Among various peoples certain foods are forbidden to priests or magicians. The priests of the ancient Egyptians were not allowed to eat fish,20 nor to meddle with the esculent or potable substances which were produced out of Egypt;21 and, according to Plutarch, they so greatly disliked the nature of excrementitious things that they not only rejected most kinds of pulse, but also the flesh of sheep and swine, because it produced much superfluity of nutriment.22 The lamas of Mongolia will touch no meat of goats, horses, or camels.23 Among the Semang of the Malay Peninsula the medicine-men will not eat goat or buffalo flesh and but rarely that of fowl.24 The dairymen of the Todas may drink milk from certain buffaloes only, and are altogether forbidden to eat chillies.25 These and similar restraints laid upon priests or wizards are probably connected with the idea that holiness is a delicate quality which calls for special precautions.26 Schomburgk states that the conjurers of the British Guiana Indians partake but seldom of the native hog, because they consider the eating of it injurious to the efficacy of their skill.27 And the Ulád Bu ʿAzîz in Morocco believe that if a scribe or a saint eats wolf’s flesh the charms he writes will have no effect, and the saliva of the saint will lose its curative power.

There are still other cases in which certain persons are permanently required to abstain from certain kinds of food. Thus in the Andaman Islands every man and woman “is prohibited all through life from eating some one (or more) fish or animal: in most cases the forbidden dainty is one which in childhood was observed (or imagined) by the mother to occasion some functional derangement; when of an age to understand it the circumstance is explained, and cause and effect being clearly demonstrated, the individual, in question thence forth considers that particular meat his yât-tūb, and avoids it carefully. In cases where no evil consequences have resulted from partaking of any kind of food, the fortunate person is privileged to select his own yât-tūb, and is, of course, shrewd enough to decide upon some fish, such as shark or skate, which is little relished, and to abstain from which consequently entails no exercise of self-denial.” It is believed that the god Pūluga would punish severely any person who might be guilty of eating his yât-tūb, either by causing his skin to peel off, or by turning his hair white, and flaying him alive.28 In Samoa each man had generally his god in the shape of some species of animal; and if he ate one of these divine animals it was supposed that the god avenged the insult by taking up his abode in the eater’s body and there generating an animal of the same kind until it caused his death.29 The members of a totem clan are usually forbidden to eat the particular animal or plant whose name they bear.30 Thus among the Omaha Indians men whose totem is the elk believe that if they ate the flesh of the male elk they would break out in boils and white spots in different parts of their bodies; and men whose totem is the red corn think that if they ate red corn they would have running sores all round their mouths.31 Yet, however general, prohibitions of this kind cannot be said to be a universal characteristic of totemism.32 Sir J. G. Frazer even suggests that the original custom was perhaps to eat the totem and the latter custom to abstain from it.33 But this is hardly more than a guess.

There are, finally, restrictions in eating which refer to the whole people or tribe. In early society certain things which might serve as food are often not only universally abstained from, but actually prohibited by custom or law. The majority of these prohibitions have reference to animals or animal products, which are naturally more apt to cause disgust than is vegetable food—probably because our ancestors in early days, by instinct, subsisted chiefly on a vegetable diet, and only subsequently acquired a more general taste for animal nourishment.34 Certain animals excite a feeling of disgust by their very appearance, and are therefore abstained from. This I take to be a reason for the aversion to eating reptiles. It is said that snakes are avoided as food because their flesh is supposed to be as poisonous as their bite;35 but this explanation is hardly relevant to harmless reptiles, which are likewise in some cases forbidden food.36 The abstinence from fish seems generally to have a similar origin, though some peoples say that they refuse to eat certain species because the soul of a relative might be in the fish.37 The Navahoes of New Mexico “must never touch fish, and nothing will induce them to taste one.”38 The Mongols consider them unclean animals.39 The South Siberian Kachinzes are said to refrain from them because they believe that “the evil principle lives in the water and eats fish.”40 The Káfirs on the North-Western frontier of India “detest fish, though their rivers abound in them.”41 The same aversion is common in the South African tribes42 and among most Hamitic peoples of East Africa;43 when asked for an explanation of it, they say that fish are akin to snakes. Fish, or at least certain species of fish, were forbidden to the ancient Syrians;44 and the Hebrews were prohibited from eating all fish that have not fins and scales.45 It is curious to note that various peoples who detest fish also abstain from fowl.46 The Navahoes are strictly forbidden to eat the wild turkey with which their forests abound;47 and the Mongols dislike of fowl is so great that one of Prejevalsky’s guides nearly turned sick on seeing him eat boiled duck.48 Some peoples have a great aversion to eggs,49 which are said to be excrements, and therefore unfit for food.50 There may be a similar reason for the abstinence from milk among peoples who have domesticated animals able to supply them with it.51 The Dravidian aborigines of the hills of Central India, who never use milk, are expressly said to regard it as an excrement.52 The ancient Caribs had a horror of eggs and never drank milk.53 The Ashantees are “forbidden eggs by the fetish, and cannot be persuaded to taste milk.”54 The Kimbunda in South-Western Africa detest milk, and consider it inconceivable how a grown-up person can enjoy it; they believe that the Kilulu, or spirit, would punish him who partook of it.55 The Dyaks of Borneo, the Javanese, and the Malays abstain from milk.56 To the Chinese milk and butter are insupportably odious.57

