Eight theories of religion pals pdf

EIGHT THEORIES OF RELIGION

SECOND EDITION

Daniel L. Pals

University of Miami

New York Oxford

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

2006

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pals, Daniel L.

Eight theories of religion / by Daniel L. Pals. — 2nd ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 0-19-530458-9 (hard : alk. paper)—ISBN-13: 0-19-516570-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 0-19-530458-6 (hard : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-19-516570-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Religion–Study and teaching–History. I. Pals, Daniel L. Eight theories of religion.

II. Title.

BL41.P36 2005

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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To the memory of my father, Herbert H. Pals (1916–2004).

Filiis caritatem maiorem posset nullus pater habere.

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CONTENTS

Preface ix

Introduction 3

1. Animism and Magic 18

E. B. TYLOR AND J. G. FRAZER

2. Religion and Personality 53

SIGMUND FREUD

3. Society as Sacred 85

éMILE DURKHEIM

4. Religion as Alienation 118

KARL MARX

5. A Source of Social Action 149

MAX WEBER

6. The Reality of the Sacred 193

MIRCEA ELIADE

7. Society’s “Construct of the Heart” 229

E. E. EVANS-PRITCHARD

8. Religion as Cultural System 260

CLIFFORD GEERTZ

9. Conclusion 292

Index 325

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PREFACE

Over the years since it was first published, Seven Theories of Religion seems to have found a

serviceable niche on the shelf of books that discuss modern efforts to explain and understand

religion. Its original purpose was not just to acquaint nonspecialist readers with general patterns of

interpretation but to offer a sequence of intellectual portraits centered on theorists at work,

reviewing the kinds of evidence they adduce, tracing the forms of argument they advance, and

appraising, amid comparison, both the agendas and achievements they promise. The focus fell on

certain classic formulations—a sequence of theories that by merit and historical influence have

managed to chart the main paths of discussion over the last century and more. Judging by the

responses of most readers, that approach has proved helpful, especially to students and their

instructors in both college and university classrooms. Accordingly, at the editors’ invitation, I

agreed to revisit the original and offer certain improvements.

Though it (necessarily) carries a new title, this book forms a second edition of Seven Theories,

revised and amplified in ways meant to enhance its overall design. While reproducing the main

sequence of discussion in the original, the present work seeks to extend its reach by offering 1) a

revised introduction, 2) a new chapter on the work of German social theorist Max Weber, 3)

associated other revisions that bring Weber into the earlier analyses and comparisons, and 4) a

revised and enlarged conclusion that traces patterns of recent inquiry against the background of

these classic approaches. In addition, a few minor clarifications suggested by observant critical

readers have been included.

The addition of Max Weber, now the fifth in the new sequence of eight theorists, merits a brief note

of explication. For all his originality and historical importance, Weber was omitted from Seven

Theories, mainly because the aim of the book was to present classic theories of a pure, or ideal, type

(a rationale Weber himself certainly could have appreciated). Because of their

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power to provoke or promote debate, the accent fell on explanations advanced in support of a single

overriding thesis—as in Freud’s finding that all religion reduces to neurosis—rather than those that

rely on complex multidimensional constructs. The latter, of course, is the kind of approach that

Weber preeminently represents; hence he was excluded. Over time, however, more than a few

thoughtful readers have come to take a different view of this matter. Consistency, they contend,

ought not to come at the price of completeness. In a work specifically centered on theorists who

have virtually defined the field known as “theory of religion,” the absence of Weber is a void too

large to overlook. His pioneering labors in social theory, especially as it bears on religion, argue for

his birthright in any sequence of classic figures, whatever we may think of the proper fit between

his program and those of others on the list. On rethinking the matter, this argument now strikes me

as persuasive. So Weber has here been included, taking what I hope will be an instructive place

alongside his theoretical peers.

The original conclusion to Seven Theories offered a set of structured comparisons among the

theorists presented. That material has now also been revised to include Weber in the sequence. The

idea of enlarging the final chapter to trace recent developments in the theory of religion comes at

the suggestion of Executive Editor Robert Miller and Oxford’s readers. I have followed their advice

in the discussion that now opens the concluding chapter. It seeks to show how the themes addressed

by these classic interpreters have evolved into the corollary issues, variant formulations, and newly

framed questions that stand at the center of today’s discussion and debate. Finally, in the interest of

economy in the presentation of scholarly citations, a substantial number of endnotes in the first

edition have been deleted or abbreviated in those places where close scholarly verification is not

absolutely essential to the exposition.

It is perhaps needless to say that this edition, no less than the first, bears prints of assistance from

multiple hands. For more than two decades, I have profited from the cordial atmosphere of

dedication to both learning and teaching fostered by thoughtful colleagues in the Department of

Religious Studies at the University of Miami. For the last eight years, members of the department

have enjoyed the further benefit of wise, patient leadership provided by Professor Stephen Sapp, a

chair who knows instinctively how to promote the mission of his faculty and, deservedly, gets their

best efforts in response. In this collegial context, I must especially thank longtime colleague and

friend David Kling, who carefully read through all the new materials and improved them with his

customary blend of pertinent query, apposite clarification, and constructive criticism. My nephew,

Derek John Brouwer of Denver Theological Seminary, gave the manuscript a similarly close

reading. Both know already how helpful their efforts have been. A more general word

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of appreciation is also due to Robert Miller, whose skills as an editor include persistence, patience,

and a capacity to routinely offer good literary advice. I am most grateful to him—and to the entire

team of skilled professionals on staff at Oxford Univesity Press who have assisted at various phases

of the production process. That group surely includes more than those whom I have come to know

by name: Emily Voigt, Sarah Calabi, and Celeste Alexander.

