Rest Days; A Sociological Study 137 



and the most timid do not smoke. *^ In Hawaii, as we have seen, 

 during the four tabu seasons in each lunar month, " every fire and 

 Hght was extinguished." Similar rules characterize periods of 

 abstinence elsewhere in the aboriginal world (supra). 



Some of these taboos relating to fire may reflect primitive man's 

 fear of a mysterious element which had not yet been completely 

 tamed and harnessed to human use ; but the fact that among vari- 

 ous peoples all fires are put out after a death, indicates a more 

 probable origin of the prohibition in the fear of attracting evil 

 spirits or harmful influences, generally. Thus in Morocco when 

 a person has died in the morning " no fire is made in the whole 

 village until he is buried, and in some parts of the country the 

 inmates of a house or tent where a death has occurred, abstain 

 from making fire for two or three days."*^ Similar customs have 

 a wide diffusion and can be traced, for example, among the Dayaks 

 of Borneo, in Burma and ancient Persia, and among the peasants 

 of Calabria and the Scottish Highlanders. ^° It is hardly possible 

 to urge that the putting out of fires on such occasions is always 

 a necessary result of the widespread custom of fasting after a 

 death and until the corpse is buried ; as a matter of fact we find 

 that fires may be extinguished when there is no fasting, and also 

 that the fast is often restricted to the daytime when evil spirits, 

 and in particular the ghost of the dead man, are presumed to be 

 unable to see. 



But as Professor Westermarck has so ably shown the wide- 

 spread custom of fasting is itself often to be explained as due to 

 the desire to prevent pollution.^^ Under certain circumstances to 

 partake of food may cause defilement; hence fasting is only one 

 of the numerous precautions necessary to avoid contamination. 

 These ideas find expression in the rules prescribing" fasting after 



** G. Maspero New Light on Ancient Egypt,' London, 1909, pp. 130 sq. 



*' Westermarck, Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas, ii. 305. 



^ For a collection of the ethnographic evidence see Frazer, " On Certain 

 Burial Customs as Illustrative of the Primitive Theory of the Soul," 

 Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 1885, xv. 90. 



" E. Westermarck, " The Principles of Fasting," Fo.k-Lore, 1908, xviii. 

 397 ^QQ-; idem, Moral Ideas, ii. 293 sqq. 



iS7 



