Anthropological Psychoanalysis of Religion The Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion by Weston La Barre; They Shall Take up Serpents: Psychology

of the Southern Snake-Handling Cult by Weston La Barre; The Human Animal by Weston La Barre; The Peyote Cult by Weston La Barre Review by: Mac Linscott Ricketts History of Religions, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Aug., 1971), pp. 147-156 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1061788 . Accessed: 04/03/2014 17:24
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History of Religions
PSYCHOANALYSIS OF REIIGION ANTHROPOLOGICAL

The Ghost Dance: Origins of Religion. By WESTON LA BARRE. New York: Doubleday & Co., 1970. Pp. xvi+677. $12.50. They Shall Take Up Serpents: Psychology of the Southern Snake-handling LA BARRE.New York: Schocken Books, 1969. (First Cult. By WESTON published University of Minnesota Press, 1962). Pp. ix + 208. $2.45 (paper). The Human Animal. By WESTON LA BARRE. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954 (eighth printing, 1968). Pp. xvii + 386. $1.95 (paper). The Peyote Cult. By WESTON LA BARRE. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. (First published Yale University Publications in Anthropology, no. 19, 1938.) Pp. xvii+ 260. $2.45 (paper).

Weston La Barre is an anthropologist who employs psychoanalytic theory in his interpretation of ethnological data. However, this Freudian approach is not found in his earliest book, The Peyote Cult, which originated as a Ph.D. dissertation at Yale, written under the direction of Leslie Spier, an anthropologist of the Boasian school. In his new preface to the paperback edition of this book, La Barre explains that Spier "considered that the search for meaning was dubious enough, but
scientific generalization was close to original sin [and he] was highly suspicious of all psychology" (p. xii). For this reason, the reader finds that The Peyote Cult is a straightforward, factual account of the background, beliefs, ritual, etc., of the cult which became institutionalized as the Native American Church. La Barre says he dared not venture more than a footnote or two of "summarizing opinion" in this work, although he was already attracted by a new culture-and-personality anthropology being worked out at Yale by Edward Sapir. Subsequently, La Barre was to do field work among the South American Aymara Indians of the Lake Titicaca Plateau and serve as a research fellow at the Menninger Clinic. As a naval officer and parachutist, his World War II assignments in the China-Burma-India theater gave him firsthand contacts with Asiatic cultures. Since 1946 he has taught at Duke University where he now is a James B. Duke Professor of Anthropology. The Peyote Cult is still regarded as the standard work on the subject within the limits in which it was conceived (though a later study by James S. Slotkin, The Peyote Religion [Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1956] gives more "inside information" on the church itself). The current edition contains two supplements: an article by La Barre reprinted from Current Anthropology (vol. 1, no. 1 [1960], "Twenty Years of Peyote Studies"), and a chapter written especially for this last edition, "The Last Five Years of Peyote Studies," which bring the book up to date. The other Schocken reprint, They Shall Take Up Serpents, is a study of a bizarre cult of the southeastern United States in which the handling of poisonous snakes is the distinguishing feature. The heyday of the movement was in the 1930s and 1940s, after which it was suppressed by
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Book Reviews
legislation, although occasionally since then isolated instances of the practice have been reported. La Barre's book on the cult includes a chronicleof the movement from its obscure origins to the date of writing, and an extensive biography of a cult leader, taken from interviews with him (made by a student of La Barre's, see p. 114) in which he freely talked about himself. On the basis of the latter, La Barre has written a detailed and rather convincing psychoanalysis of the man (but is it responsible practice to psychoanalyze at such a distance?). As La Barre sees the cultist, he is a psychopath, who, due to inadequate childhood relations with his mother and father, failed to achieve mature sexuality as an adult. His religion, therefore, is a "socially adapted though somewhat mutilated solution of the oedipal problem... and a solution possible, perhaps, only in a pathological subculture that uses predominantly the simple hysteroid mechanism of denial" (p. 160). That is, for this preacher and his followers, religion is a pathological thing. The snake-handling cult, as La Barre explains it, focuses on a creature which, because of its shape, represents for the worshippers the penis, and its manipulation by cult devotees is an unconscious but nevertheless real means of expressing repressed sexual drives. To support this hypothesis, the author draws upon comparative ethnology, citing instances of snake cults, mythology, and folklore from Africa, the Near East, Europe, and elsewhere (chaps. 6, 7, and 8). He believes he can show in each instance that the snake is a phallic symbol (although historians of religions may not always agree). In order to see the snake as having everywhere a similar symbolic significance, La Barre does not resort to a Jungian hypothesis of an unconscious collective archetype, but instead he invokes the Freudian principle of body-image fantasy (p. 61). For the Old World, additionally, the author proposes a diffusion thesis (but not Kulturkreise),with Egypt as the center from which (or through which) the snake cult was mediated to Africa, Asia Minor, and Europe-perhaps even to India and the Far East (p. 54). The Human Animal, now in its eighth printing, undoubtedly has been La Barre's most widely read book. Here, drawing upon biology, paleontology, linguistics, folklore,physical and cultural anthropology,Freudian psychology, and other sources, he attempts to depict man in his wholeness-man who as maker of culture is different from all other organisms. A delightfully readable, often witty book, TheHuman Animal represents La Barre at his best, synthesizing diverse materials into one consistent portrait of man as the psychoanalytic anthropologist must see him. This book makes the best case which I have seen for the Freudian viewpoint, supported as it is here by more recent and better ethnological and biological knowledge than was available to Freud. What is surprising,perhaps, is to find in a book of this kind a major chapter (14) and parts of three others (12, 13, and 15) devoted to religion. Historians of religions, of course, are committed to the proposi148

