The historical study of African religion

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duced to the many-sided aspects of Mendelssohn's involvement in Jewish affairs, and especially his central role in the struggle for full Jewish civil and religious Emancipation and his participation in the general philosophical controversies of his day. In drawing his rich picture of Mendelssohn's life, the biographer has not only added innumerable new and interesting details to the already quite well known aspects of Mendelssohn's career, such as his relation and struggle with the Swiss-Christian theologian Lavater, and his friendship with Lessing, but he has also placed Mendelssohn in his time, against the myriad background of 18th century German and Jewish thought . Thus we see the full and complex relation of Mendelssohn to men like Hamann, Kant, Lessing and Jacobi, and to those Jewish intellectuals who formed the first stages of the Haskalah-the Jewish Enlightenment . Moreover Altmann, himself a master of Rabbinic erudition and in full control of the Jewish sources, ably grounds Mendelssohn's thought in its Jewish context, pointing out what is traditional and what radical in Mendelssohn's approach to Judaism made famous in his Jerusalem . Altmann's achievement deserves the admiration and gratitude of every scholar working in the fields touched by this work . Not least of all, we must be thankful that Altmann has rescued Mendelssohn from those historians of philosophy who mistakenly see him as a second line figure in the midst of 18th century Protestant thought and has given him his rightful place as a major figure within the Jewish tradition . University of Lancaster

Steven T. Katz

RANGER, T . O . and KIMAMBO, Isaria, (eds .) The Historical Study of African Religion. London : Heinemann Educational Books, 1972, pp . ix+ 2 77 ICr .5op (Paperback) . Some recent symposia on Africa have been awful warnings on the perils of mixing one's drinks, by reason of the glaring lack of common themes and the evident lack of any real editorial guidance . Professors Ranger and Kimambo have brilliantly rehabilitated the symposium, guiding their talented team of contributors to tackle a set of inter-related themes . More than this, they have, from the point of view of `straight' history, opened a number of new paths into the East African past, while from the point of view of religious studies and sociology, they have shown how religion, traditional, Islamic, and Christian, has transformed, while being coloured by, the societies to which it has been present . This is surely a book destined to beget other books . In the first section of the book, `Methods for the Reconstruction of Religious History', Merrick Posnansky, drawing on both East and West



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SHORT REVIEWS AND

African experience, suggests links between anthropology and archaeology, particularly with regard to the study of present-day shrines . Christopher Ehret briefly discusses linguistic evidence in an essay which needs crossfertilization with Aidan Southall's recent writings on cross-cultural semantics . Michael Gilshenan charmingly describes Vico's theory of myth, and then applies it to Rwanda material . He ends with a call for unfreezing the boundaries of anthropology and history, a call which he himself helps to answer. In the second section, `Cults of Kingship' Matthew Schoffeleers, a Catholic missionary and anthropologist, shows how the M'Bona cult adapted and expanded over several hundreds of years in Malawi . The Zambian scholar, Mutumba Mainga, shows . how the Lozi royal cult combined three separate types of ritual, the cult of God, that of royal ancestors, and finally magic and divination . In the third section `The Interaction of Religious and Political Innovation' (which could equally have been a title for the whole book) Isaria Kimambo and C . K . Omari competently discuss the innovation of centres of worship and changing social scale among the Pare of Tanzania . Bethwell Ogot's essay on the Padhola is unfortunately weakened by his acceptance of stereotypes . Thus, we are told (p . 132) that `The European missionaries had little difficulty therefore in concluding that the Padhola were a people without religion', while on the next page, the first Catholic missionary in the area is quoted as saying, `Their belief in after-life makes them bring their children for baptism .' He also claims that `The new faith, to Padhola, was merely restating what they had believed all along' (p . 1 33) and then comments on the superficiality of Padhola belief in Christianity . The fourth section of the book consists of a single essay by Aylward Shorter, like Matthew Schoffeleers a White Father and an anthropologist, on the significance for African history of V. W . Turner's work on ritual and symbolism. In calling attention to the political and historical significance of initiation rituals and liminal figures, Shorter's essay relates to two later studies, that by E . A . Alpers, `Towards a History of Expansion of Islam in East Africa', in which the Islamization of rites of passage is stressed as a bridge to the full acceptance of Islam, and Terence Ranger's own essay on the adaptation of initiation rites by the Anglican mission in Masasi diocese . The fifth section on religion and the social crisis of the later nineteenth century has, apart from Alper's essay, a useful fresh look by Marcia Wright on the Nyakyusa material, and what is probably the best essay in the book, C . G. K. Gwassa's study of the roots of the Maji Maji ideology, which raises the question, touched on elsewhere in the book, of the degree to which traditional African religion possessed a messianic aspect. Finally, the sixth section has, apart from Ranger's article on adaptation a kind of anti-case of non-adaptation, being the antagonism of the Catholic missions to the Nyau society in colonial Nyasaland (Malawi) . The account by Matthew Schoffeleers and Ian Linden is detailed enough, but does not make it clear why the Nyau could rally such unyielding sup-



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port, though it is recognised that much of its religious value has evaporated over the past eighty years . Finally, the editors are to be congratulated on having two indexes, one being an index of themes that by itself stimulates to much further thought . Federal Department of Antiquities, National Museum, Enugu, Nigeria .

A. C . Edwards

DAVID, A. ROSALIE, Religious Ritual at Abydos (c . 7300 B .C.), Modern Egyptology Series, Aris and Phillips Ltd, 1973, vii+ 353pp . L4 .95 . Ancient Egypt exercises a strange fascination on most people as the success of the Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum showed . Its religious ideas and practices have been of particular interest to many Comparative Religion specialists (James, Bleeker, Brandon and to a lesser degree Eliade), most general books on the History of Religion include sections on Egypt (e.g . those of Smart, Ling and Ringgren and Strom) and the subject is included in many Study of Religion or Phenomenology of Religion courses . A scholarly study of Egyptian religion is therefore of wide interest . Many historical or archaeological studies pay such little regard to the religious aspect of a culture, merely describing as `a ritual implement' any object otherwise unclassifiable, that it is a pleasure to draw attention to this study by an Egyptian historian, the aim of which is to reconstruct the ritual reflected by the architecture, paintings and inscriptions of the mortuary temple of King Sethos I (13o5-12go B .C .) at Abydos . Abydos is 103 miles from Thebes on the Nile . For centuries prior to Sethos it was a holy centre . For a period of three millenia all Egyptians made pilgrimmage to this the traditional burial place of Osiris and where the annual resurrection of the god was thought to occur . Abydos was of strategic as well as ritual importance for it was the place where Upper and Lower Egypt met. The subject under study is therefore one of considerable importance . `The layout and decoration of an Egyptian temple were never haphazard' (p . 289) by studying in detail the layout, decoration alterations to the original plan, epigraphic and iconographic evidence from this site, comparative material from other sites and with a cautious use of pieces of literary evidence (e.g . Plutarch and Strabo) the author reconstructs the daily temple ritual, the ritual of the royal ancestors, tracing the processions and ceremonies in the various rooms, corridors and halls of this complex of buildings . She also reconstructs the rituals associated with the death and resurrection of Osiris, the identification of Sethos with Osiris and his ultimate resurrection as King of the Dead . The rituals associated with Osiris are specific to Abydos, the others were performed throughout Egypt .