On a personal level, my wife, Phyllis, and my daughter, Katharine, already know how crucial they

are to every joy in my life. Seven Theories was dedicated to them. With their warm approval, this

work is dedicated to the memory of my father—a man who answered lifelong hardship only with

quiet sacrifices for his three sons and a simple ethic of hard work that expected neither fair reward

nor fitting recognition. He is a treasure that cannot be lost because he cannot be forgotten.

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EIGHT THEORIES OF RELIGION

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Introduction

On a February day in the winter of 1870, a personable middle-aged German scholar rose to the

stage of London’s prestigious Royal Institution to deliver a public lecture. At the time, German

professors were famous for their deep learning, and this one was no exception, though as it

happened, he had also become very English. His name was Friedrich Max Müller. He had first

come to Britain as a young man destined for Oxford, where his plan was to study the ancient texts

of India’s Vedas, its books of sacred knowledge. He soon settled in, married a proper English wife,

and managed to acquire a position at the university. Müller was admired for his knowledge of

ancient Hinduism, but he also acquired a mastery of written English, which he applied with

admirable skill in popular writings on language and on mythology that appealed widely to curious

Victorian readers. On this occasion, however, he proposed a different subject: He wished to

promote something he called “the science of religion.”

Those words in that combination doubtless struck some in Müller’s audience as puzzling in the

extreme. After all, he was speaking at the end of a decade marked by furious debate over Charles

Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) and its startling theory of evolution by natural selection.

Thoughtful Victorians had heard so much of science pitted against religion that a science of religion

could only fall on the ears as a curious combination, to say the least. How could the age-old

certainties of faith ever mix with a program of study devoted to experiment, revision, and change?

How could these opposing systems, these two apparently mortal enemies, meet without one

destroying the other? These were understandable concerns, but Müller was of a different mind. He

was quite certain that the two could meet and that a truly scientific study of religion had much to

offer to both sides in that controversy. His lecture, the first in a series that was later published as an

Introduction to the Science of Religion (1873), was designed to prove just that point. He reminded

his

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listeners that the words of the poet Goethe on human language could also be applied to religion:

“He who knows one, knows none.”1 If that is so, then perhaps it was time indeed for a new and

objective look at this very old subject. Instead of following the theologians, who wanted only to

prove their own religion true and all others false, the time had come to take a less partisan approach,

seeking out those elements, patterns, and principles that could be found uniformly in the religions of

all times and places. Much could be gained by proceeding like any good scientist, gathering the

various facts—the customs, rituals, and beliefs—of religions throughout the world and then offering

theories that compare and account for them, just as a biologist or chemist might explain the

workings of nature.

Certainly not everyone, even among scholars, agreed that something of value could be gained from

the study of many religions. Back in Germany, Adolf von Harnack, the foremost Church historian

of the age, insisted that Christianity alone is what matters; other faiths do not. “Whoever does not

know this religion knows none,” he wrote in pointed rejection of Müller’s view, “and whoever

knows it and its history, knows all.”2 It was useless, he added with a certain disdain, to go to the

Indians, the Chinese, or even the Negroes or the Papuans. Christian civilization was the only one

destined to endure. Harnack was unusually blunt, but his view itself was not so unusual. There was

a fairly wide consensus among theologians and historians across Europe that Christian ideals and

values, which formed the spiritual center of the West, expressed the highest in human moral and

cultural achievement. To imagine that something significant could be learned from others was to

think inferiors can tutor their betters. Disagreement of this kind did not discourage Müller, however.

He was entirely confident that serious study would show how certain profound and shared spiritual

intuitions link the sages of distant India and China to the saints and martyrs of the Church.

Ancient Theories

Müller’s program may have been unwelcome to some at the time and new to others, but elements of

what he proposed in his lecture were in fact very old. Questions as to what religion is and why

different people practice it as they do doubtless reach back as far as the human race itself. The

earliest theories would have been framed when the first traveler ventured outside the local clan or

village and discovered that neighbors had other gods with different names. When on his travels the

ancient historian Herodotus (484–425 B.C.E.) tried to explain that the gods Amon and Horus,

whom he met in Egypt, were the equivalents of Zeus and Apollo in his native Greece, he was

actually offering

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at least the beginning of a general theory of religion. So was the writer Euhemerus (330–260

B.C.E.) when he claimed that the gods were simply outstanding personages from history who began

to be worshipped after their death. According to Cicero of Rome, the Stoic Chrysippus (280–206

B.C.E.) was a thoroughly systematic student of the customs and beliefs of as many tribes and races

as his travels led him to encounter. Some Stoic philosophers accounted for the gods as

personifications of the sky, the sea, or other natural forces. After viewing the facts of religion, they

and others sought, often quite creatively, to explain how it had come to be what it was.3

Judaism and Christianity

Thinkers such as these lived in the classical civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome, where many

divinities were worshipped, and the idea of comparing or connecting one god with another was a

natural habit of mind. Judaism and Christianity, however, took a very different view of things. To

Isaiah and other prophets of Israel, there was no such thing as a variety of gods and rituals, each

with a different and perhaps equal claim on our interest or devotion. There was only the one true

God, the Lord of the covenant, who had appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and had revealed

the divine law to Moses on Mt. Sinai. Since this God alone was real and all others were mere

figments of the human imagination, there was very little about religion that needed either

comparison or explanation. The people of Israel were to trust in Yahweh because God had chosen

only them and had spoken to them directly; other nations worshipped idols, their eyes being

darkened by ignorance, wickedness, or both. Christianity, which arose out of later Judaism, took

over this perspective of Isaiah almost without change. For the apostles and theologians of the early

