Davidson, 1964). In black Africa more generally, the sacred was largely manifest as animist and particularist. Individual communities had their own gods, shrines, and priestly class, the last-named functioning as intermediaries with the divine and/or as healers. African gods in general were associated with "the mysteries of nature . . . to whom one appealed for help and protection against the unknown" (Davidson, 1966, p. 126). Ancestors, or more exactly their spirits, had semi-divine status and functioned as moral authority for community life and were the locus of rites of passage. The use of ritual masks appears to have been most strongly associated with initiation rites connected to ancestor worship, "one of the central organizing factors in African society" (Davidson, 1966, p. 126). That fact that the primary moral goal of Africans was to live as one's ancestors had lived explains the depth of resistance to Christian missionaries.
In addition to god worship and ancestor worship, spiritual life in Africa entailed magic. The structure and depth of be
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