The most massive segment of African society is traditional, and yet not purely so. By now, it is irretrievably impregnated at a variety of depths by elements of a succession of once alien cultures. It is natural for current accounts of traditional societies to adopt an empirical approach with regard to this most massive segment, just as it is inevitable for them to resort to speculation concerning its past. The union of the two approaches is often made to spawn programmatic social theories. In their light non-traditional features are to be blanched since corrupting, or condemned since inauthentic and alien, or--with much caution--integrated and internalized as triggers of beneficial evolution and catalysts of progress.

I propose two discussions: one, suggesting a theory of the traditional and ancient society, an hypothesis concerning its origins and the motives of its cultural forms; and a second discussion which relies upon the first and from them develops a ground of comment, clarifies a basis for acculturation, and synthesizes principles governing the crystallization of cultural identity.

SOCIETY AND THE CULTURAL FORMS

The Existential Predicament

Social stress operates at seams: it creates or dissolves them; it makes society solidarist or fissiparous. Its actual effect evidently depends in part on the extent of its homogeneity. When this is sufficiently extensive, the stress is experienced as an existential predicament; and yet it may become a welding power if tapped, and if untapped a disruptive force and breeder of anarchy. Let humanity's first realization that nature is independent of man, of his needs, his desires and his motives be an original existential predicament. In any age before the practical mastery of nature, this perception of nature as intractable is bound to be traumatic. This threatening condition would call for a pragmatic resolution through practice first, and subsequently an intellectual resolution through theory. The theory would initially rationalize the practice and thereby subsequently guide it. In the latter stage, it would define the goals and moments of practice, and it would create the ground for its optimism. In turn, with each appearance of success, practice would give an air of confirmation to theory, and thus help entrench it.

At their first appearance, practice would comprise a variety of formulae, incantations, magical rites and ceremonies, all calculated to bind nature to the ends of man; and theory would take the form of nested myths. There are reasons for these forms. One can imagine that our earliest attempts to overcome the shocking discovery concerning nature were oneiric. This would cause our earliest dreams to have the character of nightmares; for in order to come to terms with our distress, we must first re-enact the shocking discovery in circumstances in which there is certitude of a continued escape from the distress. The re-enactment of the shocking discovery in dream constitutes the nightmare, and in the measure that we are successful in overcoming it, we ourselves may become heroic agents in our dreams, inexplicably equipped with the power to overcome refractory nature. We herewith create the prototype of the wish-fulfilling dream.

Alternatively, and more likely, agents other than ourselves intervene in the dream in our behalf, presenting unguent for the distress, solace for the unhappy consciousness. These agents act not as benevolent aliens, but as subjective surrogates, imbued on the occasion of the dreams with anima and thus enabled to communicate and to act, although in themselves they are known to be inanimate and inert objects.

In this latter kind of dream, we do mythify our experience of nature, for we personify objects, which indeed are recognizably inanimate, and imbue them with a supra-human efficacy. That they are recognizably inanimate may be gathered from the fact that not every instance of objects of the kind in question is held to be thus efficacious. The object which is imbued with the anima is thus untypical of its kind. The personification likewise is hardly metaphysical in import, for at that juncture in the history of human culture, the only genre of explanation or account familiar to man is historical, or, rather, biographical. Myth as an account must accordingly rely at this time on the biographical mode. Since this mode calls for a sense of human agency and human causation; objects otherwise known to be inanimate come in myth to be apprehended as willful agents endowed with purposes and motives. The failure of nature which causes the existential predicament comes in turn to be felt not as a mere sparseness but, under the same biographical mode, as a determination to tantalize our hopes, and to be indifferent to our wishes and welfare. This perception of a personalized and yet insufficiently understood nature now suggests the need for a supra-human efficacy in order to overcome it and coerce it to our ends. Even so, nature is only somewhat personified, for unlike real persons, it cannot be trained or bound through mere cunning or strength.

Indeed, infants too seem to experience a similar existential predicament when they discover that their circumambient world is occasionally refractory. Typically, they are thrown into a rage which solicitous mothers may pacify by conformable behavior. If infants too were highly conceptual, their rationalization of these facts would be mythic in content. One surmises that their earliest dreams would likewise and in any case be nightmarish, re-enacting the refractoriness and devising oneiric means to overcome it. In the adult life of the society, however, mere rage would be impotent, and circumambient nature, disposed more like a stepmother than a doting mother, would require to be tackled by other means, if the threat of the abortion of mankind so posed is to be stalled.

I know that a widely held view is that our first experience of nature is symbolic and mythic. What I am suggesting, on the other hand, is that our first experience is in fact thoroughly literal. The experience of slaking our thirst from rivulets and springs, or of assuaging our hunger from harvests in the wild must from the very first have been a matter of course, and completely devoid of symbols. The sure instinct which leads infants to the mother's breast, or man to the abundance of nature, completely lacks metaphysical or speculative motives. Pre-prandial or postprandial grace surely must be a later and non-instinctual development. Rather, it must take the distress of our existential predicament--when rivulets turn brackish or springs dry up, when wild harvests fail a fruit-gathering and improvident society, in a word, when nature is experienced as independent of our will, and a threat of the abortion of man can be smelled--to compel us to resort to mythification and mystery. The resulting imbuing our dreams of otherwise ordinary objects with anima and supra-human efficacy can be accepted also as the prototype of sacralization. And, if sacralization be the paradigm of a symbolic perception of nature, then the present contention is that it only ensues upon the existential predicament, by which it is evoked as a response, and does not precede it at all.

