In its curving watercourse, the Loire encompasses vast areas of central France—Touraine, Blésois, Sologne, Berry—former provinces, all closely related, where one travelled from one town to another by imperceptible degrees, a whole district which since time immemorial, has been, above all, French. The towns there have remained as they were in olden times: peaceful populous villages which are quiet and slow-moving although their organisation is complex, standing on an unpretentious historic substructure whose only outcrops are familiar remains: Here a still-imposing castle; there a church, frequently of outstanding beauty; and sometimes public monuments dating from the first onset of community awareness—they consist of such things as a wash-house, a fountain, a bridge over a river, a shady square, or covered market…

The seal of Utopia stamped the history of Mexico from its colonial origins. Thomas More's Utopia was published at Louvain in 1516, three years before Cortez disembarked on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, and twenty years later Vasco de Quiroga, the first bishop of Michoacan, attempted to realise Utopia in his diocese. When, in the first years of the last century, the learned traveler Alexander de Humboldt made investigations which resulted in A Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, he was able to verify the Indians’ continuance of the country of the “venerable Vasco” (tata Vasco) Besides a hagiographic legend (one could cite a great many of them) and besides an equally significant regional tradition, the historian establishes that the Utopian aspirations and Messianic hope had been permanent characteristics of the national conscience of Mexico throughout its formation.

If one were to arrange the history of the ideas of violence and aggression in periods, the first would be that in which such evils were accepted as an integral part of cosmic history. I refer to what we know of Zoroastrianism. According to this complex of ideas there is a constant battle going on between the forces of evil and those of good, a battle whose ground extended to the limits of the universe. Little if anything is known of the sources of this cosmology but judging from appearances it looks as if they were the frank acceptance of the empirical observation that evil is an active force, autonomous and normally present in all human affairs. History would seem to be the result of an ever-living struggle between evil and the good. That the two sets of contradictory forces are given divine names, Ahura-Mazda and Ahriman, is of no importance here. What is of importance is the acceptance of the evil powers as something inevitable and the relegation of the triumph of goodness to the infinitely remote future.

Anarchist aesthetics are virtually unheard-of today. As a reflection of the birth of a new anti-authoritarian sensibility, as well as of the somewhat mechanical application of the general theses of the philosophy of anarchism to the problems of literary and artistic creation, these aesthetics did, however, know an hour of glory in the 19th century. But at the turn of the century anarchism lost its sense of immediacy when it no longer held its position as the ideology of the international worker's movement. Its fortune, like the fortune of any “political” aesthetic, depends very closely on the successes and failures of the ideology of which it is a point of reference.

Some original forms of state emerge from the clan structures in central Africa in the 16th and 17th centuries, beyond the reach of any European influence. The oral epic traditions which echo these events draw from the founts of Bantu mythic thought. The Luba national epic recounts the dramatic origin of its sacred royalty and describes the passage from a primitive culture to a refined civilization, from an uneventful history to one full of movement; but above all it abandons itself to a singular meditation on the ritual usage of fire, on family and death, on time and space, on the rainbow and lightning. If we take the fantastic seriously, symbolic patterns appear which filter the historical tradition and transform it into metaphysics. The reeling King Woot seems to play in reverse the Luba role, on the royal scene of Kuba mythology, where almost Biblical figures could be recognized: the tower of Babel throws its shadow on the adventures of an African Noah who first abandons himself to drunkenness, then to incest, delivering society to the diversity of languages and plunging the universe into primordial chaos. A transition between the myth and the tale, the founding epic of the Lunda state is bathed three times in blood: the blood of the warriors, of the women, and of the beasts who fall prey to a marvelously seductive hunter. Looking closely, we see that this Prince-stranger, initiator of a line of anointed royalty, carries on his shoulders, as does his Luba counterpart, a part of the universe. The cosmogony is veiled in the myth but transparent in the ritual, in the actions and mysterious words of the initiates into mungonge religious society: men with eyes of light are the counterpart of animals with eyes of darkness, as the star of day is opposed to the sinister hyena-moon. The founding epic of the Bemba state tells, like the Kuba myth, of the fascination of the principle of pleasure among a migrating aristocracy, somewhat decadent in comparison with the rude warrior or hunter heroes in the Luba and Lunda epics. But all these narratives, in the final analysis, form one sole myth, which develops its autonomous structures under the turbulence of an historical adventure each time different. More than unfolding the particular story of each kingdom, these legendary chronicles of Zaïre, Zambia and Angola reveal that the powerful political organisations set up by the Bantu to the south of the great forest are not isolated from eacb other: they administrate in common an intellectual patrimony which breaks loose from the ideological role that the kings, whether drunk on palm wine or on military ambition, try to make them play for their own glory: myths and rites obey their own codes, recognize no master but one, which they give themselves in their own kingdom: the Imaginary.

The text which follows here is concerned in particular with the epic of the Bemba people, whose dominating aristocracy imposed an anointed royalty on some 100,000 people formerly grouped in matrilinear clans.

The present-day dossier of the blacksmith in black Africa and elsewhere is made up of a considerable bulk of literature. The various documents are not homogenous: some are confined to providing us with raw information—a sort of implicit phenomenology; others tend to be in support of, for the most part, particular theories, and, in fairly rare cases, general theories. Engendered by the ambiguous status of this artisan at once manipulator of fire and of chtonic powers, this literature attempts to put forward conclusive answers to situations which are, either in a real sense or in an apparent sense, contradictory. Thus it is that the blacksmith is at times the marginal citizen, something of an outcast who is despised above all else, and at others the equivalent of the figure holding the reins of power, if not this figure in person; in this way his image travels from one extreme of recognised social standing to the other. But in almost every instance he is recognised as possessing the technical knowledge which is the determining factor for the functioning of societies, whatever the category of social formation in which they may be included.

The wide diffusion of the concepts of “cultural personality” or “cultural originality” in the social thought of developing Asian and African countries is determined by a number of circumstances. These concepts, though they claim a theoretical understanding of the processes involved in the “entry of these countries into the 20th century,” all boil down to the basic fact that the source, the foundation and the decisive sphere for the processes of self-determination in developing Asian and African countries in the present day world must be their traditional cultures, as opposed to the industrial civilization of the West.