Taboo. And the Perils of the Soul

In its time The Golden Bough was the sort of book to read beneath the bed-sheets by the light of the torch. When the first edition appeared in 1890, a little frisson seems to have gone around the literary world. The speed and extremity of this reaction is even now not surprising. For The Golden Bough is a dangerous book which retains its ability to disconcert. As then, so now, it is a work whose essence lies in its challenge to received cultural attitudes. One of Frazer’s subjects in this book is that strange phenomenon, well known to Victorian society but named after an obscure Tongalese custom, called a taboo. The taboo-building capacity was something all human beings hold in common and which, by means of the very devices intended to enforce difference, render all men akin. The equivalences set up between things so apparently unlike were taboos; to find them, in 1890 or thereabouts, you read The Golden Bough. This portion of the original text is now being made available on popular demand.