Church, God had put himself on clear display in the human person of Jesus the Christ. Those who

believed in him had found the truth; those who did not could only be regarded as victims of the

great deceiver Satan—souls destined to pay the bitter price of eternal suffering in Hell. As

Christianity spread across the ancient world and later to the peoples of Europe, this view came to

dominate Western civilization. There were occasional exceptions, of course, but the prevailing

attitude was expressed most clearly in the great struggle against Islam during the age of the

Crusades. Christians, the children of light, were commanded to struggle against the children of

darkness. The beauty and truth of God’s revelation explained the faith of Christendom; the

machinations of Satan explained the perversions of its enemies.4

For the better part of a thousand years after the Roman Empire had become Christian, this militant

perspective on religions outside the creed of the Church

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did not significantly change. But around the year 1500, as the epoch of world explorations and the

age of the Protestant Reformation arrived, the beginnings of a new outlook began to take shape. The

voyages of explorers, traders, missionaries, and adventurers to the New World and to the Orient

brought Christians into direct encounters with alien peoples who were neither Jews nor Muslims,

both of whose religions were readily dismissed (the first as a mere preface to Christianity, the

second as a perversion of it). Missionaries, traveling with those who explored and conquered, were

at the leading edge of the engagement. Their aim was to bring “heathen nations” to Christ and the

Church, and so they certainly did with many whom they converted, but that process brought some

surprises. When the Jesuit father Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) took residence at the court of the

emperor in China, the missionary very nearly became the convert. The Chinese, he discovered, had

a real civilization, with art, ethics, and literature. Their ways were rational, and they followed the

impressive moral wisdom of their own Moses, the ancient teacher Confucius. Another Jesuit,

Roberto di Nobili (1577–1656), had a similar experience in India. The spiritual wisdom of India

captured his imagination, and he studied the sacred books so intensively that he became known as

“the white Brahmin.” Still other missionaries, at work in the New World, discovered something like

a Supreme Being among the tribes of American “Indians.” As these reports filtered back to Europe,

it occurred to some in thoughtful circles that the condemnation of such peoples as disciples of the

Devil seemed inappropriate and misguided. China’s Confucians may not know Christ, but

somehow, without a Bible to guide them, they had produced a civilization of mild manners and high

morals. Had the apostles visited, they too would have admired it.

At the very same moment that these contacts were being made, the Christian civilization that Jesus

presumably had established found itself plunged into bloody and violent turmoil. Led by Martin

Luther in Germany and the lawyer John Calvin in Switzerland and France, the new Protestant

movements of Northern Europe challenged the power of the Church and rejected its interpretations

of Biblical truth. While the explorers traveled, their homelands often came ablaze with the fires of

persecution and war. Communities were split apart by ferocious quarrels over theology, first

between Catholics and Protestants and later among the scores and even hundreds of different

religious groups that began to appear in once-unified Christendom. Amid the storms of

ecclesiastical conflict and political struggle that gripped the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is

not surprising that concerned believers on all sides grew ever less certain that they alone held God’s

final truth in their hands. The deadly, destructive wars of religion, which persisted for more than a

hundred years in some lands, led people to believe that the truth about religion

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cannot possibly be found in sects that were prepared to torture and execute opponents, confident

their work was God’s will. Surely, some said, the truth of religion must be found beyond the

quarrels of the churches, beyond the tortures of the stake and the rack. Surely, the faiths of Europe

could find a pure and common form, a more universal framework of belief and values.5

The Enlightenment and Natural Religion

It was this great quest, set against the bloody background of the previous era, that thinkers of the

eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment, embarked upon when they proposed the idea of a

pure and ancient “natural religion” shared by the entire human race. Natural religion formed the

basic creed of Deism, as it commonly came to be called. It enlisted the most articulate voices and

celebrated names of the age: philosophers such as John Toland and Matthew Tindal in Britain, the

American colonial statesmen Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin, brilliant men of letters such as

Denis Diderot and the great Voltaire in France as well as the dramatist Gotthold Lessing and

philosopher Immanuel Kant in Germany. Nearly all in this group endorsed the idea of a universal,

natural religion. It included the belief in a Creator God who made the world and then left it to its

own natural laws, a parallel set of moral laws to guide the conduct of humanity, and the promise of

an afterlife of rewards for good and punishments for evil. To the Deists this elegantly simple creed

was the faith of the very first human beings, the common philosophy of all races. The best hope of

humanity was to recover this original creed and to live by it in a universal brotherhood of all

peoples—Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Confucians, and all others—under their one Creator

God.

In addition to its commendable work in promoting tolerance, the Deist notion of an original natural

religion of humanity opened the door to a new way of explaining the many forms of religion in all

their conflicts and confusions. Whatever the different beliefs of the various Christian sects, the

rituals of America’s Indians, the ancestral rites of the Chinese, or the teachings of Hindu sages, all

could ultimately be traced back to the natural religion of the first human beings and then followed

forward as that wisdom was gradually transformed and dispersed into its modern variants. China

especially offered proof of this point. As trading ships from the Orient began to arrive regularly in

the 1700s, fascination attended all forms of Chinoiserie. Fabrics, spices, porcelains, teas, and

furnishings gave evidence of China’s civility, elegance, prosperity, and piety, all obviously acquired

without any help from the Bible. These graces, and the ethics of Confucius especially, exhibited the

virtues of natural religion.

