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Updated: May 2, 2025
Apparently holiness, magical virtue, taboo, or whatever we may call that mysterious quality which is supposed to pervade sacred or tabooed persons, is conceived by the primitive philosopher as a physical substance or fluid, with which the sacred man is charged just as a Leyden jar is charged with electricity; and exactly as the electricity in the jar can be discharged by contact with a good conductor, so the holiness or magical virtue in the man can be discharged and drained away by contact with the earth, which on this theory serves as an excellent conductor for the magical fluid.
Marnoo told me, with evident alarm in his countenance, that although admitted into the bay on a friendly footing with its inhabitants, he could not presume to meddle with their concerns, as such a procedure, if persisted in, would at once absolve the Typees from the restraints of the “taboo,” although so long as he refrained from any such conduct, it screened him effectually from the consequences of the enmity they bore his tribe.
Some of this relaxation is a good thing, but it is a mistake to let home and spouse degenerate into nothing more than an invitation to be lazy. Using the mate for relief, as in nagging, whining, crying, or grumbling, is taboo. If you are tired or irritable, you can rest or exercise for restoration, as in the days before marriage.
"She is very good; but all wives promise that kind of thing before marriage. And there is apt to come a day when the familiar bachelor friend falls under the domestic taboo, together with smoking in the drawing-room, brandy-and-soda, and other luxuries of the old, easy-going, single life." "Marian is not very likely to prove a domestic tyrant.
Why parents have chosen to taboo this important subject, and why they surround it with falsehood and subterfuge, and suggest that it is unclean or vulgar, has always puzzled me. Inconceivable harm, lifelong disaster, has befallen many a girl and many a boy through this mistaken attitude of parents to God's basic law of the universe. Genevieve is only ten.
It would require more space than we can afford to enumerate the various cases in which the "taboo" operates as a matter of course, even were we to say nothing of the numerous exigencies in which a resort to it seems to be at the option of the parties concerned.
Or again, the educated classes have tabooed most jesting about personal appearance; but in doing this they taboo not only the humor of the slums, but more than half the healthy literature of the world; they put polite nose-bags on the noses of Punch and Bardolph, Stiggins and Cyrano de Bergerac.
And this perhaps was a wise line to take. A taboo on promiscuity had to be created, and for this purpose any current prejudice could be made use of. Myth, Ritual and Religion, i, p. 66. See Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Australia. The author of The Mystic Rose seems to take this view. See p. 214 of that book. With us moderns the whole matter has taken a different complexion.
Not only was it delectable to ride in the high place, to watch trains come and go, to carry your load of travellers back to the Mansion House, but there were interludes of relaxation when you could sit about in the office of the stables and listen to agreeable talk from the choice spirits of abundant leisure, with whom work seemed to be a tribal taboo, daily assembled there.
"When genius like Madame's monopolizes the bay, we less gifted mortals must even twine myrtle leaves, or else humbly bow, bare of chaplets. But may I ask why you so sternly taboo that social world which you are so pre-eminently fitted to grace and adorn?
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