Rest Days; A Sociological Study 147 



The foregoing considerations do not, however, apply to all ex- 

 amples of the superstition under discussion. In many instances, 

 as has been repeatedly noticed, no clear line of demarcation can 

 be drawn between days tabu and days considered " unlucky." 

 Both may involve similar ideas of contagion; the notion of sanc- 

 tity or pollution in the one being conceived as scarcely more trans- 

 missible than the vaguer conception of " unluckiness " which 

 attaches to certain periods and affects everything done on such 

 occasions. In each case the roots of the institution go back to 

 the primitive, unanalyzed sense of danger lurking in the unusual 

 and the abnormal. Accordingly, many of the so-called unlucky 

 days found among peoples of archaic culture and still lingering 

 in contemporary civilization may be regarded as survivals from 

 an earlier institution of days of abstinence communally observed. 

 It is true that as compared with the longer duration of some 

 tabooed periods among primitive peoples, the unlucky day consti- 

 tutes a limited season of restriction. This difference may be ex- 

 plained as the necessary outcome of advancing culture, since the 

 burden of the old restrictions would otherwise become intolerable. 

 Every progressive society tries to shake off vexatious restrictions, 

 the classic example of which was the voluntary abolition in Hawaii 

 of the entire tabu system before the advent of the missionaries.'^ 



22. UNLUCKY DAYS IN THE LOWER AND THE HIGHER CULTURE 



The likeness between tabooed days and some " unlucky " days 

 may be illustrated by much ethnographic evidence drawn from 

 different cultural areas.^ The Maori, we are told, endeavor to 

 determine by divination whether the day set for a journey is fa- 



' This took place in 1819 when Kamehameha II succeeded to the throne 

 previously occupied by his energetic father. The first missionaries did not 

 arrive from America until 1820. See the accounts of this remarkable revo- 

 lution in Ellis, op. cit., iv. 126 sqq. Cf. also, The Private Journal of the 

 Rev. C. S. Stevjart, Dublin, 1830, p. 78. 



* Some material on unlucky days is collected in R. Andree's brief article 

 " Tagewahlerei " in his Ethnographlsche Parallelen und VergJeiche, Leip- 

 zig, 1878, pp. 1-8. The chapter devoted to the subject in William Jones, 

 Credulities Past and Present,' London, i8g8, is an uncritical miscellany. 