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Modern Theories

There was, of course, another side to the Deist agenda. To praise natural religion was also to blame

revealed religion, which by the Deists’ estimate was little more than the twisted handiwork of

priests and theologians. By and large, the Christian Church was seen by Deists as filled with

retailers of ignorance and superstition, revelations and ceremonies, miracles and confessions,

sacraments and saints, and sacred rites and texts in languages none could understand. Natural

religion, on the other hand, was emphatically not a set of truths revealed directly by God to the

Church and withheld from the rest of humanity. True religion was natural and primeval—the one

universal faith of humanity long before it had been corrupted by churches and dogmas and clerics.

Because it was natural rather than supernatural, religion could also be explained rationally, just as

the laws of motion and gravitation had been shown by Newton the mathematician to be implanted

in the world as it came from the Creator’s hand.6

Deists prized rationality but showed little appreciation for the deep emotions that give life to

religion or for the enchantments of its rich history and its wealth of diverse cultural forms. That

posture deeply alienated those who saw traditional devotion as the very heart of religion. Devout

Catholics, fervent Protestants (called Pietists), and revivalists such as John Wesley protested the

Deist program by celebrating a religion of the heart, rather than a dry, rationalistic religion of the

head. Their appreciation of the emotions was shared by religious Romantic writers, scholars, and

poets who joined to it a deep appreciation of just what Deists despised—the glory of churches and

temples, the surpassing beauty of rituals and ceremonies, the power of sacraments and prayers, the

entire rich and colorful history of religious faith, especially (but not only) the Christian faith. The

historical forms and institutions of religion, they contended, are not enemies of the religious spirit;

they are its guardians and they bear its torch. The accents of this Romantic reaction are perhaps best

illustrated in the great French historical novelist Vicomte de Chateaubriand, whose book The

Genius of Christianity (1802) savors the beauty and history of Catholicism.

It is fair to say that both of these historical streams—the cold current of Enlightenment Deism and

the warm waters of religious Romanticism— converged in the mind of Max Müller and others

among his associates. As a thinker, Müller was a virtual Deist. He relied on the philosopher

Immanuel Kant, Germany’s voice of Enlightenment, who centered religion on the two cardinal

doctrines of Deism: a belief in God and “the moral law within.” As a personality, however, Müller

was a Romantic. His young life overlapped the later years of Chateaubriand, and though he was a

German Protestant rather

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than a French Catholic, he was just as deeply affected by the same mystical spirit and attuned to the

presence of the divine wherever it could be discerned, either in the beauty of nature or in the

spiritual strivings of humanity. Wherever in nature or history clues to the divine might appear, he

was prepared to find them.

This blend of contrasting perspectives—Deist and Romantic—furnished Müller and others like him

with both a motive and rationale for the study of all religions. They believed that it was possible to

find the root impulse, or cause, of religion everywhere, and they made use of methods that were

mainly historical. By sustained and diligent inquiry, they would reach far back in time to discover

the earliest religious ideas and practices of the human race; that accomplished, it was a natural next

step to trace their development onward and upward to the present day. Müller and his associates

believed not just that they could do such a thing but that in their time it could be done better than

the Deists ever imagined, largely because of great advances made in the study of archaeology,

history, language, mythology, and the newfound disciplines of ethnology and anthropology.7 In

addition to his knowledge of the Vedas and mythology, Müller was himself one of Europe’s

foremost names in the field of comparative philology, or linguistics; the Hindu Vedas that he edited

were then thought to be the oldest religious documents of the human race. Archaeologists in the

early years of the nineteenth century had made significant discoveries about earlier stages of human

civilization, historians had pioneered new critical methods for studying ancient texts, students of

folklore were gathering information on the customs and tales of Europe’s peasants, and the first

anthropologists were beginning to draw on reports from those who had observed societies of

apparently primitive people still surviving in the modern world. In addition, there was now the very

successful model of the natural sciences to imitate. Instead of just guessing about the origins and

development of religion or naively assuming with some Deists that to know the writings of

Confucius was to know all of Chinese religion, inquirers could now systematically assemble facts—

rituals, beliefs, customs —from a wide sample of the world’s religions. With these in hand and

properly classified, they could infer the general principles—the scientific “laws of development”—

that would explain how such things arose and what purposes they served.

By the middle decades of the 1800s, then, a small circle mainly of French, German, and British

scholars felt that both the methods and materials were on hand to leave behind unfounded

pronouncements about the beginnings of religion and formulate instead systematic theories of its

origin that could claim the authority of science. Not only in Müller’s lectures but in other writings

of the time as well, we can notice an optimism, an energy, and a confidence

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about the research that was being undertaken. Their aim was not just to offer another guess or a set

of speculations but to frame theories based on evidence. Like their counterparts in the physical

sciences, students of religion would work from a solid foundation of facts and formulate

generalizations that could be carefully tested, revised, and improved. To all appearances, this

scientific method had the further advantage that it could be applied independently of one’s personal

religious commitments. Müller was a deeply devout, almost sentimental Christian who believed that

the truth of his faith had nothing to fear from science and would in fact shine brighter if it were

explained in the context of other religions. As we shall soon see, E. B. Tylor, Müller’s

contemporary and critic, took an opposite view, feeling that his scientific inquiry gave support to

his personal stance of agnostic religious skepticism. Both, however, believed that a theory of

religion could be developed from a common ground of objective facts that would provide all

theories with both evidentiary support and a final test of truth. Both also believed that they could

reach theories that were comprehensive and general in nature. Such was the confidence they had in

both their science and the body of facts at their disposal that they felt no hesitation in claiming they

could explain the entire phenomenon of religion—not just this ritual or that belief, not just religion

in one place or time, but the worldwide story of its origin, development, and diversity. In stating

this bold ambition, they laid out the issues that the major theorists of the twentieth century (those

whose names figure most prominently in this book) would later need to address.8

When we look back on it from the present, this hope of forming a single theory of all religions

astonishes us by its vaulting ambition. Thoughtful observers today are inclined to be far more

modest. Impressive books have been written just to explain one belief of one religion or to compare

a single feature—a specific custom or ritual—of one religion with something similar in another.

