The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 03 of 12)

§ 3. Women tabooed at Menstruation and Childbirth

Taboos imposed on women at menstruation.

In general, we may say that the prohibition to use the vessels, garments, and so on of certain persons, and the effects supposed to follow an infraction of the rule, are exactly the same whether the persons to whom the things belong are sacred or what we might call unclean and polluted. As the garments which have been touched by a sacred chief kill those who handle them, so do the things which have been touched by a menstruous woman. An Australian blackfellow, who discovered that his wife had lain on his blanket at her menstrual period, killed her and died of terror himself within a fortnight.⁵¹⁶ Hence Australian women at these times are forbidden under pain of death to touch anything that men use, or even to walk on a path that any man frequents. They are also secluded at childbirth, and all vessels used by them during their seclusion are burned.⁵¹⁷ In Uganda the pots which a woman touches while the impurity of childbirth or of menstruation is on her should be destroyed; spears and shields defiled by her touch are not destroyed but only purified.⁵¹⁸ No Esquimaux of Alaska will willingly drink out of the same cup or eat out of the same dish that has been used by a woman at her confinement until it has been purified by certain incantations.⁵¹⁹ Amongst some of the Indians of North America, women at menstruation are forbidden to touch men's utensils, which would be so defiled by their touch that their subsequent use would be attended by certain mischief or misfortune.⁵²⁰ For instance, in some of the Tinneh or Déné tribes girls verging on maturity take care that the dishes out of which they eat are used by no one else. When their first periodical sickness comes on, they are fed by their mothers or nearest kinswomen, and will on no account touch their food with their own hands. At the same time they abstain from touching their heads with their hands, and keep a small stick to scratch their heads with when they itch. They remain outside the house in a hut built for the purpose, and wear a skull-cap made of skin to fit very tight, which they never lay aside till the first monthly infirmity is over. A fringe of shells, bones, and so on hangs down from their forehead so as to cover their eyes, lest any malicious sorcerer should harm them during this critical period.⁵²¹ “Among all the Déné and most other American tribes, hardly any other being was the object of so much dread as a menstruating woman. As soon as signs of that condition made themselves apparent in a young girl she was carefully segregated from all but female company, and had to live by herself in a small hut away from the gaze of the villagers or of the male members of the roving band. While in that awful state, she had to abstain from touching anything belonging to man, or the spoils of any venison or other animal, lest she would thereby pollute the same, and condemn the hunters to failure, owing to the anger of the game thus slighted. Dried fish formed her diet, and cold water, absorbed through a drinking tube, was her only beverage. Moreover, as the very sight of her was dangerous to society, a special skin bonnet, with fringes falling over her face down to her breast, hid her from the public gaze, even some time after she had recovered her normal state.”⁵²² Among the Bribri Indians of Costa Rica a menstruous woman is regarded as unclean (bukuru). The only plates she may use for her food are banana leaves, which, when she has done with them, she throws away in some sequestered spot; for were a cow to find them and eat them, the animal would waste away and perish. And she drinks out of a special vessel for a like reason; because if any one drank out of the same cup after her, he would surely die.⁵²³ In the islands of Mabuiag and Saibai, in Torres Straits, girls at their first menstruation are strictly secluded from the sight of men. In Mabuiag the seclusion lasts three months, in Saibai about a fortnight. During the time of her separation the girl is forbidden to feed herself or to handle food, which is put into her mouth by women or girls told off to wait on her.⁵²⁴

Taboos imposed on women in childbed.

