lopment of society; but
not, we may surmise, at quite the lowest. What eventually is done
{231} consciously and deliberately is probably done in the first place
much more summarily and automatically. And--in quite the lowest stage
of social development--it is by means of the action of taboo that
summary and automatic punishment for breaches of the custom of the
community is inflicted. Its action is automatic and immediate: merely
to come in contact with the forbidden thing is to become tabooed
yourself; and so great is the horror and dread of such contact, even if
made unwittingly, that it is capable of causing, when discovered,
death. Like the justice, however, of which it is the forerunner, it
does not result always in death, nor does it produce that effect in
most cases. But what it does do is to make the offender himself taboo
and as infectious as the thing that rendered him taboo. Here, too, the
action of taboo, in excommunicating the offender, anticipates, or
rather foreshadows, the action of justice when it excludes the guilty
person from the community and makes of him an outlaw. Again, in the
rough justice found at almost, though not quite, the lowest stages, the
earliest offences of which official notice, so to speak, is taken, are
offences for which the punishment--disease or famine, etc.--falls on
the community as a whole, because the {232} community, in the person of
one of its members, has offended as a whole against heaven. In the
earlier stage of feeling, also, which survives where taboo prevails, it
is the community as a whole which may be infected, and which must
suffer if the offender is allowed to spread the infection; it is the
community, as a whole, which is concerned to thrust out the guilty
person--every one shuns him because he is taboo. Thus, in this the
earliest stage, the offender against the custom of the community is
outlawed just as effectively as in later stages of social development.
But no formal sentence is pronounced; no meeting of the men or the
elders of the community is held to try the offender; no reason is given
or sought why the offence should thus be punished. The operation of
taboo is like that of the laws of nature: the man who eats poisonous
food dies with no reason given. A reason may eventually be found by
science, and is eventually discovered, though the process of discovery
is slow, and many mistakes are made, and many false reasons are given
before the true rea