Dictionary of the History of Ideas (on religion)

it was
recorded that these gods were originally great kings
of remote antiquity who had subsequently been deified.

2,200 years before Frazer said the same thing!

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To him mythology was “a dis-
 ease of language.” He believed that the various names
 for God could be traced back to a common origin in
 human speech.

According to Müller, the first form of religion was
 henotheism or cathenotheism, which signified a vague
 conception of deity that found expression in the
 attribution of divine qualities to whatever manifesta-
 tion of power an individual happened to be concerned
 with on a particular occasion.

                  
                

Müller greatly pro-
 moted the comparative study of religion, especially by
 his initiating of the celebrated series of translations
 entitled The Sacred Books of the East. The origin of
 religion he traced to the mind of man:
 No doubt there existed in the human mind, from the very
 beginning, something, whether we call it a suspicion, an
 innate idea, an intuition, or a sense of the Divine. What
 distinguishes man from the rest of the animal creation is
 chiefly that ineradicable feeling of dependence and reliance
 upon some higher power, a consciousness of bondage from
 which the very name of “religion” was derived  (Chips from
 a German Workshop, 2 vols., London [1867], I, 239).

                  
                

Charles-
 François Dupuis in his Origine de tous les cultes (1795).
 He maintained that Christ, Osiris, Bacchus, and Mithra
 were only allegorical personifications of the sun and
 its annual career.

                  
                

Maritime exploration,
 and the trade and colonization which resulted from
 it, brought contact with the great civilizations of Asia
 and their religions, together with knowledge of the
 primitive peoples of Africa, Australasia, and the
 Americas. All this new information gradually stirred
 the minds of educated men in Europe, making them
 aware of the diversity and complexity of the cultures
 of mankind, many of them far older than that of Chris-
 tian Europe and of equal achievement in many things.

                  
                

Christian thinkers had
 been obliged to find answers to pagan criticism of their
 faith. One of their chief points of concern was the
 newness of Christianity compared with the great
 antiquity of the pagan cults. This objection was met
 by the formulation in the third and fourth centuries
 of a philosophy of history, to which Julius Africanus,
 Eusebius of Caesarea, and Augustine of Hippo made
 the most notable contributions. By taking over the
 Hebrew scriptures as their own legitimate heritage,
 Christians were able to show to their own satisfaction
 that their religion could be traced back to the very
 Creation. This philosophy of history, together with
 their exclusive soteriology, provided medieval Chris-
 tians with a completely adequate account of the origin
 of religion, since for them there was only one true
 religion, and that was their own.

                  
                

Lucretius in
 his De rerum natura taught that men had dreamed of
 gods, to whom they attributed omnipotence and
 immortality. Unable to account for natural phenomena,
 especially in its more terrifying aspects, men had gone
 on to ascribe all such things to the gods, whom they
 consequently feared and sought to propitiate. Lucretius
 did not deny the existence of gods, but he held that
 they had no contact at all with the world and mankind.

                  
                

about 450 B.C., Anaxagoras shocked con-
 servative opinion in Athens by declaring that the sun
 and moon were red-hot stones, which meant that they
 could not be divinities.

Xenophanes (sixth century B.C.). As
 the following fragments disclose, Xenophanes had
 perceived the ethnic relativity of the personification
 of deity, as well as its innate anthropomorphism:
 Mortals think that the gods are born, and wear clothes like
 their own, and have a voice and bodies.

                  
                

 Rudolf Otto (1869-1937), a German philosopher of
 religion, in his widely influential book Das Heilige 
 (1917), which was translated into English as The Idea
 of the Holy (1923). Otto was concerned to emphasize
 the nonrational nature of religious experience.

                  
                

Among Freud's followers, the most distin-
 guished was C. J. Jung (1875-1961), who developed
 his own distinctive interpretation of man's mental and
 emotional life. Jung defined religion as
 a peculiar attitude of mind which could be formulated in
 accordance with the original use of the word “religio,”
 which means a careful consideration and observation of
 certain dynamic factors, that are conceived as “powers”;
 spirits, demons, gods, laws, ideals, or whatever name man
 has given to such factors in his world as he has found
 powerful, dangerous, or helpful enough to be taken into
 careful consideration, or grand, beautiful, and meaningful
 enough to be devoutly worshipped and loved  (Jung, p. 8).

                  
                

In his Totem and Taboo (1918), Freud
 propounded his thesis that “the beginnings of religion,
 ethics, society, and art meet in the Oedipus complex.”
 He imagined a primordial state of human society
 composed of a “primitive horde,” dominated by a
 father who kept all females for himself and repelled
 his growing sons. The latter banded together to slay
 their father, whom they both hated and admired. They
 ate their victim, to identify themselves with him and
 absorb his strength. After their parricide, remorse set
 in and a sense of guilt formed. Rituals of expiation were
 devised, centered on the totem as the “father substi-
 tute.” 

                  
                

earch now began to be made in other directions,
 most notably in human psychology or in some supposed
 precognitive stage in human development.

