This book, as all my friends well know, has been a long time coming. Some of its ideas came to me as early as the late 1960s, and I have worked on them in fits and starts ever since. I've lectured on ritual and religion during most academic years, and published preliminary versions of some of the book's elements in such essays as the Obvious Aspects of Ritual, and Sanctity and Lies in Evolution, both 1979. An earlier version of this manuscript was accepted for publication in 1982 with requests for no more than minor revisions. Upon rereading it at that time, however, I decided it didn't say quite what I wanted to say, so I put it aside “until I had time” to revise it to my liking. But I was about to go off to do field work and when I came back I was elected to the presidency of the American Anthropological Association, an office which engaged virtually all time left over from my full-time position at the University of Michigan. And then there have always been, as for most of us, requests for articles and essays that one expects to take a week to write, but usually take me a couple of months. And so, although I made some progress on the manuscript, it was slow going. This didn't make me happy, but I was given some comfort by the feeling that my revisions were better than what I had done originally.