The Great Taboo

The Project Guten­berg eBook, The Great Taboo, by Grant Allen

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Ti­tle: The Great Taboo

Au­thor: Grant Allen

Re­lease Date: Oc­to­ber 26, 2004 [eBook #13876]

Lan­guage: En­glish

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THE GREAT TABOO

by

GRANT ALLEN

PREF­ACE

I de­sire to ex­press my pro­found in­debt­ed­ness, for the cen­tral mytho­log­ical idea em­bod­ied in this tale, to Mr. J.G. Fraz­er's ad­mirable and epoch-​mak­ing work, “The Gold­en Bough,” whose main con­tention I have en­deav­ored in­ci­den­tal­ly to pop­ular­ize in my present sto­ry. I wish al­so to ex­press my obli­ga­tions in oth­er ways to Mr. An­drew Lang's “Myth, Rit­ual, and Re­li­gion,” Mr. H.O. Forbes's “Nat­ural­ist's Wan­der­ings,” and Mr. Ju­lian Thomas's “Can­ni­bals and Con­victs.” If I have omit­ted to men­tion any oth­er au­thor to whom I may have owed in­ci­den­tal hints, it will be some con­so­la­tion to me to re­flect that I shall at least have af­ford­ed an op­por­tu­ni­ty for le­git­imate sport to the am­ateurs of the new and pop­ular British pas­time of bad­ger-​bait­ing or pla­gia­ry-​hunt­ing. It may al­so save crit­ics some mo­ments' search if I say at once that, af­ter care­ful con­sid­er­ation, I have been un­able to dis­cov­er any moral what­so­ev­er in this hum­ble nar­ra­tive. I ven­ture to be­lieve that in so en­light­ened an age the ma­jor­ity of my read­ers will nev­er miss it.

G.A.

THE NOOK, DORK­ING, Oc­to­ber, 1890.