I have been reading an 84-page pamphlet called ‘Artukovitch, the Himmler of Yugoslavia’, by three New Yorkers, called Gaffney, Starchevitch and McHugh. Artukovitch was Minister of the Interior, 1941 to 1945, under the dictator Pavelitch in the independent state of Croatia. Very few people have heard of him, yet if his story were told with remorseless candour, we would have a picture not only of Croatia twenty years ago, but of all Christendom in our century. Everything that the New Yorkers relate should be already known to us, except for one startling paragraph. It is an extract from a memoir by Artukovitch himself. After describing how he escaped to Austria and Switzerland in 1945, he goes on:

So evidently we in Ireland, had sheltered this notable man for a whole year. He was not, like Eichmann, a humble executive, but himself a maker of history, dedicated to the extermination not of Jews alone, but also of his fellow-Christians, the Serbian Orthodox. He himself in the spring of 1941 introduced and signed the laws, which expelled them from Zagreb, confiscated their property and imposed the death penalty on those who sheltered them. He established the twenty concentration camps, in which they were exterminated. Why do we know so little about his sojourn among us ?

Liturgy is a great thing for sending people to sleep. It does not matter how archaic a word or phrase in the liturgy is, or obscure or even downright nonsense, it can still be said, provided it is said or sung often enough. Witness the remarkable lines of some popular hymns. This is even true of such an exalted thing as the Lord’s Prayer, which has been said somewhere in the liturgy from the earliest times.

Englishmen still say ‘hallowed’ long after the word has gone out of current use, largely because Englishmen have always said ‘hallowed’ since at least the days of King Alfred. This is not an English eccentricity. The Greeks have always recited the Lord’s Prayer with the word epiousios, which is known to have been unintelligible to second-century Christians. Nobody then and nobody since has ever heard of this word in any other context, and nobody is really sure what it means. And yet for century after century the Greeks have gone on saying it.

If this is so of single words, it is more so with whole phrases. The meaning of the line ‘lead us not into temptation’ is no less obscure than epiousios. The words themselves do not present any difficulty, but taken together they seems to imply something that is quite unthinkable. Are we really meaning that God would lead us into temptation, if we didn’t pray to him not to ? This certainly troubled the early Latin Fathers when they were engaged on providing a satisfactory translation for the Western Church. They frequently softened the shock by inserting something like: ‘do not suffer us to be led into temptation’ (ne patiaris nos . . .). But the novelty wore off, and as this cushioning interpolation was not in the Greek, St Jerome stuck on ne nos inducas . . . , and the Western Church was quietly lulled off to sleep by the liturgical anodyne of centuries of repetition.

Anyone sensitive to symbolism must normally shudder at the words of eucharistic consecration. Not because of the current English translation. Something that cuts deeper: the priest takes the chalice and says: ‘And when supper was ended, he took the cup, saying: This is my blood. . . .’ Most chalices are still lined with gold, a mark of respect, the most precious metal alone allowed to touch the consecrated wine. Yet that gold, enshrined at the heart of our celebration of love and peace, is also, still, at the base of the international monetary system; more specifically, it underpins the economy of South Africa, the world’s largest gold-producing country: the blood that is relevant here is also the blood of apartheid. The hasty response, that a gold-lined cup is a mere container, can only be dubious in the light of a sacramental theology that recognizes the sign-value of form. More honest to admit the contradiction, acknowledge indeed the wider interlocking of the eucharistic community itself with that systematic exploitation revealed in a minor, everyday detail.

The other words of consecration, ‘This is my body’, have resonance for another sacrament: matrimony. Bellarmine traced a further echo: ‘The sacrament of marriage ... is similar to the Eucharist, which likewise is a sacrament not only in the moment of its accomplishment, but also as long as it remains.’ But the eucharistic bread, one might argue, can decay and corrupt; it may not ‘remain’; an opening, by analogy, towards divorce appears: individual relationships may cease adequately to measure up to the form of marriage; the core corrupts, the sign decays.

The lady in Muriel Spark’s latest novel, eagerly looking out for her murderer, was surely an anthropologist manquée. For one element in the anthropologist’s complex fate is the dialectical compulsion to achieve the synthesis of contraries. The anthropologist’s charter— the cohesiveness and interpretability of all the works of social man— is part of the legacy of the Enlightenment surely; yet this volume suggests that it is in the very area where the hidden and the hateful come nearest to receiving the guilty approval of social man that anthropologists can do their finest work, marked by that passionate rationality and clear-eyed empathy which do at times reward painstaking research and patient reading. It is true that the best essays are by historians, or by anthropologists using history to gain a wider range; but the historians, Professor Norman Cohn, Mr Peter Brown, Dr Alan Macfarlane, and Mr Keith Thomas, have adopted the anthropological approach, which examines the interplay of ideology and institution, rather than work in the historian’s tradition of the placing of men in their milieu.

This collection, then, dedicated to exploring the dark margin of society’s self-consciousness, is intended as a commemoration of Professor Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the A'zande. Now this is one of the classics of anthropology in more than one sense. The ease of style depends on the extreme clarity of the underlying thought, and this in turn is the fruit of the prolonged, patient absorbing of an enormous mass of material.