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Updated: May 3, 2025
And the tendency of such a negative type of religion is to pile precautions on precautions. Thus the dairyman, in order to be equal to his sacred office, must observe taboos without end. He must be celibate. He must avoid all contact with the dead. He is limited to certain kinds of food; which, moreover, must be prepared in a certain way, and consumed in a certain place.
Nobody's heart is in the work very long; nobody's but those fanatical and morbid guardians of morality who make it a life's specialty. The aroused public opinion which the Commission asks for cannot be held if all it has to fix upon is an elaborate series of taboos.
In short, the girl is viewed as charged with a powerful force which, if not kept within bounds, may prove destructive both to herself and to all with whom she comes in contact. To repress this force within the limits necessary for the safety of all concerned is the object of the taboos in question. The same explanation applies to the observance of the same rules by divine kings and priests.
Only the Siem family can use such timber. There are the following special taboos for pregnant women. There is a similar prohibition regarding the finishing of the plaiting of wicker baskets. Folk-Tales, Traditions and Superstitions Folk-Tales. The Khasis possess a considerable amount of folk-lore.
But the twelve-year-old lad who stole in and cautiously stepped over the sleepers and threaded his way among the captives, did so with his heart in his mouth. He knew what taboos he was violating.
Though it might be folly to match alien customs to Terran, Ross thought of that very ancient pact on his own world. Eat a man's food, become his friend, or at least declare a truce between you. Stiff taboos and codes of behavior marked nations on Terra, especially warrior societies, and the same might be true here.
"And I mean it in the very simplest and most literal sense," Bertram went on quite seriously. "I'd been among you some time before it began to dawn on me that you English didn't regard your own taboos as essentially identical with other people's. To me, from the very first, they seemed absolutely the same as the similar taboos of Central Africans and South Sea Islanders.
French and German will certainly be aggregating languages during the greater portion of the coming years. Of the two I am inclined to think French will spread further than German. There is a disposition in the world, which the French share, to grossly undervalue the prospects of all things French, derived, so far as I can gather, from the facts that the French were beaten by the Germans in 1870, and that they do not breed with the abandon of rabbits or negroes. These are considerations that affect the dissemination of French very little. The French reading public is something different and very much larger than the existing French political system. The number of books published in French is greater than that published in English; there is a critical reception for a work published in French that is one of the few things worth a writer's having, and the French translators are the most alert and efficient in the world. One has only to see a Parisian bookshop, and to recall an English one, to realize the as yet unattainable standing of French. The serried ranks of lemon-coloured volumes in the former have the whole range of human thought and interest; there are no taboos and no limits, you have everything up and down the scale, from frank indecency to stark wisdom. It is a shop for men. I remember my amazement to discover three copies of a translation of that most wonderful book, the Text-book of Psychology of Professor William James,[ERRATUM: for 'The Text Book of Psychology, read 'The Principles of Psychology'.] in a shop in L'Avenue de l'Opera three copies of a book that I have never seen anywhere in England outside my own house, and I am an attentive student of bookshop windows! And the French books are all so pleasant in the page, and so cheap they are for a people that buys to read. One thinks of the English bookshop, with its gaudy reach-me-downs of gilded and embossed cover, its horribly printed novels still more horribly "illustrated," the exasperating pointless variety in the size and thickness of its books. The general effect of the English book is that it is something sold by a dealer in bric-
The heir to the throne of Loango is forbidden from infancy to eat pork; from early childhood he is interdicted the use of the cola fruit in company; at puberty he is taught by a priest not to partake of fowls except such as he has himself killed and cooked; and so the number of taboos goes on increasing with his years.
See Westermarck, op. cit., pp. 54-56. A system of taboos is very strongly established, and as we should expect the women appear to be most active in maintaining these sexual separations. If a man, even by mistake, kills the sex-totem of the women, they are as much enraged as if it were one of their own children, and they will turn and attack him with their long poles.
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