Taboo, or TABU, a Polynesian term (probably from ta, 'to mark,' and pu, expressing intensity) that has supplied a useful verb to the English tongue. The origin of the notion is based on a fundamental religious conception of animistic religion about the natural relations between the gods and certain physical things; it means properly 'sacred,' 'consecrated,' but by a natural transference of meaning by association of ideas has also become equivalent to 'accused,' 'unholy.' The idea of a thing being sacred involves a sense of prohibition, just as a temple or church may be a sanctuary where the safety of a fugitive is respected. And such restrictions enforced by the dread of supernatural penalties become rules of conduct for the regulation of a man's relations to the divine, and thus lead naturally up to ideas of holiness of more advanced religions. Among the Maoris and Polynesians such prohibitions were included within the signification of the word tabu, embracing both traditional rules binding on chiefs and people alike, and special prohibitions imposed like the interdict of a modern court of justice, from time to time. Thus the notion could be utilised as a method of protection to life or property—a rudimentary police system and discipline of character, but based upon spiritual even more than on temporal terrors (cf. Judges, xvii. 2). Some things, as idols, the persons and property of chiefs or priests, were always tabu, as well as some kinds of food, as the pork denied to women in Hawaii, the water that might not be brought within the house in the Marquesas Islands. Special taboos might be interdicts laid on a house or a road, or an obligation to abstain from some of the ordinary pleasures of life during the sickness of a chief or the time before a battle or a special religious ceremony. This special consecration of the person before battle seems to be fairly made out also as a Semitic custom, by comparing Deut. xxiii. 9-14 with 1 Sam. xxi. 4-6. Again, taboos varied in intensity—during the stricter none went outside his house save the priests, and no fire was lighted. The usual length was forty days, and the fact was intimated by such marks as a white cloth hung up on the thing tabooed. Again, many things were naturally taboo—women after childbirth or menstruation, the bodies of the dead, the head and hair of a chief, and the like—usages which touch the ceremonial uncleanness of Leviticus and some the distinctive characteristics of Nazarites. Elaborate ceremonies were fixed for the removal of the interdict of taboo, and the penalty for its violation was death, in New Zealand usually indiscriminate spoliation of the property of the offender. In New Zealand also there was a development of the system by which a man could reserve something to himself by a kind of private taboo—a system which would readily lend itself to dishonest ends like the Corban by means of which unprincipled New Testament Jews wriggled themselves out of their natural obligations. Anything formally devoted or consecrated to a god is inalienable, and contact with it is forbidden under supernatural penalties. Such a ban is merely a taboo, and we find the full significance of such wide-spread restriction in such passages as 1 Kings, xvi. 34; Deut. vii. 26; Josh. vii.; Job, xv. 28. It is obvious that ecclesiastical Excommunication (q.v.) is itself a form of taboo, as also the infamous 17th-century Letters of Intercommuning issued by the Scottish Privy-council against holding any intercourse with the persons therein named, as well as the too notorious boycotting of later days in Ireland.
It only remains to say that a similar distinction between the ceremoniously clean and unclean will be found in the religious rituals of every primitive people. Holy and unclean things are alike in this, that both lay restrictions on man's use of and contact with them, the former because they pertain to the gods, the latter because they are hateful to the gods and therefore not to be tolerated by their worshippers. Uncleanness is treated like a contagion, to be washed or purified away. The prohibitions against eating certain animals are closely parallel to the taboos which totemism lays on the use of sacred animals as food. Certain garments also become taboo by contact with holy places, and the worshipper must put off his ordinary clothes (1 Sam. xix. 24) or put on special garments (cf. Ex. xix. 10, Gen. xxxv. 2). And herein we may find the key to many such wide-spread phenomena as fasts, special abstinences, periods of continence, injunctions against eating special things or naming certain names.
See the works on Polynesia or New Zealand, by Ellis, Turner, Waitz-Gerland (vol. vi.), Shortland; the admirable article by J. G. Frazer in Ency. Brit. (vol. xxiii. 1888), and Notes C and D to Prof. Robertson Smith's Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (1889).