Tabu

“ All the common people prostrated themselves with their faces touching the ground before the sacred chiefs when they walked out, particularly during tabu; and neither the king nor the priests were allowed to touch anything; even their food was put into their mouths by another person. The tabu was imposed either by proclamation, when the crier or herald of the priests went round, generally in the evening, requiring every light to be extinguished, the path by the sea to be left for the king, the paths inland to be left for the gods, etc. ”

“ I will mention a few:—for instance, the rules of behavior derived from the tabu notion. Certain kinds of food may not be eaten; certain objects like the Ark of the Covenant in David’s time may not be touched.19 Strict tabus obtain in regard to marriage such as the rules of endogamy and exogamy. Certain persons may not even be looked at. ”

“ Sympathetic magic bulks largely in the life of backward peoples, not merely in the form of actions to be performed, but also in those to be abstained from. The ‘Thou shalt not’ is more in evidence than ‘Thou shalt.’ The prohibitions of savages and barbarians are now spoken of under the general term of tabu. ”

“ It must, however, be remembered that a man who breaks the clan tabu is probably, before breaking it, very sceptical as to the evil effects, and, being sceptical, would presumably be proof against the hypnotic auto-suggestion. ”

“ One may gather something to the point from the Irish story where the divinity of the well is offended because a woman has gazed into its depths, and here probably, as already suggested (p. 392) , we come across an ancient tabu directed against women, which may have applied only to certain wells of peculiarly sacred character. ”

“ Those women easily learned to put up with shark and taro and dog for a diet when the other things were so expensive.
It was death for any one to walk upon tabu’d ground; or defile a tabu’d thing with his touch; or fail in due servility to a chief; or step upon the king’s shadow. The nobles and the King and the priests were always suspending little rags here and there and yonder, to give notice to the people that the decorated spot or thing was tabu, and death lurking near. The struggle for life was difficult and chancy in the islands in those days. ”

“ Human sacrifices were offered at times to the chief gods. The idols of the natives were much like those of the North American Indians, but the Kanakas are not like the Indians in character.
The oppressive tabu was part of the religion, and the penalty for breaking it was death. The word means prohibited, and the system was a set of rules, made by the chiefs and high priests, which forbade certain things. For instance, it was tabu for women to eat with men or enter the men's eating house, or to eat pork, turtles, cocoanuts, bananas and some kinds of fish. ”

“ Person carried to other world for breaking tabu.
A751.1.1. Man in moon burns brush as punishment for doing so on Sunday.
C952. Immediate return to other world because of broken tabu. (Cf. C31, C31.4, C327.) — Type 710 (Gr. No. 3) ; Greek: Fox 229 (Persephone) , 122 (Thetis) ; India: Thompson-Balys; Japanese: Ikeda; Africa (Congo) : Weeks 206 No. 3; (Fjort) : Dennett 41 No 5.
C31. Tabu: offending supernatural wife. C932. Loss of wife for breaking tabu.
C953. Person must remain in other world because of broken tabu. Greek myth: Grote 137; Swiss: Jegerlehner Oberwallis 295 No. 13; Jewish: Neuman ”

“ It will easily be seen that we have here civilized counterparts of what was above mentioned as sexual tabu; but it is worth noting that the interdiction in these cases is ordained by the women themselves, or perhaps rather by the older among them, while the young do not always willingly comply. ”

“ This can hardly be attributed to accident, for our sources of information mention hundreds, even thousands, of men bewitched, and by demonic force abandoned by their indwelling gods, but never a woman. Women not infrequently figure as causing the condition of tabu, but never as having fallen to the powers of devils, or witches, or as being under the protection of a personal god. ”

“ There were many tabu periods when "no canoe could be launched, no fire lighted, no tapa beaten or poi pounded, and no sound could be uttered on pain of death, when even the dogs had to be muzzled, and the fowls were shut up in calabashes for twenty-four hours at a time." Besides the religious tabus there were civil ones, which could be imposed at any time at the caprice of king or chiefs, who would often forbid the people to have certain things because they wished to keep them for themselves. ”

“ Felled tree raises itself again.
C44. Tabu: offending guardian spirits. Icel.: MacCulloch Eddic 321; Herrmann Saxo Gr. II 586.
C45. Tabu: offending devil. A smith or priest continually insults the devil's statue or picture (cf. C13) . The devil brings the offender into dangerous situation (suspicion of theft or murder) , and saves him miraculously when he promises never again to abuse the devil's likeness. ”

“ It accounts, too, for the ferocity of the punishments for the infringement of the Taboo. Death was the penalty. The man who fails to pour dust on the blood of a pigeon that he has knocked down with an arrow, the man who picks up sticks upon the Sabbath, the perfumer who imitates a temple smell, the man who roasts the smallest particle of fat or blood, the labourer who has an abscess and fails to take two turtle doves as a "sin offering" to the priest at "the door of the tabernacle of the congregation" (Levit. xv. 15) , may all be cut off. Every one may be stoned for infringing the Taboo. ”

“ The positive precepts are charms: the negative precepts are taboos. In fact the whole doctrine of taboo, or at all events a large part of it, would seem to be only a special application of sympathetic magic, with its two great laws of similarity and contact. Though these laws are certainly not formulated in so many words nor even conceived in the abstract by the savage, they are nevertheless implicitly believed by him to regulate the course of nature quite independently of human will. ”

“ But it isn’t so easy to make haste when all your movements are impeded and hampered by endless taboos and a minutely annoying ritual. Before Tu-Kila-Kila could get himself under way, sacred umbrella, tom-toms, and all, it was necessary for the King of Fire and the King of Water to make taboo on an elaborate scale with their respective elements; and so by the time the high god had reached M. Jules Peyron’s garden, Felix Thurstan had already some time since returned to Muriel’s hut and his own quarters. ”

