The Golden Bough, a Study in Magic and Religion, Vol. 2: Taboo and the Perils of the Soul (Classic Reprint) - Hardcover

James George Frazer

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9780265457689: The Golden Bough, a Study in Magic and Religion, Vol. 2: Taboo and the Perils of the Soul (Classic Reprint)

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ISBN 10: 0265457688 ISBN 13: 9780265457689

Publisher: Forgotten Books, 2018

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Excerpt from The Golden Bough, a Study in Magic and Religion, Vol. 2: Taboo and the Perils of the Soul

The term Taboo is one of the very few words which the English language has borrowed from the speech of savages. In the Polynesian tongue, from which we have adopted it, the word designates a remarkable system which has deeply in fluenced the religious, social, and political life of the Oceanic islanders, both Polynesians and Melanesians, particularly by inculcating a superstitions veneration for the persons of nobles and the rights of private property. When about the year 1886 my ever-lamented friend William Robertson Smith asked me to write an article on Taboo for the N inth Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, I shared what I believe to have been at the time the current view of anthropologists, that the institution in question was con fined to the brown and black races of the Pacific. But an attentive study of the accounts given of Taboo by observers who wrote while it still flourished in Polynesia soon led me to modify that view. The analogies which the system presents to the superstitions, not only of savages elsewhere, but of the civilised races of antiquity, were too numerous and too striking to be overlooked and I came to the conclusion that Taboo is only one of a number of similar systems of superstition which among many, perhaps among all races of men have contributed in large measure, under many different names and with many variations of detail, to build up the complex fabric of society in all the various sides or elements of it which we describe as religious, social.

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