Among many peoples similar restrictions are imposed on women in childbed and apparently for similar reasons; at such periods women are supposed to be in a dangerous condition which would infect any person or thing they might touch; hence they are put into quarantine until, with the recovery of their health and strength, the imaginary danger has passed away. Thus, in Tahiti a woman after childbirth was secluded for a fortnight or three weeks in a temporary hut erected on sacred ground; during the time of her seclusion she was debarred from touching provisions, and had to be fed by another. Further, if any one else touched the child at this period, he was subjected to the same restrictions as the mother until the ceremony of her purification had been performed.⁵²⁵ Similarly in Manahiki, an island of the Southern Pacific, for ten days after her delivery a woman was not allowed to handle food, and had to be fed by some other person.⁵²⁶ In the Sinaugolo tribe of British New Guinea, for about a month after her confinement a woman may not prepare or handle food; she may not even cook for herself, and when she is eating the food made ready for her by her friends she must use a sharpened stick to transfer it to her mouth.⁵²⁷ Similarly in the Roro and Mekeo districts of British New Guinea a woman after childbirth becomes for a time taboo (opu), and any person or thing she may chance to touch becomes taboo also. Accordingly during this time she abstains from cooking; for were she to cook food, not only the victuals themselves but the pot and the fire would be tabooed, so that nobody could eat the victuals, or use the pot, or warm himself at the fire. Further at meals she may not dip her hand into the dish and help herself, as the natives commonly do; she must use for the purpose a long fork, with which she takes up the bananas, sweet potatoes, yams, and so forth, in order not to contaminate the rest of the food in the vessel by the touch of her fingers. If she wishes to drink, a gourd is set before her, and wrapping up her hands in a cloth or coco-nut fibre she pours the water into a small calabash for her use; or she may pour the water directly into her mouth without letting the gourd touch her lips. If anything has to be handed to her, it is not given from hand to hand but reached to her at the end of a long stick.⁵²⁸ Similarly in the island of Kadiak, off Alaska, a woman about to be delivered retires to a miserable low hovel built of reeds, where she must remain for twenty days after the birth of her child, whatever the season may be, and she is considered so unclean that no one will touch her, and food is reached to her on sticks.⁵²⁹ In the Ba-Pedi and Ba-Thonga tribes of South Africa a woman in childbed may not touch her food with her hands all the time of her seclusion; she must eat with the help of a wooden spoon. They think that if she touched her victuals she might infect them with her bloody flux, and that having partaken of such tainted food she would fall into a consumption.⁵³⁰ The Bribri Indians regard the pollution of childbed as much more dangerous even than that of menstruation. When a woman feels her time approaching, she informs her husband, who makes haste to build a hut for her in a lonely spot. There she must live alone, holding no converse with anybody save her mother or another woman. After her delivery the medicine-man purifies her by breathing on her and laying an animal, it matters not what, upon her. But even this ceremony only mitigates her uncleanness into a state considered to be equivalent to that of a menstruous woman; and for a full lunar month she must live apart from her housemates, observing the same rules with regard to eating and drinking as at her monthly periods. The case is still worse, the pollution is still more deadly, if she has had a miscarriage or has been delivered of a stillborn child. In that case she may not go near a living soul: the mere contact with things she has used is exceedingly dangerous: her food is handed to her at the end of a long stick. This lasts generally for three weeks, after which she may go home subject only to the restrictions incident to an ordinary confinement.⁵³¹ Among the Adivi or forest Gollas of Southern India, when a woman feels the first pains of labour, she is turned clean out of the village and must take up her quarters in a little hut made of leaves or mats about two hundred yards away. In this hut she must bring forth her offspring unaided, unless a midwife can be fetched in time to be with her before the child is born; if the midwife arrives after the birth has taken place she may not go near the woman. For ninety days the mother lives in the hut by herself. If any one touches her, he or she becomes, like the mother herself, an outcast and is expelled from the village for three months, The woman's husband generally makes a little hut about fifty yards from hers and stays in it sometimes to watch over her, but he may not go near her on pain of being an outcast for three months. Food is placed on the ground near the woman's hut and she takes it. On the fourth day after the birth a woman of the village goes to her and pours water on her, but may not come into contact with her. On the fifth day the villagers clear away the stones and thorny bushes from a patch of ground about ten yards on the village side of the hut, and to this clearing the woman removes her hut unaided; no one may help her to do so. On the ninth, fifteenth, and thirtieth days she again shifts her hut nearer and nearer to the village; and again once in each of the two following months she brings her hut still nearer. On the ninetieth day of her seclusion the woman is called out from her hut, washed, clad in clean clothes, and after being taken to the village temple is conducted to her own house by a man of the caste, who performs purificatory ceremonies.⁵³²

Dangers apprehended from women in childbed.

These customs shew that in the opinion of some primitive peoples a woman at and after childbirth is pervaded by a certain dangerous influence which can infect anything and anybody she touches; so that in the interest of the community it becomes necessary to seclude her from society for a while until the virulence of the infection has passed away, when, after submitting to certain rites of purification, she is again free to mingle with her fellows. This dread of lying-in women appears to be widespread, for the practice of shutting them up at such times in lonely huts away from the rest of the people is very common. Sometimes the nature of the danger which is apprehended from them is explicitly stated. Thus in the island of Tumleo, off German New Guinea, after the birth of her first child a woman is shut up with her infant for five to eight days, during which no man, not even her husband, may see her; for the men think that were they to see her, their bodies would swell up and they would die.⁵³³ Apparently their notion is that the sight of a woman who has just been big with child will, on the principles of homoeopathic magic, make their bodies big also to bursting. The Sulka of New Britain imagine that, when a woman has been delivered of a child, the men become cowardly, weapons lose their force, and the slips which are to be planted out are deprived of their power of germinating. Hence they perform a ceremony which is intended to counteract this mysterious influence on men and plants. As soon as it is known that a woman has been brought to bed, all the male population of the village assembles in the men's clubhouse. Branches of a strong-smelling tree are fetched, the twigs are broken off, the leaves stripped off and put on the fire. All the men present then seize branches with young buds. One of them holds ginger in his hand, which, after reciting a spell over it, he distributes to the others. They chew it and spit it out on the twigs, and these twigs are afterwards laid on the shields and other weapons in the house, and also on the slips which are to be planted; moreover they are fastened on the roofs and over the doorways of the houses. In this way they seek to annul the noxious infection of childbirth.⁵³⁴ Among the Yabim of German New Guinea, when a birth has taken place in the village, all the inhabitants remain at home next morning “in order that the fruits of the field may not be spoiled.”⁵³⁵ Apparently they fear that if they went out to their fields and gardens immediately after a woman had been brought to bed, they would carry with them a dangerous contagion which might blight the crops. When a Herero woman has given birth to a child, her female companions hastily construct a special hut for her to which she is transferred. Both the hut and the woman are sacred and “for this reason, the men are not allowed to see the lying-in woman until the navel string has separated from the child, otherwise they would become weaklings, and when later they yumbana, that is, go to war with spear and bow, they would be shot.”⁵³⁶ Thus the Herero like the Sulka appear to imagine that the weakness of a lying-in woman can, on the principles of homoeopathic magic, infect any men who may chance to see her.