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History of Religions
tion that one of the unique and most significant aspects of man is his religiosity, but we have come to expect anthropologists to give little attention to religious data as such. La Barre, to be sure, calls religion "superstition" and discusses it in the "reductionistic" terms of psychoanalysis, but this latter treatment is no different from that which he accords all other aspects of culture. It is plain, though, that the author truly is interested in religion and regards it as a distinct phenomenon within the larger total culture. He is at pains to make it clear that he considers religion to be a misguided and pernicious attempt at adjustment to the world, which men should now be able to set aside. By far the longest book La Barre has written is The Ghost Dance (about twice the length of The Human Animal), and this despite the fact that, as the author tells us, the manuscript was condensed to one-third its original length before publication! (see p. xv).1 Unquestionably, La Barre has a compelling (compulsive?) interest in religion, despite his negative and hostile attitude toward it. La Barre considers The GhostDance a sequel to The Human Animal (see biographicalnote in Peyote Cult, p. 195), and if one may judge from the size of the book and its subtitle, "Originsof Religion," he must also intend this as his magnum opus. One cannot fail to be impressed, in reading this book, by the range of the author's reading, the grandness of the design of the work, and the immensity of the effort which must have been expended to produce this volume. However, I fear that historians of religions will be, in the end, disappointed in this work, despite the magnitude of its dimensions. The preface and introduction summarize the book and set forth the methodology and principal hypotheses of the author. La Barre lays all his cards on the table in the beginning. Therefore, there is no mistaking his hostility toward religion and his purpose of refuting its claims; thus, there are few surprises for the reader in all the subsequent pages. The author states his position forthrightly at the beginning of the introduction:
There is no mystery about religion. The genuine mysteries lie in what religion purports to be about: the mystery of life and the mystery of the universe. But religion itself is the beliefs, behaviors, and feelings of people. As such, when societies are concerned, religion is a proper subject for anthropology and history; and when the individual is concerned, for psychology and psychiatry. . . . Of course, this approach will give us no answers to the "questions" asked by religions; but in the process we may learn something about the nature of religion itself. [P. 1]

The book's title derives from the name given to two cults which flourished briefly among some Indian tribes of the American West in 1870 and 1890. The second and more important one was tied in with the last Sioux uprising which resulted in the death of Sitting Bull and the
1 " ... in an attempt to reach the general reader as well." But how can a book reach the general reader when its pages are liberally salted with words such as "tergiversating," "heterosis," "vatic," "ecdysiasm," "logodaedaly," "maundering," "phatic," etc.? 149

