Unlike him who said: “Man is something that must be gone beyond,” I shall have the temerity to say: “Man is something that must be opened out.” But this opening out presupposes a statutory plurality of the person, society and the world. It is because it ignored this plurality and broke away from it that the industrial era is experiencing what have been called contradictions.

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…

This is a deliberately provocative title, chosen in an iconoclastic moment, when I was annoyed by reading yet another book, in which the author prostrates himself abjectly before the altar of Homer the historian. The worship of this false god has reached such proportions that every writer on Mycenaean Greece devotes a great deal of space to what Homer says, and spends page after page trying to reconcile the Homeric account with the archaeological evidence. The idea that Homer can tell us about the Mycenaean Age dies hard; it is time to administer the coup de grâce.

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.

Those who study myth today consider with some predilection societies with no written language, such as are studied by ethnologists, wherein they hope to find myth of a more pure and more living nature than is to be found in civilizations where it has been treated in a “literary” form. To me, it does not appear at all obvious that the least elaborate should necessarily be the most pure and the most revealing. While, as they develop, societies may be invested with structures of an increasing complexity and which are superimposed to such an extent that their organizational plan sometimes seems confused, at the same time the social functions are diversified and each of them becomes more simple. Is it in a society where the same character is at one and the same time king, priest and chief warrior that the distinctive characteristics of political authority, sacerdotal office and military activity are the most clearly illustrated, or is this clearer in a society where the different responsibilities are dissociated—even if, in their effective execution, it appears that complex relationships connect this authority, this office and this activity one with the other? In the same way, are not societies where there is coexistence and confrontation between clearly distinct conceptual thought and mythic thought, each aware of its own specificity, those that allow us best to understand the essence of the myth in its greatest purity?

In 1790 Melchior Grimm wrote to Catherine II: “Two empires will share all the benefits of civilization, power, genius, letters, the arts, weaponry and industry: Russia in the East and America, which has recently become independent, in the West.” Eighty years later Bachofen made public the same strongly held conviction: “I am beginning to believe that the twentieth-century historian will have only to speak of America and Russia.” In the intervening period Tocqueville concluded the first volume of his work Democracy in America thus: “There are at the present time two great nations in the world, which started from different points, but seem to tend towards the same end. I allude to the Russians and the Americans. …The principal instrument of the former is freedom; of the latter, servitude. Their starting-point is different and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems marked out by the will of heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.”

The five texts listed at the front of this edition of Diogenes are the work of the “Equipe de recherches en littérature africaine comparée” (ERLAC), which is headed by Mr. Thomas Melone, professor at the Federal University of Cameroon. They are part of a collection of studies carried out by this center, shortly to be published under the title: African Miscellany (Mélanges Africains).

Myth is like religion: both present one and the same fundamental problem—that of the whole of existence.

“Thy word (or: essence) is true from the beginning”; thus reads the Psalmist's passage, oft quoted in kabbalistic literature (Psalm 119: 160). According to the originally conceived Judaistic meaning, truth was the word of God which was audible both acoustically and linguistically. Under the system of the synagogue, revelation is an acoustic process, not a visual one; or revelation at least ensues from an area which is metaphysically associated with the acoustic and the perceptible (in a sensual context). This is repeatedly emphasised with reference to the words of the Torah (Deuteronomy 4: 12): “Ye heard the voice of the words, but saw no similitude; only ye heard a voice.” What precisely we are to understand by this voice and what is uttered through it is the very question which the various currents of Judaistic religious thought have constantly posed themselves. The indissoluble link between the idea of the revealed truth and the notion of language—is as much, that is, as the word of God makes itself heard through the medium of human language, if, otherwise, human experience can reach the knowledge of such a word at all—is presumably one of the most important, if not the most important, legacies bequeathed by Judaism to the history of religions.

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.

Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge attracts the attention of ethnologists who are interested by the symbolical analysis of kingship. Although this book does not deal with the theme of kingship as such, it overlaps it on a mythical level. It is a novel about the rise and fall of a man, Henchard, whose initial act is to sell his wife and daughter; in order to commit this act he deviates from the context of the human norm by way of drunkenness. He then enjoys great success as a corn merchant and becomes mayor of the town. Twenty years after this the graph of his destiny starts to fall with the arrival of a young man named Farfrae, who eventually ousts Henchard from his business as well as from his political position, and who goes to the length of taking over not only Henchard's mistress, Lucetta, but also his daughter, Elizabeth-Jane.

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.