Myth as Existential Response

The overriding pre-occupation of man in this condition would surely be to overcome and mold nature at all costs. The two levels of components in implementing this purpose are practice and theory; these mark the real and pregnant beginning of human culture, the substitution of plan for instinct. The overriding purpose of both the practice and the theory is to situate man safely in the world. To guide will and plan, mankind devises ritual and myth.

This overriding purpose imposes certain typic features upon both ritual and myth. That myth devised in response to the original existential predicament will be called original myth. Three things evidently need to be addressed by it as desiderata which impose typic features upon it. These features will distinguish original myth, irrespective of its actual origins and initial circumstance; they are universal features.

The first of these is that original myth must offer assurance of dependability in nature. This requires that nature be conceived as being subject to rule and as order made manifest. So anxious has myth been to offer that assurance that it has often conceived the order as inexorable, and has expressed it in terms of idioms of necessity or fate and its handmaidens. Because its genre must still be biographical, original myth assumes the form of a genesis account, an account of the beginnings of the world as a whole, and also of society. It is also in the context of society that the course of nature poses a threat of an abortive humanity, and it is only in the same context that the survival of humanity can be conceived and preserved.

The intended orderliness of nature is not to be grasped as a sheer datum. This much has been apprehended in the felt intractability and the existential distress it begets and which may occasion unexpected famine through blight, and physical destruction through sudden flood, earthquake, or spontaneous conflagration. In the light of this, the first task of original myth is to create an account which depicts nature as really orderly, and explains the threatening variation as an aberration. The practical interest in this first thrust of myth is eventually to make the orderliness so revealed accessible to human will and purposes. The key to this access is ritual practice.

The second typical feature of original myth is connected with another urgent task; this is to present the threat so posed in the aberration as gratuitous. Were it not gratuitous but merited, there might well be no way to evade it or to prevent it, no way to bend nature to human purposes and will, with the consequence that humanity might yet be aborted. The second feature is therefore an account of fault and the causes of the aberration. The third typic feature is connected with a third task, that of securing the means of making these optimistic conceptions fruitful. It rationalizes the rites calculated to thwart the intractability of nature and render its orderliness once again beneficent.

The characteristic manner in which the original myth introduces the orderliness is through the idea of creation, conceived as an operation upon a pristine chaos or indeterminateness or even nothingness. Creation is thus portrayed as the eduction of a paradisiac state out of this pristine nebulousness. The anthropocentric emphasis of this cosmogony is unmistakable, and as regards man this beneficent orderliness is expressed in terms of the subjection of nature to his dominion. Yet this universal and original existential predicament is connected with the fear that nature might not be antecedently primed to serve the purposes and needs of man. This inspires little confidence in the idea of an initial paradisiac state. A contradiction arises in paradise, for it is in paradise that the aberration is experienced. It is the psychic terror so generated by this contradiction that original myth seeks to relieve through its genetic explanation of the aberration and through its theory of fault.

The right conception is desperately crucial, for if the aberration were to be due to some failing in man, the refractoriness of nature would loom as a recoiling or alienation of a paradisiac nature from man; and this would entail man's expulsion from paradise. Original myth transforms this experience of alienation, and infuses it with optimism. This is its second typic feature. The chaos, the indeterminateness, the nebulousness is external to man and is the ultimate source of the refractoriness of nature. It is the mother of this possibility. The fruition of the possibility is, however, due to some specific event, an event which brings about a disconnection of human society from the beneficent order of nature. The event initiates a regress into the nebulousness. Man himself must be blameless in this event.

Man's blamelessness in this event suggests an early conception of fault as a merely external blemish and not an internal failing--something essentially superficial which can be removed or reduced through cleansing means, rites or other benign enactments, possessing a restorative power. In this light it is easy to correct that austere idea which attributes to the barbarousness of ancient society the certainty of affliction for every faulty act. The fault should be conceived after a geological parallel, and not ethical at all: it is simply disconnection from the beneficent order of nature, and such disconnection, howsoever brought about, is an inconvenience to any person or group situated at that point. Notions of desert and vengefulness are not required in the least. This much is confirmed by the antecedent inchoateness from which the paradisiac state itself is coaxed. The inchoateness poses a continual threat of perturbation and regression.

The third typic feature of original myth lies in a prescription of rites and usages able to restore aberrant nature to its beneficence. With these, a new conception of fault emerges, for further lapses of this beneficence or, what is phenomenally the same, the apparent failure of the rites, must now be attributed to acts of omission or commission, whether voluntary or involuntary, on the part of individuals or groups of individuals, in short, to human mistakes. With this arises the ascription of blame and the meted punishment. This new view of fault with its associated vengefulness seems needed for the general credibility of the ritual usages, for now their apparent failures can be promptly explained in terms of such reprehensible mistakes, and so in terms of interference. By now a transition has occurred from impersonal fault to authored offense.

