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 gets enveloped at last in a perfect mist and labyrinth of taboos, a cobweb of conventions.  The Flamen Dialis at Rome, you know, mightn’t ride or even touch a horse; he mightn’t see an army under arms; nor wear a ring that wasn’t broken; nor have a knot in any part of his clothing.  He mightn’t eat wheaten flour or leavened bread; he mightn’t look at or even mention by name such unlucky things as a goat, a dog, raw meat, haricot beans, or common ivy.  He mightn’t walk under a vine; the feet of his bed had to be daubed with mud; his hair could only be cut by a free man, and with a bronze knife; he was encased and surrounded, as it were, by endless petty restrictions and regulations and taboos—­just like those that now surround so many men, and especially so many young women, here in England.”

“And you think they arise from the same causes?” Frida said, half-hesitating:  for she hardly knew whether it was not wicked to say so.