Nonetheless, the hope of one day discovering some broad pattern or general principle that explains

all (or even most) religious behavior has not been given up easily. As will be clear in some of the

chapters to come, several important theorists of the twentieth century have been inspired by this

very same ideal, and for understandable reasons. Physicists have not given up on Einstein’s unified

field theory even though finding it has proved far more difficult than any of them imagined. In the

same way, religionists, despite the difficulties, have also been inspired by the scientific ideal of a

general theory that can draw many different phenomena into one coherent, widely illuminating

pattern. Moreover, explanations need not be valid to be of value. In religion, as in other fields of

inquiry, a suggestive and original theory can, even in failure, stimulate new inquiry or reformulate

problems in such a way as to promote fruitful new understandings. Thus, even if most of what they

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say were found to be in error, the theorists who appear in these pages would still deserve our time

and attention because their ideas and interpretations often filter well beyond the sphere of religion

to affect our literature, philosophy, history, politics, art, psychology, and indeed almost every realm

of modern culture.

It is interesting in this connection to notice how well hidden are the origins and first advocates of

ideas now regarded as belonging to the stock of common knowledge. How many people who

casually refer to religion as a superstitious belief in spirits realize that they are essentially repeating

E. B. Tylor’s famous theory of animism as explained in Primitive Culture, a work now over a

hundred years old? Would they today recognize the name of either the author or his once-revered

book? Who among those who argue that science replaces religion can recall the fame of James

Frazer at the turn of the twentieth century, when he placed that thesis at the center of his

monumental Golden Bough? How many general readers with a curiosity about religion would

recognize the unusual name and provocative theory of Mircea Eliade, even though his influence on

the study of religion in America over the last four decades has been quite remarkably widespread?

How many know the role that anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard’s work has played in recent

philosophical debates over rationality and relativism? How readily can people who conveniently

refer to the Protestant work ethic in everyday conversation identify the German sociologist Max

Weber, who first defined it? The views associated with the great radical thinkers of our time,

especially Marx and Freud, tend to be better known, of course, but all too often in ways that are

vague, fragmentary, or distorted. In consequence, a great deal of current debate about such theories

often goes on without a very clear and precise grasp of the assumptions, evidence, and logic to be

found in them. One service this discussion can render is to help readers relatively new to this

subject avoid making just this mistake.

Eight Theories

The following chapters consider eight of the most important theories of religion that have been put

forward since the idea of a scientific approach to religion first caught the imagination of serious

scholars in the nineteenth century. In each case, the theory is presented first by discussing the life

and background of its major spokesman, then by treating its key ideas as presented in certain central

texts, and finally by noticing its distinctive features in comparison with other theories and recording

the main objections raised by its critics.

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Principle of Selection

Out of a number of theories that might have been chosen for this purpose, this book selects eight

that have exercised a shaping influence not only on religion but on the whole intellectual culture of

the twentieth century. The representative spokesmen selected for each are 1) E. B. Tylor and James

Frazer, 2) Sigmund Freud, 3) Emile Durkheim, 4) Karl Marx, 5) Max Weber, 6) Mircea Eliade, 7)

E. E. Evans-Pritchard, and 8) Clifford Geertz. Knowledgeable observers will notice at once that

several highly regarded names, including the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and even Max Müller

himself, fall outside this group. Omissions as large as these are not easy to justify; indeed, another

author might well have chosen differently. But the choices do have a rationale. Important as he was

in promoting the idea of a science of religion, Max Müller has been left aside because his own

theory, which found religion to originate in nature worship, was for the most part rejected in his

own time and had only limited influence thereafter. Again, the influential French philosopher

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, who is noticed briefly in chapter six, is a theorist who some would say deserves

admission here, but Lévy-Bruhl too is a complex figure whose views changed significantly over

time; moreover, since the major issues he took up were also considered by E. E. Evans-Pritchard,

who had the further benefit of grounding his views in actual fieldwork among tribal peoples, the

latter seems for our purposes the better of the two to select. The same is true to a degree in the case

of Carl Jung. It is well known that Jung took a subtle, sympathetic, and textured approach to

religion and that he made extensive use of religious materials in his psychological research. For just

that reason, however, he offers a somewhat less rigorously consistent example of a psychologically

functional interpretation than we find in Freud. Jung’s influence on the field, though great, was less

extensive, so Freud seems the better choice. In the end, of course, any book must have limits, and

some choices will always appear to some readers more arbitrary than astute. The important thing is

to grasp that these classic theorists offer models of how some—but certainly not all—of the most

influential interpretations of religion have made their mark over the last century.

