The poem on page xi is from “The Ninth Elegy,” in Rainer Maria Rilke,
Duino Elegies, translated by C.F. MacIntyre (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1963, pp. 67 and 69), originally published
by the University of California Press; reprinted by permission of The
Regents of the University of California.
In memory of Otto Rank, whose thought
may well prove to be the rarest gift of Freud’s
disciples to the world.
There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is
inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because
the evil facts which it positively refuses to account
for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may
after all be the best key to life’s significance, and
possibly the only openers of our eyes to the
deepest levels of truth.
William James 1
If a way to the better there be, it lies in
taking a full look at the worst.
Thomas Hardy
Why, if it’s possible to spend this span
of existence as laurel, a little darker than all
other greens, with little waves on every
leaf -edge (like the smile of a breeze), why, then,
must we be human and, shunning destiny,
long for it? . . .
Oh, not because happiness,
that over -hasty profit of loss impending, exists.
Not from curiosity, or to practise the heart,
that would also be in the laurel . . .
but because to be here is much, and the transient Here
seems to need and concern us strangely. Us, the most
transient.
Everyone once, once only. Just once and no more.
And we also once. Never again. But this having been
once, although only once, to have been of the earth,
seems irrevocable.
And so we drive ourselves and want to achieve it,
want to hold it in our simple hands,
in the surfeited gaze and in the speechless heart.
Want to become it. Give it to whom? Rather
keep all forever . . . but to the other realm,
alas, what can be taken? Not the power of seeing,
learned here so slowly, and nothing that’s happened
here.
Nothing.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Contents
Prefatory N ote
Preface xvii
Introduction. The Human Condition: Between Appetite
and Ingenuity
The Primitive World: Ritual as Practical Technics 6
The Primitive World: Economics as Expiation and
Power 26
The Origin of Inequality 38
The Evolution of Inequality 52
The New Historical Forms of Immortality Power
Money: The New Universal Immortality Ideology 73
The Basic Dynamic of Human Evil 91
The Nature of Social Evil 96
Social Theory: The Merger of Marx and Freud 128
Retrospect and Conclusion: What Is the Heroic Society? 146
References 171
Index 183
xiii
Prefatory Note
Approaching death, Ernest Becker requested that the original manu-
script of this, his final book, rest private and unpublished in a desk
drawer, no energy remaining in him for any further barter with
the gods. Believing the work to be an eloquent closure of his sci-
entific literary career, Robert Wallace and I (with some initial
anguish over the risk of irreverence) firmly decided upon publica-
tion realizing that had the time remained, the author himself would
have done so for what he considered to be his magnum opus. Some
material has been eliminated as it appears elsewhere, but beyond
editing and routine work the book is Ernest’s.
Marie Becker
xv
Preface
This book is a companion volume to The Denial of Death. It
completes the task begun there, which is to synthesize the scien-
tific and tragic perspectives on man. In The Denial of Death 1 ar-
gued that man’s innate and all-encompassing fear of death drives
him to attempt to transcend death through culturally standardized
hero systems and symbols. In this book I attempt to show that man’s
natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic
self-image are the root causes of human evil. This book also com-
pletes my confrontation of the work of Otto Rank and my attempt
to transcribe its relevance for a general science of man. Ideally, of
course, the two books should be read side by side in order to give
the integrated and comprehensive picture that the author himself
has ( or imagines he has ) ; but each book stands on its own and can
be read without the other.
In my previous writings I tried to sketch out what might be a
synthesis of the science of man. One of their major shortcomings, I
now see, had to do with their fundamental organizing concept. I
thought it was enough to use the unifying “principle of self-esteem
maintenance.” But as we will see in Chapter Five, it was too ab-
stract, it lacked body, a universal, energetic content in the form of
specific, inflexible motives. These motives I found in the work of
Rank, in his insistence on the fundamental dynamic of the fear
of life and death, and man’s urge to transcend this fear in a cul-
turally constituted heroism.
My previous writings did not take sufficient account of truly
vicious human behavior. This is a dilemma that I have been caught
in, along with many others who have been trying to keep alive the
Enlightenment tradition of a science of man: how to reflect the
empirical data on man, the data that show what a horribly destruc-
tive creature he has been throughout his history, and yet still have
a science that is not manipulative or cynical. If man is as bad as
he seems, then either we have to behaviorally coerce him into the
good life or else we have to abandon the hope of a science of man
xvn
XViii PREFACE
entirely. This is how the alternatives have appeared. Obviously it
is an enormous problem: to show that man is truly evil-causing in
much of his motivation, and yet to move beyond this to the possi-
bilities of sane, renewing action, some kind of third alternative be-
yond bureaucratic science and despair.
Whether I have succeeded in leaving open the possibility for such
a third alternative, while looking man full in the face for the first
time in my career, is now for others to say. In the process of writing
this book I compiled a pile of slips with things to say in the Preface,
about the matters on which my mind has largely changed, those on
which my views remain the same, etc. But this would be redundant;
it would be easy for any interested student to trace — if he had the
inclination to — the errors and wanderings, the inevitable record of
personal growth and sobering up that characterize a so-called sci-
entific career. Let me just say that if I have changed my views on
many things, this change leaves intact, I believe, the basic premise
of the Enlightenment which I feel we cannot abandon and continue
to be working scientists — namely, that there is nothing in man or
nature which would prevent us from taking some control of our
destiny and making the world a saner place for our children. This
is certainly harder, and more of a gamble, than I once thought; but
maybe this should reinforce our dedication and truly tax our imagi-
nations. Many of us have been lazy or smug, others too hopeful
and naive. The realism of the world should make us better scien-
tists. There is a distinct difference between pessimism, which does
not exclude hope, and cynicism, which does. I see no need, there-
fore, to apologize for the relative grimness of much of the thought
contained in this book; it seems to me to be starkly empirical.
