Break The Taboo Quotes

Shapeshifting requires the ability to transcend your attachments, in particular your ego attachments to identity and who you are. If you can get over your attachment to labeling yourself and your cherishing of your identity, you can be virtually anybody. You can slip in and out of different shells, even different animal forms or deity forms.

The material world is all feminine. The feminine engergy makes the non-manifest, manifest. So even men (are of the feminine energy). We have to relinquish our ideas of gender in the conventional sense. This has nothing to do with gender, it has to do with energy. So feminine energy is what creates and allows anything which is non-manifest, like an idea, to come into form, into being, to be born. All that we experience in the world around us, absolutely everything (is feminine energy). The only way that anything exists is through the feminine force.

Fats was starting to think that if you flipped every bit of received wisdom on its head you would have the truth. He wanted to journey through dark labyrinths and wrestle with the strangeness that lurked within; he wanted to crack open piety and expose hypocrisy; he wanted to break taboos and squeeze wisdom from their bloody hearts; he wanted to achieve a state of amoral grace, and be baptised backwards into ignorance and simplicity.

There are Tantrics who deliberately seek to do more active forms of renunciation, so transgression of social norms and breaking of taboo, and breaking of social taboos especially, is a form of renunciation.

If you wish to break with tradition, learn your craft well, and embrace adversity

Nothing could be easier than disturbing a status quo instituted by others; the real work of the sinister current is to break the rules we rigidly establish for ourselves.” -Zeena Schreck for "Contemporary notions of Kundalini, its background and role within new Western religiosity," University of Stockholm, Malin Fitger 2004

So many fairy tales were about breaking taboos, and being punished for crossing lines you shouldn't have crossed. Touching a spindle you were forbidden to touch. Inviting a witch into your cottage, and accepting the shiny apples she brought you, even though you knew better, because you wanted them. And while most heroes or heroines managed to scratch or scheme their way out of peril, it was easier to avoid doing something stupid in the first place. Smarter, better, and infinitely less fraught with regret.

To whom does he owe ultimate re- sponsibility? Since Romanticism, we have expected the artist not to celebrate God, king, family, and established values but to break taboos, to explore his or her deepest, most socially forbidden self.

He wanted to journey through dark labyrinths and wrestle with the strangeness that lurked within; he wanted to crack open piety and expose hypocrisy; he wanted to break taboos and squeeze wisdom from their bloody hearts; he wanted to achieve a state of amoral grace, and be baptized backwards into ignorance and simplicity.

A unifying factor between the different traditions and lineages of Tantra, is that it is feminine in nature. It acknowledges the feminine as the basis from which all the practices spring. Therefore, Tantra is by its nature, the understanding that all phenomenal existence, the universe, or cosmos, that we experience is feminine in nature.

In order to understand why one chooses to be a Tantric practitioner, there has to be an understanding of cause and effect, cyclic existence, the awareness that the reality that we think we are seeing is not reality as it really truly is. So enlightenment is seeing reality with bare awareness, non-conceptual reality.

Here, by the grace of God and an inside straight, we have a personality untouched by the psychotic taboos of our tribe - and you want to turn him into a carbon copy of every fourth-rate conformist in this frightened land! Why don't you go whole hog? Get him a brief case and make him carry it wherever he goes - make him feel shame if he doesn't have it.

was like…a dam breaking; the taboo was shattered, and the truth just started flooding out. It was…liberating.

It is the desire for irreverence as much as anything else that brought me first to poetry. The need to make fun of authority, break taboos, celebrate the body and its functions, claim that one has seen angels in the same breath as one says that there is no god.

Zeena Schreck believes that the right-hand path and the left-hand path have traditionally had the same end goal; it is only the method that is different and the fact that adepts on the left-hand path seek liberation in this life. --About Zeena Schreck by Malin Fitger 'Contemporary notions of Kundalini, its background and role within new Western religiosity,' University of Stockholm, 2004

Anarchism alone stresses the importance of the individual, his possibilities and needs in a free society. Instead of telling him that he must fall down and worship before institutions, live and die for abstractions, break his heart and stunt his life for taboos, Anarchism insists that the center of gravity in society is the individual--that he must think for himself, act freely, and live fully. The aim of Anarchism is that every individual in the world shall be able to do so. If he is to develop freely and fully, he must be relieved from the interference and oppression of others. Freedom is, therefore, the cornerstone of the Anarchist philosophy. Of course, this has nothing in common with a much boasted "rugged individualism." Such predatory individualism is really flabby, not rugged. At the least danger to its safety it runs to cover of the state and wails for protection of armies, navies, or whatever devices for strangulation it has at its command. Their "rugged individualism" is simply one of the many pretenses the ruling class makes to unbridled business and political extortion.

I’m a virgin Mr Cohen,” Carrie said, “I’ve never been with a man before.

There are Tantrics who deliberately break taboos and social norms and then there are other Tantrics who, by means of their practices and the way that they practice, that to society in general, it may have the appearance of breaking social norms but in fact that is just the manifestation of the progress of their practice.

There were undoubtedly those to whom killing was easy and pleasurable: he had met a few such. Millions had been successfully trained to end others' lives; he, Strike, was one of them. Humans killed opportunistically, for advantage and in defense, discovering in themselves the capacity for bloodshed when no alternative seemed possible; but there were also people who had drawn up short, even under the most intense pressure, unable to press their advantage, to seize the opportunity, to break the final and greatest taboo.

The part of our being (mentality, feeling, physicality) which is free of all control let's call our 'unconscious'. Since it's free of control, it's our only defense against institutionalized meaning, institutionalized language, control, fixation, judgement, prison. Ten years ago, it seemed possible to destroy language through language: to destroy language that normalizes and controls by cutting that language. Nonsense would attack the empire-making (empirical) empire of language, the prisons of meaning. But this nonsense, since it depended on sense, simply pointed back to the normalizing institutions. What is the language of the 'unconcious'? (If this ideal unconscious or freedom doesn't exist: simply pretend that it does, use fiction, for the sake of survival, for all of our survival.) Its primary language must be taboo, all that is forbidden. Thus an attack on the institutions of prison via language would demand the use of language or languages that are which aren't acceptable, which are forbidden. Language, on one level, constitutes a series of codes and social and historical agreements. Nonsense doesn't per se break down the codes; speaking precisely that which the codes forbid breaks the codes.

... what makes things break up like they do?" Piggy rubbed his glasses slowly and thought. When he understood how far Ralph had gone towards accepting him he flushed pinkly with pride. "I dunno, Ralph. I expect it's him." "Jack?" "Jack." A taboo was evolving round that word too. Ralph nodded solemnly. "Yes," he said, "I suppose it must be.

