Note 11 — INTRODUCTION

As Sir James Frazer has pointed out (Encyclopædia Britannica,⁹ xxiii, 18), the Greeks usually discriminated the two ideas, ἁγνός being devoted to the sense of “sacred” and ἐναγής to that of “unclean” or “accursed.” The two words, of course, have no connection, ἁγνός being related to Skt. yaj-, “sacrifice” and ἐναγής to Skt. āgas-, “sin” (E. Boisacq, Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue grecque, Heidelberg and Paris, 1907, pt. i, 7, 9). Among the Romans sacer always continued to retain the double meaning; it may be closely rendered by tabu. Compare Servius on Vergil, Æneis, iii, 75. The late W. Robertson Smith referred to the fact that the Hebrew ṭāmē “is not the ordinary word for things physically foul; it is a ritual term and corresponds exactly to the idea of taboo” (Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia,² London, 1903, p. 309). For a list of Biblical passages containing ṭāmē see Brown, Driver, and Briggs, A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, Boston, 1906, p. 379.