Since I have been fighting against admitting the dark side of hu-
man nature for a dozen years, this thought can hardly be a simple
reflex of my own temperament, of what I naturally feel comfortable
with. Nor is it a simple function of our uneasy epoch, since it was
gathered by the best human minds of many dispositions and epochs,
and so I think it can be said that it reflects objectively the universal
situation of the creature we call man.
Finally, it goes without saying that this is a large project for one
mind to try to put between two covers; I am painfully aware that
I may not have succeeded, that I may have bitten off too much
Preface xix
and may have tried to put it too sparely so that it could all fit in.
As in most of my other work, I have reached far beyond my
competence and have probably secured for good a reputation for
flamboyant gestures. But the times still crowd me and give me no
rest, and I see no way to avoid ambitious synthetic attempts; either
we get some kind of grip on the accumulation of thought or we
continue to wallow helplessly, to starve amidst plenty. So I gamble
with science and write, but the game seems to me very serious and
necessary.
Research on the book was aided by Simon Fraser University
President’s Research Grants.
Vancouver, 1972
E.B.
INTRODUCTION
The Human Condition:
Between Appetite and Ingenuity
What could we say in the simplest possible way that would "reveal”
man to us — show what he was, what he was trying to do, and what
it all added up to? I have been working on this for some years
now, trying to make complex things more clear, to peel away dis-
guises and marginalia, trying to get at the truly basic things about
man, the things that really drive him. I now see that we must make
a clear distinction between man’s creatureliness — his appetite —
on the one hand and his ingenuity on the other.
Man is an animal. The upshot of the modern body of work called
ethology, of Lionel Tiger, Robin Fox, Konrad Lorenz, and a host of
others, is that it reminds us of the basic human condition: that
man is first and and foremost an animal moving about on a planet
shining in the sun. Whatever else he is, is built on this. The argu-
ment of these people is that we shall never understand man if we
do not begin with his animal nature. And this is truly basic. The
only certain thing we know about this planet is that it is a theater
for crawling life, organismic life, and at least we know what or-
ganisms are and what they are trying to do.
At its most elemental level the human organism, like crawling life,
has a mouth, digestive tract, and anus, a skin to keep it intact, and
appendages with which to acquire food. Existence, for all organis-
mic life, is a constant struggle to feed — a struggle to incorporate
whatever other organisms they can fit into their mouths and press
down their gullets without choking. Seen in these stark terms, fife
on this planet is a gory spectacle, a science-fiction nightmare in
which digestive tracts fitted with teeth at one end are tearing away
at whatever flesh they can reach, and at the other end are piling up
the fuming waste excrement as they move along in search of more
flesh. I think this is why the epoch of the dinosaurs exerts such a
2
ESCAPE FROM EVIL
strange fascination on us: it is an epic food orgy with king-size
actors who convey unmistakably what organisms are dedicated to.
Sensitive souls have reacted with shock to the elemental drama of
life on this planet, and one of the reasons that Darwin so shocked
his time — and still bothers ours — is that he showed this bone-
crushing, blood-drinking drama in all its elementality and necessity:
Life cannot go on without the mutual devouring of organisms. If
at the end of each person’s life he were to be presented with the
living spectacle of all that he had organismically incorporated in
order to stay alive, he might well feel horrified by the living energy
he had ingested. The horizon of a gourmet, or even the average
person, would be taken up with hundreds of chickens, flocks of
lambs and sheep, a small herd of steers, sties full of pigs, and rivers
of fish. The din alone would be deafening. To paraphrase Elias
Canetti, each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles
into the sun, and declares life good.
Beyond the toothsome joy of consuming other organisms is the
warm contentment of simply continuing to exist — continuing to
experience physical stimuli, to sense one’s inner pulsations and mus-
culature, to delight in the pleasures that nerves transmit. Once the or-
ganism is satiated, this becomes its frantic all-consuming task, to hold
onto life at any cost — and the costs can be catastrophic in the case of
man. This absolute dedication to Eros, to perseverance, is universal
among organisms and is the essence of life on this earth, and be-
cause we are mystified by it we call it the instinct for self-preserva-
tion. For man, in the words of the anthropologist A. M. Hocart, this
organismic craving takes the form of the search for “prosperity” —
the universal ambition of human society. Now, prosperity means
simply that a high level of organismic functioning will be main-
tained, and so anything that works against this has to be avoided. In
other words, in man the search for appetitive satisfaction has be-
come conscious: he is an organism who knows that he wants food
and who knows what will happen if he doesn’t get it, or if he gets
it but falls ill and fails to enjoy its benefits. Once we have an animal
who recognizes that he needs prosperity, we also have one who
realizes that anything that works against continued prosperity is bad.
And so we understand how man has come, universally, to identify
disease and death as the two principal evils of the human organis-
The Human Condition: Between Appetite and Ingenuity 3
mic condition. Disease defeats the joys of prosperity while one is
alive, and death cuts prosperity off coldly.
Extinction: The Dread of Insignificance
And this brings us to the unique paradox of the human condition:
that man wants to persevere as does any animal or primitive or-
ganism; he- is driven by the same craving to consume, to convert
energy, and to enjoy continued experience. But man is cursed with
a burden no animal has to bear: he is conscious that his own end is
inevitable, that his stomach will die.
Wanting nothing less than eternal prosperity, man from the very
beginning could not live with the prospect of death. As I argued
in The Denial of Death , man erected cultural symbols which do not
age or decay to quiet his fear of his ultimate end — and of more im-
mediate concern, to provide the promise of indefinite duration. His
culture gives man an alter-organism which is more durable and
powerful than the one nature endowed him with. The Muslim
heaven, for example, is probably the most straightforward and un-
selfconscious vision of what the human organism really hopes for,
what the alter-organism hopes to enjoy.