“ If you have to submit to the disadvantages of taboo, you may as well claim its advantages as well. “The King of Fire and the King of Water crossed my taboo line. Why shouldn’t I cross equally the King of the Birds’, then?”
“So you might—as a rule,” the Shadow answered with promptitude. “You are both gods. Your taboos do not cross. You may visit each other. You may transgress one another’s lines without danger of falling dead on the ground as common men would do if they broke taboo-lines. ”

“ The taboos of chastity, decency, propriety, and modesty, and those on all sex relations are therefore adjustments to facts of human nature and conditions of human life. It is never correct to regard any one of the taboos as an arbitrary invention or burden laid on society by tradition without necessity. Very many of them are due originally to vanity, superstition, or primitive magic, wholly or in part, but they have been sifted for centuries by experience, and those which we have received and accepted are such as experience has proved to be expedient. ”

“ In short, those negative precepts which we call taboo are just as vain and futile as those positive precepts which we call sorcery. The two things are merely opposite sides or poles of one great disastrous fallacy, a mistaken conception of the association of ideas. Of that fallacy, sorcery is the positive, and taboo the negative pole. If we give the general name of magic to the whole erroneous system, both theoretical and practical, then taboo may be defined as the negative side of practical magic. ”

“ The taboo system is also very curious. The priests govern chiefly in this matter. They settle what or who is to be tabooed, and how long it is to last. To taboo is not only to set aside for a particular object, but to make sacred. The king, a hog, or a house, may be tabooed. During that time people may not do certain acts, and animals or things may not be touched or used. So important are these taboos held, that any person breaking through one of them is punished severely, often with death. ”

“ The objects of the taboo are many: 1. direct taboos aim at (a) protection of important persons—chiefs, priests, etc.—and things against harm; (b) safeguarding of the weak—women children and common people generally—from the powerful mana (magical influence) of chiefs and priests; (c) providing against the dangers incurred by handling or coming in contact with corpses, by eating certain food, etc.; (d) guarding the chief acts of life—births, initiation, marriage and sexual functions—against interference; (e) securing human beings against the wrath or power of gods and spirits [34] ”

“ It behooves us to be very careful how we deal with gods. Our people will stand round your precinct in a row, and guard you with their spears. You shall not cross the taboo line to them, nor they to you: all shall be neutral. Food shall be laid by the line, as always, morn, noon, and night; and your Shadows shall take it in; but you shall not come out. Neither shall you bury the body of Lavita, the son of Sami. Till the canoe comes back it shall lie in the sun and rot there. ”

“ Thus the standard of conduct is shifted from a natural to a supernatural basis: the supposed wish of the deity or, as we commonly put it, the will of God, tends to supersede [pg 214] the wishes, real or imaginative, of purely natural beings as the measure of right and wrong. The old savage taboos, resting on a theory of the direct relations of living creatures to each other, remain in substance unchanged, but they are outwardly transformed into ethical precepts with a religious or supernatural sanction. ”

“ The consideration of taboo introduces us to the subject of religion; for, on the one hand, the foregoing evidence tends to establish a connexion between the institution of taboo and the doctrine of the human soul, and on the other hand some of our best authorities on the Marquesans have stated that the taboo was believed to be an expression of the will of the gods conveyed to the people through the mouth of a priest. ”

“ An influential outgrowth of primitive Magic is the taboo. Taboo is the dangerousness of a person, or thing, or action, or word, conceived of as a motive for not touching or uttering or meddling therewith. The dangerousness may either lie in the nature of a person or thing, or be imposed upon it. A chief, for example, and everything belonging to him, is generally taboo by inherent sacredness: he is, like Mr. Weeks’s Congolese, full of evil magic. The idea of the talisman has thus been extended to include certain men. In many tribes it includes all women ”

“ Negative Magic.—There is also a negative side to magic, which, together with ritual prohibitions of a religious nature, is often embraced under the name of taboo (q.v.) ; this extension of meaning is not justified, for taboo is only concerned with sacred things, and the mark of it is that its violation causes the taboo to be transmitted. All taboos are ritual prohibitions, but all ritual prohibitions are not taboos ”

“ Let us now summarize what understanding we have gained of taboo through its comparison with the compulsive prohibition of the neurotic. Taboo is a very primitive prohibition imposed from without (by an authority) and directed against the strongest desires of man. The desire to violate it continues in the unconscious; persons who obey the taboo have an ambivalent feeling toward what is affected by the taboo. The magic power attributed to taboo goes back to its ability to lead man into temptation ”

“ In the economic and sexual taboos mentioned above, in the dread of corpses, in the fear of touching things belonging to a chief, and in other cases there are customs that can only be referred to a belief in an injurious potency residing in certain objects.1020 Practically, savage tribes distinguish between taboo and magic.
620. Contamination of customs has always been the rule in human communities, early and late, savage and civilized. We have seen how there has often been a coalescence between taboo regulations proper and ordinary civil law. ”

“ Finally the help of the angakok678 is invoked, and he discovers that the cause of the [pg 212] misfortune of the people is due to the transgression of a taboo. Then the guilty one is searched for. If he confesses, all is well; the weather moderates, and the seals allow themselves to be caught; but if he obstinately maintains his innocence, his death alone will soothe the wrath of the offended deity....
The transgression of taboos affects the soul of the transgressor, becoming attached to it and making him sick. If the attachment is not removed by the wizard, the man will die. ”

“ To take examples of permanent taboos, the idols and temples, the persons and names of the king and other members of the royal family, the persons of priests, canoes belonging to the gods, the houses, clothes, and mats of the king and priests, and the heads of men who were the devotees of any particular idol, were always taboo or sacred. ”