Section 1. Chiefs and Kings tabooed.
WE have seen that the Mikado's food was cooked every day in new pots
and served up in new dishes; both pots and dishes were of common clay,
in order that they might be broken or laid aside after they had been once
used. They were generally broken, for it was believed that if any one else
ate his food out of these sacred dishes, his mouth and throat would become
swollen and inflamed. The same ill effect was thought to be experienced by
any one who should wear the Mikado's clothes without his leave; he would
have swellings and pains all over his body. In Fiji there is a special name
(kana lama) for the disease supposed to be caused by eating out of a
chief's dishes or wearing his clothes. "The throat and body swell, and the
impious person dies. I had a fine mat given to me by a man who durst not
use it because Thakombau's eldest son had sat upon it. There was always
a family or clan of commoners who were exempt from this danger. I was
talking about this once to Thakombau. `Oh yes,' said he. `Here,
So-and-so! come and scratch my back.' The man scratched; he was one
of those who could do it with impunity." The name of the men thus highly
privileged was Na nduka ni, or the dirt of the chief. 1
In the evil effects thus supposed to follow upon the use of the vessels or
clothes of the Mikado and a Fijian chief we see that other side of the
god-man's character to which attention has been already called. The
divine person is a source of danger as well as of blessing; he must not only
be guarded, he must also be guarded against. His sacred organism, so
delicate that a touch may disorder it, is also, as it were, electrically
charged with a powerful magical or spiritual force which may discharge
itself with fatal effect on whatever comes in contact with it. Accordingly the
isolation of the man-god is quite as necessary for the safety of others as for
his own. His magical virtue is in the strictest sense of the word contagious:
his divinity is a fire, which, under proper restraints, confers endless
blessings, but, if rashly touched or allowed to break bounds, burns and
destroys what it touches. Hence the disastrous effects supposed to attend a
breach of taboo; the offender has thrust his hand into the divine fire, which
shrivels up and consumes him on the spot. 2
The Nubas, for example, who inhabit the wooded and fertile range of
Jebel Nuba in Eastern Africa, believe that they would die if they entered
the house of their priestly king; however, they can evade the penalty of
their intrusion by baring the left shoulder and getting the king to lay his
hand on it. And were any man to sit on a stone which the king has
consecrated to his own use, the transgressor would die within the year. The
Cazembes of Angola regard their king as so holy that no one can touch him
without being killed by the magical power which pervades his sacred
person. But since contact with him is sometimes unavoidable, they have
devised a means whereby the sinner can escape with his life. Kneeling
down before the king he touches the back of the royal hand with the back
of his own, then snaps his fingers; afterwards he lays the palm of his hand
on the palm of the king's hand, then snaps his fingers again. This ceremony
is repeated four or five times, and averts the imminent danger of death. In
Tonga it was believed that if any one fed himself with his own hands after
touching the sacred person of a superior chief or anything that belonged to
him, he would swell up and die; the sanctity of the chief, like a virulent
poison, infected the hands of his inferior, and, being communicated through
them to the food, proved fatal to the eater. A commoner who had incurred
this danger could disinfect himself by performing a certain ceremony, which
consisted in touching the sole of a chief's foot with the palm and back of
each of his hands, and afterwards rinsing his hands in water. If there was
no water near, he rubbed his hands with the juicy stem of a plantain or
banana. After that he was free to feed himself with his own hands without
danger of being attacked by the malady which would otherwise follow from
eating with tabooed or sanctified hands. But until the ceremony of expiation
or disinfection had been performed, if he wished to eat he had either to get
some one to feed him, or else to go down on his knees and pick up the
food from the ground with his mouth like a beast. He might not even use a
toothpick himself, but might guide the hand of another person holding the
toothpick. The Tongans were subject to induration of the liver and certain
forms of scrofula, which they often attributed to a failure to perform the
requisite expiation after having inadvertently touched a chief or his
belongings. Hence they often went through the ceremony as a precaution,
without knowing that they had done anything to call for it. The king of
Tonga could not refuse to play his part in the rite by presenting his foot to
such as desired to touch it, even when they applied to him at an
inconvenient time. A fat unwieldy king, who perceived his subjects
