[1040] This act takes on a sacred character, it is true, when the elements eaten are sacred. But in itself, the act is so very profane that eating a sacred food always constitutes a profanation. The profanation may be permitted or even ordered, but, as we shall see below, only on condition that rites attenuating or expiating it precede or accompany it. The existence of these rites shows that, by itself, the sacred thing should not be eaten.
[1041] Nor. Tr., p. 263.
[1042] Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 171.
[1043] Howitt, Nat. Tr., p. 674. Perhaps the rule against talking during the great religious solemnities is due to the same cause. Men speak, and especially in a high voice, during ordinary life; then, in the religious life they ought to keep still or talk in a low voice. This same consideration is not foreign to the alimentary interdictions (see above, p. 128).
[1044] Nor. Tr., p. 33.
[1045] Since there is a sacred principle, the soul, within each man, from the very first, the individual is surrounded by interdicts, the original form of the moral interdicts which isolate and protect the human person to-day. Thus the corpse of his victim is considered dangerous for a murderer (Spencer and Gillen, Nat. Tr., p. 492), and is taboo for him. Now the interdicts having this origin are frequently used by individuals as a means of withdrawing certain things from common use and thus establishing a property right over them. "When a man goes away from the camp, leaving his arms and food there," says Roth, speaking of the tribes on the Palmer River (North Queensland), "if he urinates near the objects he leaves, they become tami (equivalent to taboo) and he may be sure of finding them intact on his return" (North Queensland Ethnography, in Records of the Australian Museum, Vol. VII, No. 2, p. 75). This is because the urine, like the blood, is believed to contain some of the sacred force which is personal to the individual. So it keeps strangers at a distance. For the same reasons, the spoken word may also serve as a vehicle for these same influences; that is how it becomes possible to prevent access to an object by a mere verbal declaration. This power of making interdicts varies with different individuals; it is greater as their character is more sacred. Men have this privilege almost to the exclusion of women (Roth cites one single case of a taboo imposed by women); it is at its maximum with the chiefs and old men, who use it to monopolize whatever things they find it convenient to (Roth, ibid., p. 77). Thus the religious interdict becomes a right of property and an administrative rule.
[1046] See below, this book, ch. ii.
[1047] See above, p. 10.
[1048] See above, p. 219.
[1049] See Hubert and Mauss, Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice, in Mélanges d'histoire des religions, pp. 22 ff.