What I am saying is that man transcends death via culture not
only in simple (or simple-minded) visions like gorging himself
with lamb in a perfumed heaven full of dancing girls, but in much
more complex and symbolic ways. Man transcends death not only
by continuing to feed his appetites, but especially by finding a
meaning for his life, some kind of larger scheme into which he fits:
he may believe he has fulfilled God’s purpose, or done his duty to
his ancestors or family, or achieved something which has enriched
mankind. This is how man assures the expansive meaning of his life
in the face of the real limitations of his body; the "immortal self’
can take very spiritual forms, and spirituality is not a simple reflex
of hunger and fear. It is an expression of the will to live, the
burning desire of the creature to count, to make a difference on the
planet because he has lived, has emerged on it, and has worked,
suffered, and died. 1
4
ESCAPE FROM EVIL
When Tolstoy came to face death, what he really experienced
was anxiety about the meaning of his life. As he lamented in his
Confession:
What will come of my whole life. ... Is there any meaning in my life
that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy? 2
This is mankind’s age-old dilemma in the face of death: it is the
meaning of the thing that is of paramount importance; what man
really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignifi-
cance. Man wants to know that his life has somehow counted, if
not for himself, then at least in a larger scheme of things, that it has
left a trace, a trace that has meaning. And in order for anything
once alive to have meaning, its effects must remain alive in eternity
in some way. Or, if there is to be a “final” tally of the scurrying of
man on earth — a “judgment day” — then this trace of one’s life must
enter that tally and put on record who one was and that what
one did was significant.
We can see that the self-perpetuation of organisms is the basic
motive for what is most distinctive about man — namely, religion. As
Otto Rank put it, all religion springs, in the last analysis, “not so
much from . . . fear of natural death as of final destruction.” 3 But it
is culture itself that embodies the transcendence of death in some
form or other, whether it appears purely religious or not. It is very
important for students of man to be clear about this: culture itself
is sacred, since it is the “religion” that assures in some way the
perpetuation of its members. For a long time students of society
liked to think in terms of “sacred” versus “profane” aspects of social
life. But there has been continued dissatisfaction with this kind of
simple dichotomy, and the reason is that there is really no basic
distinction between sacred and profane in the symbolic affairs of
men. As soon as you have symbols you have artificial self-transcen-
dence via culture. Everything cultural is fabricated and given
meaning by the mind, a meaning that was not given by physical
nature. Culture is in this sense “supernatural,” 4 and all systematiza-
tions of culture have in the end the same goal: to raise men above
nature, to assure them that in some ways their lives count in the
universe more than merely physical things count.
The Human Condition: Between Appetite and Ingenuity 5
Now we can get to the point of this brief Introduction and see
where it has all been leading. The reader has surely already seen
the rub, and objected in his own mind that the symbolic denial of
mortality is a figment of the imagination for flesh-and-blood or-
ganisms, that if man seeks to avoid evil and assure his eternal
prosperity, he is living a fantasy for which there is no scientific
evidence so far. To which I would add that this would be all right if
the fantasy were a harmless one. The fact is that self-transcendence
via culture does not give man a simple and straightforward solution
to the problem of death; the terror of death still rumbles under-
neath the cultural repression (as I argued in a previous book). 5
What men have done is to shift the fear of death onto the higher
level of cultural perpetuity; and this very triumph ushers in an
ominous new problem. Since men must now hold for dear life onto
the self-transcending meanings of the society in which they live,
onto the immortality symbols which guarantee them indefinite
duration of some kind, a new kind of instability and anxiety are
created. And this anxiety is precisely what spills over into the affairs
of men. In seeking to avoid evil, man is responsible for bringing
more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by
exercising their digestive tracts. It is man’s ingenuity, rather than
his animal nature, that has given his fellow creatures such a bitter
earthly fate. This is the main argument of my book, and in the
following chapters I want to try to show exactly how this comes
about, how man’s impossible hopes and desires have heaped evil
in the world.
CHAPTER ONE
The Primitive World:
Ritual as Practical Technics
The object of ritual is to secure full life and to
escape from evil. . . .
A. M. Hocart 1
One can read anthropology for years — even the very best anthropol-
ogy — without ever really understanding what men are trying to do in
primitive society. There are so many facts, so many strange customs,
and they give a picture so complex and overflowing that there doesn’t
seem to be a center anywhere, and so we can’t get any conceptual
grip on the phenomenon. Even the voluminous brilliance of a Levi-
Strauss never really tells us tvhy primitives are doing such complex
and ingenious intellectual work. I have read only one anthropologist
who has given us the larger view of the primitive world — A. M.
Hocart. It is true that Johan Huizinga came close in his Homo
Ludens, but Hocart, with his wealth of anthropological data and
detail, has brought us to the heart of the matter.
