Inspired by a recent post on Brenda Daverin’s blog, I’ve been thinking about the difference between taboo words in ancient times and those of today. From what sources are available, it seems that taboo words in ancient times were taboo out of respect for the power of the word or the deity to which they were connected.

To the ancient Hebrews, the name of their God was a taboo word. There is linguistic evidence that certain words connected to the gods of the Proto-Indo-Europeans were taboo. Peter Ellis in his book, The Druids, speaks of the work of Paul Meillet on the subject of taboo words:

Meillet pointed to the fact that there seemed to be no identifiable common Indo-European root for the hand or arm and concluded that the word was a subject of taboo. The word for hand/arm varies so much in each Indo-European language … suggesting that a euphemism was used in each language. He pointed to this being due to an ancient Indo-European cult of a god with a large hand or long arm.

This long arm god becomes Lugh to the Irish Celts. There is also similar evidence concerning astronomical words such as “sun” and “moon” — words also obviously linked to key deities.

In contrast to the ancient world, most taboo words today, in American English at least, are taboo because we want to diminish them and ‘clean’ them from our public discourse. But, I think the ancients understood something that we don’t today. They understood that to make a word secret gives it power.

Consider how much power our taboo words have simply because they are taboo. The more taboo they are, the more powerful they are. We feel that power when we release them in fits of anger or frustration. There’s a scene in the movie “A Christmas Story” where the little boy, in a moment of desperate frustration, yells, “Oh FUDGE!” But as the little-boy-grown-up narrator makes clear: “I didn’t say ‘Fudge.’ I said THE word, the big one, the queen-mother of dirty words, the ‘F-dash-dash-dash’ word!” The ‘F-dash-dash-dash’ word has power, but only because we gave it power as the ‘ultimate’ taboo word.

I think what this means for us, in trying to reconnect with the ways of the ancients, is that we should be careful how we use words concerning our deities. We should speak of them with respect, obviously, but maybe more than that. To the Celts, it seems, it was not the names of the deities themselves that were taboo, but what they were associated with. There was a ’secret’ name for ‘moon’ and for ‘hand.’ Perhaps, we should meditate on the secret names — the True Names of the Moon and the Earth, the Sun and the Sky. I don’t mean to try to figure out what those names are. They will be forever secret to us all. I mean to meditate on the truth that they have secret names — names that only They will ever know. We should appreciate the power of secrets, guard the secrets we have been entrusted with, and not disrespect our gods by speaking carelessly of them.