ABSTRACT
Prophets and artists tend to be liminal and marginal people, ‘edgemen’, who strive with a passionate sincerity to rid themselves of the clichés associated with status incumbency . . . Liminality, marginality, structural inferiority are conditions in which are frequently generated myths, symbols, ritual, philosophical systems, and works of art. These cultural forms provide men with a set of templates or models which are, at one level, periodical reclassifications of reality and man’s relationship to society, nature, and culture. But they are more than classifications, since they incite men to action as well as thought. Each of these productions has a multivocal character, having many meanings, and each is capable of moving people at many psychobiological levels simultaneously.1
