But war-fever is a mild variety of mobbish experience as compared with panic in any form, and with superstitious panic most of all.

Being attacked in the dark, as it were, causes the strongest to lose their heads.
Hence it is not hard to understand how it comes about that the violator of a taboo is the central object of communal vengeance in primitive society.

The most striking instance of such a taboo-breaker is the man or woman who disregards the prohibition against marriage within the kin--in other words, violates the law of exogamy.

To be thus guilty of incest is to incite in the community at large a horror which, venting itself in what Bagehot calls a "wild spasm of wild justice," involves certain death for the offender.

To interfere with a grave, to pry into forbidden mysteries, to eat forbidden meats, and so on, are further examples of transgressions liable to be thus punished.
Falling under the same general category of sin, though distinct from the violation of taboo, is witchcraft.