Dangers apprehended from women in childbed by Indians and Esquimaux.

Among the Saragacos Indians of eastern Ecuador, as soon as a woman feels the travail-pangs beginning, she retires into the forest to a distance of three or four leagues from her home, where she takes up her abode in a hut of leaves which has been already prepared for her. “This banishment,” we are told, “is the fruit of the superstition of these Indians, who are persuaded that the spirit of evil would attach himself to their house if the women were brought to bed in it.”⁵³⁷ The Esquimaux of Baffin Land think that the body of a lying-in woman exhales a vapour which would adhere to the souls of seals if she ate the flesh of any seals except such as have been caught by her husband, by a boy, or by an aged man. “Cases of premature birth require particularly careful treatment. The event must be announced publicly, else dire results will follow. If a woman should conceal from the other people that she has had a premature birth, they might come near her, or even eat in her hut of the seals procured by her husband. The vapor arising from her would thus affect them, and they would be avoided by the seals. The transgression would also become attached to the soul of the seal, which would take it down to Sedna,” the mythical mother of the sea-mammals, who lives in the lower world and controls the destinies of mankind.⁵³⁸

Dangers apprehended from women in childbed by Bantu tribes of South Africa. Dangers apprehended from a concealed miscarriage.

Some Bantu tribes of South Africa entertain even more exaggerated notions of the virulent infection spread by a woman who has had a miscarriage and has concealed it. An experienced observer of these people tells us that the blood of childbirth “appears to the eyes of the South Africans to be tainted with a pollution still more dangerous than that of the menstrual fluid. The husband is excluded from the hut for eight days of the lying-in period, chiefly from fear that he might be contaminated by this secretion. He dare not take his child in his arms for the three first months after the birth. But the secretion of childbed is particularly terrible when it is the product of a miscarriage, especially a concealed miscarriage. In this case it is not merely the man who is threatened or killed, it is the whole country, it is the sky itself which suffers. By a curious association of ideas a physiological fact causes cosmic troubles!”⁵³⁹ Thus, for example, the Ba-Pedi believe that a woman who has procured abortion can kill a man merely by lying with him; her victim is poisoned, shrivels up, and dies within a week. As for the disastrous effect which a miscarriage may have on the whole country I will quote the words of a medicine-man and rain-maker of the Ba-Pedi tribe: “When a woman has had a miscarriage, when she has allowed her blood to flow, and has hidden the child, it is enough to cause the burning winds to blow and to parch the country with heat. The rain no longer falls, for the country is no longer in order. When the rain approaches the place where the blood is, it will not dare to approach. It will fear and remain at a distance. That woman has committed a great fault. She has spoiled the country of the chief, for she has hidden blood which had not yet been well congealed to fashion a man. That blood is taboo (yila). It should never drip on the road! The chief will assemble his men and say to them, ‘Are you in order in your villages?’ Some one will answer, ‘Such and such a woman was pregnant and we have not yet seen the child which she has given birth to.’ Then they go and arrest the woman. They say to her, ‘Shew us where you have hidden it.’ They go and dig at the spot, they sprinkle the hole with a decoction of mbendoula and nyangale (two sorts of roots) prepared in a special pot. They take a little of the earth of this grave, they throw it into the river, then they bring back water from the river and sprinkle it where she shed her blood. She herself must wash every day with the medicine. Then the country will be moistened again (by rain). Further, we (medicine-men) summon the women of the country; we tell them to prepare a ball of the earth which contains the blood. They bring it to us one morning. If we wish to prepare medicine with which to sprinkle the whole country, we crumble this earth to powder; at the end of five days we send little boys and little girls, girls that yet know nothing of women's affairs and have not yet had relations with men. We put the medicine in the horns of oxen, and these children go to all the fords, to all the entrances of the country. A little girl turns up the soil with her mattock, the others dip a branch in the horn and sprinkle the inside of the hole saying, ‘Rain! rain!’ So we remove the misfortune which the women have brought on the roads; the rain will be able to come. The country is purified!”⁵⁴⁰

Belief of the Ba-Thonga that severe droughts result from the concealment of miscarriages by women.

