Not only menstrual blood but any kind of
blood is the object of such feelings among savage and barbarous peoples.
All sorts of precautions must be observed with regard to blood; in it
resides a divine principle, or as Romans, Jews, and Arabs believed, life
itself. The prohibition to drink wine, the blood of the grape, found among
some peoples, is traced to its resemblance to blood, and to its
sacrificial employment (as among the ancient Arabians and still in the
Christian sacrament) as a substitute for drinking blood. Throughout, blood
is generally taboo, and it taboos everything that comes in contact with
it. Now woman is chronically "the theatre of bloody manifestations," and
therefore she tends to become chronically taboo for the other members of
the community. "A more or less conscious anxiety, a certain religious
fear, cannot fail to enter into all the relations of her companions with
her, and that is why all such relations are reduced to a minimum.
Relations of a sexual character are specially excluded. In the first
place, such relations are so intimate that they are incompatible with the
sort of repulsion which the sexes must experience for each other; the
barrier between them does not permit of such a close union. In the second
place, the organs of the body here specially concerned are precisely the
source of the dreaded manifestations. Thus it is natural that the feelings
of aversion inspired by women attain their greatest intensity at this
point.
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