TABOO AND GENETICS 153 



... In the Slave Coast hysterical women are 

 believed to be possessed with spirits. The 

 Fuegians beUeved that there had been a time 

 when women wielded the empire through her 

 possession of the secrets of sorcery." (8 : pp. 85f.) 



The history of modern spiritualism has so 

 well confirmed this view of Lombroso's that we 

 are safe in accepting it as the partial explana- 

 tion of the attribute of a mysterious and uncanny 

 power which man has always given to the 

 feminine nature. The power of prophecy and 

 divination which was possessed by women at 

 the dawn of history and for some time thereafter 

 was probably not different in its essentials from 

 the manifestations of hysterical girls who have 

 puzzled the wisest physicians or the strange 

 phenomena of those spiritualistic mediums who 

 have been the subject of research well into our 

 own times. (15.) 



If we wish to push our inquiry still further 

 and ask why woman should be so much more 

 subject than man to hysterical seizures and to 

 hypnotic suggestion, we shall probably find that 

 it is an essential part of her femininity. Modern 

 psychology and physiology have pointed out 

 that the menstrual cycle of woman has a vast 

 influence not only on her emotional nature but 

 on her whole psychic life, so that there are times 

 when she is more nervously tense, more apt to 

 become hysterical or to yield to the influence of 