These ideas can indeed be illustrated from extant myths. There is clear reference to the prehistoric chaos from which an orderly world is induced and begotten. In the Bakuba, for example, Mbombo ruled when earth was nothing but water shrouded in darkness. Overcome by the pangs of birth, he exgurgitated the heavenly bodies. Meteorological processes brought about the formation of the clouds and the emergence of dry hills. By further acts of exgurgitation, mankind, animals and other terrestrial life were begotten. Similar antecedents of the created world may be found in the Tao, which Lao-Tzu described as formless, unknowable, and nonsubstantial. In Hesiod's Theogony, a primal chaos, a vast immeasurable abyss is described, waste and wild, from which at length earth arose and in the end, mankind. In the Rig-Veda, there is a song of an indeterminable state preceding the gods themselves. In the Zuni tale of the Pueblo region of New Mexico, a void and desolate space is described and subsequently filled by Awonawilona by dint of sheer thought and strong will. The Maori account details nine successive states of the universal and cosmic void. Even the Timaeus puts forward the formless, indeterminate and recalcitrant bounty upon which order is imposed by the demiurge.

Less obvious embodiments of the same idea are myths relating to creation from the dismembered body of a god or especially a monster or hybrid being or other distorted and not well-formed figure. Attenuated and perhaps parochial, but nonetheless similar, is the idea of the original commixture of earth and sky from whose separation earth and sky are articulated. The fashioning of a living and sentient man from inanimate earth, clay or mud, or his simple emergence from the ground, are but more forgetful variations on the same theme: the emergence of defined forms from the nebulous.

To recapitulate briefly, the leading part of what I have called original myth is cosmogonic in content, and its form is most commonly biological because its idiom must be biographic as earlier explained. The second substantial part relates to the dangerous influence of the pristine chaos on the scheme of things. The manifestation of this influence is seemingly recounted, not only in accounts of a specific fall leading to the loss of paradise, but also in recurrent images of disorderliness and its continual threat and similar themes welling up from the primitive well-springs of human nature and pre-historic experience.

The loss of paradise should, in my opinion, be sought in tales depicting the origin of death, and not in stories of meteorological disasters. Such stories do not relate to the original distress, but rather to potential consequences of ritual, infraction and offense, and accordingly are late. They appear to be connected with widespread maculation and general infractions of commandments designed to safeguard society.

I have mentioned that in order to wrest optimism from the maws of catastrophe, and explain the survival of man in spite of the introduction of death, original myth has to absolve man from responsibility. The most common device used to convey this in Africa as elsewhere is the message that failed. The Creator sends a message of blessing to man, which is corrupted into a curse by the time man receives it; the corruption usually takes place through an eavesdropper delivering the wrong word ahead of the authorized messenger. Sometimes, the authorized messenger himself tarries too long and corrupts the message through faulty recollection. The identity of the messenger varies from region to region, and almost from people to people. It might be the cat, the duck, the frog, the chameleon, the goat, the praying mantis, the tortoise, or the centipede. One way or another the assurance of human immortality is corrupted into a message of death. The Book of Genesis conforms to this structure also. Two trees are involved in the story of the Fall: one the tree of life, and the other, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 2.9). The former bestows immortality (Gen. 3.21) and the latter, mortality. The prohibition regarded the latter only (Gen. 216 ff). What the serpent did was to pervert gratuitously the word which God himself had given to man, and to describe the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and of death as though it were a tree of knowledge and life (Gen. 3.4 ff).

Original myth also relies on other motifs to indicate the blamelessness of man in the appearance of death. In the Ruandan account, Kazi Ramuntu, common ancestor of all mankind, was directly created by Imana. Man did not die initially. One day, however, Imana was in hot pursuit of Death, so that man would never die. An old woman, in ignorance of the reason for the chase, pitied the quarry and offered Death refuge. Imana then decreed that as man had invited and welcomed Death, Death would thenceforth have its abode with man. It was not long before fratricide and other degradations appeared and spread. Man thus became liable to die in consequence of a virtue of supererogation. Whatever the motif, what is common to all such accounts is the repudiation of all human responsibility in the original distress. The early state of innocence which they preach is not an ad hoc supposition, but is crucial for the survival and integrity of the human psyche.

SOURCES OF NATIONAL AND COMMUNAL IDENTITY:

MYTH, ART AND PHILOSOPHY

Myth

The original events which myth records and ritual reenacts are events involved in our discovery of the independence of nature. If memory of them has been preserved, the myth of creation will introduce a power able to create the world, not as a pile of bodies, but as an ordered system. Man would be created in a state of innocence, which would be disrupted by some mythic event occasioning the distress. Even though potentially fatal, the threat is treated as being in the end futile.

These events are, of course, not now datable. They are both primordial and continual: they are also potentially fatal. The sedimented experience of the threat of abortive humanity is recovered in myth; but even now, in periods of great exigency, many are driven to science fiction and the most remote fantasies.

