ABSTRACT
No society can include within itself all the ways of being human; otherwise it would have no boundaries, normative or territorial. Any society that lacks a capacity to understand the language of the soul will be at a loss for words to encompass the possibilities that reside in the depths of the psyche. Religious language, when it is adequate to the task, can indeed incorporate possibilities that to a person or to a society may seem too illicit or dangerous to contemplate. Every society has a way of characterizing as primitive those who do not speak the language of the more cultivated. The more complex and rationalized a society becomes, the more open it is to a wide range of possibilities. Whenever a society makes distinctions, then, it differentiates, whether by segregating men from women, black from whites, or the old from the young.
