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In this interesting and agreeable essay—an expansion of his Frazer Lecture—Professor Fortes begins by using the myths of Oedipus and Job to illustrate two primitive, but very different, concepts of causality: one in which fate or destiny, the other in which divine justice, governs our affairs. He then goes on to show how each of these recurs in West African religion.
The tragedy of Oedipus lies, not merely in his punishment (by blinding or castration) for the crimes of parricide and incest, but in the way his conscious longing to be a good son is defeated by his evil destiny—which Fortes derives from his unconscious revolt. Moreover, it is his unconsciously determined curiosity which ultimately brings about his downfall, and helps to determine the form of his self-punishment. For this consists in the destruction of the organ of his insight—a point stressed by Fortes, as by Bion in a recent paper.
The story of Job seems—at least at first sight—to be based on an entirely different theory of the cause of human ills. No destiny compels Job to sin against his will, and so to earn inevitable punishment. But he does sin, and in a very subtle way, by being so self-righteous that he puts himself on a par with God. So, after all, his punishment was just. When he sees this and repents, he is forgiven and his prosperity is restored.
Nevertheless, I am inclined to regard the two myths less as illustrations of two different theories of human misfortune than as stressing two different aspects of the same one. This, when freed from the distorting effect of projection, is the belief (which is very largely true) that our lives are determined by the interplay of our ids and our superegos. For there can be little doubt that these are the entities personified in the concepts of destiny and justice—though not always unambiguously. Both Oedipus and Job sin unconsciously; their sin is committed by a repressed or split-off part of themselves, that is, by something from their ids. A