and in other cases
there are customs that can only be referred to a belief in an injurious
potency residing in certain objects.[1020] Practically, savage tribes
distinguish between taboo and magic.

+620+. Contamination of customs has always been the rule in human
communities, early and late, savage and civilized. We have seen how
there has often been a coalescence between taboo regulations proper and
ordinary civil law. To state the case more fully, these have been fused
into a unity of social life with individual initiative, magical notions,
arbitrary enactments. The actual social constitution even of slightly
developed tribes is composite, the outcome of long experience and
experiment in which all the lines of social feeling and thought have
gradually drawn together and been compacted into a more or less unitary
mass. While these lines have influenced each the others, it is possible,
to a considerable extent, to distinguish the sphere of each. Thus we
can, in many cases, see where ordinary civil law comes in to adopt,
modify, or set aside taboo rules, and so we can generally recognize the
line of demarcation between definite taboo and the conception of
association of ideas. In some cases the explanations offered of taboo
customs are afterthoughts--imagined hypotheses to account for things
already in existence.[1021]

+621+. The despotism exercised by taboo systems over certain Polynesian
communities is one of the extraordinary facts of human history. In New
Zealand and Hawaii the restrictions on conduct were so numerous and were
carried out so mercilessly that life under these conditions would seem
to us intolerable.[1022] In addition to a great number of particular
prohibitions and to the constant fear of violating the sacredness of the
persons of chiefs and trenching on their prerogatives, we find in New
Zealand the amazing rule that on the occasion of a great misfortune (as
a fire) the sufferer was to be deprived of his possessions--the blow
that fell on him was held to affix a stigma to all that he owned.
Besides the traditional taboos there were the arbitrary enactments of
chiefs which might constantly introduce new possibilities of suffering.
Yet with all this the people managed to live in some degree of comfort,
somewhat as in civilized communities life goes on in spite of
earthquakes, epidemics, bank failures, the injustices of law, and the
tyranny of the powerful.

+622+. The duration of certain taboo per