ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with the social referents of symbols that also represent aspects of sexuality. The fusion of a plurality of sociocultural referents with a plurality of organic referents in a single visible representation, invested by believers with an extraordinary power, and possessing a new quality of human communication, is an important characteristic of religious symbols. The bearing of twins constitutes for the Ndembu what people would call a paradox—that is, a thing that conflicts with preconceived notions of what is reasonable or possible. There are several absurdities in the physiological fact of twinship for the Ndembu. Among many Bantu-speaking peoples, including the Ndembu, twins are neither put to death nor permanently assigned a special status as among the Ashanti. The paradox that what is good is bad becomes the mobilizing point of a ritual that stresses the overall unity of the group, surmounting its contradictions.
