Freud - Complete Works (451 page)

Totem And Taboo

2697

   The question of why the emotional
attitude towards rulers includes such a powerful unconscious
element of hostility raises a very interesting problem, but one
that lies outside the limits of the present study. I have already
hinted at the fact that the child’s complex of emotions
towards his father - the father-complex - has a bearing on the
subject, and I may add that more information on the early history
of the kingship would throw a decisive light on it. Frazer
(1911
a
) has put forward impressive reasons, though, as he
himself admits, not wholly conclusive ones, for supposing that the
earliest kings were foreigners who, after a brief reign, were
sacrificed with solemn festivities as representatives of the deity.
It is possible that the course taken by the evolution of kings may
also have had an influence upon the myths of Christendom.

(
c
)
The Taboo upon the Dead

   We know that the dead are
powerful rulers; but we may perhaps be surprised when we learn that
they are treated as enemies.

   The taboo upon the dead is - if I
may revert to the simile of infection - especially virulent among
most primitive peoples. It is manifested, in the first instance, in
the consequences that follow contact with the dead and in the
treatment of mourners.

   Among the Maoris anyone who had
handled a corpse or taken any part in its burial was in the highest
degree unclean and was almost cut off from intercourse with his
fellow-men, or, as we might put it, was boycotted. He could not
enter any house, or come into contact with any person or thing
without infecting them. He might not even touch food with his
hands, which, owing to their uncleanness, had become quite useless.
‘Food would be set for him on the ground, and he would then
sit or kneel down, and, with his hands carefully held behind his
back, would gnaw at it as best he could. In some cases he would be
fed by another person, who with outstretched arm contrived to do it
without touching the tabooed man; but the feeder was himself
subjected to many severe restrictions, little less onerous than
those which were imposed upon the other. In almost every populous
village there lived a degraded wretch, the lowest of the low, who
earned a sorry pittance by thus waiting upon the defiled.’ He
alone was allowed ‘to associate at arm’s length with
one who had paid the last offices . . . to the dead.
And when, the dismal term of his seclusion being over, the mourner
was about to mix with his fellows once more, all the dishes he had
used in his seclusion were diligently smashed, and all the garments
he had worn were carefully thrown away.’

Totem And Taboo

2698

   The taboo observances after
bodily contact with the dead are the same over the whole of
Polynesia, Melanesia and a part of Africa. Their most regular
feature is the prohibition against those who have had such contact
touching food themselves, and the consequent necessity for their
being fed by other people. It is a remarkable fact that in
Polynesia (though the report may perhaps refer only to Hawaii)
priestly kings were subject to the same restriction while
performing their sacred functions.¹ The case of the taboo upon
the dead in Tonga offers a specially clear instance of the way in
which the degree of prohibition varies according to the taboo power
of the person upon whom the taboo is imposed. Thus anyone who
touches a dead chief is unclean for ten months; but if he himself
is a chief he is only tabooed for three, four, or five months
according to the rank of the dead man; but if the dead man were the
‘great divine chief’, even the greatest chief would be
tabooed for ten months. These savages believe firmly that anyone
who violates the taboo ordinances is bound to fall ill and die;
indeed they believe it so firmly that, in the opinion of an
observer, ‘no native ever made an experiment to prove the
contrary’.²

   Essentially the same prohibitions
(though from our point of view they are more interesting) apply to
those who have been in contact with the dead only in a metaphorical
sense: the dead person’s mourning relations, widowers and
widows. The observances that we have so far mentioned may seem
merely to give characteristic expression to the virulence of the
taboo and its contagious power. But those which now follow give us
a hint at the
reasons
for the taboo - both the ostensible
ones and what we must regard as the deep-lying real ones.

   ‘Among the Shuswap of
British Columbia widows and widowers in mourning are secluded and
forbidden to touch their own head or body; the cups and cooking
vessels which they use may be used by no one
else. . . . No hunter would come near such mourners,
for their presence is unlucky. If their shadow were to fall on
anyone, he would be taken ill at once. They employ thorn-bushes for
bed and pillow . . . and thorn-bushes are also laid
all around their beds.’ This last measure is designed to keep
the dead person’s ghost at a distance. The same purpose is
shown still more clearly in the usage reported from another North
American tribe which provides that, after her husband’s
death, ‘a widow would wear a breech-cloth made of dry
bunch-grass for several days to prevent her husband’s ghost
having intercourse with her.’ This suggests that contact
‘in a metaphorical sense’ is after all understood as
being bodily contact, for the dead man’s ghost does not leave
his relations and does not cease to ‘hover’ round them
during the time of mourning.

   ‘Among the Agutainos, who
inhabit Palawan, one of the Philippine Islands, a widow may not
leave her hut for seven or eight days after the death; and even
then she may only go out at an hour when she is not likely to meet
anybody, for whoever looks upon her dies a sudden death. To prevent
this fatal catastrophe, the widow knocks with a wooden peg on the
trees as she goes along, thus warning people of her dangerous
proximity; and the very trees on which she knocks soon die.’
The nature of the danger feared from a widow such as this is made
plain by another example. ‘In the Mekeo district of British
New Guinea a widower loses all his civil rights and becomes a
social outcast, an object of fear and horror, shunned by all. He
may not cultivate a garden, nor show himself in public, nor walk on
the roads and paths. Like a wild beast he must skulk in the long
grass and the bushes; and if he sees or hears anyone coming,
especially a woman, he must hide behind a tree or a thicket.’
This last hint makes it easy to trace the origin of the dangerous
character of widowers or widows to the danger of
temptation
.
A man who has lost his wife must resist a desire to find a
substitute for her; a widow must fight against the same wish and is
moreover liable, being without a lord and master, to arouse the
desires of other men. Substitutive satisfactions of such a kind run
counter to the sense of mourning and they would inevitably kindle
the ghost’s wrath.³

  
¹
Frazer (loc. cit.).