Definition of Terms

Before we begin, some comment may be needed on the two terms that are most basic to the

discussions that follow: “religion” and “theory.” Most people, even if they are coming to this

subject for the first time, have some idea of what the term “religion” means. They are likely to think

of belief in a God or gods, in supernatural spirits, or in an afterlife. Or they are likely

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to name one of the great world religions, such as Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, or

Islam. They also probably have some general idea of what the term “theory” means. Having heard

the term most often in the context of science, they think of it as a kind of explanation—an attempt

to account for something that is not at first understood, usually by offering an answer to the

common question “Why?” Most of us readily admit that we do not understand the theory of

relativity, but we do recognize that it somehow accounts for the connection between space and time

in a way that no one had imagined before. At the start of things, there is no need for us to go beyond

everyday notions such as these. Whatever their limitations, ordinary understandings of general

terms such as “religion” and “theory” are indispensable for a book such as this—not only as starting

points but as guideposts while we proceed. At the same time, we should also notice that few of the

theorists we shall consider are content to stay with these intuitions of common sense once they have

seriously worked their way into the issues.

When discussing the term “religion,” some observers find that “belief in a God or gods” is far too

specific, far too theological a definition to use for certain people such as Buddhists, who worship no

God, or for specific groups such as Jews, who think of their faith chiefly as a matter of activities

rather than ideas. To accommodate such instances, which clearly belong to the sphere of religion, a

theorist might follow the path chosen by Durkheim and Eliade, who prefer a broad concept like “the

sacred” as the defining essential of religion. They note that the Buddhist who does not believe in

God does, after all, have a sense of the sacred. So they find this abstract term more suitable when

one is considering the entire span and story of religion in the world rather than traditions of just one

place or time or type. Again, some theorists strongly prefer substantive definitions, which closely

resemble the commonsense approach. They define religion in terms of the beliefs or the ideas that

religious people commit to and find important. Other theorists think this approach just too

restrictive and offer instead a more functional definition. They leave the content or the ideas of

religion off to the side and define it solely in terms of how it operates in human life. They want to

know what a religion does for an individual person psychologically or for a group socially. Less

concerned with the actual content of people’s beliefs or practices, they are inclined to describe

religion, whatever its specific content, as that which brings a sense of comfort or well-being to an

individual or provides support for a group. As we proceed, it will be wise to keep in mind that the

matter of defining religion is closely linked to the matter of explaining it and that the matter of

definitions is considerably more difficult than common sense at first look leads us to believe.

The same can be said for the term “theory.” At first glance, the idea of an explanation of religion is

not hard to understand, but again, the more deeply

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one moves into the actual business of explaining, the more complex it seems to become. Two brief

illustrations can demonstrate the problem. First, a theorist who proposes to explain religion by

showing its “origin” can mean by this word any of several things: its prehistorical origin—how, at

the dawn of history, the first human beings acquired a religion; its psychological or social origin—

how, at all times in human history, it arises in response to certain group or individual needs; its

intellectual origin—how, at one time or all times, certain perceived truths about the world have led

people to believe certain religious claims; or its historical origin—how, at a specific time and place

in the past, a certain prophetic personality or a special sequence of events has created a religion and

given it a distinctive character or shape. Both in describing and in evaluating a theory, it is

important to know what kind of origin of religion it is seeking and what connection one kind of

origin may have with the other kinds.

The second problem has already been alluded to: Theories of religion, no less than definitions, may

also be either substantive or functional in character. Theorists who advocate substantive approaches

tend to explain religion intellectually in terms of the ideas that guide and inspire people. They stress

human intention, emotions, and agency. People are religious, they say, because certain ideas strike

them as true and valuable and therefore ought to be followed in the framing of their life. Theorists

who stress this role of human thought and feeling are sometimes described as interpretive rather

than explanatory in their approach. Religions, they contend, are adopted by persons and are about

things that have meaning to human beings; accordingly, interpretations, which take account of

human intent, best explain religion, which after all is the product of human thoughts and purposes.

Interpretive theorists tend to reject “explanations” because they are about things, not persons. They

appeal only to impersonal processes rather than to humanly meaningful purposes. Functional

theorists, by contrast, strongly disagree. They think that though explanations are of course good for

things—for physical objects and natural processes—they are just as useful in understanding people.

Functional theorists strive to look beneath or behind the conscious thoughts of religious people to

find something deeper and hidden. They routinely contend that certain underlying social structures

or unnoticed psychological pressures are the real cause of religious behavior. Whether they are

individual, social, or even biological, these compelling forces—and not the ideas that religious

people themselves imagine to be governing their actions—form the real sources of religion

wherever we find it. We will be able to trace these differences in some detail later on in our

discussion.9 For the moment, however, they can serve as fair warning that with theories of religion,

no less than with definitions, the seemingly simple often masks the deceptively complex.

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In the chapters that follow, we will need to attend to the definitions as well as the explanations

advanced by our theorists, taking notice of the links that in each case connect the one with the other.

Along the way, it should become apparent how and why each theorist is moved to consider both the

obvious and the unnoticed, the surface and the substrate, in the effort to understand religion. It

should also be clear that these theories have been placed in a sequence, both chronological and

conceptual, that is meant to show a pattern. After starting with the classic intellectualist theories of

Tylor and Frazer, we move next to explanatory approaches, tracing the lines of psychological,

social, and economic functionalism through Freud, Durkheim, and Marx, respectively. We then turn

to Weber, who marks a qualified dissent, and Eliade, who strikes a more assertive protest, against

the more extreme form of the explanatory approach, usually called “reductionism.” We finish with

the more recent theories of Evans-Pritchard and Geertz, both of which may be seen as attempts to

overcome the interpretive-explanatory divide. The conclusion will offer a brief review of what has

happened among theorists in the interval since these classic theories came into currency, and it will

ask some final comparative and analytical questions.

Notes

1. F. Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Religion (New York: Charles Scribner and Company,

1872), p. 11. This was also published under the title Introduction to the Science of Religion. On

Müller’s interesting life, see Nirad Chaudhuri, Scholar Extraordinary: The Life of Professor the Rt.

