Cameroon's western grassland incantations

The overall aim of this study has been to show that incantations from the Western Grassland region of Cameroon derive their essence from the people’s religious beliefs and practices and that they reveal a perception of the universe as an ordered system, a whole. This whole comprises many structures, from inorganic matter to man, the inanimate, animate, celestial, and spirit worlds – all these reduced to the physical and metaphysical realms of existence. From a purely metaphysical point of view, the structures that constitute the universe form a hierarchy of perfections or degrees of being. The most elementary structure of reality is that of inorganic matter – the lowest level of perfection in the visible universe. Above the level of inorganic matter are the various levels or degrees of life. Life, on whatever level it can be considered, manifests itself as a real and active synthesis, that is, the reduction of diversity to unity. Vegetative life utilises inorganic matter and reduces the diversity of this matter to the unity of an organism. The next level of life – sensory or animal life – utilises in its turn vegetative life. And, finally, the highest level of life – the spiritual or intellectual and volitional life of man – presupposes and utilises a very highly developed form of sensory life. Here, the reduction of diversity to unity reaches its maximum, for in human life the sense-knowledge and sense-affections of purely animal life are transcendently unified in the ideas and value of the spiritual self, linking man to the spirit world.