ABSTRACT
Introduction My title might seem to beg a question: does ritual work, the kind of ritual, that is, which involves the invocation of goddesses or other spirit-beings? Not so long ago, the common assumption would be, 'of course not'. Scholars of an earlier generation were more confident of the truth of the Western scientific understanding of the world, and dismissed the idea of communication with a world of spirits, deities and other entities as obviously incorrect and fraudulent. At most, as in Robin Horton' s (1967) c1assic explanation of African traditional thought as quasi-scientific, the language of spirits might offer 'a kind of distorted pre-scientific echo of our own genuine and veridical knowledge of the universe.