Hon. Friedrich Max Müller (London: Chatto & Windus, 1974).

2. Cited in Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer, “The Economic Ethics of the World Religions,” in Hartmut

Lehman and Guenther Roth, Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Contexts (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 350.

3. On these ancient precursors of the modern theory of religion, see Eric J. Sharpe, Comparative

Religion: A History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975), pp. 1–7.

4. Sharpe, Comparative Religion, pp. 7–13.

5. On the connection between the wars of religion in Europe and the effort to explain religion

comparatively, without theological judgments, see J. Samuel Preus, Explaining Religion: Criticism

and Theory from Bodin to Freud (New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1987), pp. 3–20.

6. On early Deism and later skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment, see the discussions of Herbert

of Cherbury and David Hume in Preus, Explaining Religion, pp. 23–39, 84–103.

7. On the rise of anthropology in the mid-Victorian years, see (among others) Richard M. Dorson,

The British Folklorists: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968); Paul Bohannan,

Social Anthropology (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1969), pp. 311–15; J. W. Burrow,

Evolution and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge

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University Press, 1970); and George W. Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free

Press, 1987).

8. On these early efforts to develop theories of religion with the help of anthropological and other

research, see Brian Morris, Anthropological Studies of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1987), pp. 91–105.

9. The most important and provocative analyses of this division are to be found in two collections of

trenchant essays by Robert A. Segal: Religion and the Social Sciences: Essays on the Confrontation

(Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989) and Explaining and Interpreting Religion: Essays on the Issue (New

York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1992).

Suggestions for Further Reading

Chaudhuri, Nirad C. Scholar Extraordinary: The Life of Professor the Rt. Hon. Friedrich Max

Müller. London: Chatto & Windus, 1974. A detailed study of the life and some consideration of the

theories of Friedrich Max Müller.

Eliade, Mircea, Editor in Chief. The Macmillan Encyclopedia of Religion. New York: Macmillan,

1987. At present the most useful and comprehensive Englishlanguage reference work on religion.

Evans-Pritchard, E. E. Theories of Primitive Religion. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1965. A

brief and penetrating analysis of certain classic approaches to the explanation of religion.

Fitzgerald, Timothy. The Ideology of Religious Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

A controversial critique of the study of religion on the grounds that the term “religion” is impossible

to define, so explanations that appeal to the concept are neither meaningful nor useful.

Harrison, Peter. “Religion” and the Religions in the English Enlightenment. Cambridge, England:

Cambridge University Press, 1990. An informative historical study which shows how the thinkers

and ideas of the Enlightenment in England contributed to the rise of the scientific study of religion.

Kunin, Seth. Religion: The Modern Theories. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,

2003. An informative, concise survey of most efforts to explain religion carried out over the last

century. Especially helpful short discussions of theories and theorists not mentioned in the present

work.

Masuzawa, Tomoko. In Search of Dreamtime: The Quest for the Origin of Religion. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1993. An original but difficult book that examines the presuppositions

behind the keen interest of earlier, evolutionary theorists in the historical origin of religion.

McCutcheon, Russell T. Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the

Politics of Nostalgia. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. A provocative critique of the

recent approaches to the study of religion, including that of this book, and similar research pursued

in Religious Studies departments of American universities.

Morris, Brian. Anthropological Studies of Religion. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University

Press, 1987. A comprehensive survey of scientific theories of religion in the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries.

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Preus, J. Samuel. Explaining Religion: Criticism and Theory from Bodin to Freud. New Haven:

Yale University Press, 1987. A study much-praised by current theorists that follows the history of

thinking about religion over most of the last three centuries.

Segal, Robert A. Religion and the Social Sciences: Essays on the Confrontation. Brown Studies in

Religion, no. 8. Atlanta, Georgia: Scholars Press, 1989. Trenchant essays by a keenly analytical

recent theorist who sees an inescapable conflict between the theories of those who personally

sympathize with religion and the critical explanatory methods of the social sciences.

Sharpe, Eric J. Comparative Religion: A History. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975. A

wide-ranging overview of theories and theorists of religion. Helpful both as an introduction to the

field and for short accounts of the lives and thought of leading figures in the field.

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1

Animism and Magic:

E. B. Tylor and J. G. Frazer

Are the forces which govern the world conscious and personal, or

unconscious and impersonal? Religion, as a conciliation of the

superhuman powers, assumes the former. … [I]t stands in fundamental

antagonism to magic as well as to science [which hold that] the course

of nature is determined, not by the passions or caprice of personal

beings, but by the operation of immutable laws acting mechanically.

James Frazer, The Golden Bough1

Our survey begins with not one but two theorists whose writings are related and whose ideas closely

resemble each other. The first is Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917), a self-educated Englishman

who never attended a university but, through his travels and independent study, arrived at the theory

of animism, which in his view held the key to the origin of religion. The second is James George

Frazer (1854–1941), a shy, scholarly Scotsman who, unlike Tylor, spent virtually all of his life in a

book-lined apartment at Cambridge University. Frazer is often associated with what is sometimes

called the “magic” theory of religion, rather than with Tylor’s animism, but in fact he was a disciple

of Tylor, who readily took over his mentor’s main ideas and methods while adding certain new

touches of his own. As we shall see in our discussion, the two theories are so closely related that we

can more helpfully consider them as differing versions—an earlier and later form—of the same

general point of view. Tylor is perhaps the more original thinker, while Frazer enjoys the greater

fame and influence.

