But it was Roman naturalist and writer, Pliny the Elder who popularized the idea that menstruating women were possessors of dark magic. At the end of the first century CE, he wrote the following in his thirty-seven-volume Naturalis Historia or Natural History: Contact with the monthly flux of women turns new wine sour, makes crops wither, kills grafts, dries seeds in gardens, causes the fruit of trees to fall off, dims the bright surface of mirrors, dulls the edge of steel and the gleam of ivory, kills bees, rusts iron and bronze, and causes a horrible smell to fill the air. Dogs who taste the
...more
