William Robertson Smith was a Semitic scholar of the late 19th century, best known for his book Lectures on the Religion of the Semites ([1889] 1927). Smith considered Israelite practices such as the casting of sins onto a scapegoat and the rules of impurity and defilement surrounding birth, death, disease and menstruation, mentioned in Leviticus, to be primitive survivals. This belief in dangerous, contaminating, supernatural agents, capable of inflicting severe penalties on those unwise enough to ignore the rules, differed from Semitic rules of holiness such as those pertaining to sanctuaries and priests. He considered the former to be magical superstition while Semitic rules of holiness were founded on respect for a benevolent god. The inability to distinguish between taboos relating to impurity and those applied to the sacred was a sign of an unsophisticated religious sensibility:
The person under taboo is not regarded as holy, for he is separated from approach to the sanctuary as well as from contact with men, but his act or condition is somehow associated with supernatural dangers, arising, according to the common savage explanation, from the presence of invisible spirits which are shunned like an infectious disease. In most savage societies, no sharp line seems to be drawn between the two kinds of taboo … and even in more advanced nations the notions of holiness and uncleanness often touch … the fact that the Semites … distinguish between the holy and the unclean, marks a real advance upon savagery. All taboos are inspired by awe of the supernatural, but there is a great moral difference between precautions against the invasion of mysterious hostile powers and precautions founded on respect for the prerogative of a friendly god (Smith, 1929, p. 153).
Smith argued that magical thought preceded religion and that the latter was a social phenomenon with the god and his worshippers forming a single community. Those social laws determining ethical behaviour among the clansmen also governed their relations to the god.
References
Beidelman, Thomas O. 1974. W. Robertson Smith and the Sociological Study of Religion. Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press.
Smith, William Robertson. [1882] 1982. The Prophets of Israel and their Place in History to the Close of the Eighth Century B. C. New York: AMS Press. Smith, William Robertson. [1885] 1967. Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Snails
Snails are taboo for male initiates among the Hua people of the highlands of New Guinea. The Hua attribute this prohibition to the snails’ female characteristics:
They are prohibited because the slime they secrete is said to be like female vaginal secretions. Also its korogo (wet, soft, fertile, cool) quality is said to resemble the vagina (M eigs, p. 158).
Eating something with female attributes is thought to weaken the initiate.
References
Meigs, Anna S. 1984. Food, Sex and Pollution: A New Guinea Religion. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.
Solitude
While many religions value solitude as an opportunity for religious contemplation, Judaism, with its emphasis on family life, is wary of it. “It is not good that man should be alone”, states God (Genesis 2.18) before creating Eve. The dangers of solitude are elaborated by the Rabbis. In the 1st century ce Rabbi Hanina warned “It is forbidden for a man to sleep alone in a house lest Lilith get hold of him”. Lilith, in Jewish folk belief, was a wild-haired succuba who had once been the wife of Adam. She had refused to lie beneath him, as she claimed she was his equal, and was banished to the Dead Sea where she procreated demons. But her lust for humans continued and a passage in the Zohar, a 13th-century Kabbalistic text, describes her mode of operation:
She roams at night, and goes all about the world and makes sport with men and causes them to emit seed. In every place where a man sleeps alone in a house, she visits him and grabs him and attaches herself to him and has her desire from him, and bears from him. And she also afflicts him with sickness, and he knows it not, and all this takes place when the moon is on the wane (Patai, p. 233).
Afterward, she shows no remorse:
… she removes her ornaments and turns into a menacing figure. She stands before him clothed in garments of flaming fire, inspiring terror and making body and soul tremble, full of frightening eyes, in her hand a drawn sword dripping bitter drops. And she kills that fool and casts him into Gehenna [hell] (Patai, p. 233–34).
It is perhaps not so surprising that nocturnal emissions and lascivious thoughts should be blamed on the evil machinations of a female since, despite the injunction not to sleep alone, and the decree forbidding onanism, the Old Testament does not view women in a favourable light.
References
Patai, Raphael. 1990. The Hebrew Goddess. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Soma
Soma is an Indo-Iranian sacred hallucinogen, known by the term soma in Indian religious tradition and as haoma in Iran (sauma in Proto-Indo-Iranian). An invocation from the ancient Iranian Avesta, dating back to the first millennium bce, stresses its virtues:
O, Yellowish One, I call down thy intoxication. Indeed all other intoxications are accompanied by Violence of the Bloody Club, but the intoxication of Haoma is accompanied by bliss-bringing Rightness. The intoxication of Haoma goes lightly (From Hom Yasht, the part of the Avesta devoted to the worship or
breach in courtesy. The plant therefore became taboo in the sauma ceremonies and was replaced by harmless substitutes.
References
Flattery, David Stophlet and Martin Schwartz. 1989. Haoma and Harmaline: The Botanical Identity of the Indo-Iranian Sacred Hallucinogen “Soma” and its Legacy in Religion, Language, and Middle Eastern Folklore. Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press.
The Rig Veda. trans. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty. [1981] 1983. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin.
Wasson, R. Gordon. 1972. “The Divine Mushroom of Immortality". In Flesh of the Gods: The Ritual Use of Hallucinogens. ed. Peter T. Furst, p. 185–200. London: George Allen and Unwin.
Wasson, R. Gordon. 1972. “What Was the Soma of the Aryans?” In Flesh of the Gods: The Ritual Use of Hallucinogens. ed. Peter T. Furst, p. 201–213. London: George Allen and Unwin.