Page:Totem and Taboo (1919).djvu/176

den to many savage races to keep in the house sharp weapons and instruments for cutting.^[1] Frazer cites a German superstition that a knife must not be left lying with the edge pointing upward because God and the angels might injure themselves with it. May we not recognize in this taboo a premonition of certain “symptomatic actions”^[2] for which the sharp weapon might be used by unconscious evil impulses?

1. Frazer, 1. c., p. 237.
2. Freud, “Psychopathology of Everyday Life,” p. 215, trans, by A. A. Brill (The Macmillan Company, N. Y., and T. Fisher Unwin, London).