Hocart, as I have said, saw the universal human ambition as the
achievement of prosperity — the good life. To satisfy this craving,
only man could create that most powerful concept which has both
made him heroic and brought him utter tragedy — the invention and
practice of ritual, which is first and foremost a technique for promot-
ing the good life and averting evil. Let us not rush over these words:
ritual is a technique for giving life. The thing is momentous:
throughout vast ages of prehistory mankind imagined that it could
control life! We scoff at the idea because we do not believe life can
be controlled by charms, spells, and magic. But as Hocart warns us,
just that we do not believe in the efficacy of the technique is no
6
The Primitive World: Ritual as Practical Technics
7
reason for overlooking the momentous place that ritual has had in
the life of mankind . 2
The fact is that primitive man imagined he could transfer life
from one thing to another, that he could, for example, take the
spirit-power that resided in the scalp of an enemy and, by proper
dancing and chanties, transfer that life from its former owner to
the new one. Or, in the famous totemic increase ceremonies of the
Australian aborigines, primitive men imagined that by going
through the motions of imitating animal births they could in-
crease the number of kangaroos, emus, grubs in the world. The
technique was so precise that the aborigine could even prescribe the
color of the kangaroos — brown, say, rather than gray. Or again,
the aim of the technique could be general and vast, and make the
renovation of the whole universe, the sun, and all the earth. Or,
finally, ritual could generate not only bears or yams, or the life of
the whole universe, but the individual soul as well. This is the
meaning of the “rites of passage” rituals which took place at birth,
puberty, marriage, and death: by means of symbolically dying and
being reborn via ritual the individual was elevated to new states of
being. Life was not a curve as we see it, where birth is zero and
death a return to zero. For primitive man birth was zero, but very
often death was considered the final promotion of the soul to a
state of superhuman power and indefinite durability.
I’m sure I don’t have to expand on any of this — the literature is
familiar to most readers, and in any case there is no substitute for
reading the details in Hocart, Mircea Eliade, Henri Frankfort, Jane
Harrison, or any of a number of such regaling authorities. The point
I want to make is very simple and direct: that by means of the
techniques of ritual men imagined that they took firm control of
the material world, and at the same time transcended that world
by fashioning their own invisible projects which made them super-
natural, raised them over and above material decay and death. In
the world of ritual there aren’t even any accidents, and accidents,
as we know, are the things that make life most precarious and
meaningless. Our knees grow weak when we think of a young
girl of awesome beauty who gets crushed to death simply because
her foot slips on a mountain path; if life can be so subject to
7
8
ESCAPE FROM EVIL
chance, it mustn’t have too much meaning. But how can that be,
since we are alive and since creatures are so marvelous? Primitive
man takes care of this problem by imagining that his control over
nature is fairly complete, and that in any case nothing ever happens
unless somebody wants it to happen. So a person slips on a
mountain path because some powerful dead spirit is jealous of the
living, or some witch is secretly working her ritual against that
person . 3
As I see it, the history of mankind divides into two great periods:
the first one existed from time immemorial until roughly the
Renaissance or Enlightenment, and it was characterized by the
ritualist view of nature. The second period began with the efflores-
cence of the modern machine age and the domination of the
scientific method and world view. In both periods men wanted to
control life and death, but in the first period they had to rely on a
nonmachine technology to do it: ritual is actually a preindustrial
technique of manufacture; it doesn’t exactly create new things,
Hocart says, but it transfers the power of life and it renovates
nature. But how can we have a technique of manufacture without
machinery? Precisely by building a ritual altar and making that the
locus of the transfer and renewal of life power:
Unable to take down, repair, and put together again the actual ma-
chinery [of the world] when it goes wrong, [the ritualist] . . . takes to
pieces and rebuilds their form by means of the [ritual] sacrifice . 4
If the altar represents a person’s body (the machinery) that body
may function well or poorly depending how carefully the altar has
been constructed. As Hocart adds — and as Levi-Strauss has recently
conclusively argued — there is no need to postulate a mind differ-
ently constituted from our own. Man controls nature by whatever
he can invent, and primitive man invented the ritual altar and the
magical paraphernalia to make it work. And as the modern
mechanic carries around his tools, so did the primitive scrupulously
transport his charms and rebuild his altars.
We call it magic because we don’t believe it worked, and we
call our technology scientific because we believe it works. I am
not pretending that primitive magic is as efficacious for the control
of nature as is our science, but in our time we are beginning to live
The Primitive World: Ritual as Practical Technics 9
with some strange and uncomfortable realizations. Primitive ritual
manufacture of life may not have actually controlled the universe,
but at least it was never in any danger of destroying it. We control
it up to a point — the point at which we seem to be destroying it.
Besides, our belief in the efficacy of the machine control of nature
has in itself elements of magic and ritual trust. Machines are sup-
posed to work, and to work infallibly, since we have to put all our
trust in them. And so when they fail to work our whole world view
begins to crumble — just as the primitives’ world view did when they
found their rituals were not working in the face of western culture
and weaponry. I am thinking of how anxious we are to find the
exact cause of an airplane crash, or how eager we are to attribute
the crash to “human error” and not machine failure. Or even more,
how the Russians hush up their air crashes: how can machines fail
in machine paradise?
The fact that western man didn’t know what was going on be-
cause he was faced with a technics so alien to his ways of thought
probably explains our long puzzlement over the organization of
primitive society. The Australian aborigines — who were living in
the Stone Age — seemed the most paradoxical of all, with their
luxuriant systems of kinship classification and their complex
divisions of their tribe into half and half and then half again.
This passion for splitting things into two polar opposites that were
complementary was a most striking and widespread feature of
primitive man’s social organization. ( The Chinese Yin and Yang is a
survival of this phenomenon. ) A person belonged either to one half
or the other, traced his descent from a common ancestor, often
identified with a particular animal totem representing his half,
usually married someone in the other half, and had rigorously
specified types of relationship with people in the other half, includ-
ing the duty to bury them and mourn for them. One of the main
things that took place between the halves was something Homo
sapiens seems to thrive on: contests of skill and excellence. Hocart
thinks that the teasing and mocking behaviors which anthropologists
call “joking relationships” may have had their origin there. In fact,
it is possible that all team games arose out of the dual organization.
Actually the puzzlement mentioned earlier continued until just
yesterday. It was laid to rest when Levi-Strauss tackled head on the
io
ESCAPE FROM EVIL
luxuriance of primitive symbolism and classification . 5 The result
was the complete, widespread, and popular recognition of some-
thing anthropologists among themselves had long known: that the
primitive mind was just as intelligent as ours, just as intent on
examining the minute facts of existence and putting order into
them. Primitive man fed into his cerebral computer all the important
natural facts of this world as he observed and understood them, and
tried to relate them intimately to his life just as we try to relate
the mechanical laws of the universe to our own. Did we wonder at
the complexity of primitive symbolism and social organization?