Myth is a universal, and is not bound by the particular time and space of the original events which it represents. Myth reconstrues what is truly historical into that which is historic. The first step is to shear off from that which is historical every element which renders it spatially and temporally determinate. The events and kinds of objects so treated must in the first place have been involved in a profound experience which becomes sedimented and is capable of recovery in diverse ways. The experience, along with being deeply affective, must also be universal. The second step is to reconstruct the experience in a narrative form, thereby replacing the original principals with personas conceived as bringing about their substantiation. It is through such substantiation alone that myth is able to present history, indeed universal history. It is thus that myth becomes universally applicable, when events which are originally locked in time and space lose their provin

cialism and acquire the valency of the historic.

This substantiation encourages a conception of objects and events which invests them with a certain energy that reaches beyond their concrete span. It is when we limit real existence to the palpable and physically continuous that the conception of objects assumed in myth appears symbol-laden, mysterious or superstitious. The principle of comprehensive objecthood should certainly allow historical objects posthumously to acquire properties. Thus, one may say that a deceased person, rather than his estate, can be cheated by his lawyer.

If the motivation of myth is to promote an account which treats potentially fatal threats as being in the end futile, if the primary intent of myth is pragmatic then ritual will be crucial. Its aim will be a retracing of steps to ensure correction, a re-enactment calculated to evade the disruption and ensure control. To be useful for this purpose, ritual enactments will possess an identity transcending their local confines. This enables objects to be involved in a re-enactment, for the re-enactment is not merely mimetic or allegorical; it does not rest upon an analogy with the originals. It is precisely this substantiation which is reflected also in the mythic identification of image with object, and of word with essence.

I am well aware that the foregoing views do not consort well with those accounts which are accorded favor. In fact, it owes something to them. According to one not so current account, myth arises from the bewitchment which language casts upon thought. This view is philosophically interesting if not particularly so to anthropologists today, for Ludwig Wittgenstein too once suggested a similar origin for speculative philosophy. The best basis of this view lies in the linguistic phenomenon of paronymy, whereby one etymological root possesses different significations. For example, the root connection between the two Greek words laoí (men) and lâoi (stones) is pronounced to be the source of the myth of Deucalion and Pyrrha, according to which men grew from stones. The general idea in such accounts is that adults used colorful and concrete language in their communications, and children lost the original meanings while retaining the colorful expressions. This forgetfulness brings about a pathology of language, whereby figurative expressions are misconstrued, and a mythopoeic etymology promoted for the vocabulary of morality and nature. Views like this have been held even in our own day by Ernst Cassirer.

A second view advocates a psychological mythology. Here, myth is said to result from the play of the subjective fantasy, and this derives from the sphere of affectivity and will. This is put forward as the origin of art and religion, and myth becomes the daydream of the race, to be explained by plumbing the subconscious and by producing symbols of psychoanalytic exegesis. This is of a piece with the species of accounts which regard myths as allegories of profound meaning.

A third kind of view, endowing myth with cognitive content, treats it as a highly subjective account of objective events. In this view myth is cultural tradition, a repository of ancient history or science. This view of myth, championed by Andrew Lang, Thomas Carlyle and Tylor, portrays myth as primitive science in which the human self is relied upon as model. The inward life, expressed in dream and imagination, is projected onto a nature which thus becomes peopled by animated and wilful plant, animal, and natural phenomenon, creatures to be influenced by imitation and propitiation. A limited form of this position was held in Germany by schools counting among their members stalwarts like Ehrenreich, Siecke, and Winckler, and also Müller, Frobenius and Kuhn.

The other view, held by people like Rivers and Bellamy, is that myth records history, rather than science. Related to this is the class of views which treat myth as ideological and social in purpose. With a little violence, commentators as diverse as Frazer, Malinowski, and Freud can be saddled with such views. Society justifies and enforces tribal customs, especially those relating to economic relations, by putting forward legend as tribal history.

No review of theories of myth, however cursory, could overlook the highly influential ideas of Levi-Strauss, who gives to myth the purpose of devising a logical model to overcome a contradiction, and makes mythical thought work always from an awareness of oppositions onto their progressive mediation. The views of Levi-Strauss in fact apply nicely to those subordinate myths devised to handle parochial loci of predicament. If the view I am putting forward is accepted, then Levi-Strauss can also be said to apply to original myth the contradiction lying now in the opposition between the beneficent orderliness of nature and the suppressed chaos in it which causes our original existential predicament. The whole function of original myth would then be to procure a mediation of the two. Levi-Strauss himself, however, applied his views to what I call subordinate myths dealing with specific predicaments and their loci. Not only could such predicaments arise from ritual infractions, also subordinate myths would need to be instituted to regulate and safeguard society. In the end, however, Levi-Strauss' account is purely structural, and is not directed at the question of origin or the typology of content.

There is much which none of the customary accounts will explain. Neither the claim of paronymy nor the psychological account as it commonly occurs will explain the typic and structural similarities among myths of widely scattered peoples, where historical and linguistic connections cannot be assumed. In the view I am advocating, a comparability of mind set in early man, irrespective of locale, and the comparability of his existential predicament and its cause, lead to a mythic similarity in the character of content, type and structure. Indeed, the original causes of the predicament are always parochial, local, and historical; but because their effect and significance are universally the same, they can be freed from the unities of time and space without historic travesty. The dramatic and miraculous transformations noted in psychological accounts in fact relate to the existential predicament and its imperative of resolution. Their reference to unceasing frustrations and bold deeds in fact merely imposes upon dream and myth the character of the epic. According to the present account, the frustrations reflect the experienced intractability of nature, and initial myth in fact gives a promise that they are not intrinsically unceasing. The bold deeds refer to the actions required to stifle that intractability and promise the same eventual optimism and relief.