Two ideas have been linked in human thought for millenia: age and wisdom. Until now, no one has questioned their close relationship. A myth common to all humanity is that of the wisdom of the elder, which certainly answers a human need for security. It is also an intellectual response to observation based on experience. So why does one call this “myth”? One means here by myth a concept or idea which, having been given value by a group, a society, or indeed, humanity, guides their attitudes and behaviour. It appears that old age is a condition attached to the notion of wisdom by human agreement. This determines the attitude of the individual toward himself and his environment —his conduct, motivation and life-style. At first glance, wisdom would seem to be compounded from a lifetime's observation and experience. Thus the biological factor of longevity is the basis of wisdom. Other psychological, intellectual and moral phenomena are balanced on this physical structure. It remains to be seen if today the myth of age as symbol of wisdom can maintain its integrity in the midst of socioeconomic and political transformations, in a world of expanding scientific knowledge and in an age of mass communication. What are the consequences in a changing world for values based on longevity and experience?

Moslem thinkers have treated the idea of justice from a religious and human point of view by examining it on two planes: God and Man. Whatever their inclinations may be, their concept of justice is linked to other connected notions such as beauty and ugliness, good and evil, free will, the volition and wisdom of God, and predestination. In the framework of this study of the idea of justice and its related concepts, we shall confine ourselves to setting out the points of view of the principal sects (the Ash'arites, the Mu'tazilites and Maturidism) and of certain philosophers such as Averroes and some mystics including Ibn'Arabi. We shall probably be led to a brief comparison of the ideas of Ibn'Arabi with those of Leibniz. For more ample details on this subject, we refer the reader to a series of articles already published in which we underlined the points of convergence between these two philosophers with regard to the infinite, monadism, optimism, good and evil, and predestination.

It is difficult to make valid statements on a subject over which the most distressing commonplaces are poured out daily and which escapes, in large measure, the competence of any one man.* Since the area for all fruitful reflection is encumbered by knotty and prejudicial diagrams, the first task must be to clear an empty space in which to inscribe some concepts and some measures appropriate to the historical and sociological situation of the Islamic countries. However, the situation itself is very little understood because of the very backward state of modern Islamological studies. Under these conditions, it will be understood that theoretical and practical thought cannot avoid encountering obstacles in the question of Islam's development. True scientific research consists in posing real problems well, not so much in defining more or less durable solutions. That does not mean that theory must develop in parallel with practice: the decisions of political man have such a greater import because they are inscribed in a problematic at once large and rigorous. We shall try to surmount the obstacles that hinder reflection and distort the results of the best-intentioned action, by (1) discarding the false problems and (2) posing the essential question.

It will be interesting to listen to the personal beliefs concerning “Truth” as revealed in the studies of different scholars in different countries. But how will such a collection of beliefs contribute to the seeking of truth itself when we want to attribute to the word truth one of the adjectives: “absolute,” or “universal”?

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 Beti with whom this study is concerned belong to the “so-called Pahouin group,” which includes, besides the Beti, the Bulu and the Fang. This group occupies large parts of Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and southern Cameroon. The region where the Beti live has a quite varied relief; the vegetation is extremely luxuriant, worthy of the great tropical forest, and there are many hills and streams. The Beti population, organized along what are known as “anarchic” lines, is made up essentially of farmers and hunters, as are most of the forest populations. The flora and fauna are also quite varied; they are the same that appear in typical Beti tales and fables.

It is possible to assert that the present crisis in history on which there has been so much discussion is more specifically a problem affecting the historical sciences in the West rather than in the Afro-Asian countries. In the Afro-Asian countries, particularly those which have either become independent recently or have been able to assert their independence recently, history is considered important in forming a national self-image, help in the processes of national unity, and in the processes of modernization or social change within the nation. The role of history in providing an ideological-cultural framework for national unity and growth is important, for in many of these countries the concept of a nation has not grown out of a long historical process by which people belonging to different race, religion and regions have become emotionally welded together. Rather, nationalism in these countries is a means for bringing about such a unity. The interpretation of the past therefore becomes a matter of wider public concern. In this context, history can hardly be regarded by anyone as irrelevant: it remains a prestigious subject in most universities (not only because it offers a better opportunity for entering into a civil service career), and national historians command a measure of public esteem which is becoming rare elsewhere. On the other hand, history has been displaced from its pre-eminent position in the West. The profession no longer enjoys the prestige which it enjoyed among nineteenth-century intellectuals: many social scientists consider that “the destruction of the conventional historian's conception of history is a necessary stage in the construction of a true science of society”; “a significant number of philosophers seem to have decided that history is either a third-order form of science, related to the social sciences as natural history was once related to the physical sciences, or that it is a second-order form of art, the epistemological value of which is questionable, the aesthetic worth of which is uncertain.”