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While their uncleanness lasted they had to prepare their own food. The men believed that if they were to approach a menstruous woman, they would fall ill, and that some mishap would overtake them when they went to the wars.

In like manner among the Piapocos, an Indian tribe on the Guayabero, a tributary of the Orinoco, a menstruous woman is secluded from her family every month for four or five days. She passes the time in a special hut, whither her husband brings her food; and at the end of the time she takes a bath and resumes her usual occupations.

And hence, as I have said, all the righteousness they seek to accomplish is but as a menstruous cloth and filthy rags; therefore they are sinners still. Indeed, to some men's thinking, the Pharisee is holier than the Publican; but in God's sight, in the eyes of Divine justice, they stand alike condemned. 'All have sinned'; there is the poison!

Barrenness makes women look young, because they are free from those pains and sorrows which other women are accustomed to. Yet they have not the full perfection of health which other women enjoy, because they are not rightly purged of the menstruous blood and superfluous seed, which are the principal cause of most uterine diseases.

As to menstruation, it is defined as a monthly flow of bad and useless blood, and of the super-abundance of it, for it is an excrement in quality, though it is pure and incorrupt, like the blood in the veins. And that the menstruous blood is pure in itself, and of the same quality as that in the veins, is proved in two ways.

The Stseelis Indians of British Columbia imagined that if a menstruous woman were to step over a bundle of arrows, the arrows would thereby be rendered useless and might even cause the death of their owner; and similarly that if she passed in front of a hunter who carried a gun, the weapon would never shoot straight again.

The Stseelis Indians of British Columbia imagined that if a menstruous woman were to step over a bundle of arrows, the arrows would thereby be rendered useless and might even cause the death of their owner; and similarly that if she passed in front of a hunter who carried a gun, the weapon would never shoot straight again.

In Fiji a pregnant wife may not wait upon her husband. In the Caroline Islands men may not eat with their wives when pregnant, but small boys are allowed to do so. The avoidance of the menstruous woman is an even more widespread custom than the shunning of pregnancy, probably because this function was interpreted as a symptom of demonic possession.

Nor can any man, be he who he will, and though he watches, prays, strives, denies himself, and puts his body under what chastisement or hardships he can; yea, though he also get his spirit and soul hoisted up to the highest peg or pin of sanctity and holy contemplation, and so his lusts to the greatest degree of mortification; but sin will be with him in the best of his performances: with him, I say, to pollute and defile his duties, and to make his righteousness speckled and spotted, filthy and menstruous.

The false Courses, or Whites. From the womb, not only the menstruous blood proceeds, but many evacuations, which were summed up by the ancients under the title of rhoos gunaikeios, which is the distillation of a variety of corrupt humours through the womb, which flow from the whole body or a part of it, varying both in courses and colour.