Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

172 Forbidden Words
large plaza, it was considered honorable to eat man’s and dog’s excrements as well . . .
[T]he Parsi of ancient Persia . . . believed that upon delivering a baby, Parsi women
should drink urine; and so too should children at the time of being dressed in the
symbols of their faith. (Arango 1989: 45)
Anthropologist Anna Meigs describes at length the positive powers attributed
to polluting substances among the Hua of New Guinea. 85 For Australian
Aborigines, faeces has always been regarded as having protective and curative
powers; one traditional practice was to smear the faces of new born
babies with excrement. 86 Knowing this, it is no surprise to learn that our own
practice of throwing rice and confetti at newly weds has its origins in the
throwing of excrement.
It is puzzling that something can be both polluting and purifying. How can
it reduce health, but at the same time promote it? Surely, it is not simply a
matter that the cure has to be worse than the complaint? Meigs offers a
perspective of the pollution theory to account for what she finds among the
Hua. She points out the strong association between these substances and
organic decay:
Body emissions are classified as polluting because they are perceived as decaying,
rotting, dying, and anything which is so perceived is held to be polluting provided that
it is threatening to gain access to the body. (Meigs 1978: 316f)
In decay there is death, and the anxiety inspired by pollutants is surely closely
connected to the fear of death. Yet, it is also out of decay that new life is
nourished; that which dies is the compost for future generations. Things
which rot attract worms and vermin. Medieval belief held that such creatures
thrive in the putrescent walking ‘dung-heap’, the sterquilinium that is the
human body. Here is St Bernard’s graphic comment:
Man is nothing but stinking sperm, a sack of excrement and food for worms. After man
comes the worm, stench and horror. And thus is every man’s fate. (St Bernard,
Meditationes; cited in Camporesi 1988: 78)
Just as dung (under the euphemism manure) and rotting compost will enrich
soil and promote growth in the garden, so too do bodily effluvia have special
regenerative, curative and protective powers. Pulverized worm was the prime
ingredient in many medieval remedies. Because the womb is the harbinger of
life, a woman was believed to be fuller of vermin than a man; hence the ‘dark,
smelly, explicitly rotting interiors attributed to females’ bodies’ by the Hua, 87
and Aristotle’s view of the nutritious residue from menses that combines with
semen to grow an embryo. 88 A woman’s power to give birth should have
afforded her a dominating position in society, revered as divine; instead,
women have often been regarded as dangerously polluting creatures, sometimes
tabooed in the same way as corpses.