Page:Totem and Taboo (1919).djvu/84

72 him of his offense in eating the meal of the chief. The man had been a strong, brave, warrior, but as soon as he heard this he collapsed and was afflicted by terrible convulsions, from which he died towards sunset of the following day. A Maori woman ate a certain fruit and then learned that it came from a place on which there was a taboo. She cried out that the spirit of the chief whom she had thus offended would surely kill her. This incident occurred in the afternoon and on the next day at twelve o’clock she was dead. The tinder box of a Maori chief once cost several persons their lives. The chief had lost it and those who found it used it to light their pipes. When they learned whose property the tinder box was they all died of fright.

It is hardly astonishing that the need was felt to isolate dangerous persons like chiefs and priests, by building a wall around them which made them inaccessible to others. We surmise that this wall, which originally was constructed out of taboo rules, still exists to-day in the form of court ceremony.

But probably the greater part of this taboo of the rulers cannot be traced back to the need of