Freud - Complete Works (450 page)

   Some of the taboos laid upon
barbarian kings remind one vividly of the restrictions imposed upon
murderers. Thus in West Africa, ‘at Shark Point near Cape
Padron, in Lower Guinea, lives the priestly king Kukulu, alone in a
wood. He may not touch a woman nor leave his house; indeed he may
not even quit his chair, in which he is obliged to sleep sitting,
for if he lay down no wind would arise and navigation would be
stopped. He regulates storms, and in general maintains a wholesome
and equable state of the atmosphere.’ The same writer says of
Loango (in the same part of the world) that the more powerful a
king is, the more taboos he is bound to observe.² The heir to
the throne is also subject to them from infancy; their number
increases as he advances in life, till at the moment that he
ascends the throne he is positively suffocated by them.

   Our space will not allow nor does
our interest require us to enter further into a description of the
taboos associated with the dignity of kings and priests. I will
only add that the principal part is played in them by restrictions
upon freedom of movement and upon diet. Two examples of taboo
ceremonials occurring in civilized communities of a far higher
level of culture will serve to show, however, what a conservative
effect upon ancient usages is exercised by contact with these
privileged personages.

  
¹
Kaempfer (1727), quoted by Frazer
(1911
b
, 3 f.).

  
²
Frazer (1911
b
, 5 and 8), quoting
Bastian (1874-5).

Totem And Taboo

2692

   The Flamen Dialis, the high
priest of Jupiter in ancient Rome, was obliged to observe an
extraordinary number of taboos. He ‘might not ride or even
touch a horse, nor see an army under arms, nor wear a ring which
was not broken, nor have a knot on any part of his
garments; . .  . he might not touch wheaten flour or
leavened bread; he might not touch or even name a goat, a dog, raw
meat, beans, and ivy; . . . his hair could be cut
only by a free man and with a bronze knife, and his hair and nails
when cut had to be buried under a lucky tree; . . .
he might not touch a dead body; . . . he might not
be uncovered in the open air’, and so on. ‘His wife,
the Flaminica, had to observe nearly the same rules, and others of
her own besides. She might not ascend more than three steps of the
kind of staircase called Greek; at a certain festival she might not
comb her hair; the leather of her shoes might not be made from a
beast that had died a natural death, but only from one that had
been slain or sacrificed; if she heard thunder she was tabooed till
she had offered an expiatory sacrifice.’ (Frazer,
1911
b
, 13 f.)

   The ancient kings of Ireland were
subject to a number of exceedingly strange restrictions. If these
were obeyed, every kind of blessing would descend upon the country,
but if they were violated, disasters of every kind would visit it.
A complete list of these taboos is contained in the
Book of
Rights
, the two oldest manuscript copies of which date from
1390 and 1418. The prohibitions are of the most detailed character,
and refer to specific actions at specific places at specific times:
the king, for instance, may not stay in a certain town on a
particular day of the week; he may not cross a certain river at a
particular hour of the day; he may not encamp for nine days on a
certain plain, and so on. (Frazer, 1911
b
, 11 f.)

Totem And Taboo

2693

   Among many savage peoples the
severity of these taboo restrictions upon priestly kings has led to
consequences which have been important historically and are of
particular interest from our point of view. The dignity of their
position ceased to be an enviable thing, and those who were offered
it often took every possible means of escaping it. Thus in
Cambodia, where there are kingships of Fire and Water, it is often
necessary to force successors into accepting these distinctions. On
Niue or Savage Island, a coral island in the South Pacific, the
monarchy actually came to an end because no one could be induced to
take over the responsible and dangerous office. ‘In some
parts of West Africa, when the king dies, a family council is
secretly held to determine his successor. He on whom the choice
falls is suddenly seized, bound, and thrown into the fetish-house,
where he is kept in durance till he consents to accept the crown.
Sometimes the heir finds means of evading the honour which it is
thought to thrust upon him; a ferocious chief has been known to go
about constantly armed, resolute to resist by force any attempt to
set him on the throne.’¹ Among the natives of Sierra
Leone the objection to accepting the honour of kingship become so
great that most tribes were obliged to choose foreigners as their
kings.