How can we pick and choose which parts of the Bible to follow? One thing is God’s will and another is just cultural differences? What if it’s all cultural? What if homosexuality or saving yourself for marriage is as outdated as women staying silent in church or Leviticus forbidding tattoos?

We're breaking another taboo, talking about racism, but I've just broken a bigger one confronting that guy before the entire restaurant, instead of sticking to that Asian nonconfrontational thing. But these are rules meant to be broken. Something happens to a kid when they see their parent treated like that. Something happens to the parent.

It's a physical sickness. Etienne. How much I love him. I love Etienne. I love it when he cocks an eyebrow whenever I say something he finds clever or amusing. I love listening to his boots clomp across my bedroom ceiling. I love that the accent over his first name is called an acute accent, and that he has a cute accent. I love that. I love sitting beside him in physics. Brushing against him during lands. His messy handwriting on our worksheets. I love handing him his backpack when class is over,because then my fingers smell like him for the next ten minutes. And when Amanda says something lame, and he seeks me out to exchange an eye roll-I love that,too. I love his boyish laugh and his wrinkled shirts and his ridiculous knitted hat. I love his large brown eyes,and the way he bites his nails,and I love his hair so much I could die. There's only one thing I don't love about him. Her. If I didn't like Ellie before,it's nothing compared to how I feel now. It doesn't matter that I can count how many times we've met on one hand. It's that first image, that's what I can't shake. Under the streeplamp. Her fingers in his hair. Anytime I'm alone, my mind wanders back to that night. I take it further. She touches his chest. I take it further.His bedroom.He slips off her dress,their lips lock, their bodies press,and-oh my God-my temperature rises,and my stomach is sick. I fantasize about their breakup. How he could hurt her,and she could hurt him,and of all the ways I could hurt her back. I want to grab her Parisian-styled hair and yank it so hard it rips from her skull. I want to sink my claws into her eyeballs and scrape. It turns out I am not a nice person. Etienne and I rarely discussed her before, but she's completely taboo now. Which tortures me, because since we've gotten back from winter break, they seem to be having problems again. Like an obsessed stalker,I tally the evenings he spend with me versus the evening he spends with her. I'm winning.

The clown is a creature of chaos. His appearance is an affront to our sense of dignity, his actions a mockery of our sense of order. The clown (freedom) is always being chased by the policeman (authority). Clowns are funny precisely because their shy hopes lead invariably to brief flings of (exhilarating?) disorder followed by crushing retaliation from the status quo. It delights us to watch a careless clown break taboos; it thrills us vicariously to watch him run wild and free; it reassures us to see him slapped down and order restored. After all, we can condone liberty only up to a point. Consider Jesus as a ragged, nonconforming clown--laughed at, persecuted and despised--playing out the dumb show at his crucifixion against the responsible pretensions of authority.

What Fats wanted to recover was a kind of innocence, and the route he had chosen back to it was through all the things that were suppose to be bad for you, but which, paradoxically, seemed to Fats to be the one true way to authenticity; to a kind of purity. It was curious how often everything was back to front, the inverse of what they told you; Fats was starting to think that if you flipped every bit of received wisdom on its head you would have the truth. He wanted to journey through dark labyrinths and wrestle with the strangeness that lurked within; he wanted to crack open piety and expose hypocrisy; he wanted to break taboos and squeeze wisdom from their bloody hearts; he wanted to achieve a state of amoral grace, and be baptized backwards into ignorance and simplicity.

Zeena Schreck believes that the right-hand path and the left-hand path have traditionally had the same end goal; it is only the method that is different and the fact that adepts on the lefthand path seek liberation in this life. --About Zeena Schreck by Malin Fitger 'Contemporary notions of Kundalini, its background and role within new Western religiosity,' University of Stockholm, 2004

George Ball, Under Secretary of State in the Johnson administration and the only adviser who dared to break the taboo and recommend immediate withdrawal, had the courage to tell the President in 1965).

It's about existing in spaces we're told we shouldn't exist in or how we behave in spaces that expect us to behave a certain way, to be a certain thing - and what if we don't want to be that thing? What if we don't want to behave in that way? And then what if actually everywhere is one of those restrictive spaces? What if the whole world is designed to inhibit you and just to exist in it is to break some deep taboo? So what if you give up making yourself smaller all the time, like all the time, and you make yourself bigger instead? And what if, to make space for yourself to be bigger, you have to take it?

One of the biggest dangers on the left-hand path, according to Zeena, is that the initiate often adheres to the need of ‘maintaining his personality’, even when consciousness expands beyond every known border. The left-hand path requires, [...] that certain aspects of the self dies, something which she believes to be elucidated in the tantric death symbolism. --About Zeena Schreck by Malin Fitger 'Contemporary notions of Kundalini, its background and role within new Western religiosity,' University of Stockholm, 2004

In Demons of the Flesh, Zeena describes how Shiva and Shakti are actually ‘two sides of the same deity’. The goal of the initiate on the left-hand path is to become ‘this bisexual twin godhead’ and activate a state of perceptual sexual ecstasy within one's own consciousness. Zeena points out that a corresponding symbolism is found in the western hermeticism in the idea of ‘the inner androgyne.’ --About Zeena Schreck by Malin Fitger 'Contemporary notions of Kundalini, its background and role within new Western religiosity,' University of Stockholm, 2004

It is worth recalling that it took brave pioneers many years to overcome the powerful taboo against the dissection of human cadavers during the early years of modern medicine. And we should note that, notwithstanding the outrage and revulsion with which the idea of dissection was then received, overcoming that tradition has not led to the feared collapse of morality and decency. We live in an era in which human corpses are still treated with due respect—indeed, with rather more respect and decorum than they were treated with at the time dissection was still disreputable.

Once you break one taboo, others soon come thumgbling down. Once you start rolling downhill, you carry on rolling until you reach the lowest point. For someone with no aim in life and who has never known love, leading a respectable life seems utterly pointless and unbearable.

Zeena believes that the breaking of taboos creates access to blocked energy that is let loose in a forceful way. The left-hand path is about consciously breaking with a ‘sleepwalker orthodoxy’ to be able to act as a fully awaken and conscious individual. In her book, George Orwell (1984) is quoted: “Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” At the same time she notes that the left-hand path is the ‘way of action’. It is not about intellectual contemplation, or worse, just reading about action.' About Zeena Schreck by Malin Fitger from: Contemporary notions of Kundalini, its background and role within new Western religiosity, University of Stockholm, 2004

In some cultures, if you break a Control Connection, you are shunned, alienated from the society that originally created the taboo, the one you have known, the one from which you seek acceptance. Even their God, they say, will turn against you. But making up what God will do is just another way of establishing a backwards connection. Even keeping a relationship but at a distance may be forbidden in very oppressive families.

