Section 1. The Meaning of Taboo.
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