The meat of certain animals may also be regarded with disgust on account of their filthy habits or the nasty food on which they live. In the Warramunga tribe, in Central Australia, there is a general restriction applying to eagle-hawks, and the reason assigned for it is that this bird feeds on the bodies of dead natives.58 It seems that the abstinence from swine’s flesh, at least in part, belongs to the same group of facts. Various tribes in South Africa hold it in abomination.59 In some districts of Madagascar, according to Drury, the eating of pork was accounted a very contemptible thing.60 It is, or was, abstained from by the Jakuts of Siberia, the Votyaks of the Government of Vologda,61 and the Lapps.62 The disgust for pork has likewise been met with in many American tribes. The Koniagas will eat almost any digestible substance except pork.63 The Navahoes of New Mexico abominate it “as if they were the devoutest of Hebrews”;64 it is not forbidden by their religion, but “they say they will not eat the flesh of the hog simply because the animal is filthy in its habits, because it is the scavenger of the town.”65 In his description of the Indians of the South-Eastern States Adair writes:—“They reckon all those animals to be unclean that are either carnivorous, or live on nasty food, as hogs, wolves, panthers, foxes, cats, mice, rats…. When swine were first brought among them, they deemed it such a horrid abomination in any of their people to eat that filthy and impure food, that they excluded the criminal from all religious communion in their circular town-house…. They still affix vicious and contemptible ideas to the eating of swine’s flesh; insomuch that Shúkàpa, ‘swine eater,’ is the most opprobrious epithet that they can use to brand us with; they commonly subjoin Akang-gàpa, ‘eater of dunghill fowls.’ Both together signify ‘filthy, helpless animals.’”66 So also those Indians in British Guiana who have kept aloof from intercourse with the colonists reject pork with the greatest loathing. Schomburgk tells us that an old Indian permitted his children to accompany him on a journey only on the condition that they were never to eat any viands prepared by his cook, for fear lest pork should have been used in their preparation. But this objection does not extend to the native hog, which, though generally abstained from by wizards, is eaten by the laity indiscriminately, with the exception of women who are pregnant or who have just given birth to a child.67 This suggests that the aversion to the domestic pig partly springs from the fact that it is a foreign animal. Indeed, the Guiana Indians refuse to eat the flesh of all animals that are not indigenous to their country, but were introduced from abroad, such as oxen, sheep, and fowls, apparently on the principle “that any strange and abnormal object is especially likely to be possessed of a harmful spirit.”68 The Kafirs, also, abstain from the domestic swine, though they eat the wild hog.69 Some writers maintain that pork has been prohibited on the ground that it is prejudicial to health in hot countries;70 but, as we have seen, this prohibition is found among various northern peoples as well, and it seems besides that the unwholesomeness of pork in good condition has been rather assumed than proved. Sir J. G. Frazer, again, believes that the ancient Egyptians, Semites, and some of the Greeks abstained from this food not because the pig was looked upon simply as a filthy and disgusting creature, but because it was considered to be endowed with high supernatural powers.71 In Greece the pig was used in purificatory ceremonies.72 Lucian says that the worshippers of the Syrian goddess abstained from eating pigs, some because they held them in abomination, others because they thought them holy.73 The heathen Harranians sacrificed the swine and ate swine’s flesh once a year.74 According to Greek writers, the Egyptians abhorred the pig as a foul and loathsome animal, and to drink its milk was believed to cause leprosy and itchy eruptions;75 but once a year they sacrificed pigs to the moon and to Osiris and ate of the flesh of the victims, though at any other time they would not so much as taste pork.76

