degree contagious; but our view of it, when we are cool, is secular and scientific: while the primitive aspect of it is {97} supranormal and mystic, and the contagion is something spiritual and incalculably dangerous. In the Zend-Avesta we find an interesting special application of this idea: the defiling power of the dead varies directly according to the sanctity or rank of the deceased; thus it is greatest in the corpse of the priest, somewhat less in that of a warrior, and least in that of the husbandman:[97.1] _corruptio optimi pessima_: the most sacred person can defile the most, because he is charged with the most mysterious and therefore dangerous potency. The Latin term “sacer” has the double meaning of “holy” and “accursed”: from the same Greek root, αγ, spring a word connoting holiness and a word meaning “pollution.” Primeval thought or feeling holds together in a vague unity ideas that afterwards differentiate themselves and even become antithetical. The same power of radiating dangerous influence, supposed {98} to attach to the holy man, the polluted man and the polluting thing, brought them originally under the same dim conception. It would not repay us here to endeavour to trace out and explain all the minutiæ of this superstition: the long lists of pure and impure things that one might compile do not disclose any single regulative idea, and nothing is more baffling than the eccentricities of prejudice and terror. But this superstition often proceeds with a logic of its own: as a corpse is most unclean, and all who touch it are impure, therefore dogs and wolves and carrion birds are impure and must not be eaten: and anything that however distantly reminds us of danger and death, such as quarrelsome acts and words, may come to be rigidly prohibited during a ritual of purification. As blood is primevally impure, therefore any substance analogous to it or of the same colour might be regarded as ill-omened, such as beans or pomegranates. The same kind of sensational aversion will cause malodorous substances to {99} be regarded usually as unclean; therefore food of an evil savour, or such as leaves unpleasant traces in the person, will often be tabooed by certain strict sects.[99.1] There is also a certain common-sense discoverable in the distinction between substances on the ground of their greater or less susceptibility to spiritual contagion: earthen pots, for instance, have been often considered more easily infected than metal, and need longer purification, liquid substances more dangerous conductors than dry. “Should the dry mingle with the dry,” says Ahura Mazda in a conversation with Zarathustra, “how soon all this material earth of mine would be only one Peshôtanu,” which is as much as to say that the earth would become a charnel-house of impurity. And Darmesteter[99.2] remarks, in commenting on this verse, “Nowadays in Persia, the Jews are {100} not allowed to go out of their house on a