The objects and actions placed under such taboos are various; and it is for the anthropologist and the psychologist, if they can, to discover their origin and application in each particular case. They involve ideas of purity and defilement, the holy and the common, the clean and the unclean. They gather in particular round blood, which rouses in some animals as in many human beings an instinctive aversion and disgust, and yet is at the same time sacred as a seat of life. They enter at the great crises of existence, birth and death; the mother, and perhaps also the new-born child, are unclean, and must be purified; the corpse defiles whoever touches it. They attend the sexual processes, which are the occasion of releasing dangerous { 201} energies. So they affect people as well as things. The king is charged with this mysterious force, and is hedged round with taboos lest it should suddenly burst forth against the intruder on his sanctity. The chief, the priest, possess it in less degree. And it is transmitted to what belongs to them. Their weapons, their food and, above all, their persons, are sacred. The oft-quoted story of the Maori may still be repeated here: it is not the only case of the kind. Strong and stalwart, he found some food beside the path, and ate it. He learned shortly afterwards that it was the remains of the king's meal. He had violated a royal taboo. The secret power had him in its grasp: he was speedily seized with cramp in the stomach, and in a few hours died.
Ritual religions are full of survivals of such taboos. "O Maker of the material world," inquires Zarathustra of Ahura Mazda, "can he be clean again who has eaten of the carcass of a dog, or the corpse of a man?" In ancient Israel various foods were forbidden by religious law; the priest might not touch a dead body; when a murder had been committed and the murderer could not be found, the elders of the city must solemnly purify the ground which unpunished bloodshed had defiled. Early Roman religion contained many such prohibitions; from certain sacrifices women and strangers and fettered criminals must withdraw; there are traces of taboo on { 202} iron and shoe-leather, on burial grounds and spots where thunder-bolts were supposed to have fallen, and on certain days, especially those connected with the cult of the dead. Such taboos still play a great part in savage society, and exert no little moral force in preserving honesty and order. In Samoa, observed Turner, objects placed under taboo are perfectly safe; they are in no danger of theft. Primitive morality is thus brought under the sanction of religion.