A taboo is a strong prohibition, felt in the body as much as reasoned, on something a people treats as too sacred, too dangerous or too out of place to touch, eat, say or do. The English word comes from the Polynesian tapu, which Captain James Cook met in Tonga in 1777, and which carried the sense of something set apart, sacred and forbidden at once. Every people has had taboos because every culture is held together by its stories, and taboos are one of the ways those stories are lived; Therapeutic Shamanism asks of each one whether it carries something healthy or is one of a culture’s made-up and ‘wonky’ stories.
What is a taboo? #
A line that must not be crossed, held in place less by argument than by feeling. Some taboos concern food, some the body, birth and death, some words that must not be spoken or places that must not be entered, and some forbid sex between particular people. What marks a taboo out from an ordinary rule is the strength of the reaction to breaking it, which is not just disapproval but a sense that something dangerous, polluting or sacrilegious has happened.
Taboos are one part of the wider set of norms by which every society lives, alongside everyday customs, the customs carrying moral weight that anthropologists call mores, and formal laws. A culture’s stories “make up the norms, mores, folkways and taboos that create social cohesion and allow societies to operate successfully; they are the glue that holds societies together.”1
Where does the word come from? #
From Polynesia. English took it from Captain James Cook, who met it on his third voyage, in Tonga in 1777, and found it had a very broad meaning there; linguists trace it to an older Polynesian word, tapu, found also as kapu in Hawaiian, combining the sense of sacred with the sense of forbidden. Cook’s Tongans lived in a chiefly society of farmers and fishers.
In English the word soon narrowed towards ‘forbidden because unclean’. The anthropologist Alma Gottlieb, following the anthropologist Franz Steiner’s lectures Taboo (1956), points out that in its own setting tapu named a state of being too powerful to discuss or act on, power that was morally neutral, neither good nor bad in itself. The narrowing to ‘dirty’ came with the word’s travels into a different culture.2
Why did every people have them? #
Because every people lives by stories, and no culture can work without them. Making up stories is in our nature, part of the gift of being human, and our stories are what bond us and bind us, and societies are formed from them and defined by them. Taboos are among the strongest of the norms those stories produce, marking the places where a culture’s stories matter most to it.3
In a shamanic culture journeying never stood alone. It sat inside a wider context of knowledge and practice, including creation stories, ways of working with the Plant, Animal and Stone PeoplesStone People. All physical matter: mountains, sea, rivers, clouds, sun and stars: the oldest and widest of the Peoples. As some animist cultures put it, ‘we are just the Stone People, dancing for a while’. Read the full answer and with the dead, and “ethics and taboos (what was and was not allowed)”.4
Anthropologists have offered many further explanations. The anthropologist Mary Douglas argued that taboo guards a culture’s picture of how the world is ordered, so that whatever blurs its categories is felt as dangerous; see Who was Mary Douglas, and what did Purity and Danger show? and What do purity and pollution mean in traditional societies? Sigmund Freud, in Totem and Taboo (1913), speculated that the two oldest and most universal taboos were against incest and against killing the father; his story of how they began has found few supporters among anthropologists, but the avoidance of sex between close relatives is found, in one form or another, in almost every society studied.
What did taboos look like among hunter-gatherers? #
Often very different from the taboos of farming and city cultures. The anthropologist Jerome Lewis studied ekila among the Mbendjele BaYaka, forest hunter-gatherers of the northern Republic of Congo who also trade and work with neighbouring farmers. Ekila is a web of taboos around menstruation, blood, sex, hunting and the sharing of meat. A hunter whose meat is not properly shared, or who laughs at an animal he has killed, ruins his ekila and his hunting.5
What Lewis found most striking is what these taboos do. There are no priests, teachers or elders with the authority to enforce them; people learn them through their own bodies over a lifetime, from a girl’s first period to a boy’s first kill. When things go wrong, ekila offers “a neutral medium for discussing success and failure”, putting misfortune down to a broken taboo instead of to anyone’s personal failing, which keeps anyone from claiming status from their skill. The neighbouring farmers, by contrast, have ideas of luck and of ancestors that need older men, living and dead, to mediate them, and uphold their authority.5 See Who is Jerome Lewis, and what can the BaYaka teach us about equality?
Do taboos have practical reasons behind them? #
Anthropologists disagree. Some argue for practical, material causes. The anthropologist Marvin Harris, in Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches (1974), explained the Middle Eastern taboo on pork by the cost of raising pigs in a hot, dry land. In north-eastern Madagascar, the scientists Christopher Golden and Jean Comaroff recorded more than six thousand food taboos, or fady, among farming households who also hunt, and found that they track real health risks. The hedgehog tenrec, which can carry plague, is taboo for almost half the population, against very few for a similar animal that does not.6
Others argue that this misses what taboos are about. Douglas rejected what she called medical materialism, holding that taboos follow a culture’s categories, not its hygiene. And Golden and Comaroff themselves found that only one of nearly twelve hundred origin stories they collected was about protecting a species, so that taboos which sometimes protect wildlife were not made for that purpose; most of the reasons people gave concerned spiritual protection, health and obligations to animals that had once saved a family.6
Did shamans keep taboos of their own? #
Very often. Across a large sample of societies, trance practitioners were found to abstain from certain foods, sex or company in the great majority of them. Among the Mentawai of Siberut Island in Indonesia, forest-dwelling horticulturalists who grow sago, the anthropologists Manvir Singh and Joseph Henrich found five animals permanently forbidden to every shaman, or sikerei, and many more prohibitions during initiation and healing, including on sex and on any kind of work. Ordinary Mentawai people read a shaman’s self-denial as a sign that he believed sincerely, was cooperative, and had real power with the spirits.7 See What is shamanic initiation, and what part does dismemberment play?
How does Therapeutic Shamanism see taboos? #
As stories, and so as something to look at rather than simply obey or throw away. Our ability to make up stories is not good or bad in itself; what matters is how we use it, and the crucial difference is between our own made-up stories and the Stories that come from Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this.8 So a taboo may carry something of those deeper Stories, or it may be a human-made story through and through, and some taboos were made up precisely to justify and enforce power.
The sky religionsSky-religion. The vertical, hierarchical reordering of the sacred that the Fall installed, governed by the spell ‘up is good, down is bad’: transcend the body, escape matter, purify upward. The conditioning Therapeutic Shamanism works to undo. More about this that arose with the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer are the clearest case. To justify and enforce the new order, they taught that up is good and down is bad, that spirit is good and matter corrupt, “that men are good and that women are dirty, unclean, inferior and not to be trusted”.9 Seeing which of the taboos we were raised with are healthy, and which are made up, is part of deprogrammingDeprogramming. The active work of shaking off Taker-culture conditioning; the companion of rewilding. More about this. Many of them feel like plain common sense from the inside, which is exactly why they need looking at. See What is deprogramming? and How has spirituality been used to justify domination?
