When he hears about automation, automatic factories, and unmanned manufacture, the worker wonders with a certain anxiety what will be his fate in an industry which is undergoing transformation and whether the trade from which he draws his livelihood today does not risk becoming useless tomorrow and leaving him without work. No doubt he has been told that the machine will never be able to replace man entirely, that there is no danger of unemployment, since new machines create new jobs, and that he will be freed of heavy labor and fatigue, thanks to the automatized factory. But these arguments are not all valid for the man whose job is eliminated or modified and who must find another situation or adapt himself to a different kind of work. It makes no difference if the over-all perspectives are reassuring—they are less so on the individual's level. The economy may continue to experience a cycle of full employment, but the individual may have to face the depressing hunt for a new job or start at the bottom in a different trade.

Our epoch, fertile in inventions in the most diverse fields, has in recent years seen several discoveries which hold extraordinary interest for history in general and for the history of religions in particular. Around 1930 seven volumes of Manichean writings were discovered at Fayum; in 1941, a few miles outside Cairo, near Tura, unpublished works of Origen and his disciple Didymus the Blind were found; the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls occurred around 1945, and in Egypt, at roughly this same time, an equally fortuitous find was made of a considerable body of Coptic manuscripts dating perhaps from the third century a.d. Although these last have not been entirely deciphered, they are considered by specialists to be prodigiously rich; such a find, says one, “does not merely enrich or renew our previous knowledge of the literature, the genealogy, or the history of Gnosticism : it revolutionizes this knowledge, and opens to research in the field a path absolutely distinct from all those which criticism has previously followed.”

Although I am by no means a specialist in this field, I was struck with the ideas presented in Roger Caillois's work, Les feux et les hommes. In it he has attempted to classify games according to their basic character and the principles from which they stem. He has also tried to demonstrate that a certain kind of society corresponds to a certain category of games. In chapter viii of his book we encounter the transition from primitive societies, where games that Caillois classifies as mimicry and ilinx (“mimicry” and “vertigo”) are the rule, to highly developed societies characterized by agôn (“regulated competition”) and alea (“chance”). The ideal toward which all modern, democratic societies aspire is total achievement of the requisite conditions for the proper evolution of agôn, not only in the realm of games, but in all of life, by guaranteeing equal opportunities to all citizens in their competition for wealth and power. However, as we can readily understand, this ideal can never be truly achieved, even in societies that are, theoretically, the most egalitarian. To this fact the author attributes the extraordinary passion for all forms of alea, which we witness today almost everywhere in the Western world. Chance offers compensation for the disappointments inherent in agôn, for the inevitable inequalities among members of any human group. Caillois provides a penetrating analysis of all the forms that alea asumes in our times (games of “double or quits,” betting, lotteries, beauty contests, infatuation with movie stars), and he cites examples to illustrate the passions they arouse. I was all the more impressed because they are practically non-existent in Finland. This is due, in my opinion, to the fact that in Finnish society opportunities for agôn are equally distributed among its members; thus they do not feel the need to seek compensation in the whims of alea.

There has often been criticism of the use which was made by certain sociologists toward the beginning of the century (Lévy-Bruhl in particular) of the adjective “primitive” to characterize the level of culture of peoples whom we formerly called “savage.” The term “archaic” perhaps creates fewer difficulties, but its etymology nevertheless involves the inconvenience of intimating that the societies in question might be closer to the origins than ours. Certain anthropologists, attempting to find an objective criterion which would permit us to draw a line of demarcation between the so-called primitives and ourselves, use the term “peoples without writing” to designate the former—that is, they refer to a technique. It is true that there might be good grounds for specifying this criterion. Indeed, graphic representation can consist of rudimentary signs such as one sees on the messagesticks of the Australians or in the sketched stories, such as those with which the North American Indian covered animal skins. We can speak of writing from the moment that definite characters of precise conventional meaning appear; but from the pictogram to the abstract sign there are still many transitions. For example, in the pre-Columbian epoch, the writing system of the Aztecs “constituted a compromise between the ideogram, phonetism, and simple drawing.” Egyptian hieroglyphics were not yet totally freed from their pictographic origins. In the evolution which led to our modern system, the first step was taken when syllabic representation was adopted. But writing ceased to be reserved for specialists and truly became a widespread institution when the alphabet was invented; and that discovery, made no doubt toward the year 1800 b.c. by the Semitic peoples, came more than three thousand years after the first step. In general, the term “peoples without writing” does not in itself specify that it must be understood as meaning “peoples without an alphabet”; thus there is some doubt about civilizations like that of the Aztecs, endowed with a rather elaborate pictographic system. There would be good reason, moreover, to ask ourselves if the technique of writing really constitutes a reliable criterion for establishing a distinction between societies which stagnate in archaism and those which open up to history. Certain writers, such as Marcel Griaule or M. Gurvitch, would be inclined to refute it and to seek other technical criteria, such as the use of machines or reference to creative characteristics.

The prospect of a science of history that would chart the past and enable the future to be projected has invariably intrigued the historian. Technically, this would leave history unencumbered by its mass and the historian concerned only with lines of development delineated by historical science. With the road map of the future before him, the status of the historian would grow as indispensable counselor of politicians and statesmen, bringing the science of human development to bear upon their deliberations. Henry Adams imagined a situation in which state and church, capital and labor, and all other important social groupings and institutions would ask anxiously of the historian: Am I justified in history and will I live on?

Charles Kerényi began his research before 1927. In that year he achieved brilliant renown, thanks to a suggestive and wonderfully comprehensive book on the Greco-oriental novel that is replete with ideas. He wrote it from the illuminating standpoint of the history of religions. Following the author of the classical Psyche, and with innumerable contributions of his own, he once again gave proof of that delicate sense of the religious subconscious which could have subsisted, more or less somnolent, in the composite spirit of the Mediterraneans of yesterday and today. We are eternally indebted to the curious, folkloric inquiries which have transported us to their time, introducing us to an ancient religiosity, secret, and perhaps unconscious. The Hellenistic or Greco-Roman novels, forerunners of some of our most modern literature, drew substance at will from eternal, human belief. In stoically scrutinizing their content—one might even say balderdash—we tend therefore to forgive them much because of the richness of their soil, infused as it was with popular legends which carry with them a highly tonic and savory mixture of old rites, discarded superstitions, half-extinguished cults. Where, for example, can one seek a better statement on the notion of the pure and the impure, which still preoccupies us so much today? Or on the sensitivity of those who, in quest of virtue, went off whenever necessary and with great ado to meet the assembled gods?