st leave
my readers to answer for themselves.

NOTE

TABOO AMOUNG THE MAORIS

The power which Maori chiefs possessed of imposing, or at all
events of enforcing, a taboo seems not to have been quite so absolute
as might perhaps be inferred from the statement in the text.[1] We
are told that the power of the taboo mainly depended on the influence
of the person who imposed it. If it were put on by a great
chief, it would not be broken, but a powerful man often violated the
taboo of an inferior. A chief, for example, would frequently lay one
of these sacred interdicts on a road or a river, and then nobody
would dare to go by either, unless he felt himself strong enough to
set the chief's taboo at defiance. The duration of the taboo was
arbitrary, and depended on the will of the person who imposed it.
Similarly with the extent to which the prohibition applied: sometimes
it was limited to a particular object, sometimes it embraced
many: sometimes it was laid on a single spot, at other times it
covered a whole district.[2]

[1] Above, p. 47.

[2] R. Taylor, _Te Ika A Maui, or New Zealand and its
Inhabitants_, Second Edition (London, 1870), p. 168. Compare J.
Dumont d'Urville, _Voyage autour du Monde et a la recherche de
la Perouse, Histoire du Voyage_ (Paris, 1832-1833), ii. 530.

To render a place taboo a chief had only to tie one of his old
garments to a pole and stick it up on the spot which he proposed
to make sacred, while at the same time he declared that the prohibited
area was part of his own body, such as his backbone, or
that it bore the name of one of his ancestors. In the latter case
all the persons descended from that particular ancestor were in
duty bound to rally to the defence of the chief's taboo, and the
more distant the ancestor, and the more numerous his descendants,
the greater the number of the champions thus pledged to the
support of the family honour. Hence the longer a man's pedigree,
the better chance he stood of maintaining his taboo against all
comers, for the larger was the troop of adherents whom he enlisted
in its defence. Thus chiefs, with family trees which reached backward
to the gods, were in a far better position to make good
their arbitrary interdicts than mere ordinary mortals, who hardly
remembered their grandfathers. In this as in other respects the
taboo was essentially an aristocratic institution.[3]

[3] R. Taylor, _op. cit._ p. 169.