In my opinion, the severest weakness of the above accounts lies not in any detailed limitation, but in their perception of myth as cultural tradition; for in this, they lose sight of the inevitability of myth and its salvific aspirations. The experienced intractability of nature and the danger thereby directed at man are what made nature worth knowing and categorizing; they are what shaped the nature of that knowledge and made it pragmatic.

Art

I have proposed the foregoing ideas because I would like to base upon them a theory of national or communal identity. Such identity has dimensions which are fostered, on the one hand, by social norms and artistic forms and, on the other, by philosophical schemes; dimensions arise by an unbroken ancestry from conceptions such as I have put forward.

Let me first explain the connection with social norms and artistic forms. These create a pre-disposition of deportment and reaction, an axiological framework within which priorities are ranked and goals imposed. In their artistic expression they explain also ceremonial music, dance, and the plastic arts, and literature.

Art is originally functional, and not a free or idiosyncratic expression at all. It is not a testament of personal taste or intimations, nor a creation intended for the museum or gallery for contemplation, study or enjoyment. Art for art's sake can only be a comparatively recent shibboleth. It is only when a people have been freed from the exigencies of functional art that art becomes a personalistic creation, an expression in which the individuality of the artist is paramount. It is certain that a society which dwells under the ever-present threat of the recurrence of an existential predicament of the sort which I have described will need to contrive corrective measures which of necessity can be repeated, a cycle of rites and ceremonies, until such time as it can invent a knowledgeable technology. The society will be organized around mythic creeds, and will embrace a view of the world and its own place in it which is metaphysical.

This given, the rites which are calculated to foster society cannot ignore the mythic theory of nature, and this theory is metaphysical in viewpoint. This viewpoint would imbue the rites not just through a general metaphysical preface, but by actually determining the very form and idiom of their devices. The ritual must rely on visible objects and palpable actions, and when correctly employed these are to re-enact original events. Now these potent objects and actions cannot achieve the substantiation and re-enactment of the past, unless, like the figures or personas in the early nightmares which I discussed at the outset, they are imbued with supra-human power and efficaciousness. Indeed, society itself is conceived correspondingly as being a sacred unity, comprising its living members, its dead which survive in disincarnate form, and its as yet unborn and unincarnate children. Each group by its peculiar attributes possesses its appropriate privileges and responsibilities. The spirits of the dead have a vision which is made clear by their acquaintance with the past, and in its behalf they can rebuke the present. They have a vision made wise by their selflessness of motive and by their single-minded insight into the present, about which they are ever solicitous. They have a vision made prophetic by their intimate appreciation of possibilities of the future, and in its behalf they admonish the living. Privileged in this magnitude, they still have to concede to the living the right of decision. At the same time, on account of the peculiar vision possessed by the dead and the succor which they are able to give, much consideration is due them. Accordingly, they are celebrated at appointed times, and invoked for help in time of need. The imposition of the appropriate form on the objects and events, which are the instruments of ritual, is the very same thing as art.

Art objects are central to such celebration and invocation, and could be so widespread that each family would possess such objects. Their forms may be dictated by the totem of the clan to which the family belongs, or by characteristics conceived as embodying the essential nature of a revered ancestor. The art object is not simply declared to represent such characteristics; it must itself be felt to embody and substantiate them, and this it can be acknowledged to do only if it itself exhibits a compelling form.

The most striking art objects have the society at large for the setting of their use, during public festivals and religious ceremonies in accordance with the calendar. These ceremonies are calculated to restore and strengthen the orderliness of nature and of society, and to evade the tragedy which a disconnection from that orderliness would entail. Again, the art objects were required to embody and substantiate the relevant forces, not by allegation, by description or by stipulation, but by credible and manifest being, something which could not be achieved without imposition of appropriate physical forms on ordinary materials. These art objects were creations of specialists who throbbed with artistic talent honed and informed through many years of apprenticeship to the master artist. During the long period, the apprentice studied themes of festivals and ceremonies, the stylizations of art associated with these themes, the prescribed medium and the prayers and incantations required for their rightful use. It is true that the creations would often bear the imprint of a particularly gifted author, but never in such a way as to register his individuality. His signature would lie in the entrancing degree to which his work is compellingly affective.

The ceremony itself would include drumming, dancing, chanting, and sacrifice. It might last for days, and its instruments by design encourage the building up of destructive feelings and passions. At the peak of the ritual, there is typically a massive release of tension and passion, and the mood of the participants becomes relaxed and even jovial. The art objects are then stored away from public view.

It is evident that these objects cannot re-enact dangerous forces nor the actions substantiate threatening events if they are representational and natural in style. When they are not totemic, they rely on an exaggerated physical form and disproportion, in order that directly and without interpretation they may induce the desired feelings and expected state of mind. These art objects were empathically fearsome, and incautious individuals who came into unauthorized contact with them during the ritual were believed to be in awful danger.

