Peter Farb Quote

What most impresses the people around the prophet is the personality change he has undergone.... when stress reaches a certain intensity in the culture, only certain individuals feel called forth to become prophets while most do not. In any event, the prophet has emerged in a new cultural role, and his personality is liberated from the stress that called his response into being in the first place. Immune to the stress under which his brethren still suffer, he must appear to them supernatural.

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)