Approach Slowly

on taboo

The following etymology comes from Bayo Akomolafe, a brilliant and generous-hearted man and an exceptional talker, who presumably doesn’t speak a Polynesian language any more than I do. So let’s file this under ‘things that make so much sense they should be true, and perhaps are.’

What Akomolafe said was that taboo (tabu, tapu) originally meant something like “approach slowly.” This suggests that at root, taboos are less absolute prohibitions than they are warning signs: ‘charged material ahead.’ Or, in some cases, ‘entering sacred ground.’

Approach slowly.

There are the fairly universal human taboos, like murder and incest.

There are more cultural-specific taboos like, say, eating with one’s hands. (I mean really eating with one’s hands, like I learned to do as a study abroad student in North India and Nepal, getting up to at least my second knuckles in rice, dāl and tarkari.) This is just a matter of etiquette and, as taboos go, pretty low-grade stuff. Breaking it might ruffle some feathers and get you kicked out from the dinner table, but no lasting consequence are likely to accrue.

Same goes for things like asking a woman’s age (the horror!), or yawning without covering your mouth. Generally there’s little more at stake in these instances than bruising someone’s pride or coming across as boorish.

More interesting is the terrain of religious taboo: the taboo against foreskins in Judaism, for instance, or against killing cows in Hinduism. But even though the workings of the religious mind offer plenty of fascinating material for contemplation, it’s not this kind of general, one-size-fits-all taboo that so much interests me here, either.

What I’m really driving at is the idea of personal taboo: the concept that, for each individual, there are certain things—behaviors, foods, items—that are best avoided altogether, or at the very least approached very slowly. For the good of that person and perhaps of those around her, too.

What if fascist tyrant X had been given a taboo against making speeches, or against scapegoating. Sure, someone as hard-headed as a Mussolini probably wouldn’t have taken the hint. But if he were embedded in a culture that took personal taboos seriously, it might have changed things.

I was introduced to this idea of personal taboo during my years-long engagement with Yoruba (West African) and diasporic religious praxis, in particular Ifa/Orisa tradition and several of its Brazilian descendants. These traditions remain relatively unknown among the kind of polite (read: white) society who shun things like eating with the hands. A slightly earlier version of my own operating system might have taken this ignorance as a pedagogical opportunity. But it’s neither my place nor my intent here to evoke these traditions’ particular and varied flavors. They’re not for me to explain, and anyway such explanation is futile. To paraphrase D.H. Lawrence on religion, it is, finally, a pool into which one either jumps or doesn’t. Any missives from the jumpers, when they bother to write home, amount to little more than a bunch of bubble noises to those standing high and dry on the lip, trying to peer into the murky waters.

So even at the risk of cherry-picking and of de-contextualizing a bit, I’ll forego discussion of the cosmology of these traditions except insofar as it comes up as part of the discussion of the topic at hand: taboo.

In Yoruba tradition, taboo is dispensed frequently, and usually on the basis of divination. Someone who consults a diviner in order to understand what’s gone wrong with his business and improve his prospects, or for any other reason, had better be willing to give up eating coconut or peanuts or guinea fowl for a few months. Had better, in fact, be willing to give up almost anything at all, because almost anything can be revoked at the diviner’s word, which is the word of the gods, the ancestors, the elemental spirits. These prohibitions last for a period of time, say a season or so. Unless the reading is part of an initiation, in which case they’re for life.

Entering into the waters of such a tradition, you learn to take these things seriously. I was once told in the context of a reading to stay home for a week: leaving the house was taboo. Being less experienced at that point and more apt to try and bargain, I asked the diviner, a Nigerian, if I could at least go to work during the time period in question. To which—American clients being what they are—he said something noncommittal and vaguely appeasing. So I took a conveniently liberal interpretation of the taboo and eliminated only what I deemed non-essential outings. I went to work. And on the way home, I hit a deer and totaled both my car and (I can only assume) the deer.

Was the diviner essentially warning me not to go out, lest I have an accident? Or was the accident a warning from the (spirits/powers/universe) not to disregard an explicit taboo? Let’s not assume these possibilities are mutually exclusive, or that they preclude still other possibilities. Let’s not assume observation doesn’t change reality; ritual certainly does, and there’s never any controlling the experiment.

It must be said that I had crashed my way headlong into Ifa tradition: from first real exposure to full initiation on Nigerian soil in a matter of less than a year. I wouldn’t recommend such a trajectory, incidentally. Several clichés come to mind, including one about looking and leaping. If I’d looked closer, I might have noticed the gap that can exist between theory and practice. Might have seen that not every traditionalist practices what their tradition preaches. Plus several other life lessons that I, apparently, needed to learn the hard way.

But, you see, I was in the early stages of finding out that magic was real; that there were other realms, and they were inhabited. The gods were insistently knocking on the door, and found myself saying, ‘yes, please, come in, all of you.’ And so, just about a decade ago, I ended up in rural Ogun State being initiated to Ifa, deity of wisdom and divination.

There’s a lot to this story that doesn’t belong here, and a fair amount that can’t rightly be told at all, because of another taboo, a serious one about not disclosing the details of initiation rites.

What I can and will say is this. As part of the initiation, I received an Ifá reading, which is a strange and wonderful process based in a brilliant (if at times morally ambiguous) spiritual technology. After the odu (divination code) was obtained, the assembled diviners began spitting verses, which sadly went untranslated and unrecorded: oral-tradition wisdom flying right over my head, never to be recovered. But afterwards there was a chance to get the English language, Cliff notes version. That included receiving my taboos. There quite a few of these. And while some had no apparent significance (such as being prohibited from eating a food I’d never heard of in the first place), a couple of them went right to my core. One in particular was something I’d been told by teachers since age 5 or so, and which was now being repeated by men who’d never met me and with whom I’d exchanged barely a word. Initiations vary widely, but I suspect they have in common an element of surprising intimacy. I felt very seen by the strictures being applied. Several of them simply fit.

I realize it takes some of the punch out of this narrative to omit the details of what have, since that night, become lifelong taboos for me. Sorry, but spilling the beans on them is a bit like Superman telling the world about Kryptonite: those paying attention might figure it out on their own, but there’s no need to broadcast it. Life is hard enough.

So in what may be anticlimactic fashion, I’ll simply conclude that the taboos I received have been medicine for me: bitter at times, frustrating, but salutary. I needed to be told some of those things, and when you’re as stubborn as I have been, it helps when they come from a source as authoritative as a deity of wisdom. Even if his human interpreters don’t always get it right.

More to the point, those in my vicinity have benefited from the learning and growth the taboos have demanded of me. There’s nothing a little constraint to spur creativity, after all. Every vine needs a trellis if it’s to bear a healthy crop of fruit.

My engagement in Yoruba tradition is now dwindling almost to none. (Regular readers may have noted the turn, or return, that my spiritual life has taken of late). Yet my taboos remain in place. I choose to keep honoring them. The fact is, I’m better for them. And so, even as I take other paths through the realms of spirit, and regardless of the knocks I’ve received along the way, I give thanks to the West African powers and their technicians. For tending to the mystery, and keeping alive the vital wisdom of taboo.

May this seed grow.

And, dear reader, may you ask yourself: what might my taboo be?