| Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941). The Golden
Bough. 1922. |
XXI. Tabooed Things |
§ 1. The Meaning
of Taboo |
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| THUS in primitive society the rules of
ceremonial purity observed by divine kings, chiefs, and priests
agree in many respects with the rules observed by homicides,
mourners, women in childbed, girls at puberty, hunters and
fishermen, and so on. To us these various classes of persons appear
to differ totally in character and condition; some of them we should
call holy, others we might pronounce unclean and polluted. But the
savage makes no such moral distinction between them; the conceptions
of holiness and pollution are not yet differentiated in his mind. To
him the common feature of all these persons is that they are
dangerous and in danger, and the danger in which they stand and to
which they expose others is what we should call spiritual or
ghostly, and therefore imaginary. The danger, however, is not less
real because it is imaginary; imagination acts upon man as really as
does gravitation, and may kill him as certainly as a dose of prussic
acid. To seclude these persons from the rest of the world so that
the dreaded spiritual danger shall neither reach them nor spread
from them, is the object of the taboos which they have to observe.
These taboos act, so to say, as electrical insulators to preserve
the spiritual force with which these persons are charged from
suffering or inflicting harm by contact with the outer world. |
1 |
| To the illustrations of these general principles
which have been already given I shall now add some more, drawing my
examples, first, from the class of tabooed things, and, second, from
the class of tabooed words; for in the opinion of the savage both
things and words may, like persons, be charged or electrified,
either temporarily or permanently, with the mysterious virtue of
taboo, and may therefore require to be banished for a longer or
shorter time from the familiar usage of common life. And the
examples will be chosen with special reference to those sacred
chiefs, kings and priests, who, more than anybody else, live fenced
about by taboo as by a wall. Tabooed things will be illustrated in
the present chapter, and tabooed words in the next. |
2 |
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