Well, it was because primitive man tried to organize his society to
reflect his theory of nature.
To quote Huizinga:
Anthropology has shown with increasing clarity how social life in the
archaic period normally rests on the antagonistic and antithetical struc-
ture of the community itself, and how the whole mental world of such
a community corresponds to this profound dualism . 6
Technically we call it “moiety” organization — a dry and forbidding
anthropological term that makes the study of primitives so dull,
until we give the term life by showing what it means and does.
Hocart thought that moiety organization had been nearly universal
at some stage of social evolution. Levi-Strauss too was taken with
what he regarded as a natural tendency of the human mind to
split things into contrasts and complementarities, which he called
“binary opposition.” It has given a great boost to the computer
freaks, this binary tendency of the primitive mind, because it seems
to show that man functions naturally just like the computer — and
so the computer can be championed as the logical fulfillment of
basic human nature, and the mystery of mind and symbolism
might well be traceable down to simple neural circuits, etc.
But Hocart did not get carried away into abstractions as many
did. His explanation for this profound dualism lies in the real
world of human ambitions and hopes :
Perhaps it is a law of nature, but that is not sufficient to explain the
dual organization. . . . Nor does it explain the curious interaction of the
The Primitive World: Ritual as Practical Technics 11
moieties; in fact it is this interaction which must explain the dual
division; for men divide themselves into two groups in order that they
may impart life to one another, that they may intermarry, compete with
one another, make offerings to one another, and do to one another what-
ever is required by their theory of prosperity . 7
There we have it. Leave it to Hocart to cut through to the heart
of the matter. The reason for the dual organization is so foreign
to us that we may not at first see it: it was necessary for ritual. The
fundamental imperative of all ritual is that one cannot do it alone;
man cannot impart life to himself but must get it from his fellow
man. If ritual is a technique for generating life, then ritual organi-
zation is a necessary cooperation in order to make that technique
work . 8
The deeper level of explanation for the dual organization is so
simple we may not see it: it is phenomenological. Man needs to
work his magic with the materials of this world, and human beings
are the primary materials for the magic wrought by social life. We
saw in the Introduction that one of the main motives of organismic
life was the urge to self-feeling, to the heightened sense of self
that comes with success in overcoming obstacles and incorporating
other organisms. The expansion of the self-feeling in nature can
come about in many different ways, especially when we get to the
human level of complexity. Man can expand his self-feeling not
only by physical incorporation but by any kind of triumph or dem-
onstration of his own excellence. He expands his organization in
complexity by games, puzzles, riddles, mental tricks of all types;
by boasting about his achievements, taunting and humiliating his
adversaries, or torturing and killing them. Anything that reduces
the other organisms and adds to one’s own size and importance is
a direct way to gain self-feeling; it is a natural development out
of the simple incorporation and fighting behavior of lower organisms.
By the time we get to man we find that he is in an almost constant
struggle not to be diminished in his organismic importance. But as
he is also and especially a symbolic organism, this struggle against
being diminished is carried on on the most minute levels of sym-
bolic complexity. To be outshone by another is to be attacked at
some basic level of organismic durability. To lose, to be second
12
ESCAPE FROM EVIL
rate, to fail to keep up with the best and the highest sends a mes-
sage to the nerve center of the organism’s anxiety: “I am over-
shadowed, inadequate; hence I do not qualify for continued dura-
bility, for life, for eternity; hence I will die.” William James saw
this everyday anxiety over failure and recorded it with his usual
pungent prose:
Failure, then failure! so the world stamps us at every turn. We strew it
with our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities, with all the
memorials of our inadequacy to our vocation. And with what a damning
emphasis does it then blot us out! . . . The subtlest forms of suffering
known to man are connected with the poisonous humiliations incidental
to these results. . . . And they are pivotal human experiences. A process
so ubiquitous and everlasting is evidently an integral part of life . 9
We just saw why: because it is connected to the fundamental
motive of organismic appetite: to endure, to continue experiencing,
and to know that one can continue because he possesses some
special excellence that makes him immune to diminution and death.
This explains too the ubiquitousness of envy. Envy is the signal
of danger that the organism sends to itself when a shadow is being
cast over it, when it is threatened with being diminished. Little
wonder that Leslie Farber could call envy a primary emotional
substratum, or that Helmut Schoeck could write a whole stimulat-
ing book about envy as a central focus of social behavior . 10 The
“fear of being reduced . . . almost seems to have a life of its own
inside one’s being,” as Alan Harrington so well put it in a couple
of brilliant pages on envy . 11
I am making this little detour into phenomenological ontology
only to remind the reader of the great stake that the organism has
in blowing itself up in size, importance, and durability. Because
only if we understand how natural this motive is can we understand
how it is only in society that man can get the symbolic measures
for the degrees of his importance, his qualification for extradurabil-
ity. And it is only by contrasting and comparing himself to like
organisms, to his fellow men, that he can judge if he has some
extra claim to importance. Obviously it is not very convincing about
one’s ultimate worth to be better than a lobster, or even a fox; but
The Primitive World: Ritual as Practical Technics 13
to outshine “that fellow sitting over there, the one with the black
eyes” — now that is something that carries the conviction of ulti-
macy. To paraphrase Buber, the faces of men carry the highest
meaning to other men.