  
²
Frazer (1911
b
, 140), quoting Mariner
(1818).

  
³
The patient whose
‘impossibilities’ I compared with taboos earlier in
this paper (see 
page 2676
) told
me that whenever she met anyone dressed in mourning in the street
she was filled with indignation: such people, she thought, should
be forbidden to go out.

Totem And Taboo

2699

   One of the most puzzling, but at
the same time instructive usages in connection with mourning is the
prohibition against uttering the name of the dead person. This
custom is extremely widespread, it is expressed in a variety of
ways and has had important consequences. It is found not only among
the Australians and Polynesians (who usually show us taboo
observances in the best state of preservation), but also among
‘peoples so widely separated from each other as the Samoyeds
of Siberia and the Todas of southern India; the Mongols of Tartary
and the Tuaregs of the Sahara; the Ainos of Japan and the Akamba
and Nandi of central Africa; the Tinguianes of the Philippines and
the inhabitants of the Nicobar Islands, of Borneo, of Madagascar,
and of Tasmania.’ (Frazer, 1911
b
, 353.) In some of
these cases the prohibition and its consequences last only during
the period of mourning, in others they are permanent; but it seems
invariably to diminish in strictness with the passage of time.

   The avoidance of the name of a
dead person is as a rule enforced with extreme severity. Thus in
some South American tribes it is regarded as a deadly insult to the
survivors to mention the name of a dead relative in their presence,
and the punishment for it is not less than that laid down for
murder. (Ibid., 352.) It is not easy at first to see why the
mention of the name should be regarded with such horror; but the
dangers involved have given rise to a whole number of methods of
evasion which are interesting and important in various ways. Thus
the Masai in East Africa resort to the device of changing the dead
man’s name immediately after his death; he may then be
mentioned freely under his new name while all the restrictions
remain attached to the old one. This seems to presuppose that the
dead man’s ghost does not know and will not get to know his
new name. The Adelaide and Encounter Bay tribes of South Australia
are so consistently careful that after a death everyone bearing the
same name as the dead man’s, or a very similar one, changes
it for another. In some instances, as for instance among certain
tribes in Victoria and in North-West America, this is carried a
step further, and after a death all the dead person’s
relations change their names, irrespective of any similarity in
their sound. Indeed, among the Guaycurus in Paraguay, when a death
had taken place, the chief used to change the name of every member
of the tribe; and ‘from that moment everybody remembered his
new name just as if he had borne it all his life’.¹

   Moreover, if the name of the dead
man happens to be the same as that of an animal or common object,
some tribes think it necessary to give these animals or objects new
names, so that the use of the former names shall not recall the
dead man to memory. This usage leads to a perpetual change of
vocabulary, which causes much difficulty to the missionaries,
especially when such changes are permanent. In the seven years
which the missionary Dobrizhoffer spent among the Abipones of
Paraguay, ‘the native word for jaguar was changed thrice, and
the words for crocodile, thorn, and the slaughter of cattle
underwent similar though less varied vicissitudes’.² The
dread of uttering a dead person’s name extends, indeed, to an
avoidance of the mention of anything in which the dead man played a
part; and an important consequence of this process of suppression
is that these peoples possess no tradition and no historical
memory, so that any research into their early history is faced by
the greatest difficulties. A number of these primitive races have,
however, adopted compensatory usages which revive the names of dead
persons after a long period of mourning by giving them to children,
who are thus regarded as reincarnations of the dead.

  
¹
Frazer (1911
b
, 357), quoting an old
Spanish observer.

  
²
Frazer (1911
b
, 360), quoting
Dobrizhoffer.

Totem And Taboo

2700

   This taboo upon names will seem
less puzzling if we bear in mind the fact that savages regard a
name as an essential part of a man’s personality and as an
important possession: they treat words in every sense as things. As
I have pointed out elsewhere, our own children do the same. They
are never ready to accept a similarity between two words as having
no meaning; they consistently assume that if two things are called
by similar-sounding names this must imply the existence of some
deep-lying point of agreement between them. Even a civilized adult
may be able to infer from certain peculiarities in his own
behaviour that he is not so far removed as he may have thought from
attributing importance to proper names, and that his own name has
become to a very remarkable extent bound up with his personality.
So, too, psycho-analytic practice comes upon frequent confirmations
of this in the evidence it finds of the importance of names in
unconscious mental activities.¹

   As was only to be expected,
obsessional neurotics behave exactly like savages in relation to
names. Like other neurotics, they show a high degree of
‘complexive sensitiveness’ in regard to uttering or
hearing particular words and names; and their attitude towards
their own names imposes numerous, and often serious, inhibitions
upon them. One of these taboo patients of my acquaintance had
adopted a rule against writing her own name, for fear that it might
fall into the hands of someone who would then be in possession of a
portion of her personality. She was obliged to fight with
convulsive loyalty against the temptations to which her imagination
subjected her, and so forbade herself ‘to surrender any part
of her person’. This included in the first place her name,
and later extended to her handwriting, till finally she gave up
writing altogether.

  
¹
Cf. Stekel and Abraham.

Totem And Taboo

2701

   We shall no longer feel
surprised, therefore, at savages regarding the name of a dead
person as a portion of his personality and making it subject to the
relevant taboo. So, too, uttering the name of a dead person is
clearly a derivative of having contact with him. We may therefore
turn to the wider problem of why such contact is submitted to so
strict a taboo.