the riddle of taboo? Not only, I think, because every psychological problem is well worth the effort of investigation for its own sake, but for other reasons as well. It may be surmised that the taboo of Polynesian savages is after all not so remote from us as we were at first inclined to believe; the moral and customary prohibitions which we ourselves obey may have some essential relation to this primitive taboo the explanation of which may in the end throw light upon the dark origin of our own “categorical imperative.”
We are therefore inclined to listen with keen expectations when an investigator like W. Wundt gives his interpretation of taboo, especially as he promises to “go back to the very roots of the taboo concepts.”[1]
Wundt states that the idea of taboo “includes all customs which express dread of particular objects connected with cultic ideas or of actions having reference to them.”[2]
On another occasion he says: “In accordance with the general sense of the word we understand by taboo every prohibition laid down in customs or manners or in expressly formulated laws, not to touch an object or to take it for one’s own use, or to make use of certain proscribed
