Being is, above all, a vocation to continue to be. In the inanimate world, pure inertia achieves this ambition by means of its insistence on maintaining every conceivable state of equilibrium or else of movement. That which is persists in remaining as it is; a stone, for instance, insofar as nothing prevents it from continuing to exist in its condition as a stone. Certainly, this is the earliest and most remote origin of that which, at a later stage, is destined to manifest itself in art in a form that is not recognizable; in this case one might well say that, in the Beginning, was Classicism.

Ever since the mediaeval quarrel over universais, there have invariably been minds for whom every general concept is a flatus vocis. And for many African intellectuals, the term “negritude,” introduced by Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor around the years 1933-1935, is no more than just a word. Yet the mere fact that it came into being, even though it should have no intelligible content, is in itself significant. It is indicative of the same growing awareness that led to the struggle against racial discrimination and the liberation movements of colonial peoples. But a growing awareness of what?

Crimes committed in the name of God are a recurrent theme in the history of Christian Europe. The ancients practiced torture and murder in war, on slaves (who were supplied by the wars) and as a form of entertainment: the circenses. But in spiritual matters the emperors were relatively tolerant. If the Christians were singled out as scapegoats, it was because they did not yet at that time place the state above all else and still recognized something higher than the empire. But since Constantine in his unscrupulous way singled out Christianity from among the existing religions to fill in the cracks in his crumbling empire and elevated it to the state religion, Europe has stood under the sign of that doctrine and betrayed it again and again. If the words of the founder, his recorded will, his precepts had been put in practice instead of being interpreted by the scholars, neither the unified Christians of the middle ages nor the disunited Christians of the modern period would have had their splendid careers. Whatever teachings could have been taken over from the Old Testament, glory in battle was no part of it. Under the heathen emperors, the commandment to render unto caesar what was caesar's could bring Christians into conflict with the state and, when they rightly refused to observe it, to the cross. But the Christian emperors would have untertaken no wars of conquest, they would have named no tribunals to punish those who had offended against them. The victorious course of Christianity since Nicaea and especially since Augustine, which was not unlike the expansion of Buddhism since the reign of Asoka, sealed its pact with that worldy wisdom which it had originally professed to renounce. Its readiness for fanaticism, without which its ascendancy would have been unthinkable, testified to a secret and indomitable hatred for that attitude of mind for which its founder had earlier been put to death.

Samuel Butler sees the nightshirts of the master and the lady of the house drying on the line in the garden next door. The following year he notices that a small baby's shirt has been added. As a superficial onlooker he could be led to believe that the two large shirts have engendered the small one. We make a somewhat similar mistake, says Butler, in believing that the bodies of the parents have made the baby. The body of the baby has no more been made by the two grown babies, on whose pattern it is modeled, than the small shirt has been made by the two large ones… What makes the small shirt as well as the baby is something we know absolutely nothing about. In any case, it is always risky to “place” the organic lines of continuity or of “genidentity.” One risks taking the resulting and secondary forms for the constituent reality itself, the machines for the machinists, especially within the organism, where the machines and machinists are intimately bound together.

We think of the Indian as our problem. We think of him as a biological entity within our collectivity. He is not exactly the proletariat, the working class of our society. He is the underdog, the outcast, the untouchable.

We admire the sheer ability of the Indian to live as an animal, to procreate his image without change century after century, to lie drunk in the cool soft air of the Andes muttering bad words and supplications to the virgin and all the pagan gods. “The Indian always works slowly, at a retarded rhythm, a monotonous and unchangeable beat. Never, or very rarely, can he be seen running, jumping, excited, realizing rapid action, violent, energetic, of nervous impulse. In his music, in his dance, in his song, we see the repercussion of this physical state and from it the sobbing monotony of his cultural manifestations. The reciprocal action of the physiological on the psychological and vice versa complete the group of factors that account for the morbid languor in which the Indian vegetates.” Yet despite all of this the Indian is eternal. Since he does not enter into the cycle of evolution, of progress, he neither lives in the true sense of civilization, nor does he die. This phenomena of stagnant purely biological existence may be explained from many points of view.

Very rarely does the statement of its basic doctrines and demands truly define the individuality of a religion. It certainly does not in Islam. The particulars by which both believer and outsider will identify the Muslim faith are hardly of a kind to account for its striking distinctiveness. This distinctiveness is customarily circumscribed in terms of the so-called “pillars of the faith;” but to repeat for the thousand and first time that, to the Muslim, there is but one God whose Messenger is Muhammad, that five daily prayers are enjoined as are one month of fasting, an alms-tax and, when possible, the pilgrimage to the central sanctuary at Mecca, the Messenger's birth-place, will not convey much of the uniqueness and the unmistakability of Islam. Even when we realize that originality is not a value specific to the religious life—where innovation to be valid must always mean uncovery of, or recourse to, an eternal verity—the formulation of the “pillars” contains nothing that could have startled the world into which Islam was born long accustomed as it was to the ideas of monotheism and the prophetic messenger and the devotional practices of prayer, fasting and pilgrimage.

The myth (whose different definitions we need not enumerate here) cannot be categorized. It has an autonomous status. Imbued as it is with religious ideas, it is in practice an indispensable part of the African liturgy. It is often a necessary component of the rite, sustaining the thread of certain ceremonies. What we call drame sacré is, with all its implied formalism, a dramatization of the myth, or what amounts to the same thing, an actualization of holy scriptures.

Exorbitant attention has been paid to the nature of gods, whose character it is to be inacessible to examination, but relatively less attention has been paid to the impresarios of gods, viz. prophets and shamans and priests—the de facto sources of all our religious information—who are available for study. It is our contention that the nature of deities is to be sought in the psychic disposition of their exponents and, more than this, that the ancestor of the god is the shaman himself. The vatic personality is often known to be psychologically abnormal, or perhaps only temporarily in such a state as the dream or the vision, and doubtless often in response to the pressure of some current crisis, personal or social or both. But the conditions for hallucinatory contact with spirits and gods may easily be gained by psychically quite ungifted persons, through the use of psychotropic drugs. It is this second situation we would wish to examine in the present study.

Many scholars who have thought hard about the problems of peace and war in the thermonuclear age have concluded that mankind is faced with an unprecedented situation. Thus Kenneth Boulding (Conflict and Defense, p. 336) has remarked that “Our hope for the future of mankind… lies first in the human imagination, which can create the forms of things unknown and so create the image of possible futures that have not been previously imagined.” Thermonuclear war and world disarmament are both thought to be unprecedented possibilities. And from this belief has sprung the notion of many war-peace researchers that study of the past is unlikely to contribute much to understanding of an unprecedented future. Perhaps partly for this reason, few professional historians have become involved in the kind of peace research that has interested many economists, political scientists, and—perhaps preeminently—psychologists.