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Book Reviews
bloody massacre of Indians called the Battle of Wounded Knee. The best account of the cult is James Mooney's The Ghost Dance Religion (Annual Report of Bureau of American Ethnology, 1892, no. 14, pt. 2 [Washington, 1893], pp. 641-1110; reissued in 1965 by the University of Chicago Press). However, if the reader is looking for an extensive description of the Ghost Dance of 1890 in La Barre's book, he will look in vain. Less than four full pages are devoted to it (pp. 229-32), and only about a page is given to the earlier Ghost Dance of 1870. Instead, we find these religious movements discussed in no more detail than many other "crisis cults" which the author chronicles from the New World, Africa, and the South Pacific-indeed, from all parts of the world and all periods of history. (Curiously,the Peyote cult is never described but only mentioned in passing references here and there in the book.) The name "ghost dance" is used by La Barre as a term to designate any religious movement which has arisen in a time of stress, and sometimes it seems that the author employs the term as a synonym for "religion." It is the author's thesis that all religions began as "ghost dances" (see pp. 44, 345). In this book which reopens the question of the origin(s) of religion, the writer wishes to say that every religion, if we could recover the circumstances that brought it to birth, would be seen as a crisis cult: people under stress following the revelations and preaching of a "vatic personality" (see p. 343). This is not a novel thesis, as La Barre acknowledges: he credits Anthony F. C. Wallace with having first suggested it (p. 354, n. 17). La Barre, however, more than anyone else, has marshaled an array of evidence to support this theory, and furthermorehe has sought to show, in psychoanalytic terms, why this should be the way religions begin. To judge by the arrangement of chapters in the book, the author's main purpose is to exhibit Platonic philosophy and Christianity (which in the hands of Paul became a Hellenistic mystery religion, according to La Barre) as Ghost Dances. (In this he follows V. Macchioro; see pp. 486, 507.) No less than three chapters are devoted to the Greeks: tracing the origins of their Gods and cults; showing the secular trends of pre-Socratic philosophy; and, finally, depicting Plato as the reviver of "shamanism"(Pythagorism) and the leader of a "ghost dance" which had disastrous consequences for Greece and Western civilization. The last chapter, on the Jews, attempts to show how, through changes made at various critical times, the Old Testament Jewish religion became more and more a "ghost dance."2In the epilogue, Christianityis treated as a ghost dance, with the Apostle Paul coming out as the villain in the story. New Testament Christianity is "simply Paul's personal neurosis" (p. 609). Before we reach these final chapters on the peoples who have given
because 2 Still, La Barre seems basically to admire the Jewish people-perhaps they produced Sigmund Freud. At least, he finds many things about them to praise (see pp. 589-91). 150

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History of Religions
the West its cultural heritage, we are led by thb author to view mankind in earlier and simpler cultures, those with which anthropologists usually deal. The Freudian interpretation of the ethnological data pervades all: we have here the same blend of anthropology and psychoanalysis which characterizes The Human Animal. "Mana"is, accordingto La Barre, an idea derived from the early child-motherrelationship; while "animism" comes from a later phase of personality development when the child recognizes the father as a person with whom he must deal. Hence, "mothers make magicians; fathers, gods" (p. 357). But, "ultimately both magic and religion reflect the individual narcissism that insists, inalternatively, that somewhere there must be an omnipotence to
one's ...

jection of its dream of omnipotence which it has carried over from its prenatal paradise where all wants were satisfied. The magician-shaman,who deals in mana, is mankind's first religious leader, La Barre believes, and he thinks this is proved both by ethnology of peoples such as the Indians, and by European paleolithic cave art (chap. 21). Curiously, though wisely it seems to me, La Barre will not firmly grasp the corollaryof this thesis, that magic is older than religion: "It is ... not a question of whether manaism or animism 'came first' in any necessary or real or universal evolution of historic religious ideas. For the subjective psychological states behind both of these conceptualized experiences are present in every human being, and these are necessary and universally human biological grounds" (p. 371). But the shaman is more than the first religious specialist: because he "embodies omnipotence himself" (p. 372) he is mankind's first god. He is a father figure for the people-thus, Freud's thesis that God is the father is preserved. Men worship the shaman; this man who seems to command the powers of nature. The shaman worships no one but believes himself to have the powers men later ascribe to their gods. "There were shamans before there were gods" (p. 161). It is true that shamans deal with "masters of animals," but La Barre believes that "the master of animals is first simply the human shaman himself, who has a special affinity with them and proclaims his magic power over animals. Only when he is dead, remoter in time and gradually given a cult, does the spirit of the shamanistic master of animals become the supernatural helper of later shamans" (pp. 163-64). The oldest myth-figure, the trickster-transformer-culturehero, La Barre sees as the symbolic shaman (p. 183). The later prophets who have arisen among American Indians and elsewhere, who have been leaders of crisis cults, are the old "culture heroes returned," just as the myths often foretell they will. The conclusion of the matter is : "It is not so much that shamanism is the root of all religion as that all religion is in sober essence shamanism" (p. 223). The author is primarily an anthropologist, and within his discipline he is an Americanist, having done specialized study of Indians in both
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sacred id need" (p. 110). God, that is, is only the ego's pro-

