Menstruation taboo in Rome, Judaism, and China

Ancient Rome

Menstruation taboo is popularly held throughout history. Here's a selection of quotes.

Pliny the Elder, the most famous naturalist of ancient Rome, stated that:

Contact with [menstrual blood] turns new wine sour, crops touched by it become barren, grafts die, seed in gardens are dried up, the fruit of trees fall off, the edge of steel and the gleam of ivory are dulled, hives of bees die, even bronze and iron are at once seized by rust, and a horrible smell fills the air; to taste it drives dogs mad and infects their bites with an incurable poison.

-- Pliny the Elder, Natural History, Book 7, Chapter 13

Basically, menstruation blood causes rabies in dogs. Not to worry though, later in Book 28, Chapter 28, Pliny stated that a strip of cloth dipped in menstrual blood can cure rabies in humans... because homeopathy! In the same chapter, he also quoted (without agreeing) other magical beliefs about menstruation:

hailstorms, they say, whirlwinds, and lightning even, will be scared away by a woman uncovering her body while her monthly courses are upon her. The same, too, with all other kinds of tempestuous weather; and out at sea, a storm may be lulled by a woman uncovering her body merely, even though not menstruating at the time... If the menstrual discharge coincides with an eclipse of the moon or sun, the evils resulting from it are irremediable... if a woman strips herself naked while she is menstruating, and walks round a field of wheat, the caterpillars, worms, beetles, and other vermin, will fall from off the ears of corn... this is not done at sun-rise, for if so, the crop will wither and dry up. Young vines, too, it is said, are injured irremediably by the touch of a woman in this state; and both rue and ivy, plants possessed of highly medicinal virtues, will die instantly upon being touched by her.

Judaism

The Bible deals with menstruation mainly in chapter 15 of Leviticus, which is basically a collection of rules for Jews around the 4th century BC. It was a long list of how unclean menstruating women are. It ends with a ritual for making her clean again.

When a woman has her regular flow of blood, the impurity of her monthly period will last seven days, and anyone who touches her will be unclean till evening.

And the priest shall offer the one for a sin offering, and the other for a burnt offering; and the priest shall make an atonement for her before the LORD for the issue of her uncleanness. 

-- Leviticus 15:19, 30

Here, "sin offering" is better translated as "purification offering", which is a sacrifice to God to apologize for unintentionally breaking a rule. Menstruation breaks the rule about contacting with blood. Similarly, childbirth also required a purification offering.

These ancient Jewish laws still hold power over conservative Jews to this day. According to Wikipedia,

In Orthodox Judaism nowadays, zavah (an abnormal discharge) and niddah (healthy menstruation) are no longer distinguished. A menstruating woman (niddah) is required to wait the seven additional clean days that she would if she were a zavah.

Other than the Leviticus, a few other places mention menstruation, but as a metaphor for uncleanness.

Jerusalem has sinned greatly; therefore she has become an object of scorn. All who honored her now despise her, for they have seen her nakedness; she herself groans and turns away. Her uncleanness stains her skirts; she did not consider her end. Her downfall was astounding; there was no one to comfort her.

-- Lamentations 1:8

These are all from the Old Testament, though. The New Testament has no mention of menstruation as an unclean thing. Considering this, the Bible endorsement of menstruation taboo is firmly in the (old) Judaism part, not the (new) Christianity part.

China

Intermission: Placenta

There are a lot of weird things used in Traditional Chinese Medicine, such as 紫河车 (human placenta), which was described approvingly in the 本草纲目 (Compendium of Materia Medica), chapter 人胞 (Human fetus). No, that chapter does not describe using human fetus for medicine. Just the placenta.

I was going to do a post on eating human placenta, but there are enough reports already.

So have just one cool photo of dried placenta instead!

"Produced in: Guangdong"

"Effect: warms the kidney, refills the essence; good for the qi and nurtures the blood."

"Storage: put in a dry place, avoid bugs."

Also have this extremely cursed cookbook from Wikipedia: Cookbook:Placenta.

Intermission end

The first menstruation blood of women is called 红铅 (red lead), and it is supposed to have very strong yang energy, thus it is a good medicine for men. The emperor Jiajing took this a bit too seriously. He was a Taoist and searched for the elixir of eternal life, and got the idea that red lead is a necessary ingredient in elixir. So he collected many young girls and made them only eat mulberry leaves and rainwater to keep them pure. Girls who developed illnesses were thrown out and they could be beaten for the slightest offence

Menstruation riot

Eventually this drove a group of such girls into forming a conspiracy to kill emperor Jiajing. This was called 壬寅宫变 palace plot of Renyi year:

In 1542, the emperor was staying in Consort Duan's quarters. A group of palace women pretended to wait on him, tied a rope around his neck and attempted to strangle him. They failed to do so and, in the meantime, one of them got cold feet and went to alert Empress Fang. The empress hurried over and the palace eunuchs revived the emperor. The palace women were all arrested.

