The Art of Taboo Deformation

Frightful beasts, metaphors, and secret names

Photo by mana5280 on Unsplash

taboo deformation

noun

1. (linguistics) A modification of a word or phrase by way of euphemism to avoid a taboo (as in the case of a minced oath or due to the belief that mentioning a dangerous creature's name may cause that creature to appear).

(from Wiktionary)

“All of these concrete metaphors increase enormously our powers of perceptions of the world about us and our understanding of it, and literally create new objects. Indeed, language is an organ of perception, not simply a means of communication.”

-Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind

The Old English epic Beowulf tells the story of a brave warrior who defeats a horrible beast and becomes a hero to his people. Yet he himself was named after a creature whose epithet was too terrible to utter aloud: the bear. Beowulf simply means “bee wolf,”¹ a euphemism for “the brown one,” whom the Germanic people feared and respected more than almost any other animal. Old English is a branch of Germanic on the family tree of Indo-European languages, and linguists have reconstructed an ancient root for the word bear, the Proto Indo-European (PIE) *h₂ŕ̥tḱos, from which comes the Greek arktos and the Latin ursus. But something happened to the word on its journey from the Eurasian steppe (where the speakers of PIE likely originated) to the frigid northern lands of Scandinavia. The nomadic herders who colonized those lands, the hardy progenitors of the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings, seemingly developed such a high degree of fear and superstition around “the brown one” that they stopped using the word that their ancestors had used to describe this creature and instead settled on bera, which likely derives from the Proto-Germanic word for brown. Their distant relatives who settled the warmer regions of southern Europe didn’t have to deal with the bear menace as often, and, having no need for the euphemism, kept the old word instead.

People practicing ancient or traditional lifestyles the world over tend to adhere to strict taboo avoidance. For many of these cultures, taboos make up the mores and folkways that anchor the individual to the group, a line drawn in the sand and a strong link in the chain of social cohesion. We moderns, we civilized folk, have much less need of these taboos because we made up a bunch of laws that are backed up by the threat of incarceration. Growing up in a secular family in 20th century America, my only concept of taboo breaking involved something filthy or raunchy. It never would have occurred to me that to utter the name of bear or a wolf would be kind of like Harry Potter speaking aloud the name of Voldemort. But that’s life in the modern city for you. When your food comes from the frozen aisle of the supermarket and the only animals you see are captive or domestic, it’s hard to have anything but an abstract idea of the relationship we humans have had with predators and pack animals over the past two or three million years. But for those who stalked their prey on the plains and forests as their grandfathers had since time immemorial, these kinds of taboos were both sacred and functional. The Paleolthic cave art of Lascaux and Chauvet offer a glimpse into the deep antiquity of our ancestor’s reverence for animals, one could speculate that these elaborate frescoes of ochre and charcoal are the remnants of our earliest religious impulses. Just as the Iron Age Israelites developed a prohibition against writing the name of Yahweh, it could be that an ancient shamanistic tradition persisted through the millennia that contributed to a similar taboo against speaking the true name of those totemic beasts.

And so people developed ways of referring to these animals that made creative use of words, the act of so doing reflecting perhaps the even more ancient role of metaphor in the creation of language (or, as Cormac McCarthy put it, the idea that one thing can be another thing). I’m drawn to the idea that language itself is a way of seeing, an instrument just as vital to our perception of the world as the five senses. Try for a moment to imagine the first utterances of our ancestors to emerge from the primordial womb of grunts and gestures. Although it very likely involved no small amount of grunting and gesticulating, the first speakers to elucidate in some clear fashion a comparison between one thing and another were crossing a threshold of profound implications. They were the first alchemists, the first true magicians. For while many other animals have complex systems of communicating with one another, we humans use our words to see. We do not simply agree on a sound to signify the approach of a lion, we warn our children of the obsidian daggers in her mouth, elevating the innate defenses of our nervous system from the biological to the mythical. From there, it’s not difficult to see how everything from Beowulf to Beyoncé is built upon this simple edifice. The superstitious barbarians who referred to a bear as a “bee wolf” also called the ocean “the whale road” and a warrior a “feeder of ravens.” These kennings are illustrative and beautiful to read today but they also remind us that language is the shared inheritance of many generations of problem solving, and the offspring of these experiments are often wonderful in unexpected ways.

What is the legacy of this inheritance today? For better or worse, our proficiency with metaphor has enabled our species’ stunning rise to world dominance. The historian Yuval Noah Harari has said that it is our ability to create “fictions” such as mythology and money that seperate us from other mammals and allow us to create dynamic social coalitions.² And what is a fiction but an outgrowth of a simple metaphor? Our ability to create new meta-concepts with our words has allowed us to shape the world in ways the first speakers could never have imagined. From superstitious taboos to shamanistic rituals, we began to separate ourselves from the rest of the animal kingdom word by word, concept by concept, until the natural impulse of territorialism found a foothold in mythological concepts that embraced the dominance of one group over another, culminating in the atrocities witnessed in the 20th century. We have evolved from hunters who held monstrous beasts in fearful reverence, constructed elaborate taboos around the menses of women, and posted the skulls of their neighbors on pikes at the borders of their lands. Today most of us live with little or no connection to the land or its traditions, and for many the strongest taboos of the present era involve the repudiation of the subjugation of women and of prejudice towards our neighbors. And yet, we are still stuck with the frustrating persistence of “othering” our fellow humans, and the horrible suffering this behavior engenders.

There are clearly many taboos that are difficult for us to talk about openly and honestly nowadays. We live in a time of increased sensitivity and a fear of the power of language to shape impressionable minds towards some of the darker impulses of our nature. In Ursula LeGuin’s classic fantasy novel A Wizard of Earthsea, the young protagonist practices a form of magic that is predicated on knowing the true name of all things, a concept that has deep roots in many religious traditions but also emerges in subsequent works of popular fiction, such as the aforementioned Harry Potter novels. To know or obscure the name of a thing is to either unleash or restrict its power. Perhaps this is just as true for us today as it was for our ancient forebearers. Language and mythology have incredible power to unite and divide us. And as the edifice of religion is slowly stripped away, we have constructed new secular taboos that are equally powerful, and often manifest themselves in the regulation of language.

I’m not here to poke the bear, or add to the meaningless provocations of outrage for which the internet is now known for. We are in the grip of a culture war that is itself a harbinger of a great paradigm shift, the outcome of which will not be decided by the utterance or avoidance of forbidden words. If the internet was intended to unite us in a new Tower of Babel, as some have claimed, it has failed miserably in this quest. And yet, technological advances in archaeogenetics have given us a plethora of tools to understand the richness of the our past in ways that have never seemed possible before. If these tools are utilized in the service of humanism and pluralism instead of nationalism and militarism, perhaps we can reverse engineer the tower, and imagine what it was like when we all spoke the same tongue. To be a human in the 21st century is to bear witness to the strange, terrifying and beautiful lineage that has marked the emergence of homo sapiens since we first began to use language, myth, and religion to sculpt the world around us. Metaphor is the thread that binds these things. Perhaps, through an examination of the importance of symbolic culture in the ascent of our species, we can use this primordial instrument to name and understand that most wretched of beasts: ourselves.

1. Sweet, Henry. (1884) Anglo-Saxon Reader in Prose and Verse The Clarendon Press, p. 202.

2. Harari, Yuval Noah (2011) Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind Harper Collins, p. 24