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Book Reviews
North and South America. In the preface he leads us to expect that the book will be mainly about American Indians (it turns out that it is not), because of his special competence to deal with them-although, "theoretically, it would not matter where one found the data, insofar as the interest lies in meanings and functions and relationships; for my purpose it sufficesthat the Indian be human" (p. xxi). He explains that we may "creep up" on Eurasiatic history via a study of American Indians because the latter came from Asia bearing the ancient common stone age culture of the Old World, and they have preservedit relatively without change: Indian culture is a "Mesolithicfossil" (pp. xiv-xv). Since his ultimate purpose is to reveal to us the origins and meanings of our own religious heritage, which "would be too strong medicine to take" if given immediately (at the outset of the book, p. xxii), the author has used the circuitous method of leading the reader from prehistory to classical historical times by way of traditional American Indian culture and more recent crisis cults among them and other "primitives" around the world. I shall not here attempt to criticize the Freudian viewpoint which informs the whole work. Others, more competent than I, have addressed themselves to this matter. It should be noted that La Barre himself has not followed Freud in his "Totemand Tabootheory" about the primeval patricide. La Barre calls the work in which this "myth" appeared the "most wrong-headedly Jungian of his books" (p. 36, see also p. 594, n. 10; and The Human Animal, p. 351), because it implies that the sense of guilt for this deed was inherited by subsequent generations. By thus improving upon Freud (and by using more recent data), La Barre has made a strong case for the psychoanalytic view of man-but this he had done already in The Human Animal. La Barre's view that the shaman is man's first religious leader I find quite acceptable, but I object to his delineation of the "structure" of the shaman and to his view that the shaman is purely a magician and becomes man's first god. La Barre thinks he is following Eliade's definition of "shaman," but in fact he is not. La Barre says, " 'Shamanism' should always be used in the strict sense of Eliade to mean ecstatic possession of a human practitioner by a (supposed) alien spirit or power" (p. 186, n. 4). For Eliade, "ecstasy" and "possession" are two different phenomena, and true shamanism must include only the former: "The shaman specializes in a trance during which his soul is believed to leave the body and ascend to the sky or descend to the underworld"(Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, Bollingen Series 76 [New York: Pantheon Books, 1964], p. 5). "Possession," which may occur in conjunction with shamanism, Eliade considers "exceptional" (ibid., p. 6). The shaman, moreover, is not simply a magician. He deals not only with "mana" but also with spirits. One may even say that the shaman "worships" these spirits at times, although his purpose finally is to dominate them and gain their power. He certainly is not "preanimistic" in his belief! Furthermore, he is a mediator between his people and the 152