The very word philosophy terrifies many women. In Quintessence I strive to exorcise this patriarchally embedded fear that undermines our intelligence and passion. We were all philosophers when we were five years old. Re-Calling our connections with nature at that age, many women can Re-member our sense of wonder and our urgent need to know. We were always asking “Why?” This state of mind can be called Wonderlust—meaning a strong and unconquerable longing for Elemental adventure and knowledge. What happened to our Wonderlust? Our visions, dreams, and far-out questions have been stunted by phallocratic society and its institutions. When we come into contact with our own deep and passionate intellectuality, we become intolerably threatening to the patriarchy. This is why there is an overwhelming taboo against women becoming philosophers, that is, seekers of wisdom on our own terms/turf. Philosophy—of our own kind, for our own kind—is a source of wholeness and power that rightfully belongs to women. Breaking the patriarchal taboo against it—against us—we break out of the state of deception. Moreover, we open gateway after gateway into our own Other-world, our Homeland. From this perspective we can See, Name, and Act to end the atrocities perpetrated against ourSelves and all the Biophilic beings.

I also knew that, though I had never cared much what others thought of me and what I did, I would care even less in the future. And I realized that for the women's movement to succeed, many women had to be similarly free, not just from the terror of breaking taboos, but from the garden-variety fear of social disapproval as well.

Zeena Schreck is a Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist, author, musician/composer, tantric teacher, mystic, animal rights activist, and counter-culture icon known by her mononymous artist name, ZEENA. Her work stems from her experience within the esoteric, shamanistic and magical traditions of which she's practiced, taught and been initiated. She is a practicing Tibetan Buddhist yogini, teaches at the Buddhistische Gesellschaft Berlin and is the spiritual leader of the Sethian Liberation Movement (SLM).

White" is seen as the default, the absence of race. ...Whiteness, then, is shrouded in silence. To speak about it openly is to break a taboo.

Menstruation is not a problem, poor menstrual hygiene is

What art does is to coax us away from the mechanical and towards the miraculous. The so-called uselessness of art is a clue to its transforming power. Art is not part of the machine. Art asks us to think differently, see differently, hear differently, and ultimately to act differently, which is why art has moral force. Ruskin was right, though for the wrong reasons, when he talked about art as a moral force. Art is not about good behaviour, when did you last see a miracle behave well? Art makes us better people because it asks for our full humanity, and humanity is, or should be, the polar opposite of the merely mechanical. We are not part of the machine either, but we have forgotten that. Art is memory — which is quite different [from] history. Art asks that we remember who we are, and usually that asking has to come as provocation — which is why art breaks the rules and the taboos, and at the same time is a moral force.

One of the challenges adult children of narcissistic mother’s face is the myth that every mother is giving, nurturing, and gracious. Worldwide, this is a false notion and taboo topic. For many adult children, they are scolded by our society who chides, “But it’s your MOTHER!” Despite the fact that we’ve spent a lifetime suffering chronic mental abuse, rejection, criticisms, and scapegoating by our mothers, most people don’t believe us, don’t understand us, nor have they personally experienced narcissistic abuse by their mothers.

All forms of hybridization – whether they are mythical amalgamations of animal and human beings, offspring of intermarriage or interpenetrating multicultural configurations – imply a form of trespass, an act of transgression. They often involve the rupturing of boundaries and the breaking of taboos. Moreover, hybrids (from satyrs to androgynes to vampires) have always been viewed as outsiders. Their very being embodies the threat of chaos, since they challenge the contours that define normative and so-called pure states of being.

Child neglect and abuse is a hidden epidemic. The topic is taboo. Surviving abusive relationships, especially in the family unit, is complicated. Oftentimes, victims of child abuse, sexual assaults, domestic violence, and narcissistic abuse don’t report it. During my extensive research, I discovered that most children don’t disclose their sexual abuse, until late in life. On the website, Child USA, they share about delayed disclosure. “Most child victims of sexual assault disclose, if they disclose at all, during adulthood, with a median age of 48 and an average age of 52.

It isn’t always a matter, we should note, of identifying with the protagonist. No one I know, regardless of how much they love his novel, wants to be Humbert Humbert or Victor Frankenstein, although perhaps for different reasons. Or Heathcliff. Ever want to be Heathcliff? I didn’t think so. They are not the stuff of our fantasy lives, yet we may revel in their world, even while reviling their personalities. Consider Humbert. The narrative strategy Nabokov employs is very daring, since it demands that we identify with someone who is breaking what nearly everyone will consider the most absolute taboo. …Sympathy is out of the question. What the novel requires, however, is that we continue reading, something it audaciously gives us reason to do. The word games and intellectual brilliance helps, certainly; he’s detestable but charming and brilliant. The other element is that we watch him with a sort of appalled fascination: can he really intend that; does he really do this; would he really attempt even that; has he lost all sense of proportion? The answers are, in order, yes, yes, yes, and yes. Pretty clearly, then, there are pleasures in the text that are not inherent in the personality of the main character.

There is a noticeable symphony being played around the world today. That symphony speaks of the independent, unorthodox, proud women. Yes, it is the International Women's Day! It is the day to celebrate the women in your life. In my life I have never believed in a particular day to celebrate women though, but a date is necessary rather customary to remind you of their contributions in your life lest you forget it. So here's wishing all those strong women who competed in a man's world, defeating them and breaking the taboos to earn the place which was rightfully theirs from the start but usurped in the past by manly morals and ego, a very- HAPPY INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY!

That night he wrote in his diary, "Challenge a remaining taboo." It was that simple. He had always wanted to understand genius, and now he had the formula. Freud, living in an age that prized its own seeming rationality, had found one of the remaining taboos and dared to think beyond it: he discovered infant sexuality and the unconscious, among other things. Galileo had gone beyond the taboo "Thou shalt not question Aristotle." Every great discovery had been the breaking of a taboo.

