Semitic magic : its origins and development

TABU ON MARRIAGE, ETC. 113
hand to enable him to avail himself of this most important
branch of the science. But since then hundreds of tablets
bearing on the subject have been made available to scholars,
and the value that they have in this study cannot be over-
estimated, as they represent a series of beliefs probably
far more ancient than the epoch at which the tablets
which we now possess were actually written. Further, the
translations are now much more trustworth}^ partly because
of the large number of new texts now published, which
afford ample means of explaining doubtful phrases by
parallel passages, and partly because Assyriology has made
rapid strides in other branches in the last two decades.
The whole of the Assyrian religion is therefore a com-
paratively fresh source to draw from, and it is in the
arcana of exorcisms and magical invocations that we may
hope to find material to explain some of the difficult
questions of the tabus of uncleanness.
Starting with this clue, and taking savage beliefs as
the handmaid of our investigations, we shall see that,
besides the tabus on the dead, the uncleanness that rests
with all sexual functions is most marked. Marriage,
a woman in her courses,^ or the man with an issue, the
birth of a child (with the risk to which all babes appear
liable until some time after birth), are all curiously
tabooed, and, as Robertson Smith says, are nevertheless
" often involuntary, and often innocent, or even necessary
to society. The savage, accordingly, imposes a taboo on
a woman in childbed, or during her courses, and on
the man who touches a corpse, not out of any regard
for the gods, but simply because birth and everything
^ Particularly the first occasion.