Of the abhorrence of cannibalism I shall speak in a separate chapter, but in this connection it is worth noticing that the eating of certain animals is regarded with horror or disgust either because they are supposed to be metamorphosed ancestors77 or on account of their resemblance to men. Various peoples refrain from monkey’s flesh;78 and European travellers mention their own instinctive repugnance to it and their aversion to shooting monkeys.79 The Indians of Lower California will eat any animal, except men and monkeys, “the latter because they so much resemble the former.”80 According to an ancient writer quoted by Porphyry, the Egyptian priests rejected those animals which “verged to a similitude to the human form.”81 The Kafirs say that elephants are forbidden food because their intelligence resembles that of men.82

Moreover, intimacy with an animal easily takes away the appetite for its flesh. Among ourselves, as Mandeville observes, “some people are not to be persuaded to taste of any creatures they have daily seen and been acquainted with, whilst they were alive; others extend their scruple no further than to their own poultry, and refuse to eat what they fed and took care of themselves; yet all of them will feed heartily and without remorse on beef, mutton, and fowls, when they are bought in the market.”83 Among other races we meet with feelings no less refined. Mencius, the Chinese moralist, said:—“So is the superior man affected towards animals, that, having seen them alive, he cannot bear to see them die; having heard their dying cries, he cannot bear to eat their flesh. Therefore he keeps away from his slaughter house and cook-room.”84 The abstinence from domestic fowls and their eggs, as also from the tame pig, may occasionally have sprung from sympathy. Dr. von den Steinen states that the Brazilian Yuruna cannot be induced to eat any animal which they have bred themselves, and that they apparently considered it very immoral when he and his party ate hen-eggs.85 In the sacred books of India it is represented as a particularly bad action to eat certain domestic animals, including village pigs and tame cocks; a twice-born man who does so knowingly will become an outcast.86 Among the Bechuanas in South Africa dogs and tame cats are not eaten, though wild cats are.87 The Arabs of Dukkâla in Morocco eat their neighbours’ cats but not their own. Among the Dinka only such cows as die naturally or by an accident are used for food; but a dead cow is never eaten by the bereaved owner himself, who is too much afflicted at the loss to be able to touch a morsel of the carcase of his departed beast.88 Herodotus says that the Libyans would not taste the flesh of the cow, though they ate oxen;89 and the same rule prevailed among the Egyptians and Phœnicians, who would sooner have partaken of human flesh than of the meat of a cow.90 The eating of cow’s flesh is prohibited by the law of Brahmanism.91 According to Dr. Rájendralála Mitra, the idea of beef as an article of food “is so shocking to the Hindus, that thousands over thousands of the more orthodox among them never repeat the counterpart of the word in their vernaculars, and many and dire have been the sanguinary conflicts which the shedding of the blood of cows has caused.”92 In China “the slaughter of buffaloes for food is unlawful, according to the assertions of the people, and the abstaining from the eating of beef is regarded as very meritorious.”93 It is said in the ‘Divine Panorama’ that he who partakes of beef or dog’s flesh will be punished by the deity.94 In Japan neither cattle nor sheep were in former days killed for food;95 and in the rural districts many people still think it wrong to eat beef.96 In Rome the slaughter of a labouring ox was in olden days punished with excommunication;97 and at Athens and in Peloponnesus it was prohibited even on penalty of death.98 Indeed, the ancient idea has survived up to modern times in Greece, where it has been held as a maxim that the animal which tills the ground ought not to be used for food.99 These prohibitions are no doubt to some extent expressions of kindly feelings towards the animals to which they refer.100 A Dinka is said to be fonder of his cattle than of his wife and children;101 and according to classical writers, the ploughing ox is not allowed to be slaughtered because he is himself an agriculturist, the servant of Ceres, and a companion to the labourer in his work.102 But at the same time the restrictions in question are very largely due to prudential motives. Peoples who live chiefly on the products of their cattle show a strong disinclination to reduce their herds, especially by killing cows or calves;103 and agricultural races are naturally anxious to preserve the animal which is used for work on the field. With reference to the Egyptian and Phœnician custom of eating bulls but abstaining from cows, Porphyry observes that “for the sake of utility in one and the same species of animals distinction is made between that which is pious and that which is impious,” cows being spared on account of their progeny.104 Until quite recently in Egypt no one was allowed to kill a calf, and permission from the government was required for the slaughter of a bull.105 Moreover, domestic animals are frequently regarded as sacred in consequence of their utility, and for that reason also abstained from. The Dinka pay a kind of reverence to their cattle.106 In Egypt, according to Herodotus, the cow was sacred to Isis.107 In India she has been the object of a special worship.108