ABSTRACT
The pollution caused by blood is also the reason that women in traditional societies were considered impure during menstruation. To cleanse the pollution of Adam and Eve's 'original sin', however, the blood of Jesus Christ was needed, blood here being much more potent than the traditionally universal purifier, water. Indeed blood, which normally pollutes, is here turned into a super-cleanser because it is after all no ordinary blood, but the blood of the Son of God. The general pollution of woman is thus expiated by the sacrifice of the Messiah. This form of atonement, as Frazer and others have shown, is a variation of offering a substitute or scapegoat who carries away the pollution, thus cleansing the community. Parker's synthesizing encapsulation of how pollution occurs, which he offers towards the end of his book, shows how it is not merely guilt or anxiety that trigger pollution but fundamental breaches in the normal order.
