the world and the universe is bound up with the health of their own
particular king or the safety of their own particular royal family; and
therefore they won't allow their Mikado or their chief to go outside
his palace, lest he should knock his royal foot against a stone, and so
prevent the sun from shining and the rain from falling. In other places,
it's a tree or a shrub with which the stability and persistence of
the world is bound up; whenever that tree or shrub begins to droop or
wither, the whole population rushes out in bodily fear and awe, bearing
water to pour upon it, and crying aloud with wild cries as if their
lives were in danger. If any man were to injure the tree, which of
course is no more valuable than any other bush of its sort, they'd
tear him to pieces on the spot, and kill or torture every member of his
family. And so too, in England, most people believe, without a shadow of
reason, that if men and women were allowed to manage their own personal
relations, free from tribal interference, all life and order would go
to rack and ruin; the world would become one vast, horrible orgy; and
society would dissolve in some incredible fashion. To prevent this
imaginary and impossible result, they insist upon regulating one
another's lives from outside with the strictest taboos, like those which
hem round the West African kings, and punish with cruel and relentless
heartlessness every man, and still more every woman, who dares to
transgress them."

"I think I see what you mean," Frida answered, blushing.

"And I mean it in the very simplest and most literal sense," Bertram
went on quite seriously. "I'd been among you some time before it
began to dawn on me that you English didn't regard your own taboos as
essentially identical with other people's. To me, from the very first,
they seemed absolutely the same as the similar taboos of Central
Africans and South Sea Islanders. All of them spring alike from a
common origin, the queer savage belief that various harmless or actually
beneficial things may become at times in some mysterious way harmful and
dangerous. The essence of them all lies in the erroneous idea that if
certain contingencies occur, such as breaking an image or deserting a
faith, some terrible evil will follow to one man or to the world, which
evil, as a matter of fact, there's no reason at all to dread in any way.
Sometimes, as in ancient Rome, Egypt, Central Africa, and England, the
whole of life