These abstract works of art were early regarded by foreigners as possessing only an ethnological interest, and no artistic value. From this point of view, they were judged to be frightfully grotesque, and of the same order of degradation as gargoyles. Subsequently, as a result of the influence which the same works exercised on others like Picasso and Braque in Paris, like Kirchner and the German Expressionists, like Henry Moore and Jacob Epstein in England, they were differently perceived, and their vibrant conatus and immediate power were more widely disclosed.

It is true indeed that in certain African societies, mainly in the Kwa language group (e.g., Benin, Yoruba, Fon, Ewe, Akan), there was a court art which I surmise to be in every case late. Even this art was still functional, and not decorative in intent. It was applied to the walls and entrance arches of palaces, and was supposed to proclaim the power and glory of kings, and the sacred sources of their authority. It is also true that certain societies, like the Tiv and the Fanti, permitted anyone who so wished to assist with their sculpture and canoe decoration. In neither case, however, was the finished work regarded as the individual or collective expression of the artists. Especially among the Tiv, it was described as the self-expression of the Supreme Being himself relying on human instruments.

The case of the highly representational Benin and Ife bronzes must loom as a notable exception to this view that all art is originally functional. They cease to seem so once it is realized that those pieces tend to be images of the head and not of the full figure, and that when they do depict a full figure, the body tends to be truncated and the head made disproportionately large. Severed heads and stunted torsos would indeed be grotesque if intended to be decorative. A clue to their real purpose should instead be sought in the fact that many African societies, and certainly the Kwa-speaking, which include Benin, do associate a spiritual factor with the human head, that factor thought to be responsible for unfolding a person's destiny and expressing itself in brand of intelligence and craftiness. The bronze heads were evidently connected with such beliefs, and in all probability depicted the heads of the most successful and powerful kings, kings of a manifest and accomplished destiny. In a full figure, the stunted torso would now draw dramatic attention to the enlarged head, as if the king were all head. The import is the same as that of an image that is only head. Head, palace wall, and arch would alike proclaim an accomplished destiny.

The artist who produced the ritual objects was himself regarded as a kind of priest. He was steeped in the metaphysics of his people and possessed the skill to concretize it in his creations. His mode of work has often been described in African novels, for example in Chinua Achebe's Arrow of God. At the peak of his work, he enters into a trance-like condition and becomes oblivious of the public and its doings. The trance-like condition insulates him from all distraction, and fixes him in tune with the forces which he seeks to concretize. His product is to be functional, and all has to be right, from selected materials, to incantations and propitiations. The artist invokes the very forces which are to animate his creation; by fashioning a work which embodies these forces, he becomes a channel of communication with them, the means of mediation between them and his society, he constitutes a priest-like figure. William Fagg, who has long studied the forms of these productions, has found that it is precisely the metaphysical purpose which explains the exponential design of much of African art.

The art objects which I have been discussing are obviously structural. I am prepared to suggest that the same functional intent imbues music and drumming, that in their original and principal setting their complicated rhythm, cadences, and counterpoint are evocative, calculated to induce a state of mind, and indeed to take its public through a pre-set range of emotions. It has often been noted by ethnomusicologists that in those societies which are closest to the traditional society, namely, those of Asia and Africa, indigenous music is connected with metaphysical and moral conceptions of its people. Where by reason of a triumphant technology there is little dread of nature, music comes to be appreciated for its form and techniques.

The situation is different, though not to this extent, for African sculptors and composers of today. Those who have tried to work in the style of past masters have failed to project the power of their works. Many factors are no doubt responsible here. Obviously, they have not been apprenticed to the old masters. More important, however, is their indifference to the old metaphysical vision and inability to commit their work to its service. When a society loses its credal commitments, and creative individuals do not serve such an outlook, a work of art truly become the expression of the creative talent of the artist, and may possess no function beyond its own aesthetics. It lends itself to exhibition, even to contemplation, and to pure aesthetic enjoyment. In the early centuries of the Christian era, when Councils defined a unitary creed, Christian iconography was functional, and relied on elements of distortion to proclaim its power. As the credal grip loosened, first under assault of heresy, subsequently through sectarianism, and finally through demythologization, differences in style have become profuse, until we now have the inoffensive, blue-eyed blond Jesus depicted with such overwhelming banality as to make it a religious farce. When society becomes atomistic and is no longer felt to be sacred, artistic skills lose their original focus and now serve individual perceptions and vision. The forms of art are then due solely to individual conceptions, and its products meant for contemplation and enjoyment.

Philosophy

It is not only art and artifacts which are connected with the purposes of original myth. Philosophy too has its roots in myths. I do not merely connect philosophy with myth, but propose to root the two in the same original experience, and oppose them not so much on the basis of their content as of their style. Plato believed that philosophy was born of wonder, and it was left to Aristotle to add that the wonder was not about esoteric matters, but exoteric ones like space, time, motion, perception. The principle of collection, not suggested by the list itself, is clear on the supposition that myth and philosophy are rooted in the same original experience. The psychically distressing phenomenon which occasions myth is universal; likewise the intellectually distressing features which occasion philosophic wonder belong within the common purview. Evidently, the existential distress can be safely intellectualized only if nature has been harnessed to a comfortable degree and its independence sufficiently overcome. Accordingly, Aristotle also noted that a pre-condition for the emergence of philosophy is the availability of leisure to a people or a class of persons whose material welfare was already assured.