Is it true it takes thirteen months for a female to carry and give birth?” “Minimum.” He said it with such casual dismissal that Bella laughed. “That’s easy for you to say. You don’t have to lug the kid around inside of you all that time. You, just like your human counterparts, have the fun part over with like that.” She snapped her fingers in front of his face. His dark eyes narrowed and he reached to enclose her hand in his, pulling her wrist up to the slow, purposeful brush of his lips even as he maintained a sensual eye contact that was far too full of promises. Isabella caught her breath as an insidious sensation of heated pins and needles stitched its way up her arm. “I promise you, Bella, a male Demon’s part in a mating is never over like this.” He mimicked her snap, making her jump in time to her kick-starting heartbeat. “Well”—she cleared her throat—“I guess I’ll have to take your word on that.” Jacob did not respond in agreement, and that unnerved her even further. Instinctively, she changed tack. “So, what brings you down into the dusty atmosphere of the great Demon library?” she asked, knowing she sounded like a brightly animated cartoon. “You.” Oh, how that singular word was pregnant with meaning, intent, and devastatingly blatant honesty. Isabella was forced to remind herself of the whole Demon-human mating taboo as the forbidden response of heat continued to writhe around beneath her skin, growing exponentially in intensity every moment he hovered close. She tried to picture all kinds of scary things that could happen if she did not quit egging him on like she was. How she was, she didn’t know, but she was always certain she was egging him on. “Why did you want to see me?” she asked, breaking away from him and bending to retrieve the book she had dropped. It was huge and heavy and she grunted softly under the weight of it. It landed with a slam and another puff of dust on the table she had made into her own private study station. “Because I cannot seem to help myself, lovely little Bella.

Looking back now, what I experienced in the wake of the Goldman piece was a lesson in the subtle truth about class politics in this country. Which is this: you can pick on the rich in an ironic, Arrested Development sort of way, you can muss Donald Trump's hair, you can even talk abstractly about class economics using clinical terms like "income disparity." But in our media you're not allowed to just kick the rich in the balls and use class-warfare language. The taboo isn't so much the subject matter, the taboo is the tone.

The new faith sought to break the human bond with magic nature, to disenchant the world of plants and animals by directing our attention to a single God in the sky. Yet Jehovah couldn’t very well pretend the tree of knowledge didn’t exist, not when generations of plant-worshiping pagans knew better. So the pagan tree is allowed to grow even in Eden, though ringed around now with a strong taboo. Yes, there is spiritual knowledge in nature, the new God is acknowledging, and its temptations are fierce, but I am fiercer still. Yield to it, and you will be punished. So unfolds the drug war’s first battle.

Our entire lives we witness individuals, the ones who break some of the most culturally sensitive moral codes, ruined permanently by the media - i.e. shamed ruthlessly by the masses - i.e. dragged horribly by the village. While this is often intended to serve as a deterrent for the rest of us not to do anything too stupid, many of us choose to do stupid things anyway; and surely it is because the lot of us regard it simply as a challenge to bravery and a temptation to try to rise above or sneak past the law, to outsmart the justice system: I'm afraid the notion 'It'll never happen to me' is one of mankind's greatest hits.

Dream House as Sodom Like Lot’s wife, you looked back, and like Lot’s wife, you were turned into a pillar of salt(44), but unlike Lot’s wife, God gave you a second chance and turned you human again, but then you looked back again and became salt and then God took pity and gave you a third, and over and again you lurched through your many reprieves and mistakes; one moment motionless and the next gangly, your soft limbs wheeling and your body staggering into the dirt, and then stiff as a tree trunk again with an aura of dust, then windmilling down the road as fire rains down behind you; and there has never been a woman as cartoonish as you—animal to mineral and back again. --- 44. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C961.1, Transformation to pillar of salt for breaking taboo.

Understanding sex, can mean understanding the deepest drive in human life. For some people it can mean everything. For others it becomes a motive for conquest. People stand in the middle of the crossroads, between the paths of freedom or self-control. They can never truly be between the two intersections without feeling hypocrites. Sex clearly cannot be a selfless path of virtue. It contains ambivalent values. Often the opposite. Is there any other motive for sex apart from the desire to fulfill one's own pleasure? Is it for love or whatever. It is impossible for people to avoid the trap of the ego. They cannot escape from selflessness, as a form of certainty that they are wanted, needed and worthy of being loved and owned. This is what compels them to rid themselves of the burden of pretense, to stand completely naked and shameless as a unity of thought and desire. Become an integral part of their own spirit, soul and body. Prepared to accept the consequences of the most shallow consciousness, wildest imagination, the most absurd thoughts, and values ​​that reflect their own personality that can not be denied or ignored. Sex is a very basic instinctive call. Like a magnet that attracts everything. Everyone will be motivated to look for and find other people who are able to reflect the desires and innermost thoughts of themselves who are willing to accept and also give with any motive. Therefore sex is not compulsion. They are born from a consciousness. Where in this human consciousness, people can ignore the limitations of their own values. Even to break the taboo word. But there actually lies the contradiction.

After hunting for an hour, they found a stray cat small enough to ride in the palm of Noboru’s hand, a mottled, mewing kitten with lackluster eyes. By then they were sweating heavily, so they undressed and took turns splashing in a sink in one corner of the shed. While they bathed, the kitten was passed around. Noboru felt the kitten’s hot heart pumping against his wet naked chest. It was like having stolen into the shed with some of the dark, joy-flushed essence of bright summer sunlight. “How are we going to do it?” “There’s a log over there. We can smack it against that—it’ll be easy. Go ahead, number three.” At last the test of Noboru’s hard, cold heart! Just a minute before, he had taken a cold bath, but he was sweating heavily again. He felt it blow up through his breast like the morning sea breeze: intent to kill. His chest felt like a clothes rack made of hollow metal poles and hung with white shirts drying in the sun. Soon the shirts would be flapping in the wind and then he would be killing, breaking the endless chain of society’s loathsome taboos. Noboru seized the kitten by the neck and stood up. It dangled dumbly from his fingers. He checked himself for pity; like a lighted window seen from an express train, it flickered for an instant in the distance and disappeared. He was relieved. The chief always insisted it would take acts such as this to fill the world’s great hollows. Though nothing else could do it, he said, murder would fill those gaping caves in much the same way that a crack along its face will fill a mirror. Then they would achieve real power over existence.

