Of Cultures, Taboos, and Chief Priests

My father always told me that "a deity is as benevolent or fiendish as its chief priest or priestess." Recently, I was re-reading Mary Douglas's seminal work, Purity and Danger, and her analysis of how dominant sections of a society determine its taboo system reminded me of my father's wisdom. Douglas writes: "The study of taboo impinges inevitably upon philosophy of belief. The taboo-maintained rules will be as repressive as the leading members of the society want them to be. If the makers of opinion want to prevent freemen from marrying slaves, or want to maintain a complex chain of inter-generational dynastic marriages, or they want to extort crushing levies -- whether for the maintenance of the clergy or for the lavish ceremonials of royalty -- the taboo system that supports their wishes will endure. Criticisms will be suppressed, whole areas of life become unspeakable and, in consequence, unthinkable. But when the controllers of opinion want a different way of life, the taboos will lose credibility and their selected view of the universe will be revised." The mindset and worldview of these "mouthpieces" of the gods, with the support of secular powers within the community, ultimately dictates the social tone of the community's sense of morality.

Mary Douglas, 1966 (2002): xiii

Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concept of Pollution and Taboo 

The Violence in the Sacred

Source: js.emory.edu

(Rene Girard)--“Religion in its broadest sense, then, must be another term for that obscurity that surrounds man’s efforts to defend himself by curative or preventive means against his own violence.... This obscurity coincides with the transcendental effectiveness of a violence that is holy, legal, and legitimate successfully opposed to a violence that is unjust, illegal, and illegitimate….

Religion, then, is far from ‘useless.’ It humanizes violence; it protects man from his own violence by taking it out of his hands, transforming it into a transcendent and ever-present danger to be kept in check by the appropriate rites appropriately observed and by a modest and prudent demeanor….

[Religious] prohibitions serve a basic function. They maintain a sort of sanctuary at the heart of the community, an area where that minimum of nonviolence essential to the survival of the children and the community’s cultural heritage—essential, in short, to everything that sustains man’s humanity—is jealously preserved. If prohibitions capable of performing this function actually exist, one can hardly attribute them to the beneficence of Nature (that good angel of complacent humanism, the last relic of those optimistic theologies engendered by the deterioration of historical Christianity).