{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.023368251410153102, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 4.569506726457399, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
New Directions in Apocalypticism

Through song and dance and the use of a hallucinogenic drug, the members of Bwiti experience vicariously the transition from life to death, from this world to the world of the ancestors, and back again. In the course of night-long ceremonies lies the promise of salvation in the world of the saved ancestors and the revitalization of the Fang worldview. This experience is made possible by the symbolic architecture of the Bwiti chapel. The plan of the chapel is based on the idea that life proceeds along a path, a red path of birth and death, which all people follow. If this path is followed well, people will arrive at the land of the dead when they die. If not, their souls will wander aimlessly in the dark forest. Bwiti ritual keeps people's souls on the right path by periodically reorienting them toward the land of the dead through the visionary experiences induced by the drug. Fernandez's "ethnography of the religious imagination" is not just descriptive. It is, perforce, his own synthesis of the complexities of Bwiti thought. It is a genuinely phenomenological effort aimed, as he says, at the "subject meaning" of Bwiti, and hence it is the product of his own religious imagination as well.