

    “Oh! menstruating woman, thou’rt a fiend
    From whom all nature should be closely screened.”

Her powers are also beneficial.  A woman at this time, as AElian expressed it, is in regular communication with the starry bodies.  Even at other times a woman when led naked around the orchard protected it from caterpillars, said Pliny, and this belief is acted upon (according to Bastanzi) even in the Italy of to-day.[367] A garment stained with a virgin’s menstrual blood, it is said in Bavaria, is a certain safeguard against cuts and stabs.  It will also extinguish fire.  It was valuable as a love-philter; as a medicine its uses have been endless.[368] A sect of Valentinians even attributed sacramental virtues to menstrual blood, and partook of it as the blood of Christ.  The Church soon, however, acquired a horror of menstruating women; they were frequently not allowed to take the sacrament or to enter sacred places, and it was sometimes thought best to prohibit the presence of women altogether.[369] The Anglo-Saxon Penitentials declared that menstruating women must not enter a church.  It appears to have been Gregory II who overturned this doctrine.

In our own time the slow disintegration of primitive animistic conceptions, aided certainly by the degraded conception of sexual phenomena taught by mediaeval monks—­for whom woman was “templum aedificatum super cloacam”—­has led to a disbelief in the more salutary influences of the menstruating woman.  A fairly widespread faith in her pernicious influence alone survives.  It may be traced even in practical and commercial—­one might add, medical—­quarters.  In the great sugar-refineries in the North of France the regulations strictly forbid a woman to enter the factory while the sugar is boiling or cooling, the reason given being that, if a woman were to enter during her period, the sugar would blacken.  For the same reason—­to turn to the East—­no woman is employed in the opium manufactory at Saigon, it being said that the opium would turn and become bitter, while Annamite women say that it is very difficult for them to prepare opium-pipes during the catamenial period.[370] In India, again, when a native in charge of a limekiln which had gone wrong, declared that one of the women workers must be menstruating, all the women—­Hindus, Mahometans, aboriginal Gonds, etc.,—­showed by their energetic denials that they understood this superstition.[371]