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History of Religions divine beings and so is already something o a "priest" (although the true priest is a distinct type which develops later). I am not at all sure that the shaman is a "fertility figure" (pp. 137 ff.) in any essential way, although I shall not argue this point since it is not clear what La Barre means by this term anyway. That the shaman is man's first god I find unsupported by the evidence. Shamanism would seem to presuppose belief in spirits of animals and nature, especially those who are masters ("fathers") of species and categories. It is much simpler to imagine that a belief in such gods (Lords of Animals) arose from the projection of the concept of father and headman than from awe of a deceased shaman. Ancestral shamans are worshipped among some peoples, being regarded as powerful and powergiving spirits, but they are not confused with masters of animals! La Barre is too quick, I believe, to identify the shaman with the trickster-transformer-culturehero of mythology. Quite often-characteristically, I think-the trickster is a caricatureof the shaman; and the culture hero (often a separate figure) is more "secular"in his activities than the shaman. Surely not all leaders of men in paleolithic times were shamans-at least, it is not so among hunting peoples today.3 The statement that there were shamans before there were gods cannot be demonstrated. That shamans are depicted on walls of paleolithic caves is quite probable; that no gods are portrayed is a weak guess. How do we know that some of the figures shown were not considered gods ? On the other hand, La Barre's suggestion that the Lascaux painting of a bird-headedman who is falling in front of a charging bison is a trickster who has bitten off more than he can chew (p. 419) I consider a highly likely possibility-the most believable interpretation as yet offered for this puzzling picture. La Barre's assertion that no true "high god" existed in aboriginal America flies in the face of fact. How can he claim that all New World deities can be subsumed under the heading "shamans, 'owners' of animals, 'transformer'demiurges and magicians, culture heroes and tricksters" (p. 199) ? While Father Schmidt was overly enthusiastic about in North America, supreme sky discovering proofs of "Urmonotheismus" sun earth and other deities, mothers, gods, types are well documented from many tribes, especially those of southeastern and southwestern United States. Even many of the more primitive hunting and gathering tribes of Canada, such as the Naskapi and Nadene groups, probably believed in a High God in charge of the whole world. Good evidence for existence of belief in supreme beings comes from the Delaware, Iroquois, Pawnee, Winnebago, Oglala Sioux, Plateau Salish, and many more tribes. And what of South America, where most tribes are said to
3 It is strange that La Barre has not appealed to the work of Joseph Campbell (The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology [New York: Viking Press, 1959]) for the support of his idea that shaman and trickster-culture hero are one. Likely the reason lies in the fact that Campbell is a Jungian. 153

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Book Reviews
recognize a supreme being (see Otto Zerries, in W. Krickeberg et al., Pre-Columbian American Religions [London:Weidenfield & Nicolson, 1968], p. 231). Part of the difficulty with La Barre's statement is that he makes no attempt to define the structures of the different types of divine figures he names, so we are not sure what he means by a "High-God Creator." Neither does he consider what might be presented as evidence against his thesis. The views that religion is essentially shamanism, and that all religions have begun in a shaman-led ghost dance, deserve some consideration. If La Barre means that the basic religious experience is like that which Otto describes, a sense of being visited by a "Holy Power" from beyond (La Barre mentions Otto several times), and that all religion is man's attempt to relate to this power, then many historians of religion will agree. (In my own view, there is another fundamental religious experience, that of the world and culture as something holy because handed down from the "beginning, which I find exemplified in the trickster and this is a private conceit.) The thesis that Dema-deity mythology-but religions have always sprung from crisis cults is one which cannot be verified, since historical data are lacking; but it seems reasonable to assume that all religious movements have had back of them individual leaders who were unusually "inspired" personalities. There is, however, some confusion in La Barre's statements about religion and shamanism, for in some places we hear that shamanism is magic and in others that it

is religion.

Historians of religions will applaud La Barre for his critique of methodologies which attempt to explain religious cults from a single narrow perspective, for example, economic, political, "great man," psychological, historical, or some other definitive term (p. 292). We share with him the opinion that functionalism is an inadequate approach to religious phenomena (pp. 49, 313). We agree that "culture" cannot be considered an entity, apart from people, as "culturologists" think (p. 47). La Barre's insistence upon a "holistic" analysis of the causes of crisis cults is valid. He sees them arising when a society (a group of individuals) suffers a crisis for which its old cultural-religious defense mechanisms are inadequate and when from within that group a leader (shaman-culture hero, messiah-prophet) comes forward with new defense mechanisms which can be accepted by the others. (The crises may come from different kinds of causes; indeed, they parallel the crisis faced by each individual when he must accept his group's culture-an alien superimposition.) Religions, functionally, make life bearable for those who cannot face "reality." Not many historians of religions, I think, will agree with La Barre when he says that formally a cult cannot be distinguished from a psychosis, the only difference being that the cult is shared by a group. For La Barre, the shaman and all his descendants are sick men-mentally ill-cases for whom modern psychoanalysts have names. La Barre does not even consider Eliade's thesis that the shaman is a man who has 154

