Sacred and Powerful
Historically, a menstruating woman was considered sacred and powerful, with increased psychic abilities, and strong enough to heal the sick According to the Cherokee, menstrual blood was a source of feminine strength and had the power to destroy enemies. In Ancient Rome, Pliny the Elder wrote that a menstruating woman who uncovers her body can scare away hailstorms, whirlwinds and lightning. If she strips naked and walks around the field, caterpillars, worms and beetles fall off the ears of corn. Menstrual blood is especially dangerous to men's power. In Africa, menstrual blood is used in the most powerful magic charms to both purify and destroy.
Read more about this topic: Culture And Menstruation
Famous quotes containing the words sacred and, sacred and/or powerful:
“The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation, and even with obscene symbols; in the religions of antiquity the sacred and the obscene often lay very close together. These men knew how to pay homage to death. For death is worthy of homage as the cradle of life, as the womb of palingenesis.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“God of justice, God of mercy,
Make us merciful and just!
Help us see all your creation
As from you a sacred trust.
And when people cry in anguish
For their own or others’ pain,
Show us ways to make a difference
O dear God, make us humane!”
—Jane Parker Huber (b. 1926)
“Justice in the hands of the powerful is merely a governing system like any other. Why call it justice? Let us rather call it injustice, but of a sly effective order, based entirely on cruel knowledge of the resistance of the weak, their capacity for pain, humiliation and misery. Injustice sustained at the exact degree of necessary tension to turn the cogs of the huge machine-for- the-making-of-rich-men, without bursting the boiler.”
—Georges Bernanos (1888–1948)