Sorry,” said Ron, wrenching Harry back out of the brambles, “but the name’s been jinxed, Harry, that’s how they track people! Using his name breaks protective enchantments, it causes some kind of magical disturbance — it’s how they found us in Tottenham Court Road!” “Because we used his name?” “Exactly! You’ve got to give them credit, it makes sense. It was only people who were serious about standing up to him, like Dumbledore, who ever dared use it. Now they’ve put a Taboo on it, anyone who says it is trackable — quick-and-easy way to find Order members! They nearly got Kingsley —” “You’re kidding?” “Yeah, a bunch of Death Eaters cornered him, Bill said, but he fought his way out. He’s on the run now, just like us.” Ron scratched his chin thoughtfully with the end of his wand. “You don’t reckon Kingsley could have sent that doe?” “His Patronus is a lynx, we saw it at the wedding, remember?” “Oh yeah . . .” They moved farther along the hedge, away from the tent and Hermione. “Harry . . . you don’t reckon it could’ve been Dumbledore?” “Dumbledore what?” Ron looked a little embarrassed, but said in a low voice, “Dumbledore . . . the doe? I mean,” Ron was watching Harry out of the corners of his eyes, “he had the real sword last, didn’t he?” Harry did not laugh at Ron, because he understood too well the longing behind the question. The idea that Dumbledore had managed to come back to them, that he was watching over them, would have been inexpressibly comforting. He shook his head. “Dumbledore’s dead,” he said. “I saw it happen, I saw the body. He’s definitely gone. Anyway, his Patronus was a phoenix, not a doe.” “Patronuses can change, though, can’t they?” said Ron. “Tonks’s

I have chosen to use the terms lesbian existence and lesbian continuum because the word lesbianism has a clinical and limiting ring Lesbian existence suggests both the fact of the historical presence of lesbians and our continuing creation of the meaning of that existence I mean the term lesbian continuum to include a range—through each woman’s life and throughout history—of woman-identified experience; not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman. If we expand it to embrace many more forms of primary intensity between and among women, including the sharing of a rich inner life, the bonding against male tyranny, the giving and receiving of practical and political support; if we can also hear in it such associations as marriage resistance and the ‘haggard’ behavior identified by Mary Daly (obsolete meanings ‘intractable,’ ‘willful,’ ‘wanton,’ and ‘unchaste’ a woman reluctant to yield to wooing’)—we begin to grasp breadths of female history and psychology that have lain out of reach as a consequence of limited, mostly clinical, definitions of ‘lesbianism.’ Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life It is also a direct or indirect attack on male right of access to women But it is more than these, although we may first begin to perceive it as a form of nay-saying to patriarchy, an act or resistance It has of course included role playing, self-hatred, breakdown, alcoholism, suicide, and intrawoman violence; we romanticize at our peril what it means to love and act against the grain, and under heavy penalties; and lesbian existence has been lived (unlike, say, Jewish or Catholic existence) without access to any knowledge of a tradition, a continuity, a social underpinning The destruction of records and memorabilia and letters documenting the realities of lesbian existence must be taken very seriously as a means of keeping heterosexuality compulsory for women, since what has been kept from our knowledge is joy, sensuality, courage, and community, as well as guilt, self-betrayal, and pain.

Did I not risk incurring the severest of penalties if I insisted on breaking that taboo? But my fear also helped me to understand a lot of things, one of them being that Freud betrayed his own insights for that very reason. Should I follow in his footsteps and revoke the insights I had gained on the frequency and the consequences of cruelty to children, so as to not be attacked and rejected? Could I really have seen something that so many people who unconditionally adulated Freud had not seen: his self-deception? I can remember that whenever I started negotiating with myself trying to find a compromise, or asking myself whether I should not perhaps divulge only part of the truth, physical symptoms were invariably the response. I had digestive problems, I could not sleep, and I suffered from bouts of depression. Once I had realized that there were no more compromises for me, those symptoms disappeared.

Just as Nietzsche appealed to the Nazis as a way to formulate a right-wing anti-moralism, it is precisely the transgressive sensibility that is used to excuse and rationalize the utter dehumanization of women and ethnic minorities in the alt-right online sphere now. The culture of transgression they have produced liberates their conscience from having to take seriously the potential human cost of breaking the taboo against racial politics that has held since WWII. The Sadean transgressive element of the 60s, condemned by conservatives for decades as the very heart of the destruction of civilization, the degenerate and the nihilistic, is not being challenged by the emergence of this new online right. Instead, the emergence of this new online right is the full coming to fruition of the transgressive anti-moral style, its final detachment from any egalitarian philosophy of the left or Christian morality of the right.

He who wishes to attain the profoundly marvelous must free images from their conventional associations, associations always dominated by utilitarian judgement; must learn to see the man behind the social function, break the scale of so-called normal values, replacing it by that of sensitive values, surmount taboos, the weight of ancestral prohibitions, cease to connect the object with profit one can get out of it, with the price it has in society, with the action it commands. This liberation begins when by some means the voluntary censorship of the bad conscience is lifted, when the mechanism of the dream is no longer impeded. Magic ceremonies, psychic exercises leading to concentration and ecstasy, the liberation of mental automatism, are so many means capable of refining vision through the tensions they induce. It is a means to enlarge normal facilities; they are a way of approach to the realm of the marvelous.

The effort made to suppress sex would be difficult to understand if it were for the sake of sex as such. Not sex, however, but the breaking of human will is the reason for vilifying sex. A great number of the so-called primitive societies have no sex taboo whatever. Since they function without exploitation and domination, they do not have to break the individual’s will. They can afford not to stigmatize sex and to enjoy the pleasure of sexual relations without guilt feelings. Most remarkable in these societies is that this sexual freedom does not lead to sexual greed; that after a period of relatively transient sexual relations couples find each other; that they then have no desire to swap partners, but are also free to separate when love has gone. For these not-property-oriented groups sexual enjoyment is an expression of being, not the result of sexual possessiveness.

The more I write openly into the space of sexual sovereignty, the more I hear from humans desperate for a safe space to share. Those who have nowhere to be fully honest and real about the whys and hows and whats and whos of their body and its desire. ⁠ What turns us on? What brings us pleasure? What completely normal and natural variation of human sexuality have we labeled deviant simply because it does not fit within the prescribed heteronormative, vanilla narrative for what we are permitted to experience? Where do we berate ourselves because we like what we like and we want what we want?⁠ It's a fucking shame that we've driven so much into the shadows. It's a travesty that we are forced to squeeze the entire spectrum of desire into such a tightly constructed box. ⁠ You've got 22 square feet of skin covering your holy human body—of course, there's a hell of a lot of different ways to make that skin feel good. ⁠ Coincidentally, 22 square feet is approximately the size of a standard closet door., and we all know a closet is a terrible place to live. When we force people into the closet, we cause harm. We create an experience of othering based on our own discomfort and unwillingness to expand our notions of acceptability.⁠ We NEED to start having way more honest, open, and raw conversations about sex, desire, and kink.⁠ We need to blow the remaining closets to smithereens. ⁠ We need to talk about how to embrace the power of full, enthusiastic consent and expand our sex-positivity and our ability to say 'that's so not for me, but GO YOU and your bad self feeling all that pleasure'. We need to start really thinking about how, as long as we bring no harm to others in the fulfillment of desire, we aren't fucking wrong for the wanting. ⁠ Embrace your queerness or your kink or your fetish in your journal or to your bestie or to an internet stranger. Hell, start by whispering it out loud in an empty room and then breathe the power of that back into your being. ⁠ You are human. You get to want. You get to feel good. Anything else is blasphemy.

