Rest Days; A Sociological Study 5 



when solemnly cursed in the name of a powerful ghost or spirit." 

 In Gabun, West Africa, ornnda meant originally " prohibited 

 from human use." Under missionary hands it grew into its 

 related sense of " sacred to spiritual use." In the Mpongwe 

 Scriptures it serves as the translation of our word " holy."" 

 The Malagasy equivalent of tabu is fady, which means, primarily, 

 " dangerous," but which has the derivative meanings : sacre, 

 " prohibited," " ill-omened," " unlucky."^^ Anthropologically, it 

 is no ver}' far cry from such expressions to the Greek ayto?? or 

 the Latin saccr, since each of these terms conveys the twin ideas 

 of sanctity and pollution. ^- 



It is convenient to distinguish between taboos which are arti- 

 ficially imposed by such individuals as chiefs and priests and 

 those which follow naturally as the consequence of certain acts or 

 as the outcome of certain situations. Thus in Polynesia a chief- 

 tain might set a taboo over the common crops until harvest time 

 or a private individual might protect his own property through 

 the use of the same supernatural machinery: these were pro- 

 hibitions analogous to the laws of an advanced society though 

 supported by sanctions both human and divine. On the other 



" R. H. Codrington, The Melanesians, Oxford, iSgi, p. 215. In the 

 Banks Islands and the New Hebrides the word rongo is employed to 

 indicate the naturally holy character which certain objects may possess 

 quite independently of any human sanction or prohibition {idem, 181). 



'"R. H. Nassau, Fetichism in West Africa, London, 1904, p. 80. 



"A. van Gennep, Taboii et totcmisme a Madagascar, Paris, 1904, pp. 12, 

 sqq., 23. 



'''Professor Frazer points out {op. cit., xxiii. 18) that the Gfeeks Usu- 

 ally discriminated the two senses, a.yp6$ being devoted to the sense of 

 " sacred " and ^^71^5 to that of " unclean " or " accursed." On the other 

 hand, sacer, among the Romans, always continued to retain the double 

 meaning. In his Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia. Cambridge, 1885, 

 p. 307, the late W. Robertson Smith showed that the Hebrew tame "is 

 not the ordinary word for things physically foul; it is a ritual term and 

 corresponds exactly to the idea of taboo ..." See Leviticus, xi. 1-31, 

 passim; xv. 4-26. passim; Psalms, cvi. 39; Ezckiel, xx. 21, 26, xxii. 5; 

 Job, xiv. 4. etc. For these references I am indebted to my friend the Rev 

 S. Mills Haves. 



