ABSTRACT
Even if one could probe within a society to its very depths as well as survey its environment for every possible affiliation and alliance, one would be unable to see every possibility for sedition or treason, for enlightenment or salvation. The problem is that any system, social or psychological, and thus every society and person, requires a vast reduction in what can be imagined, let alone experienced, perceived, understood and explained. Whatever is anti-social or sub-human, and whatever subverts the reign of convention, or whatever defies notions of reason, represents the primitive. The shape of the sacred depends on what aspects of the psyche and of the environment seem to be beyond the pale of the human and the social, that is, the primitive. The sacred is a way of defeating the primitive aspects of social life and of the psyche by imitating them.
