When
the woman has recovered, she is painted red and white, her head
covered with feathers, and returns to the camp."
In Muralug, one of the Torres Straits Islands, a menstruous woman
may not eat anything that lives in the sea, else the natives believe
that the fisheries would fail. In Galela, to the west of New Guinea,
women at their monthly periods may not enter a tobacco-field, or the
plants would be attacked by disease. The Minangkabauers of Sumatra
are persuaded that if a woman in her unclean state were to go near a
rice-field, the crop would be spoiled.
The Bushmen of South Africa think that, by a glance of a girl's eye
at the time when she ought to be kept in strict retirement, men
become fixed in whatever positions they happen to occupy, with
whatever they were holding in their hands, and are changed into
trees that talk. Cattle-rearing tribes of South Africa hold that
their cattle would die if the milk were drunk by a menstruous woman;
and they fear the same disaster if a drop of her blood were to fall
on the ground and the oxen were to pass over it.
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