Freud - Complete Works (449 page)

  
¹
Frazer (1911
b
, 169-74). These
ceremonies consist of beating on shields, shouting and screaming,
making noises with musical instruments, etc.

  
²
Frazer (1911
b
, 166), quoting
Müller (1857).

Totem And Taboo

2687

   I shall not attempt to give a
complete catalogue of the instances quoted by Frazer of
restrictions imposed upon victorious manslayers. I will only remark
upon a few more such cases in which their taboo character is
particularly marked or in which the restrictions are accompanied by
expiation, purification and other ceremonials.

   ‘Among the Monumbos of
German New Guinea anyone who has slain a foe in war becomes thereby
"unclean"’ - the same term being applied to women
who are menstruating or in child-bed. He ‘must remain a long
time in the men’s club-house, while the villagers gather
round him and celebrate his victory with dance and song. He may
touch nobody, not even his own wife and children; if he were to
touch them it is believed that they would be covered with sores. He
becomes clean again by washing and using other modes of
purification.’

   ‘Among the Natchez of North
America young braves who had taken their first scalps were obliged
to observe certain rules of abstinence for six months. They might
not sleep with their wives nor eat flesh; their only food was fish
and hasty-pudding. . . . When a Choctaw had killed
an enemy and taken his scalp, he went into mourning for a month,
during which he might not comb his hair, and if his head itched he
might not scratch it except with a little stick which he wore
fastened to his wrist for the purpose.’

   ‘When a Pima Indian had
killed an Apache, he had to go through severe ceremonies of
purification and atonement. During a sixteen-day fast he might not
touch meat nor salt, nor look on a blazing fire, nor speak to a
human being. He lived alone in the woods, waited on by an old
woman, who brought him his scanty dole of food. He bathed often in
the river and (as a sign of mourning) kept his head covered with a
plaster of mud. On the seventeenth day there was a public ceremony
of solemn purification of the man and his weapons. Since the Pima
Indians took the taboo on killing much more seriously than their
enemies and did not, like them, postpone the expiation and
purification till the end of the expedition, their warlike
efficiency suffered greatly from their moral strictness, or piety,
if that term is preferred. Despite their extreme courage, the
Americans found them unsatisfactory allies in their operations
against the Apaches.’

   However much the details and
variations of the ceremonies of expiation and purification after
the slaying of enemies might be of interest for deeper research
into the subject, I shall break off at this point, since for our
present purpose they have nothing more to tell us. I may perhaps
suggest that the temporary or permanent isolation of professional
executioners, which has persisted to the present day, may belong in
this connection. The position of the public hangman in mediaeval
society offers a good picture of the workings of taboo among
savages.¹

  
¹
Further examples of these practices will be
found in Frazer (1911
b
, 165-90) in the section upon
‘Manslayers tabooed’.

Totem And Taboo

2688

   In the accepted explanation of
all these observances of appeasement, restriction, expiation and
purification, two principles are combined: the extension of the
taboo from the slain man on to everything that has come in contact
with him, and the fear of the slain man’s ghost. How these
two factors are to be combined with each other to explain the
ceremonials, whether they are to be regarded as of equal weight,
whether one is primary and the other secondary, and if so which -
none of these questions receives an answer, and indeed it would be
hard to find one. We, on the other hand, can lay stress on the
unity
of our view, which derives all of these observances
from emotional ambivalence towards the enemy.

(
b
)
The Taboo upon Rulers

   The attitude of primitive peoples
to their chiefs, kings and priests is governed by two basic
principles which seem to be complementary rather than
contradictory. A ruler ‘must not only be guarded, he must
also be guarded against’. (Frazer, 1911
b
, 132.) Both
of these ends are secured by innumerable taboo observances. We know
already why it is that rulers must be guarded against. It is
because they are vehicles of the mysterious and dangerous magical
power which is transmitted by contact like an electric charge and
which brings death and ruin to anyone who is not protected by a
similar charge. Any immediate or indirect contact with this
dangerous sacred entity is therefore avoided; and, if it cannot be
avoided, some ceremonial is devised to avert the dreaded
consequences. The Nubas of East Africa, for instance,
‘believe that they would die if they entered the house of
their priestly king; however they can evade the penalty of their
intrusion by baring the left shoulder and getting the king to lay
his hand on it’. Here we are met by the remarkable fact that
contact with the king is a remedy and protection against the
dangers provoked by contact with the king. No doubt, however, there
is a contrast to be drawn between the remedial power of a touch
made deliberately by the king and the danger which arises if he is
touched - a contrast between a passive and an active relation to
the king.

Totem And Taboo

2689

   For examples of the healing power
of the royal touch there is no need to resort to savages. The kings
of England, in times that are not yet remote, enjoyed the power of
curing scrofula, which was known accordingly as ‘the
King’s Evil’. Queen Elizabeth I exercised this royal
prerogative no less than her successors. Charles I is said to have
cured a hundred patients at a stroke in 1633. But it was after the
Restoration of the monarchy under his dissolute son, Charles II,
that the royal cures of scrofula reached their climax. In the
course of his reign he is reputed to have touched close upon a
hundred thousand persons. The crowd of those in search of cure used
to be so great that on one occasion six or seven of those who came
to be healed were trampled to death. The sceptical William of
Orange, who be came King of England after the dismissal of the
Stuarts, refused to lend himself to these magical practices. On the
only occasion on which he was persuaded into laying his hands on a
patient, he said to him: ‘God give you better health and more
sense.’ (Frazer, 1911
a
,
1
, 368-70.)

