TABOO AND GENETICS 167 



Paradise Eve was a virgin. Virginity is natural 

 while wedlock only follows guilt." (35.) 



Tertullian addressed women in these words : 

 " Do you not know that you are each an Eve ? 

 The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives 

 in this age. . . . You are the devil's gateway. 

 . . . You destroy God's image, Man." (35 : 

 Bk. I.) 



Thus woman became degraded beyond all 

 previous thought in the teaching of the early 

 church. The child was looked upon as the 

 result of an act of sin, and came into the world 

 tainted through its mother with sin. At best 

 marriage was a vice. All the church could do 

 was to cleanse it as much as possible by sacred 

 rites, an attempt which harked back to the 

 origin of marriage as the ceremonial breaking 

 of taboo. Peter Lombard's Sentences affirmed 

 marriage a sacrament. This was reaffirmed at 

 Florence in 1439. In 1565, the Council of Trent 

 made the final declaration. But not even this 

 could wholly purify woman, and intercourse 

 with her was still regarded as a necessary evil, 

 a concession that had to be unwillingly made 

 to the lusts of the flesh. 



Such accounts as we have of the lives of holy 

 women indicate that they shared in the beliefs 

 of their times. In the account of the life of a 

 saint known as the Blessed Eugenia preserved 

 in an old palimpsest {36) we read that she 



