Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 21, 1910.djvu/345

Rh "on the belief that the qualities of the eaten pass into the eater," but they have been incorporated into the fabric of society, and have therefore and thereby acquired a special significance. Salomon Reinach invites us to accept tabu as the basis of religion, "un ensemble," as he calls it, "de scrupules qui font obstacle au libre exercice de nos facultés." He goes further, and asserts that "la sanction prévue, en cas de violation du tabou, n'est pas une pénalite édictée par la loi civile, mais une calamité, telle que la mort ou la cécité qui frappe le coupable." The criticism which I have to offer on this passage, and especially on the concluding portion of it, is that the penalty attaching to a breach of these social laws is in this area distinctly and unmistakably social, not individual. If the priest-chief eats food which is forbidden, the village may suffer a plague of boils, or of blindness. If a warrior eats food cooked by a woman before a raid, the whole enterprise will go wrong and all his companions be exposed to danger. If parents taste oil or pulse while the hair-cutting genna is in progress, the child will suffer. Just in this way the sin of Achan, who took the accursed thing, brought defeat and misfortune on the people of Israel. The strength of the genna system among the Nāgas lies, therefore, in the indirectness and uncertainty of its sanctions. A violation of a tabu on hunting during the cultivating season would,—specifically,—bring about a shortage of rice, but any subsequent misfortune would be attributed to it. If all may suffer for the default of one, it becomes the business of each to see that his neighbour keeps the law. If not the germ of altruism, is not this conducive to altruism? I have exploited this social solidarity in a severely practical manner when dealing as a judicial officer with village and other disputes. But rarely was the penalty, death or such other misfortune as an active imagination might suggest, invoked in their