Even so, the wonder which begets philosophy is not curiosity for its own sake, but a continuation of the original alienation. Its actual impetus is founded in a memory, in the recovery of a sedimented experience, and it is directed at a still distressing experience of nature. Fortunately, it is still possible to substantiate this in the genesis of Western philosophy among the ancient Ionians. As is commonly agreed, the early Greek philosophers saw a problem in change and devised philosophical accounts purporting to make it intelligible. Change is a generalized version of the original intractability of nature; it may even be distressing, and to the Ionians it was intellectually puzzling. Wonder now replaces the distress which occasions myth; and for its intellectual alleviation it occasions philosophy. If the effect of myth is to offer reassurance concerning the distressing phenomenon, the effect of philosophy is to offer illumination concerning the puzzling phenomenon.

The philosophical puzzlement was not sudden. The poetic tradition which preceded Greek philosophy also saw a conundrum in change, but it did not present it as an intellectual problem. It was presented as an existential one, responsible for a profound alienation. The poetic tradition was quite obsessed with the phenomenon of change. In fact the Ionians, who produced the first known philosophers among the Greeks, very early started to murmur about the vicissitudes of life. They were already successful enough in harnessing nature to build a surplus of material wealth and a surplus of nature, but they could have no assurance of continuing life to enjoy either. They soon broke into open accusation of the gods.

Homer, the oracle cited as authority for settling moral disputes, questions of etiquette, irredentist claims, and just about any dispute with respect to which one could find apt quotations, held out little comfort. He had indeed compared men to leaves. We only have a seasonal life, new generations arising as old generations cease. Mimnermos of Colophon, writing in the second half of the seventh century B.C., complained that man, without help of the gods, won material abundance, only to be cheated out of its enjoyment by old age and death. Could not the gods have bestowed perpetual youth on man in place of the torments of tantalization? Picking up Homer's image of leaves, he went on to list the ills of elderly life as poverty, disease, sterility, and indeed sexual fumbling. In passage after passage, he blurted the same lamentations: man was powerless before the gods, and old age was to be dreaded more than death.

Semonides of Amorgos, enlarging upon the same themes, even thought that Homer's comparison between men and leaves was the best thing he ever said. He himself compared men to cattle in the eyes of Zeus, who brought people to their end as he pleased. He exceeded all others in his melancholy. He proclaimed evil everywhere, "ten thousand dooms, woes and griefs beyond speaking are the lot of mankind." Semonides, too, although more cosmopolitan than most, still shared the dejection over the generations of men that fell like leaves of the forest.

The Ionians found no consolation with the poets, and certainly entertained no sanguine ideas about the after-life. The passage from life to death appeared to them like that from sickness or old age to ghostly existence. The ghost itself was held to be a weak, pale shadow of a real man. Accordingly, Achilles could say to Odysseus that he would "rather be a laborer to a poor man on earth than rule as king among the dead".

This distress which the Greeks felt at the fact of change was assailed in different ways. Initially, they attempted to overcome it through rites and myth. In myth, however, we have a poetic kicking against the goad, and not an unravelling of a puzzling concept. The solution offered by myth is, like its problem, existential in form and not conceptual. It is mythic, not philosophical. Even so, the myths sought to present a unified account of the world, and adumbrate the offices and arts by means of which nature could be controlled. These accounts were historic in content even though presented in historical modes. They relied on large natural masses like the water of the sea, the land of the earth, and so on, and turned them into personages. The vicissitudes which the Greeks resented were perhaps more painful than the original failures of nature, for now man is being cheated out of full possession of the rewards of his own labors. With myth, historical occurrences have been transformed into historic archetypes. The stage is set for the historic to become the philosophical.

Myth replaces the historical content with a historical style. Philosophy eschews both the historical content and the historical style in its handling of precisely the same experience as myth. Indeed, it is when a people have enough material self-assurance, and philosophy has emerged, that myth begins to acquire overtones of incredibility and figment. Until then it takes the place of philosophy. If we look upon myth and the historic as an abstraction and generalization from that which is historical, we can also look upon philosophy as further abstraction and generalization from myth. Myth has already shed historical facticity, but retains the idiom of personages, events and actions, not simply the use of proper names, but also the ascription of motives and purposes. The style of original myth may not be that of original philosophy; but its content is.

Philosophy, at its first appearance, represents a subsequent echelon to myth and, dropping the historical idiom, it adopts that of analysis and reduction. In place of biography, it substitutes explanation; in place of a human aetiology, it develops a technical vocabulary pressed into the service of a schematic account. Philosophy is neither biography nor aetiology; and yet it mimics biography with its literal ontologies, and mimics aetiology with its inferences. Perhaps the most profound misunderstanding of both myth and philosophy is represented in gnosticism, which treated myth and philosophy as at once history and aetiology; just as myth relied on rites for control, gnosticism relied on the understanding which a philosophy might provide for control. As a result, in gnosticism there is a recapitulation of the cosmic history of man, of an original alienating experience, a deterioration of perfection, which is sedimented. When this history is re-enacted, and the individual remembers who and what he is, he can overcome the original distress and thus works his own salvation. Salvation comes through knowledge, and knowledge is re-collection. It is evident that gnosticism shares with myth the idea of the original distress; it shares with philosophy the idea of the elimination of the distress through knowledge. Between myth and philosophy, the distress passes from being existential to being intellectual. With gnosticism, it is both.