   Frazer (1911
b
, 17-25)
attributes to these circumstances the fact that in the course of
history there eventually came about a division of the original
priestly kingship into a spiritual and a temporal power. Weighed
down by the burden of their sacred office, kings became unable to
exert their dominance in real affairs and these were left in the
hands of inferior but practical persons, who were ready to renounce
the honours of kingship. These, then, became the temporal rulers,
while spiritual supremacy, deprived of any practical significance,
was left to the former taboo kings. It is familiar knowledge how
far this hypothesis finds confirmation in the history of old
Japan.

  
¹
Frazer (1911
b
, 17 f.), quoting
Bastian (1874-5).

Totem And Taboo

2694

   If we take a general survey of
the relations of primitive men to their rulers, we are left with an
expectation that we shall have no great difficulty in advancing
from a description of them to a psycho-analytic understanding of
them. Those relations are of a complex kind and not free from
contradictions. Rulers are allowed great privileges, which coincide
exactly with the taboo prohibitions imposed on other people. They
are privileged persons: they may do or enjoy precisely what other
people are forbidden by taboo. As against this freedom, however, we
find that they are restricted by other taboos from which common
people are exempt. Here we have a first contrast - a contradiction,
almost - the fact, that is, of the same individual being both more
free and more restricted. Again, they are regarded as possessing
extraordinary powers of magic, so that people are afraid of coming
into contact with their persons or their property, while on the
other hand the most beneficial consequences are expected from that
same contact. Here there seems to be another, particularly glaring,
contradiction; but, as we have already seen, it is only an apparent
one. Contacts originating from the king himself are healing and
protective; the dangerous contacts are those effected by common men
upon the king or his belongings - probably because they may hint at
aggressive impulses. Yet another contradiction, and one not so
easily resolved, is to be found in the fact that the ruler is
believed to exercise great authority over the forces of Nature, but
that he has to be most carefully protected against the threat of
danger - as though his own power, which can do so much, cannot do
this. The situation is made still more difficult by the fact that
the ruler cannot be trusted to make use of his immense powers in
the right way, that is, for the benefit of his subjects and for his
own protection. Thus people distrust his and feel justified in
keeping a watch on him. The etiquette of taboos to which the
king’s whole life is subjected serves all these protective
purposes at once: his own protection from dangers and the
protection of his subjects from the dangers with which he threatens
them.

   It seems plausible to explain the
complicated and contradictory attitude of primitive peoples to
their rulers in some such way as the following. For superstitious
and other reasons, a variety of different impulses find expression
in relation to kings; and each of these impulses is developed to an
extreme point without regard to the others. This gives rise to
contradictions - by which, incidentally, a savage intellect is as
little disturbed as is a highly civilized one when it comes to such
matters as religion or ‘loyalty’.