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History of Religions
been ill and has recovered-a view which I fi d more acceptable. If we say that all religions are just collective or shared psychoses, then we have in fact declared all traditional cultures (in their non-material aspects) to be aberrations, since all partake of a "religious" world viewalthough La Barre says he does "not 'equate culture with a psychosis' as some critics have alleged" (p. 343). My most severe criticisms must fall upon the chapters on the biblical peoples (chap. 17 and epilogue). I am at a loss to understand how a responsible scholar would allow himself to write as he has done here, evidently without consulting authorities in biblical studies who might have been found on the same campus as he. His knowledge of biblical criticism depends almost exclusively upon nineteenth-century pioneers: Wellhausen, Driver, Robertson Smith, and Schweitzer; beyond these he trusts rather blindly in an article by one Andrew Peto which he found in a book called The PsychoanalyticStudy of Society (see p. 592, n. 4), and some similar Freudian-biased sources. He has read a little of Albright and he has dabbled in Dead Sea Scroll studies, but of currently recognized biblical scholars such as Von Rad, Noth, Mowinckel, Kraus, Bright, Wright, Bultmann, Robert Grant, Dodd, Knox, Jeremias, Davies, Cullman, Filson, et al.-or even Bernhard Anderson and James Price-he seems to have read nothing. The mistakes which he makes, consequently, are inexcusable in a book of this caliber. The thesis which La Barre wished to establish by citing biblical material, namely, that Judaism and Christianity may be considered as "ghost dances," is not without merit. However, no one who has any recent acquaintance with biblical scholarship would pay the slightest attention to a theory postulated on such poor scholarship. (I refrain from commenting on the quality of scholarship underlying the chapters on the Greeks, since I am not a classicist. However, when the author confesses an amateur status for this subject as well as for the Bible, I am led to doubt also the authenticity of his treatment of these people.) One wonders what American anthropologists will say of this work. Psychoanalytical ethnology is not especially in style, and indeed it was never widely popular. The generalizations and sweeping theories of this book will be summarily dismissed by many anthropologists. This is unfortunate, since general theories and broad interpretations of the meaning of religious phenomena are needed, even though, as indicated above, I cannot accept most of those which La Barre has made. The book has a comfortably old-fashioned air about it, as though we were still in the era of Tylor, Frazer, and Freud (whom the author admires), and of Durkheim, Schmidt, and Boas (whom he does not like). La Barre labors with great vigor to slay the Demon Superstition whose other name is Religion, although most anthropologists have long considered the beast dead, or too impotent to seriously consider. But La Barre knows that there are still true believers: he has seen the snake
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Book Reviews
handlers and the peyotists, and he reads History of Religions (to which he makes frequent reference in his notes)! Historians of religions, however, have been unwilling to speak forthrightly, as does La Barre, about the truth or untruth of religion, about the "objective reality" or unreality of the Holy which manifests itself. One is left to wonder where most historians of religions stand on the question of the "existence" (or being) of God. Sooner or later historians of religions are going to have to face up to such questions, even though they say their discipline does not require them to be so confronted (invoking the phenomenological epoche). La Barre hides nothing. He speaks with the voice of a prophet on behalf of the scientific world view, hailing it as an emancipation from the "psychosis" of religion! Like Freud, his admired exemplar, La Barre will not limit himself to objective discourse on a scientifically circumscribed plane. He knows that his ideas have existential implications, and he does not hesitate to draw them-admitting that here he is stepping out of his role as scientist into that of socially conscious citizen, as a man among other men (see The Human Animal, pp. 248-49, 270-71). One cannot, I think, but admire the seriousness with which La Barre views his social responsibility. A book on drug usage today might have far-reaching consequences. La Barre has prefaced his new popular edition of The Peyote Cult with a sharp and incisive critique of the modern youthful drug cultists whom he sees as social and intellectual dropouts from humanity. He has lent his aid to opposition of legislation that would restrict the religious freedom of Indian peyotists (whose usage of drugs is harmless, he thinks); he attacks McCarthyism in his book of 1954 (The Human Animal) and deplores American usage of the atomic bomb. In The GhostDance and the new preface to Serpentshe likens the effects of the Vietnam war on American democracy to that of certain events in fifth- and fourth-centuryAthens on Athenian democracy. Some may object that such views do not belong in scientific publications, but I applaud him for them. In summary: I believe that the work of Weston La Barre is of significance to historians of religions (1) for the factual material which it presents; (2) for the fresh restatement of the Freudian viewpoint which we must realize is a widely accepted one with which we must deal seriously; and (3) for the fact that it demands that we face up to the question-too long begged, I believe-as to the nature of religion and the Holy, beyond a phenomenological analysis.
MAC LINSCOTT RICKETTS

156

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