Once we understand this, we can see further why the moiety
organization is such a stroke of primitive genius: it sets up society
as a continuing contest for the forcing of self-feeling, provides
ready-made props for self-aggrandizement, a daily script that in-
cludes straight men for “joking relationships” and talented rivals
with whom to contend for social honor in games, feats of strength,
hunting and warfare. Sociologists have very nicely described the
dynamics of “status forcing” and similar types of behavior, in which
people try to come out of social encounters a little bigger than
they went in, by playing intricate games of oneupmanship. But you
cannot force your status vis-a-vis someone else unless there is a
someone else and there are rules for status and verbal conventions
for playing around with status, for coming out of social groups
with increased self-inflation. Society almost everywhere provides
codes for such self-aggrandizement, for the ability to boast, to
humiliate, or just simply to outshine in quiet ways — like displaying
one’s superior achievements, even if it is only skill in hunting that
feeds everyone’s stomach. If Hocart says that man cannot impart life
to himself but must get it via ritual from his fellow man, then we
can say even further that man cannot impart importance to himself;
and importance, we now see, is just as deep a problem in securing
life: importance equals durability equals life.
However, I don’t want to seem to be making out that primitive
society organized itself merely as a stage for competitive self-
aggrandizement, or that men can only expand their sense of self
at the expense of others. This would not be true, even though it is
a large and evidently natural part of human motivation. Primitive
society also expressed its genius by giving to people much less
invidious and competitive forms of self-expansion. I think here of
the work of Erving Coffman, in which he showed with such con-
summate art how people impart to one another the daily sense of
importance that each needs, not with rivalry and boasting, but
rather with elaborate rules for protecting their insides against social
damage and deflation. People do this in their interpersonal en-
14
ESCAPE FROM EVIL
counters by using verbal formulas that express proper courtesies,
permit gentle handling, save the other’s “face” with the proper
subtleties when self-esteem is in danger, and so on. Social life is
interwoven with salutations for greeting and taking leave, for ac-
knowledging others with short, standardized conversations which
reinforce the sense of well-being of all the members . 12 There is no
point in repeating Coffman here, or even in trying to sum up his
approach; all I want to do is to say that men in society manage
to give to each other what they need in terms of good organismic
self-feeling in two major ways: on one hand, by codes that allow
people to compare their achievements and virtues so as to outshine
rivals; on the other hand, by codes that support and protect tender
human feelings that prevent the undermining and deflation that
can result from the clash of organismic ambitions.
But now to see how the technique for the ritual renewal of nature
worked — how well it served the actors who played the parts. We
can really only get “inside” primitive societies by seeing them as
religious priesthoods with each person having a role to play in the
generative rituals. We have so long been stripped of a ritual role
to play in creation that we have to force ourselves to try to under-
stand this, to get this into perspective. We don’t know what it
means to contribute a dance, a chant, or a spell in a community
dramatization of the forces of nature — unless we belong to an ac-
tive religious community . 0 Nor can we feel the immense sense of
achievement that follows from such a ritual contribution: the ritual-
ist has done nothing less than enable life to continue; he has
contributed to sustaining and renewing the universe. If rituals
generate and redistribute life power, then each person is a generator
of life. That is how important a person could feel, within the ritual-
ist view of nature, by occupying a ritual place in a community.
Even the humblest person was a cosmic creator. We may not think
0 I think a good case could be made for rock music festivals as the modern
popular religious experience, the ultimate degenerate form of the ancient
ritual dramatization. Rock serves the same function without the cosmic con-
nection, much as the circus does. See Sidney Tarachow’s fine little overview,
“Circuses and Clowns,” in Geza Roheim, ed., Psychoanalysis and the Social
Sciences (New York: International Universities Press, 1951 ), vol. 3, pp. 171-
185, and compare this description with a performance by the Alice Cooper
rock group.
The Primitive World: Ritual as Practical Technics 15
that the ritual generation of brown kangaroos is a valid causal
affair, but the primitive feels the effect of his ability to generate
life, he is ennobled by it, even though it may be an illusion. We
may console ourselves about our historical demotion from the status
of cosmic heroism by saying that at least we know what true re-
ligion is, whereas these cosmic creators lived according to childish
magic. I’ll admit that our historical disenchantment is a burden
that gives us a certain sober worldliness, but there is no valid
difference between religion and magic, no matter how many books
are written to support the distinction. As Hocart pointed out so
succinctly, magic is religion we don’t believe in, and religion is magic
we believe in. Voila tout.
What Huizinga did in Homo Ludens was to show that primitive
life was basically a rich and playful dramatization of life; primitive
man acted out his significance as a living creature and as a lord
over other creatures. It seems to me like genius, this remarkable
intuition of what man needs and wants; and primitive man not only
had this uncanny intuition but actually acted on it, set up his social
life to give himself what he needed and wanted. We may know
what we lack in modem life, and we brood on it, but twist and
sweat as we may we can never seem to bring it off. Perhaps things
were simpler and more manageable in prehistoric times and had
not gotten out of hand, and so man could act on what he knew.
Primitive man set up his society as a stage, silrrounded himself
with actors to play different roles, invented gods to address the
performance to, and then ran off one ritual drama after the other,
raising himself to the stars and bringing the stars down into the
affairs of men. He staged the dance of life, with himself at the
center. And to think that when western man first crashed uninvited
into these spectacular dramas, he was scornful of what he' saw.
That was because, as Huizinga so well argued, western man was
already a fallen creature who had forgotten how to play, how to
impart to life high style and significance. Western man was being
given a brief glimpse of the creations of human genius, and like a
petulant imbecile bully who feels discomfort at what he doesn’t
understand, he proceeded to smash everything in sight.