The palace women in the plot were all executed, obviously. Jiajing was also very shaken by this event, became a total recluse, and moved into a new palace, perhaps to avoid possible revenge from the angry ghosts of those palace women (Building an Immortal Land: The Ming Jiajing Emperor's West Park, MCK Wan, 2009).

Menstruation is the supreme "yin" energy in Chinese thought

The following material is from Chu, Cordia Ming-Yeuk, ‘Menstrual Beliefs and Practices of Chinese Women’, Journal of the Folklore Institute, 17.1 (1980), 38 <https://doi.org/10/fjf8rz>.

Yin and yang stand respectively for negative and positive, moon and sun, dark and light, cold and hot, water and fire, soft and hard, female and male, death and life, private and public, and inside and outside. They are the two component parts of the universe and though they are in constant opposition, at the same time they complement each other and make up the whole. As long asyin and yang are balanced, the universe is in order.

Female and blood are both identified as yin. Menstrual blood is called "monthly water" (月水), and is associated with the moon and the tides, both also yin.26 During her period, a woman has a very strong yin influence flowing in her body. She is considered to be in a state of extreme imbalance toward yin and in a weakened condition.

This extreme "yin"ness of menstrual blood has been applied to warfare, as noted below.

Menstruation on the battlefield

During the Boxer Rebellion, menstruation was weaponized. From (Chu, 1980):

When Empress Cixi asked Tsai I, one of the Manchu princes, why the Boxers, who were supposedly made invulnerable to harm from knives and guns through a magic spell, could lose the battle, he explained that the foreigners used the "women's dirty thing" to break the Boxers' magic and defeat them. 

At the same time, many of the boxers believed that clothes stained with menstrual blood could stop the cannons. As described by 曹聚仁 Cao Juren, in 无题 Untitled (申报 自由谈 1933-06-04):

破红衣炮弹的唯一妙物，就是女人的月经布，满城高挂，炮弹不飞，炮身自裂，效验如神

The only thing that can defeat the Red Barbarian Cannon is the menstrual cloth. Hang them high on the castle walls, and the cannons won't fire, the cannonballs would break apart. Works like magic.

This belief was likely because menstruation is extremely "yin", so it can destroy the power of "yang" that cannons use, because yang = fire = explosions and gunpowder.

Menstruation in Chinese Buddhism

As I mentioned before, the Blood Bowl Sutra is a popular 12th century Buddhist sutra:

The Blood Bowl Sutra describes how Maudgalyāyana, disciple of the Buddha famous for his supernatural or magical powers, descended to hell to save his mother. He finds her in the company of women who are tormented by the hell wardens and are forced to drink their own menstrual blood. They are punished like this because the blood produced by their bodies pollutes the ground and offends the earth gods, or ends up in rivers from which the water to make tea for holy men is drawn.

This is decidedly not "canon" among the Buddhists, and it's probably a simple Buddhization of the traditional Chinese belief in the impurity of menstruation.

From (Chu, 1980):

Anthropologist Gary Seaman recorded an absolution ritual for this "sin" in a film taken in the P'u-li area of Taiwan entitled "Breaking the Blood Bowl" [打血盆]. He shows one aspect of a woman's funeral rites in which a man acts as a Buddha and leads the mourners into hell; there the children of the deceased drink a red liquid symbolizing the blood of their birth, and in so doing free their mother from the tortures of hell. A famous Buddhist story Mu-lien Chiu Mu [目连救母, "Maudgalyāyana saving his mother"], about a filial son, Mu-lien, who was taken into heaven for rescuing his mother from hell, was made into a commercial movie and shown in Taiwan in 1975. Susan Naquin reports that the scene of the suffering mother floundering in the blood-pond made a vivid impression on the audience.

Menstruation in Shinto

Japan has a similar conception of menstrual uncleanness, couched in the language of "kegare", the sacred pollution of Shinto.

Shinto is the traditional religion of Japan, and in it, the concept of kegare is important, meaning "pollution, dirt". Kegare has nothing to do with intentions, only actions, and it's usually caused by touching dirty things, such as death, childbirth, disease, and menstruation.