Similarly the Ba-Thonga, another Bantu tribe of South Africa in the valley of the Limpopo river, attribute severe droughts to the concealment of miscarriages by women, and they perform the following rites to remove the pollution and procure rain. A small clearing is made in a thick and thorny wood, and here a pot is buried in the ground so that its mouth is flush with the surface. From the pot four channels run in the form of a cross to the four cardinal points of the horizon. Then a black ox or a black ram, without a speck of white on it, is killed and the pot is stuffed with the half-digested grass found in the animal's stomach. Next, little girls, still in the age of innocence, are sent to draw water, which they pour into the pot till it overflows into the four channels. After that the women assemble, strip off their clothes, and covering their nakedness only with a scanty petticoat of grass they dance, leap, and sing, “Rain, fall!” Then they go and dig up the remains of the prematurely born infants and of twins buried in dry ground on a hill. These they collect in one place. No man may approach the spot. The women would beat any male who might be so indiscreet as to intrude on their privacy, and they would put riddles to him which he would have to answer in the most filthy language borrowed from the circumcision ceremonies; for obscene words, which are usually forbidden, are customary and legitimate on these occasions. The women pour water on the graves of the infants and of twins in order to “extinguish” (timula) them, as the natives phrase it; which seems to imply that the graves are thought to be the source of the scorching heat which is blasting the country. At the fall of evening they bury all the remains they have discovered, poking them away in the mud near a stream. Then the rain will be free to fall.⁵⁴¹ In these ceremonies the pouring of water into channels which run in the direction of the four quarters of the heaven is clearly a charm based on the principles of homoeopathic magic to procure rain. The supposed influence of twins over the waters of heaven and the use of foul language at rain-making ceremonies have been illustrated in another part of this work.⁵⁴²

Dangers apprehended from women in childbed by some tribes of Annam.

Among the natives of the Nguôn So'n valley in Annam, during the first month after a woman has been delivered of a child, all the persons of the house are supposed to be affected with an evil destiny or ill luck called phong long. If a member of such a household enters another house, the inmates never fail to say to him, “You bring me the phong long!” Should a member of a family in which somebody is seriously ill have to enter a house infected by the phong long, on returning home he always fumigates himself with tea leaves or some other plant in order to rid himself of the infection which he has contracted; for they fear that the blood of the woman who has been brought to bed may harm the patient. All the time a house is tainted with the phong long, a branch of cactus (Euphorbia antiquorum) or pandanus is hung at the door. The same thing is done to a house infected by small-pox: it is a danger signal to warn people off. The phong long only disappears when the woman has gone to market for the first time after her delivery.⁵⁴³ A trace of a similar belief in the dangerous infection of childbirth may be seen in the rule of ancient Greek religion, which forbade persons who had handled a corpse or been in contact with a lying-in woman to enter a temple or approach an altar for a certain time, sometimes for two days.⁵⁴⁴

Taboos imposed on lads at initiation.

Restrictions and taboos like those laid on menstruous and lying-in women are imposed by some savages on lads at the initiatory rites which celebrate the attainment of puberty; hence we may infer that at such times young men are supposed to be in a state like that of women at menstruation and in childbed. Thus, among the Creek Indians a lad at initiation had to abstain for twelve moons from picking his ears or scratching his head with his fingers; he had to use a small stick for these purposes. For four moons he must have a fire of his own to cook his food at; and a little girl, a virgin, might cook for him. During the fifth moon any person might cook for him, but he must serve himself first, and use one spoon and pan. On the fifth day of the twelfth moon he gathered corn cobs, burned them to ashes, and with the ashes rubbed his body all over. At the end of the twelfth moon he sweated under blankets, and then bathed in water, which ended the ceremony. While the ceremonies lasted, he might touch no one but lads who were undergoing a like course of initiation.⁵⁴⁵ Caffre boys at circumcision live secluded in a special hut; they are smeared from head to foot with white clay; they wear tall head-dresses with horn-like projections and short skirts like those of ballet-dancers. When their wounds are healed, all the vessels which they had used during their seclusion and the boyish mantles which they had hitherto worn are burned, together with the hut, and the boys rush away from the burning hut without looking back, “lest a fearful curse should cling to them.” After that they are bathed, anointed, and clad in new garments.⁵⁴⁶