ABSTRACT
Yoruba cosmology built on the same ground-plan as the Ashanti and the Tallensi cosmology—Supreme God, minor gods, and man, that is human beings—is in fact highly elaborated. The Lugbara believe that there is one God, who is the ultimate source of all power and of the moral order. For the Nuer the final explanation of everything is Kwoth, meaning god or spirit. The Ashanti, who speak of the gods as ‘pieces of the great God’, seem to express most delicately and poetically something of the process of deintegration and the constellation of deintegrates and archetypes. Inter-communication between the big self and the ego is assured by the deintegrates and the archetypal forms, figures, affects, and experiences. The parallel between gods on the one hand and deintegrates on the other is suggested further by the fact that archetypal experiences are characterized by a numinous—that is, a sacred quality—and further that such experiences are ‘the agents of the synthetic integrative process’.