Once you break one tabbo, others soon come thumgbling down. Once you start rolling downhill, you carry on rolling until you reach the lowest point. For someone with no aim in life and who has never known love, leading a respectable life seems utterly pointless and unbearable.

Certainly, the sexual revolution influenced the course of fashion history. As we move into the twenty-first century and fashion becomes ever more erotic and taboo-breaking, we can clearly see how important a role the mini-skirt played in the development of women's fashion.

One animal says to another animal it is not safe you must not return I love you. Another says to her sister animal when you go you will never return then she dies in a camp. Another is a child and she stops living because of deceit. The animals in their velvety dressing gowns have thought bubbles. They break the incest taboo during a long cruel close-up and you can’t help but watch.

Never break a taboo because you want to be the one to break it. Break it because you want to see what the pieces look like.

We break the pattern, before it breaks us.

It requires some courage to break a taboo [around the high likelihood of climate-induced collapse, as opposed to mere climate disruption]. It requires some courage to make people aware of darkness that they had not seen before or had turned away from. Especially when that darkness is not in the changing climate and the institutions that have damaged our world, but is also within us. Because we have all participated in both the creation of this disaster and the ignoring of it. Or being satisfied with ineffectual action that provided us with a believable myth of being a good person. As such, climate chaos is an invitation to go deeper into self-reflection and learn about why we have participated in such destruction. From that inquiry we may find ways of living that avoid making matters worse. Bringing attention to the darkness around us, ahead of us and inside of us is essential if we are then to light candles of wisdom. People who are bringing attention to the darkness are also lighting candles of wisdom. Candles only shine within darkness. As more candles are lit, so we can see each other anew. We can connect with what is burning inside our hearts and live from that truth more fully than before.

Give him a taboo and he feels the need to break it.

Hate crime and violent crime is something reprehensible perpetrated by other people, a small deviant class, mainly men – this, at least, is the commonly held view. But Miles (2003) argues that we must reckon fully and realistically with our barbaric evolutionary heritage; and Buss (2006) uses case study research to suggest that fantasising harm and death to others is extremely common. Freud would have agreed with such assessments of human nature, acknowledging that unconsciously, ‘safely’ repressed, we sometimes harbour destructive and taboo-breaking wishes not only towards enemies but also towards loved-ones and ourselves. Today’s ascendant coalition of groups opposing racism, sexism, homophobia and anti-religious views, and championing equality and human rights, want to abolish not only outward physical violence and its verbal scaffolding but also vocal and mental hatred. This amounts to an unrealistic and dangerous totalitarian agenda for the fantasised good, the mechanism for which is suppression not understanding. That we all have a barbarous dark side that can be triggered in certain circumstances is a thesis denied or ignored by many but recognised by so-called misanthropes, anthropathologists and DRs. Ironically, opponents of the concept of (often dark) human nature unwittingly force a mental illness status upon those who notice weird and hateful thoughts in their own heads and conclude that they are uniquely perverse and unacceptable individuals. In other words, denial breeds another layer of depression in the same way that sin-focused puritanical religions have caused inauthentic behaviour and created neurotic minds.

To prevent the accelerated change and Unknown Results of rapid information flow, most societies dim the timebinding function by setting heavy taboos on speech, writing and other communications. Once these taboos began to break down — after the English and American Bills of Rights became widely copied — information flow increased markedly and the world began quantum-jumping from one reality-tunnel to another with dizzying rapidity. This so alarms conservatives (neophobes) that undoing the Bill of Rights has always played a central role in any conservative program.1

Mother I need answers Is it a curse mother to be a female? Is it a taboo to be female? Don`t we have the same spirit like males? Don’t we have the same flesh like the male? Nights are harsh, nights are haunted hours gushing my tears on my hazel skin mother I‘m torn apart. Mother did my ancient mothers feel the same abuse? Mother did my ancient mothers carry the same burdens like the one I’m carrying? Mother remove your old breast, I want to suckle freedom, mother remove your breast I want some solace and protection from the screams of the world. He comes home smelling the pub, he comes with anger written on his forehead and his eyes magma henna. He opens the door and he starts to shout, vandalize the property and he wrestles me. Do I have some value under this hot sun? Mother I need The disk of the orb breaks down, seeds of tears are planted on the floor. He roughly and vigorously opens my legs and he enjoys the sex whilst I enjoy the pain. Blood flows on my legs, a pool of blood on the floor that needs to be mopped. He is snoring and he dreams of another battle where he is always victorious. Why do man abuse women? Mother I need answers.

Some people put a spin on these old cultural practices and claim they are good for women because it ensures they get rest during their most vulnerable periods. This is an even more dangerous argument, because it distorts a harmful taboo that isolates women into a form of ‘caring’. It converts mistreatment into societal generosity. Why do women need to be labelled dirty, dangerous or impure or kept isolated or not given food in order to rest? Women’s rest is regulated because if a woman were to decide when she wants to rest she begins to exist. Culturally that is a sign of trouble.

It is a time of sexual change, but not everything has changed. The Hindustan Times-MaRS Youth survey of 2014, for example, shows that while 61 per cent of youth believe that premarital sex is no longer a taboo, 63 per cent want their partners to be virgins and in Delhi this number is even higher at 67 per cent.

The new faith sought to break the human bond with magic nature, to disenchant the world of plants and animals by directing our attention to a single God in the sky. Yet Jehovah couldn’t very well pretend the tree of knowledge didn’t exist, not when generations of plant-worshiping pagans knew better. So the pagan tree is allowed to grow even in Eden, though ringed around now with a strong taboo. Yes, there is spiritual knowledge in nature, the new God is acknowledging, and its temptations are fierce, but I am fiercer still. Yield to it, and you will be punished.

We see this “taboo-breaking” element in the French tale of Melusine, for instance. In this story, the progenitor of the French Lusignan noble house marries a fairy woman named Melusine. She marries him, but makes him promise not to ever watch her bathe on Saturday. When he violates this taboo, he sees that she turns into a serpent from the waist down during this time period. He later gives himself away by calling her an “odious serpent” in anger, and she leaves him.