   The stories which follow are
evidence of the fearful effects of active contact made, even
unintentionally, with a king or anything belonging to him.
‘It once happened that a New Zealand chief of high rank and
great sanctity had left the remains of his dinner by the wayside. A
slave, a stout, hungry fellow, coming up after the chief had gone,
saw the unfinished dinner, and ate it up without asking questions.
Hardly had he finished when he was informed by a horror-stricken
spectator that the food of which he had eaten was the
chief’s.’ He was a strong, courageous man, but
‘no sooner did he hear the fatal news than he was seized with
the most extraordinary convulsions and cramp in the stomach, which
never ceased till he died, about sundown the same day’.¹
‘A Maori woman having eaten of some fruit, and being
afterwards told that the fruit had been taken from a tabooed place,
exclaimed that the spirit of the chief, whose sanctity had been
thus profaned, would kill her. This was in the afternoon, and next
day by twelve o’clock she was dead.’² ‘A
Maori chief’s tinder-box was once the means of killing
several persons; for, having been lost by him, and found by some
men who used it to light their pipes, they died of fright on
learning to whom it had belonged.³

  
¹
Frazer (1911
b
, 134-5), quoting a
Pakeha Maori (1884).

  
²
Frazer (loc. cit.), quoting Brown
(1845).

  
³
Frazer (loc. cit.).

Totem And Taboo

2690

   It is not to be wondered at that
a need was felt for isolating such dangerous persons as chiefs and
priests from the rest of the community - to build a barrier round
them which would make them inaccessible. It may begin to dawn on us
that this barrier, originally erected for the observance of taboo,
exists to this day in the form of court ceremonial.

   But perhaps the major part of
this taboo upon rulers is not derived from the need for protection
against
them. The second reason for the special treatment of
privileged persons - the need to provide protection
for
them
against the threat of danger - has had an obvious part in creating
taboos and so of giving rise to court etiquette.

   The need to protect the king from
every possible form of danger follows from his immense importance
to his subjects, whether for weal or woe. It is his person which,
strictly speaking, regulates the whole course of existence.
‘The people have to thank him for the rain and sunshine which
foster the fruits of the earth, for the wind which brings ships to
their coasts, and even for the solid ground beneath their
feet.’ (Frazer, 1911
b
, 7.)

   These rulers among savage peoples
possess a degree of power and a capacity to confer benefits which
are an attribute only of gods, and with which at later stages of
civilization only the most servile of courtiers would pretend to
credit them.

   It must strike us as
self-contradictory that persons of such unlimited power should need
to be protected so carefully from the threat of danger; but that is
not the only contradiction shown in the treatment of royal
personages among savage peoples. For these peoples also think it
necessary to keep a watch on their king to see that he makes a
proper use of his powers; they feel by no means convinced of his
good intentions or conscientiousness. Thus an element of distrust
may be traced among the reasons for the taboo observances that
surround the king. ‘The idea’, writes Frazer
(1911
b
, 7 f.), ‘that early kingdoms are despotisms in
which the people exist only for the sovereign, is wholly
inapplicable to the monarchies we are considering. On the contrary,
the sovereign in them exists only for his subjects; his life is
only valuable so long as he discharges the duties of his position
by ordering the course of nature for his people’s benefit. So
soon as he fails to do so, the care, the devotion, the religious
homage which they had hitherto lavished on him cease and are
changed into hatred and contempt; he is dismissed ignominiously,
and may be thankful if he escapes with his life. Worshipped as a
god one day, he is killed as a criminal the next. But in this
changed behaviour of the people there is nothing capricious or
inconstant. On the contrary, their conduct is entirely of a piece.
If their king is their god, he is or should be also their
preserver; and if he will not preserve them, he must make room for
another who will. So long, however, as he answers their
expectations, there is no limit to the care which they take of him,
and which they compel him to take of himself. A king of this sort
lives hedged in by a ceremonious etiquette, a network of
prohibitions and observances, of which the intention is not to
contribute to his dignity, much less to his comfort, but to
restrain him from conduct which, by disturbing the harmony of
nature, might involve himself, his people, and the universe in one
common catastrophe. Far from adding to his comfort, these
observances, by trammelling his every act, annihilate his freedom
and often render the very life, which it is their object to
preserve, a burden and sorrow to him.’

Totem And Taboo

2691

   One of the most glaring instances
of a sacred ruler being fettered and paralysed in this way by taboo
ceremonials is to be found in the mode of life of the Mikado of
Japan in earlier centuries. An account written more than two
hundred years age reports that the Mikado ‘thinks it would be
very prejudicial to his dignity and holiness to touch the ground
with his feet; for this reason, when he intends to go anywhere, he
must be carried thither on men’s shoulders. Much less will
they suffer that he should expose his sacred person to the open
air, and the sun is not thought worthy to shine on his head. There
is such a holiness ascribed to all parts of his body that he dares
to cut off neither his hair, nor his beard, nor his nails. However,
lest he should grow too dirty, they may clean him in the night when
he is asleep; because, they say, that which is taken from his body
at that time hath been stolen from him and that such a theft doth
not prejudice his holiness or dignity. In ancient times he was
obliged to sit on the throne for some hours every morning, with the
imperial crown on his head, but to sit altogether like a statue,
without stirring either hands or feet, head or eyes, nor indeed any
part of his body, because, by this means, it was thought that he
could preserve peace and tranquillity in his empire; for if,
unfortunately, he turned himself on one side or the other, or if he
looked a good while towards any part of his dominions, it was
apprehended that war, famine, fire, or some other great misfortune
was near at hand to desolate the country.’¹