[Footnote A: E.B. Tylor[3] has called attention to the belief that the
qualities of the eaten pass into the eater as an explanation of the food
taboos and prejudices of savage peoples.]

Just as the holy thing, which is to be feared as the seat of a mystic,
supernatural force, is to be avoided lest harm befall from contact with
it, or lest it be denied by human touch and its divine essence be
affected, so the unclean thing is also made taboo lest it infect man
with its own evil nature. Even as the savage will not have his idol
polluted by contact with his own personality, however indirect, so he
would himself avoid pollution in similar fashion by shunning that which
is unclean. Here also the avoidance of the tabooed person or thing is
based on the principle of sympathetic magic understood as a method of
transference of qualities, and on belief in the possibility of infection
by contact.

The dual nature of taboo as the avoidance of both the sacred and the
unclean is noted by authorities on the subject who differ in other
respects as to the definition of taboo, such as in the relation of taboo
to the magical ceremonies by which man undertook to mould his
environment to his wishes. Whether the tabooed object be regarded in one
light or the other, the breaking of taboo is associated with dread of
the unknown--besides the fear of infection with the qualities of the
tabooed object according to the laws of sympathetic magic. There is
also the fear of the mysterious and supernatural, whether conceived as
the mana force or as a principle of "bad magic."

Dr. J.G. Frazer has collected into the many volumes of "The Golden
Bough" a mass of evidence concerning the taboos of primitive society. On