Many people have scoffed at Goffman’s delineation of the every-
day modern rituals of face-work and status forcing; they have
lS ESCAPE FROM EVIL
argued that these types of petty self-promotion might be true of
modern organization men hopelessly set adrift in bureaucratic
society but these kinds of shallow oneupmanship behaviors couldn’t
possibly be true of man everywhere. Consequently, these critics say,
Coffman may be a perceptive observer of the contemporary scene,
of the one-dimensionality of mass society, but he is definitely not
talking about human nature. I have noted elsewhere that I think
these critics of Coffman are very wrong, and I repeat it here be-
cause it is more in context with the deeper understanding of
primitive society. When you set up society to do creation rituals,
then you obviously increase geometrically the magnitude of im-
portance that organisms can impart to one another. It is only in
modern society that the mutual imparting of self-importance has
trickled down to the simple maneuvering of face-work; there is
hardly any way to get a sense of value except from the boss, the
company dinner, or the random social encounters in the elevator or
on the way to the executive toilet. It is pretty demeaning — but that
is not Goffman’s fault, it is the playing out of the historical deca-
dence of ritual. Primitive society was a formal organization for the
apotheosis of man. Our own everyday rituals seem shallow pre-
cisely because they lack the cosmic connection. Instead of only
using one’s fellow man as a mirror to make one’s face shine, the
primitive used the whole cosmos. I think it is safe to say that
primitive organization for ritual is the paradigm and ancestor of
all face-work, and that archaic ritual was nothing other than in-
depth face-work; it related the person to the mysterious forces
of the cosmos, gave him an intimate share in them. This is why
the primitive seems multidimensional to many present-day anthro-
pologists who are critical of modern mass society.
So far I have been talking vaguely and in generalities about the
“cosmic connection”; I merely mentioned and skipped by the fact
that primitive society was organized according to a particular
theory of nature, hence the luxuriance of its symbolisms and the
formalism of its organization. Now we have to see what this means.
As ritual is an organization for life, it has to be carried out
according to a particular theory of prosperity — that is, how exactly
to get nature t* give more life to the tribe. The most striking thing
to us about the primitive theory of prosperity is how elemental it
1 7
The Primitive World: Ritual as Practical Technics
was — or organic, as we would say today. Primitive man observed
nature and tried to discern in it what made the dance of life — where
the power came from, how things became fecund. If you are going
to generate life, you have to determine its principles and imitate
the things that embody them. Organisms respond naturally to the
sun, which gives heat and light, and find their richness in the earth,
which produces food out of nothing — or rather out of its mysterious
bowels. The Australian aborigines have an expression about the
sun’s rays having intercourse with the earth. Very early man seems
to have isolated the principles of fecundity and fertilization and
tried to promote them by impersonating them. And so men identi-
fied with the sky or the heavens, and the earth, and divided them-
selves into heavenly people and earthly ones. Hocart sums it up
nicely:
In cosmic rites the whole world is involved, but in two parts, sky and
earth, because all prosperity is conceived to be due to the orderly inter-
action of sky and earth. The sky alone cannot create, nor the earth
alone bring forth. Therefore in the ritual that regulates the world there
must be two principles and they must be male and female, for the
interplay of the earth and sky is analogous to the intercourse of sexes . 13
The moieties stood for these opposing yet complementary principles.
The world was divided not only into sky and earth but also into
right and left, light and darkness, power and weakness — and even
life and death . 14 The point was that reality in the round had to be
represented in order for it to be controlled. The primitive knew
that death was an important part of creation, and so he embodied
death in order to control it.
Modern man has long since abandoned the ritual renewal theory
of nature, and reality for us is simply refusing to acknowledge that
evil and death are constantly with us. With medical science we
want to banish death, and so we deny it a place in our conscious-
ness. We are shocked by the vulgarity of symbols of death and the
devil and sexual intercourse in primitive ruins. But if your theory is
to control by representation and imitation, then you have to in-
clude all sides of life, not only the side that makes you comfortable
or that seems purest.
l8 ESCAPE FROM EVIL
There are two words which sum up very nicely what the primitive
was up to with his social representation of nature: “microcosmiza-
tion” and “macrocosmization.” Although they sound technically
forbidding, they express quite simple complementary maneuvers.
In macrocosmization man simply takes himself or parts of himself
and blows them up to cosmic importance. Thus the popular ancient
pastime of entrail reading or liver reading: it was thought that the
fate of the individual, or a whole army or a country, could be dis-
cerned in the liver, which was conceived as a small-scale cosmos.
The ancient Hindus, among others, looked at every part of man as
having a correspondence in the macrocosm: the head corresponded
to the sky, the eye to the sun, the breath to the wind, the legs to the
earth, and so on. lr ’ With the universe reflected in his very body, the
Hindu thus thought his life had the order of the cosmos.
Microcosmization of the heavens is merely a reverse, comple-
mentary movement. Man humanizes the cosmos by projecting all
imaginable earthly things onto the heavens, in this way again
intertwining his own destiny with the immortal stars. So, for ex-
ample, animals were projected onto the sky, star formations were
given animal shapes, and the zodiac was conceived. By man’s trans-
ferring animals to heaven all human concerns took on a timelessness
and a superhuman validity.
The immortal stars came to preside over human destiny, and the
fragile and ephemeral animal called man blew himself up to super-
human size by making himself the center of things. Campsites and
buildings were all laid out according to some kind of astronomical
plan which intertwined human space with the immortal spheres.
The place where the tribe lived was conceived as the navel of the
universe where all creative powers poured forth.
For those who want to investigate further the splendid literature
on this topic. Rank brilliantly summed up in the 1930s the accumu-
lation of the intensive research of the early decades of the century. 16
All I want to do is to emphasize that by means of micro- and
macrocosmization man humanized the heavens and spiritualized the
earth and so melted sky and earth together in an inextricable unity.