In Slovenia as well, there is an analogous figure associated with Tuesday. This is Baba Torka (named after “Torek” which is “Tuesday” in Slovene). Like Paraskeva-Friday, she punishes women who break taboos around spinning. She doesn’t differ much from the folklore figures already mentioned, except to illustrate that not all of them are associated exclusively with “Friday.” However, there is another element that shows up in association with all of these fate spirits - and that’s the domestic element.

White did try his hand at a few stories outside of actual noir. At the beginning of his career, his first book appeared as a Rainbow Books digest magazine called Seven Hungry Men! in 1952. The cover featured several taboos of the time, including a shirtless black man playing with a knife, a nasty expression on his face, alone in a cabin with a haughty white women wearing a high-slitted skirt and tipping a bottle of booze. The back cover is almost equally scandalous—it shows a black and white photograph of a woman resembling the one from the front cover wearing nothing but a matching set of underwear and a wide open lacy peignoir. Shocking stuff for 1952’s America.

Al-Khwarizmi fell into the taboo that humans refused to fall into throughout their history, not because of their stupidity, nor their lack of attention to the presence of a number here that has an impact, but because they preferred not to deal with it at all unless they fully understood it, they ignored it rather than building the world around them on a wrong frame of reference. So, you have to ask now what if we decided to change the zero and give it its value that we know for sure, which is the unknown. We do not know it, we do not understand it, and not knowing is better than building everything on the wrong frame of reference Any number multiplied by zero equals an unknown The sum of any number with zero equals an unknown The result of any number divided by zero equals an unknown The result of subtracting any number with zero equals an unknown Are you starting to feel the problem and see the size of the unknown that is inside our calculations and our whole life! Infiltrating it without knowing anything about it! The clear is clear, that zero is not only divisible, but also summation, subtraction, and multiplication, because it is unknown, and no matter how much we try to patch the tables to fit the calculations, the division keeps breaking our back and telling us, you are wrong. Despite all this, our strongest strength remains, our winning ball, which has never failed us, is the power of creative adaptation. We are not like viruses, we settle in an environment that we drain and then move to others, nor like animals, we go into an environment and adapt to it and adapt ourselves according to its capabilities. That is why when we hit zero, we got creative and innovated, and decided to change the law of the entire universe, made it a hypothetical effect inspired by our imagination, and built the world on this basis. And the crazy thing is that everything around us is working perfectly. And what is even crazier, is that if we decide to change the effect of zero, so that one multiplied by zero equals twenty, then everything around us will reset, and it will work perfectly as well. Even if we decide to change all the math tables, this universe will mutate to suit our thinking.

Whistling past the graveyard,” Julie intones. “Rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic.” I laugh. “Yes, but it’s not just death that has everyone flustered. Anyone can create a scenario to deal with death. But what’s beyond that scenario? Another scenario? And another? Eventually you run out of turtles.” “Huh? Turtles?” “A student goes to his teacher and asks ‘What does the world rest upon, master?’ To which the teacher replies ‘On the back of a giant turtle.’ The student, not to be so easily put off, asks ‘And what does the turtle rest upon, oh wise one?’ To which the teacher replies, ‘Upon another turtle.’ The student is not ready to give up. ‘And what does that turtle rest on?’ he asks, to which the master angrily replies, ‘Don’t you get it? It’s turtles all the way down!’” Julie laughs and nods her head. “The truth of the situation is that eventually, there’s nothing. Infinity. Eternity. The void. The abyss. Eventually, every water-treader has to deal with the fact that it’s just him, the infinite ocean and nothing in-between.” “And that everything else is a lie.” “Basically, yes. The body is just a rental car and this planet is just a motel. This is nobody’s home, though some treat it like a permanent residence; as if the worst thing that can possibly happen is that you pick up and move on. How absurd, and yet, how absolutely vital to the experience. Look at things in this light and you’ll see the countless ways in which society encourages the externalized self and mocks, discourages and combats the very notion of turning inward. Alan Watts called it the taboo against knowing who you are. In order to break with one’s false self, one would have to break with…” “…everything.” Julie says. “Family, friends…” Her voice falters as she considers the ramifications. “Everything. Everything you are… everything you know… everything… Really everything.” I

childhood reprimands and swearing are the two categories of language that are most often retained, even after strokes that rob the sufferer of all other types of speech. In their study, Professors Catherine Harris, Ayşe Ayçiçeği, and Jean Berko Gleason wired thirty-two native Turkish speakers to galvanic skin-response monitors. Importantly, none of these volunteers had learned English before the age of twelve, so all their tellings-off in childhood had been heard in Turkish. The scientists had them hear or read words that were neutral (e.g., “door”), positive (e.g., “joy”), negative (e.g., “disease”), taboo (e.g., “asshole”), and childhood scolds (e.g., “Don’t do that!” and “Go to your room!”). The scientists found that the volunteers didn’t react particularly strongly to the neutral, positive, or negative words, regardless of language. They reacted similarly strongly to the taboo words that they heard, regardless of whether they were in English or Turkish; their exposure to swearing in late adolescence had been enough to make English swearing an emotionally effective part of their language. However, the volunteers did respond very differently to the childhood reprimands depending on the language used. Even though the volunteers all understood the reprimands, their skin conductivity remained low—they showed no stress—when they heard the words in English. When they were exposed to the tellings-off in Turkish, and in particular when they heard rather than read them, their galvanic skin response went through the roof. Being told off in their native language was enough to make these volunteers (average age twenty-eight) break out in a cold sweat. This shows that understanding a word and feeling its emotional impact are two very different processes. We have to have experience of the emotional consequences of words if they are going to affect us.

Drinking Alone by Moonlight,” in which Li transforms a taboo—drinking alone—into a celebration: A cup of wine, under the flowering trees; I drink alone, for no friend is near. Raising my cup I beckon the bright moon, For he, with my shadow, will make three men. The moon, alas, is no drinker of wine; Listless, my shadow creeps about at my side. Yet with the moon as friend and the shadow as slave I must make merry before the Spring is spent. To the songs I sing the moon flickers her beams; In the dance I weave my shadow tangles and breaks. While we were sober, three shared the fun; Now we are drunk, each goes his way. May we long share our odd, inanimate feast, And meet at last on the Cloudy River of the Sky.

The culture of transgression they have produced liberates their conscience from having to take seriously the potential human cost of breaking the taboo against racial politics that has held since WWII.

