has very justly said, the tabooed object is very often in itself the object of supreme desire.  This is very obvious in the case of the food and sex taboos, which attempt to inhibit two of the most powerful impulses of human nature.  The two conflicting streams of consciousness called ambivalence by the psychologist may be observed in the attitude of the savage toward many of his taboos.  As the Austrian alienist cannily remarks, unless the thing were desired there would be no necessity to impose taboo restrictions concerning it.

It is by a knowledge of the mana concept and the belief in sympathetic magic, clarified by recognition of the ambivalent element in the emotional reaction to the thing tabooed, that we can hope to understand the almost universal custom of the “woman shunned” and the sex taboos of primitive peoples.  This dualism appears most strongly in the attitude toward woman; for while she was the natural object of the powerful sexual instinct she was quite as much the source of fear because she was generally supposed to be endowed with spiritistic forces and in league with supernatural powers.  During the long period when the fact of paternity was unrecognized, the power of reproduction which was thus ascribed to woman alone made of her a mysterious being.  Her fertility could be explained only on the basis of her possession of an unusually large amount of mana or creative force, or by the theory of impregnation by demonic powers.  As a matter of fact, both explanations were accepted by primitive peoples, so that woman was regarded not only as imbued with mana but also as being in direct contact with spirits.  Many of the devices for closing the reproductive organs which abounded among savage tribes were imposed as a protection against spirits rather than against the males of the human species.  The tradition of impregnation by gods or demons was not confined to savage tribes, but was wide-spread in the days of Greece and Rome and lasted into biblical times, when we read of the sons of heaven having intercourse with the daughters of men.

In addition to this fear of the woman as in possession of and in league with supernatural powers, there was an additional motive to avoidance in the fear of transmission of her weakness through contact, a fear based on a belief in sympathetic magic, and believed with all the “intensely realized, living, and operative assurance” of which the untutored mind is capable.  Crawley masses an overwhelming amount of data on this point, and both he and Frazer show the strength of these beliefs.  Indeed, in many cases violation proved to be “sure death,” not by the hand of man, but from sheer fright.  As a result, just as woman was considered to have both the tendency and power to impart her characteristics through contact, so the sexual act, the acme of contact, became the most potent influence for the emasculation of the male.