Once philosophy emerges, it is all-embracing: it proposes a general account of the world as a whole. It is only later that it differentiates into branches, giving more detailed accounts of the parts which might make up a unified account. Similarly, myth too begins with an historic account of creation of the world as a whole, and subsequently differentiates ancillary myths of facets or factors which bring their own parochial distress.

Philosophy too is concerned with ethos, but now not the ethos of a people as such. It is therefore not obliged to make prescriptions. To the extent that it gives a narrative, it may recover embedded values. The rest of its business, analysis and argument is often conducted without prior commitment to the soundness or validity of its original descriptive narrative.

General myth and first philosophy are not contrasted in content but in idiom. One sign of the approach of the one to the other is the switch from a cosmogonical focus to a cosmological. Myth develops specialized forms to cope with more parochial alienations, especially those connected with institutions; philosophy, too, beginning with an all-embracing metaphysical concern, must and does generate specialized branches, provoked by the analogue of specific distress. The ascent of abstraction in the passage from the historical to the historic and on to the philosophical will be recapitulated in a comparable passage from the metaphysical to the epistemological to the logical, a sequence verified in the history of western philosophy, where first metaphysics, then epistemology, and finally philosophical logic and its variants become in turn the fundamental parts of philosophy. My meaning is as follows. Just as original myth may need to be safeguarded by the devising of additional and more specific myths dealing with the regulation of society and individual comportment, so it comes to be conceived that metaphysics will not be securely formulated until central questions in epistemology are solved, and in turn that epistemology will not be securely formulated until questions in philosophical logic and its variants are solved. This perception has experienced cycles and can be seen in the sequence from the pre-Socratics through Plato to Aristotle, and in the more stupendous ambit of medieval philosophy, seventeenth century rationalism and empiricism, and twentieth century philosophical logic and philosophy of language.

The following incomplete table sufficiently suggests the parallel intended:

Myth

Philosophy

Cosmogonical myth of origin

Cosmological metaphysics

Religion

Philosophical theology

Social institutions

Social and political philosophy

Ritual conduct

Ethics

Ceremonial

Aesthetics

All of the foregoing suggests a principle of appraisal which can be applied fruitfully to the case of Africa, for its original myths approximate in different degrees to that critical point where philosophy erupts.

This eruption counts, among the factors which determine it, the adequate mastery of nature as proved by reliable material wealth and the provision of leisure. At this point, there is a tendency for the hold of myth to weaken. Myth itself is not questioning or self-worrying; it does not isolate and examine. Instead, it reinforces itself by repetition and entrenches itself through sanctions; it protects itself by an immunity from skeptical investigation in the manner in which it is transmitted. Whether exoteric or esoteric in transmission, the cosmogonical myth itself--the most credal in character--may become with the passage of time and increased material confidence less concrete, sketchier and forgotten in detail.

The cosmogonical character of original myth makes certain weaknesses endemic to it. As a cosmogonical account, it cannot offer a general theory of being or of objects, and must rely on external relations between types of objects. Its style is historical, and yet gives no indication of historical destiny. If the source of the world of nature is itself rational, the account is liable to generate a vicious infinite regress. If the regress doubles back on itself, and puts the beginning in the end, it will close a vicious circle. And yet should the regress cease, it will only involve special pleading on behalf of some initial term chosen for the particular cosmogony.

Ancient cosmogonies tend to be genealogical. As genealogies, they are closed to discussion. We note that something begat something else, but cannot ask why it begat at all. The sources of such explanations ultimately lie in revelation rather than discovery, and we ourselves cannot deduce the mythic ancestors from our encounter with the world. Insofar as mythic cosmogonies are historical and genealogical, they must rely on personages and events. The first break introduced by philosophy lies precisely here. It was indeed appropriate for myth to adopt its personalist idiom, which made it comparatively brief and easily memorized. Its imitation of vision in relying on personages and action was well-advised. Philosophy, however, in representing further abstraction than myth, must abandon cosmogony for cosmology, personages and events for empirical and transcendental concepts, genealogy for reduction. The unity of the world can consist now not in the unity of its source but in the unity of its substance. Its motive is not to control nature but to understand it.

I have suggested a view of the origin of myth which connects with the origins of dimensions of culture. I have tried to illustrate this connection through the example of art and philosophy. The same connection holds for literature and music and, in general, for ideas concerning the ethos of a people. Precisely because myth embraces society in a common pristine era, it provides an archaeological, sedimented, and memorial basis for social cohesion. Many are its dimensions: pedagogical, teaching people of their common origins and yielding the symbols and instruments for communicating their wisdom; ethical, deriving by subordinate myths principles of action and sensibility which are in general supportive of their general myth; prophetic, bearing on the norms and the future history of its people. A people deepen their understanding of their present by appropriating their past not only through history, but also through myth and philosophy, for there is a larger memory of the past which does not possess the conscious clarity of historical writing, a sedimented cultural memory enfolded in myth. It is a fecund womb of national identity.