approaching with this intention, while he chanced to be taking his walks
abroad, has been sometimes seen to waddle as fast as his legs could carry
him out of their way, in order to escape the importunate and not wholly
disinterested expression of their homage. If any one fancied he might have
already unwittingly eaten with tabooed hands, he sat down before the
chief, and, taking the chief's foot, pressed it against his own stomach, that
the food in his belly might not injure him, and that he might not swell up and
die. Since scrofula was regarded by the Tongans as a result of eating with
tabooed hands, we may conjecture that persons who suffered from it among
them often resorted to the touch or pressure of the king's foot as a cure for
their malady. The analogy of the custom with the old English practice of
bringing scrofulous patients to the king to be healed by his touch is
sufficiently obvious, and suggests, as I have already pointed out
elsewhere, that among our own remote ancestors scrofula may have
obtained its name of the King's Evil, from a belief, like that of the Tongans,
that it was caused as well as cured by contact with the divine majesty of
kings. 3
In New Zealand the dread of the sanctity of chiefs was at least as great
as in Tonga. Their ghostly power, derived from an ancestral spirit, diffused
itself by contagion over everything they touched, and could strike dead all
who rashly or unwittingly meddled with it. For instance, it once happened
that a New Zealand chief of high rank and great sanctity had left the
remains of his dinner by the wayside. A slave, a stout, hungry fellow,
coming up after the chief had gone, saw the unfinished dinner, and ate it
up without asking questions. Hardly had he finished when he was informed
by a horror-stricken spectator that the food of which he had eaten was the
chief's. "I knew the unfortunate delinquent well. He was remarkable for
courage, and had signalised himself in the wars of the tribe," but "no
sooner did he hear the fatal news than he was seized by the most
extraordinary convulsions and cramp in the stomach, which never ceased
till he died, about sundown the same day. He was a strong man, in the
prime of life, and if any pakeha [European] freethinker should have said he
was not killed by the tapu of the chief, which had been communicated to
the food by contact, he would have been listened to with feelings of
contempt for his ignorance and inability to understand plain and direct
evidence." This is not a solitary case. A Maori woman having eaten of
some fruit, and being afterwards told that the fruit had been taken from a
tabooed place, exclaimed that the spirit of the chief, whose sanctity had
been thus profaned, would kill her. This was in the afternoon, and next day
by twelve o'clock she was dead. A Maori chief's tinder-box was once the
means of killing several persons; for, having been lost by him, and found
by some men who used it to light their pipes, they died of fright on learning
to whom it had belonged. So, too, the garments of a high New Zealand
chief will kill any one else who wears them. A chief was observed by a
missionary to throw down a precipice a blanket which he found too heavy
to carry. Being asked by the missionary why he did not leave it on a tree
for the use of a future traveller, the chief replied that "it was the fear of its
being taken by another which caused him to throw it where he did, for if it
were worn, his tapu" (that is, his spiritual power communicated by contact
to the blanket and through the blanket to the man) "would kill the person."
For a similar reason a Maori chief would not blow a fire with his mouth; for
his sacred breath would communicate its sanctity to the fire, which would
pass it on to the pot on the fire, which would pass it on to the meat in the
pot, which would pass it on to the man who ate the meat, which was in the
pot, which stood on the fire, which was breathed on by the chief; so that
the eater, infected by the chief's breath conveyed through these
intermediaries, would surely die. 4
Thus in the Polynesian race, to which the Maoris belong, superstition
erected round the persons of sacred chiefs a real, though at the same time
purely imaginary barrier, to transgress which actually entailed the death of
the transgressor whenever he became aware of what he had done. This
fatal power of the imagination working through superstitious terrors is by no
means confined to one race; it appears to be common among savages. For
example, among the aborigines of Australia a native will die after the
infliction of even the most superficial wound, if only he believes that the
weapon which inflicted the wound had been sung over and thus endowed
with magical virtue. He simply lies down, refuses food, and pines away.
Similarly among some of the Indian tribes of Brazil, if the medicine-man
predicted the death of any one who had offended him, "the wretch took to
his hammock instantly in such full expectation of dying, that he would
neither eat nor drink, and the prediction was a sentence which faith
effectually executed." 5
