Note 62.1 — RITUAL AND BELIEF

Although the idea of orenda, or mana, may not receive everywhere the same explicit recognition, it is implied in the customs and beliefs of mankind throughout the world. It underlies the practice of Taboo. We have had already occasion to notice this in reference to the mana of Maori chiefs. In the population of Madagascar there is a large, perhaps a predominant Polynesian element. When a Malagasy sticks up in his field a figure or scarecrow to keep off robbers, it is not that they may dread prosecution with all the rigour of the law, though that may be the result if they are caught. What is threatened is sickness, mysteriously induced by the power of the owner of the field, or by the power which he has caused to be conjured into the scarecrow.62.1 A Samoan in the same way suspends to a cocoa-nut palm a small figure of a shark made with a leaf of the tree; it is notice to the robber that he will be inevitably devoured by a white shark the next time he goes to fish.62.2 Similar practices prevail in the Melanesian islands.62.3 Taboo has obtained a very prominent position in the social order and government of Polynesian communities. It is from them that the word has been adopted into English parlance, and adapted to a sense near akin to that of another interesting word—to boycott. But it is not only in Polynesia and the neighbouring islands of Melanesia that the dread of a mysterious mana is found, or that it leads to prohibitions and abstinences often very burdensome. It is unnecessary to adduce examples of the taboos on women, practically universal in the lower culture at certain times. The Siberian Chukchi, whose fire has gone out on the cold and timberless tundra, cannot borrow fire from his neighbour, for “the fire of a strange family is regarded as infectious and as harbouring strange spirits. Fear of pollution extends also to all objects belonging to a strange hearth, to the skins of the tent and the sleeping room, and even to the keepers and worshippers of strange penates. The Chukchi from far inland, who travel but little, when they come to a strange territory fear to sleep in tents or to eat meat cooked on a strange fire, preferring to sleep in the open air and to subsist on their own scant food-supply. On the other hand, an unknown traveller, coming unexpectedly to a Chukchi camp, can hardly gain admittance to a tent,” a difficulty of which the writer I am quoting had personal experience.63.1 This reluctance to contact with strangers is not shyness; nor is it the dread of hostile intentions. Each individual, each family or body of men, has its own atmosphere; and this atmosphere conveys “pollution.” It is only throwing the idea a step backwards to imagine the cause of the pollution as “strange spirits.” Spirits are mana; and it is the mana that is feared—the mystic influence or potentiality that may strike the unwary stranger. This is what issues in practice as the taboo. The subject of Taboo has been treated so fully by Professor Frazer64.1 that it is needless to discuss it here. Moreover, to do so in any detail would require a volume. Suffice it to say that the universal avoidance of a dead body, the prohibitions observed by priests, by chiefs, by hunters and warriors, the prohibitions of temple and shrine, of times and seasons, of speech and act, may all be traced to the same root-idea. Our words sanctity, pollution, infection feebly and partially translate the intuitive dread of orenda which is embodied in a taboo.