I tore through The Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies in elementary school, my pretween brain vibrating with a mixture of titillation and pretension. Ahh, so many swears. Very grown-up, I would think. And Even on an island, I would know it is bad to murder a little boy with glasses, because I am a little boy with glasses. Books hit the sweet spot of my personality; they let me experience something taboo and adult...without breaking any rules.

Let us turn now to a study of a small Newfoundland fishing village. Fishing is, in England at any rate – more hazardous even than mining. Cat Harbour, a community in Newfoundland, is very complex. Its social relationships occur in terms of a densely elaborate series of interrelated conceptual universes one important consequence of which is that virtually all permanent members of the community are kin, ‘cunny kin’, or economic associates of all other of the 285 permanent members. The primary activity of the community is cod fishing. Salmon, lobster, and squid provide additional sources of revenue. Woodcutting is necessary in off-seasons. Domestic gardening, and stints in lumber camps when money is needed, are the two other profitable activities. The community's religion is reactionary. Women assume the main roles in the operation though not the government of the churches in the town. A complicated system of ‘jinking’ – curses, magic, and witchcraft – governs and modulates social relationships. Successful cod fishing in the area depends upon highly developed skills of navigation, knowledge of fish movements, and familiarity with local nautical conditions. Lore is passed down by word of mouth, and literacy among older fishermen is not universal by any means. ‘Stranger’ males cannot easily assume dominant positions in the fishing systems and may only hire on for salary or percentage. Because women in the community are not paid for their labour, there has been a pattern of female migration out of the area. Significantly, two thirds of the wives in the community are from outside the area. This has a predictable effect on the community's concept of ‘the feminine’. An elaborate anti-female symbolism is woven into the fabric of male communal life, e.g. strong boats are male and older leaky ones are female. Women ‘are regarded as polluting “on the water” and the more traditional men would not consider going out if a woman had set foot in the boat that day – they are “jinker” (i.e., a jinx), even unwittingly'. (It is not only relatively unsophisticated workers such as those fishermen who insist on sexual purity. The very skilled technicians drilling for natural gas in the North Sea affirm the same taboo: women are not permitted on their drilling platform rigs.) It would be, however, a rare Cat Harbour woman who would consider such an act, for they are aware of their structural position in the outport society and the cognition surrounding their sex….Cat Harbour is a male-dominated society….Only men can normally inherit property, or smoke or drink, and the increasingly frequent breach of this by women is the source of much gossip (and not a negligible amount of conflict and resentment). Men are seated first at meals and eat together – women and children eating afterwards. Men are given the choicest and largest portions, and sit at the same table with a ‘stranger’ or guest. Women work extremely demanding and long hours, ‘especially during the fishing season, for not only do they have to fix up to 5 to 6 meals each day for the fishermen, but do all their household chores, mind the children and help “put away fish”. They seldom have time to visit extensively, usually only a few minutes to and from the shop or Post Office….Men on the other hand, spend each evening arguing, gossiping, and “telling cuffers”, in the shop, and have numerous “blows” (i.e., breaks) during the day.’ Pre-adolescents are separated on sexual lines. Boys play exclusively male games and identify strongly with fathers or older brothers. Girls perform light women's work, though Faris indicates '. . . often openly aspire to be male and do male things. By this time they can clearly see the privileged position of the Cat Harbour male….’. Girls are advised not to marry a fisherman, and are encouraged to leave the community if they wish to avoid a hard life. Boys are told it is better to leave Cat Harbour than become fishermen....

Fire, Earth, Air, Water -- one or more of these elements may make you restless. You need to spend them properly to find peace. To spend fire, burn outdated structures, taboos and so on. To spend Earth, build a structure, a good habit and so on. Spend air through creativity, spend water through serving and healing people.

Unspeakable"--unspeakability?--comes in three varieties. First, that which cannot be said because one does not know it, and therefore cannot say it. Second, that which cannot be spoken because it is culturally impermissible to do so. And third, that which cannot be named because it is impossible, since the language provides no terms, no words to enable articulation.

Even though Vasari listed herbs and their properties as one of Leonardo’s areas of interest, this is one of those subjects that has been taboo around Renaissance studies. But the use of herbs for artistic and philosophical purposes was old when the ancient Greeks discovered it two thousand years before. In a rule-breaking and innovative time such as the Florentine Renaissance, inhaling a little canapa might’ve helped with the night’s entertainment, especially if you played the lira and improvised a lot. We know it was around. After all, Pope Innocent VIII had banned the practice as sacrament during mass in 1484. How bad did the practice have to get before the Pope himself had to step in? Perhaps the reason the subject remains untouched is because Leonardo Studies arose with Italian Renaissance Studies in Victorian England, where some subjects were allowed and others weren’t. Cannabis was one. Homosexuality another.

We here meet a completely new conception of art; it is no longer a means towards an end, but an end in itself. At its origin, every form of spiritual endeavour is entirely determined by the useful purpose it serves, but such forms have the power and tendency to break free from their original purpose and make themselves independent; they become purposeless and to some extent autonomous. As soon as man feels secure and free from the immediate pressure of the struggle for life, he begins to play with the spiritual resources which he had originally developed as weapons and tools to aid him in his necessity. He begins enquiring into causes, seeking for explanations, researching into connections which have little or nothing to do with his struggle for life. Practical knowledge gives place to free enquiry, means for the mastery of nature become methods for discovering abstract truth. And thus art, originally a mere handmaid of magic and ritual, an instrument of propaganda and panegyric, a means to influence gods, spirits and men, becomes a pure, autonomous, ‘disinterested’ activity to some extent, practised for its own sake and for the beauty it reveals. In the same way, the commands and prohibitions, the duties and taboos, which were originally just expedients to make a common life in society possible, give rise to a doctrine of ethics that sets out to realize and perfect the moral personality. The Greeks were the first people to complete this transition from the instrumental to the ‘autonomous’ form of activity, whether in science, art or morality. Before them there was no free enquiry, no theoretical research, no rational knowledge and no art as we understand art—as an activity whose creations may always be considered and enjoyed as pure forms. This abandonment of the old view that art is only valuable and intelligible as a weapon in the struggle for life, in favour of a new attitude which treats it as mere play of line and colour, mere rhythm and harmony, mere imitation or interpretation of reality—this is the most tremendous change that has ever occurred in the whole history of art.

Among tattoo artists, there are certain taboos which it is absolutely forbidden to break. For example, they believe that if you tattoo a snake wrapped around a person’s torso you have to make a little cut under the armpit or somewhere else where it won’t show. Otherwise the throttling power of the snake’s embrace will make it difficult to sleep, and within three years the person who has the snake tattoo will be dead.