By opposing culture to nature in these ways, man allotted to him-
self a special spiritual destiny, one that enabled him to transcend
The Primitive World: Ritual as Practical Technics lg
his animal condition and assume a special status in nature. No
longer was he an animal who died and vanished from the earth;
he was a creator of life who could also give eternal life to himself
by means of communal rituals of cosmic regeneration . 0
And so we have come full circle in our overview of the primitive
world. We started with the statement that primitive man used the
dual organization to affirm his organismic self-feeling, and one of
his principal means was the setting up of society in the form of
organized rivalry. Now we can conclude that he in fact set up the
whole cosmos in a way that allowed him to expand symbolically
and to enjoy the highest organismic pleasures: he could blow the
self-feeling of a mere organismic creature all the way up to the
stars. The Egyptians hoped that when they died they would
ascend to heaven and become stars and thus enjoy eternal
significance in the scheme of things. This is already a comedown
from what primitive social groupings enjoyed: the daily living of
divine significance, the constant meddling into the realm of cosmic
power. I said that primitive society was organized for contests and
games, as Huizinga showed, but these were not games as we now
think of them. They were games as children play them: they
actually aimed to control nature, to make things come out as they
wanted them. Ritual contests between moieties were a play of life
against death, forces of light against forces of darkness. One side
tried to thwart the ritual activities of the other and defeat it. But of
course the side of life always contrived to win because by this
victory primitive man kept nature going in the grooves he needed
and wanted. If death and disease were overtaking a people, then
* In anthropology Levi-Strauss has recently revived this opposition of cul-
ture to nature, but he is somehow content to leave it as an intellectual
problem. Whereas it is obvious — as it was to Rank and Van der Leeuw —
that man has something great at stake in this °PP° s| uon. (j H . con t ro l an( j
allaying of creature anxiety. Octavio Paz has understood how central the
problem of overcoming death was to the primitive, and has criticized Levi-
Strauss for completely glossing over the vital human motives for primitive man’s
talent at symbolism. See O. Paz, Claude Levi-Strauss (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1970) and also the important attempt to reorient Levi-
Strauss in the direction of the problem of death: J. Fabian, “How Others Die,"
in Arien Mack, ed., Social Research (a publication of the New School for
Social Research), 1972, 39, number 3: 543-567.
20
ESCAPE FROM EVIL
a ritually enacted reversal of death by a triumph of the life faction
would, hopefully, set things right again . 17 *
The Logic of Sacrifice
At the center of the primitive technics of nature stands the act of
sacrifice, which reveals the essence of the whole science of ritual;
in a way we might see it as the atomic physics of the primitive
world view. The sacrificer goes through the motions of performing
in miniature the kind of arrangement of nature that he wants. He
may use water, clay, and fire to represent the sea, earth, and sun,
and he proceeds to set up the creation of the world. If he does
things exactly as prescribed, as the gods did them in the beginning
of time, then he gets control over the earth and creation. He can
put vigor into animals, milk into females, and even arrange the
order of society into castes, as in the Hindu ritual.
In the Hindu ritual and in coronation rituals, this is the point at
which the contest came in. In order to control nature, man must
drive away evil — sickness and death. And so he must overcome
demons and hostile forces. If he makes a slip in the ritual, it gives
power to the demons. The ritual triumph is thus the winning of a
contest with evil. When kings were to be crowned they had to
prove their merit by winning out against the forces of evil; dice and
chess probably had their origin as the way of deciding whether the
king really could outwit and defeat the forces of darkness . 18
We said earlier that western man did not understand this kind
of technics and so he ridiculed it. Hocart comes back again and
again to this point, that our notions of what is possible are not the
same as those of archaic men. They believed that they could put
vigor into the world by means of a ceremony, that they could create
• We will see later, when we consider the historical evolution of evil, how
fateful these ritual enactments were for the future of mankind. By opposing
the forces of light and darkness, and by needing to make light triumph over
dark, primitive man was obliged to give the ascendancy to the actors
representing light and life. In this way, as we shall see, a natural inequality
was built into social organization, ana as Hocart so superbly speculates, this
gave rise to the evolution of privileged “pure” groups and outcast “evil” ones.
The Primitive World: Ritual as Practical Technics
21
an island, an abundance of creatures, keep the sun on its course,
etc. ,u The whole thing seemed ridiculous to us because we looked
only at the surface of it and did not see the logic behind it, the
forces that were really at work according to the primitive’s under-
standing of them. There is no point in my simply repeating Hocart’s
penetrating analysis of the logic of the equivalence of the sacrificer
and the universe . 20 The key idea underlying the whole thing is that
as the sacrificer manipulates the altar and the victim, he becomes
identified with them — not with them as things, but with the essences
behind them, their invisible connection to the world of the gods
and spirits, to the very insides of nature. And this too is logical. The
primitive had a conceptualization of the insides of nature just as we
do in our atomic theory. He saw that things were animated by in-
visible forces, that the sun’s heat worked at a distance and per-
vaded the things of the earth, that seeds germinated out of the
invisible as did children, etc. All he wanted to do, with the tech-
nique of sacrifice, was to take possession of these invisible forces
and use them for the benefit of the community . 21 He had no need
for missile launchers and atomic reactors; sacrificial altar mounds
served his purposes well.
In a word, the act of sacrifice established a footing in the in-
visible dimension of reality; this permitted the sacrificer to build a
divine body, a mystical, essential self that had superhuman powers.
Hocart warns us that if we think this is so foreign to our own
traditional ways of thinking, we should look closely at the Christian
communion. By performing the prescribed rites the communicant
unites himself with Christ — the sacrifice — who is God, and in this
way the worshiper accrues to himself a mystical body or soul which
has immortal life. Everything depends on the prescribed ritual,
which puts one in possession of the power of eternity by union with
the sacrifice.
Conclusion
What I have done in these few pages is to try to show that primitive
society was organized for a certain kind of production of life, a
