religious purposes; sometimes
it was the means of saving life, and at other times it was the
ostensible reason for taking life away.[92] It may be defined as a
system of consecration which made any person, place, or thing sacred
either permanently or for a limited time.[93] The effect of this
consecration was to separate the sacred person or thing from all contact
with common (_noa_)[94] persons and things: it established a sort of
quarantine for the protection not only of the sacred persons themselves,
but of common folk, who were supposed to be injured or killed by mere
contact with a tabooed person or object. For the sanctity which the
taboo conferred on people and things was conceived of as a sort of
dangerous atmosphere, charged with a spiritual electricity, which
discharged itself with serious and even fatal effect on all rash
intruders. A tabooed person might not be touched by any one, so long as
the taboo or state of consecration lasted; he might not even put his own
hand to his own head; and he was most stringently forbidden to touch
food with his hands. Hence he was either fed like a child by another,
who put the food into his mouth; or he had to lap up his victuals like a
dog from the ground, with his hands held behind his back; or lastly he
might convey the nourishment by means of a fern stalk to his mouth. When
he wished to drink, somebody else poured water into his mouth from a
calabash without allowing the vessel to touch his lips; for mere contact
with the lips of the tabooed man would have rendered the vessel itself
sacred or tabooed and therefore unfit for common use. Similarly, when he
desired to wash his hands, water had to be poured on them from a
distance by his attendant. This state of consecration or defilement, as
we might be tempted rather to call it, was incurred by any person who
had touched either a young child or a corpse or had assisted at a
funeral. The taboo contracted by association with the dead was the
strictest and most virulent of all. It extended not only to the persons
who had handled the corpse or paid the last offices of respect to the
departed; it applied to the place where the body was buried or the bones
deposited. So sacred, indeed, was deemed the spot where a chief had died
that in the old days everything upon it was destroyed by fire. Hence in
order to avoid the destruction of a house, which a death in it would
have entailed, it was customary to remove a sick or dying man t