The drawing of attention to the communal factor
 in primitive religion was an understandable reaction
 to the hitherto prevailing disposition to contemplate
 the origin of religion in terms of individual ratiocina-
 tion.

                  
                

 Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), preeminent among
 French sociologists, saw in the institution of totemism,
 then a popular topic of concern among anthropologists,
 a concept of basic significance for understanding the
 social origins of religion. He wrote accordingly:
 The god of the clan, the totemic principle, can therefore
 be nothing else than the clan itself, personified and repre-
 sented to the imagination under the visible form of the
 animal or vegetable which serves as totem  (Elementary
 Forms of the Religious Life [1915], p. 206).

                  
                

he consequently
 saw both polytheism and polygamy as degenerate
 forms of the earlier faith and practice. Although this
 interpretation was so obviously congenial to Christian
 theology, Schmidt did not however posit an original
 divine revelation for his primeval monotheism.

                  
                

Andrew Lang (1844-1912), stressing the fact
 that many “primitive” peoples believed in a supreme
 creator-deity, a “High God” or “All-Father,” argued
 that monotheism was the earliest form of religion and
 that animism represented a degeneration from this
 original conception. This idea of a primeval
 monotheism found its most devoted exponent in Father
 Wilhelm Schmidt (1868-1954), who maintained his
 case in a twelve-volume work, Der Ursprung der
 Gottesidee (1926-55).

                  
                

Another notable contribution made by Frazer to the
 study of religious origins was his exposition of the
 economic factor in the evolution of religious ideas and
 practices. He showed that man, as an agriculturalist,
 became profoundly concerned with the annual life-
 cycle of vegetation upon which his food supply
 depended—with the drama implicit in the burying of
 the seed-corn in the earth, its germination, the upward
 surge of its new life in spring, its cutting down at
 harvest and transformation into food. It was from man's
 personification of the principle of vegetation, accord-
 ing to Frazer, that the idea of a god who dies and
 rises again originated, finding expression in such
 celebrated deities as Attis, Adonis, Osiris, and Christ.

                  
                

as
 follows:
 It becomes probable that magic arose before religion in the
 evolution of our race, and that man essayed to bend nature
 to his wishes by the sheer force of spells and enchantments
 before he strove to coax and mollify a coy, capricious, or
 irascible deity by the soft insinuation of prayer and sacrifice 
  (op. cit., I, 234).

                  
                

Frazer regarded religion as representing the
 second stage in the evolution of man's relations with
 the superior powers of the natural world. The first stage
 he designated the Age of Magic, unknowingly devel-
 oping an idea of Hegel's. 

                  
                

James George Frazer (1854-1941). His output of
 important works was prodigious. His magnum opus 
 entitled The Golden Bough comprises twelve volumes,
 an index and bibliographical volume, and a volume
 called Aftermath. The influence which he has had on
 modern thinking about religion has been very great;
 although many of his interpretations are now out-
 moded, his works remain a treasury of information
 about the religious customs and beliefs of mankind. In
 The Golden Bough (The Magic Art, 3rd. ed., I, 222)
 he set forth his definition of religion as being “a
 propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man
 which are believed to direct and control the course
 of nature and of human life.” He held that man's
 knowledge of God was inferential, being derived “ei-
 ther by meditating on the operations of his own mind,
 or by observing the processes of external nature...

                  
                

Marett sought for an even earlier and
 more primitive stage, such as was indicated by the idea
 of mana, i.e., an impersonal supernatural power
 envisaged by certain savage peoples, with which con-
 temporary anthropologists had become much con-
 cerned. According to Marett,
 The question is whether apart from ideas of spirit, ghost,
 soul, and the like, and before such ideas have become
 the dominant factors in the constituent experience, a
 rudimentary religion can exist. It will suffice to prove that
 supernaturalism, the attitude of the mind dictated by awe
 of the mysterious, which provides religion with its raw
 material, may exist apart from animism, and, further, may
 provide a basis on which animistic doctrine is subsequently
 constructed  (The Threshold of Religion, 1914).  
To define this pre-personalized stage in the evolution
 of religion, Marett invented the term “Animatism.”

                  
                

Tylor explained how the idea of an anima first
 came to be formed:
 It seems as though thinking men, as yet at a low level of
 culture, were deeply impressed by two groups of biological
 problems. In the first place, what is it that makes the
 difference between a living body and a dead one; what
 causes waking, sleep, trance, disease, death? In the second
 place, what are these human shapes which appear in dreams
 and visions? Looking at these two groups of phenomena,
 the ancient savage philosophers probably made their first
 step by the obvious inference that every man has two things
 belonging to him, namely, a life and a phantom. These two
 are evidently in close connexion with the body, the life as
 enabling it to feel and think and act, the phantom as being
 its image or second self; both, also, are perceived to be
 things separable from the body, the life as being able to
 go away and leave it insensible or dead, the phantom as
 appearing to people at a distance from it  (Primitive Culture, 
 I, 428).  
From this initial concept of an animating principle
 within man, according to Tylor, religion derived. 

                  
                

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