Totem And Taboo

2695

   So far so good; but the technique
of psycho-analysis allows us to go into the question further and to
enter more into the details of these various impulses. If we submit
the recorded facts to analysis, as though they formed part of the
symptoms presented by a neurosis, our starting-point must be the
excessive apprehensiveness and solicitude which is put forward as
the reason for the taboo ceremonials. The occurrence of excessive
solicitude of this kind is very common in neuroses, and especially
in obsessional neuroses, with which our comparison is chiefly
drawn. We have come to understand its origin quite clearly. It
appears wherever, in addition to a predominant feeling of
affection, there is also a contrary, but unconscious, current of
hostility - a state of affairs which represents a typical instance
of an ambivalent emotional attitude. The hostility is then shouted
down, as it were, by an excessive intensification of the affection,
which is expressed as solicitude and becomes compulsive, because it
might otherwise be inadequate to perform its task of keeping the
unconscious contrary current of feeling under repression. Every
psycho-analyst knows from experience with what certainty this
explanation of solicitous over-affection is found to apply even in
the most unlikely circumstances - in cases, for instance, of
attachments between a mother and child or between a devoted married
couple. If we now apply this to the case of privileged persons, we
shall realize that alongside the veneration, and indeed
idolization, felt towards them, there is in the unconscious an
opposing current of intense hostility; that, in fact, as we
expected, we are faced by a situation of emotional ambivalence. The
distrust which provides one of the unmistakable elements in kingly
taboos would thus be another, more direct, expression of the same
unconscious hostility. Indeed, owing to the variety of outcomes of
a conflict of this kind which are reached among different peoples,
we are not at a loss for examples in which the existence of this
hostility is still more obviously shown. ‘The savage Timmes
of Sierra Leone’, we learn from Frazer,¹ ‘who
elect their king, reserve to themselves the right of beating him on
the eve of his coronation; and they avail themselves of this
constitutional privilege with such hearty goodwill that sometimes
the unhappy monarch does not long survive his elevation to the
throne. Hence when the leading chiefs have a spite at a man and
wish to rid themselves of him, they elect him king.’ Even in
glaring instances like this, however, the hostility is not admitted
as such, but masquerades as a ceremonial.

  
¹
Frazer (1911
b
, 18), quoting Zweifel
and Moustier (1880).

Totem And Taboo

2696

   Another side of the attitude of
primitive peoples towards their rulers recalls a procedure which is
common in neuroses generally but comes into the open in what are
known as delusions of persecution. The importance of one particular
person is immensely exaggerated and his absolute power is magnified
to the most improbable degree, in order that it may be easier to
make him responsible for everything disagreeable that the patient
may experience. Savages are really behaving in just the same way
with their kings when they ascribe to them power over rain and
sunshine, wind and weather, and then depose them or kill them
because Nature disappoints their hopes of a successful hunt or a
rich harvest. The model upon which paranoics base their delusions
of persecution is the relation of a child to his father. A
son’s picture of his father is habitually clothed with
excessive powers of this kind, and it is found that distrust of the
father is intimately linked with admiration for him. When a
paranoic turns the figure of one of his associates into a
‘persecutor’, he is raising him to the rank of a
father: he is putting him into a position in which he can blame him
for all his misfortunes. Thus this second analogy between savages
and neurotics gives us a glimpse of the truth that much of a
savage’s attitude to his ruler is derived from a
child’s infantile attitude to his father.

   But the strongest support for our
effort to equate taboo prohibitions with neurotic symptoms is to be
found in the taboo ceremonials themselves, the effect of which upon
the position of royalty has already been discussed. These
ceremonials unmistakably reveal their double meaning and their
derivation from ambivalent impulses, as soon as we are ready to
allow that the results which they bring about were intended from
the first. The taboo does not only pick out the king and exalt him
above all common mortals, it also makes his existence a torment and
an intolerable burden and reduces him to a bondage far worse than
that of his subjects. Here, then, we have an exact counterpart of
the obsessional act in the neurosis, in which the suppressed
impulse and the impulse that suppresses it find simultaneous and
common satisfaction. The obsessional act is
ostensibly
a
protection against the prohibited act; but
actually
, in our
view, it is a repetition of it. The ‘ostensibly’
applies to the
conscious
part of the mind, and the
‘actually’ to the
unconscious
part. In exactly
the same way, the ceremonial taboo of kings is
ostensibly
the highest honour and protection for them, while
actually
it is a punishment for their exaltation, a revenge taken on them by
their subjects. The experiences of Sancho Panza (as described by
Cervantes) when he was Governor of his island convinced him that
this view of court ceremonial was the only one that met the case.
If we could hear the views of modern kings and rulers on the
subject, we might find that there were many others who agreed with
him.