Freud called this the "return of the repressed." The primal taboo doesn't destroy the desire it forbids; it intensifies it, driving it underground where it festers into fantasy. Every human being has the latent capacity for incest, violence, and cannibalism—we are primates after all. The taboo is the mental wall we build against these impulses. But walls are also interesting to look at.
These exceptions prove the rule. In every case, ritual cannibalism is heavily codified, surrounded by spiritual precaution, and never approached casually. The primal taboo against cannibalism stems from a blurring of the greatest binary distinction we make: . You are a subject (a self, a person). Food is an object (a thing, meat). To eat a human is to treat a 'someone' as a 'something.' It reduces the sacred, inviolable self to mere protein. primal taboo
The answer is complex. In their literal form, no. Mainstream society still recoils from actual incest, actual cannibalism, and actual patricide. However, in their symbolic form, they are being deconstructed. Freud called this the "return of the repressed
Are the primal taboos dying?
This taboo is the foundation of authority. The parent is the first king, the first god, the first lawgiver in the microcosm of the child. To kill the parent is to overthrow the possibility of order itself. Even in our secular age, few crimes produce the same level of moral outrage as a child murdering a parent. It violates the arrow of time (the young destroying the old) and the hierarchy of protection. We have a strange, powerful relationship with the dead. Every culture has funeral rites—complex, emotional rituals to transition the corpse from a someone to a something (ancestor, dust, memory). Until that ritual is complete, the body exists in a liminal, dangerous state. But walls are also interesting to look at
But the primal power of the incest taboo goes beyond genetics. It is the . By forcing people to seek mates outside the immediate family, the taboo created the first social contract. As Lévi-Strauss wrote in The Elementary Structures of Kinship , the prohibition of incest is the "fundamental step" by which nature is transcended by culture. It is the rule that makes society possible. To violate it is not just a biological error; it is an attack on the very architecture of human relationships. 2. Cannibalism: Eating the Other Few acts trigger a faster revulsion than the consumption of human flesh. Yet, history is littered with exceptions: funeral cannibalism (the Wari’ people of Brazil), endocannibalism (eating one’s dead relatives as an act of respect), and exocannibalism (eating enemies to absorb their power).