E. B. Tylor

E. B. Tylor’s first interest was not religion but the study of human culture, or social organization.

Some, in fact, consider him the founder of cultural,

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or social, anthropology as that science is now practiced in Britain and North America. He was born

in 1832 to a family of prosperous Quakers who owned a London brass factory.2 The Quakers

originally were an extreme, almost fanatical group of English Protestants who dressed in plain,

unfashionable clothes and lived by the inspiration of a personal “inner light.” By the 1800s,

however, most had discarded their unusual dress, earned social respect, and moved all the way over

to very liberal, even nonreligious views. This perspective is clearly present in Tylor’s writings,

which show throughout a strong distaste for all forms of traditional Christian faith and practice,

especially Roman Catholicism.

Because both of Tylor’s parents died when he was a young man, he began preparations to help in

management of the family business, only to discover his own health failing when he showed signs

of developing tuberculosis. Advised to spend time in a warmer climate, he chose travel to Central

America and left home in 1855, at the young age of twenty-three. This American experience proved

decisive in his life, for it kindled his keen interest in the study of unfamiliar cultures. As he traveled,

he took careful notes on the customs and beliefs of the people he saw, publishing the results of his

work on his return to England in a book entitled Anahuac: Or Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient

and Modern (1861). On his journeys, Tylor also met a fellow Quaker, the archaeologist Henry

Christy, who sparked his enthusiasm as well for prehistoric studies. Though he did not travel again,

Tylor began to study the customs and beliefs of all peoples who lived in “primitive” conditions,

whether from prehistoric ages (insofar as they could be known from archaeological finds) or from

tribal communities of the present day. Soon he published a second book, Researches into the Early

History of Mankind and the Development of Civilization (1865). And six years later, after much

more work on these subjects, he published Primitive Culture (1871), a large twovolume study that

became the masterwork of his career and a landmark in the study of human civilization. This

important book not only appealed to a wide audience of general readers but also cast a spell over a

number of brilliant younger men who were to become Tylor’s enthusiastic disciples. Through their

further outstanding work, the systematic study of folklore and the newly developing science of

anthropology made great strides in the later years of the nineteenth century.3 Though it was not the

only such book, Primitive Culture served as a virtual bible for all those who were inspired by what

some called “Mr. Tylor’s science.”

Tylor too continued to work, and in 1884 was appointed by Oxford University to be its first reader

in the new field of anthropology. Later on he became its first professor in the discipline, enjoying a

long career that extended all the way to World War I. Even so, none of his later writing matched the

importance

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of Primitive Culture. Since this influential book presents his theory of animism in definitive form, it

is the natural centerpiece for our examination of Tylor’s

views.

Primitive Culture

BACKGROUND

The significance of Tylor’s work is best appreciated within its historical and religious context.

Primitive Culture was published in Victorian Britain at a time when thoughtfully religious people

were wrestling with more than a few disturbing challenges to their faith. Since the early years of the

century, a number of philosophers, historians, and naturalists in the field of geology found

themselves drawn to the idea of very long-term development both in nature and human society. To

some, the earth and human life were beginning to look far older than the mere 6000 years that

theologians had assigned to them from their readings in the biblical book of Genesis. The young

Tylor was well acquainted with these discussions and was strongly disposed to think in similar

terms.4 Then, in 1859, Charles Darwin published his famous Origin of Species, perhaps the most

important single book in science or any other field during the entire nineteenth century. The theory

of evolution by natural selection that he presented struck many as shockingly contrary to the

scriptures but irresistibly persuasive nonetheless. It was followed in 1871 by The Descent of Man, a

work just as controversial because of its startling thesis about the animal origins of the human race.

After the Origin the controversy over “evolution” was on almost everyone’s lips, and the idea of

development took an even stronger hold on Tylor’s thought. Moreover, while these disputes raged,

other thinkers were raising further troublesome questions about some of the most basic elements of

Christian religious belief, including the historical accuracy of the Bible, the reality of miracles, and

the divinity of Jesus Christ. Thus, when Primitive Culture appeared, with its new theory on the

origin of all religious belief systems including the Christian one, it seemed to send yet another

tremor of doubt through an already unsettled populace.

Tylor also drew upon new trends in research. He placed a pioneering emphasis on “ethnography”

and “ethnology.” These were the labels he and his associates gave to a distinctive new kind of

study: the description (ethnography: from the Greek grapho, “to write”) and scientific analysis

(ethnology: from the Greek logos, “study”), of an individual society, culture, or racial group (from

the Greek ethnos, a “nation” or “people”) in all of its many component parts. They also used the

term “anthropology,” the scientific study of mankind (from the Greek “anthropos, “man”). In

addition, as a

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personally nonreligious man, Tylor refused to settle any question by an appeal to the divine

authority of the church or the Bible.

Prior to Tylor’s day and still during much of his career, people of traditional views insisted that the

origin of the Christian religion, at least, had to be understood as something miraculous in character,

primarily because it had been revealed as such by God in the scriptures and affirmed in church

traditions. Over against this orthodox view, Christian scholars of liberal inclinations pursued a more

naturalistic understanding of things, but still in a manner quite supportive of traditional religious

beliefs. They were led by Friedrich Max Müller, the learned and eloquent German whom we met in

our opening pages.

Müller and Tylor shared the view that appeals to the supernatural should be left out of their

discussions, but they disagreed strongly on the value of Tylor’s ethnological research. Müller felt

that the key to religion, myth, and other aspects of culture lay in language. He and other students of

comparative philology (the forerunner of today’s linguistics) had shown that the forms of speech in

India and most of Europe belonged to a group of languages that originated with a single ancient

people known as Aryans.5 By comparing word parallels across these languages, they tried to show

that the thought patterns of all these “Indo-European” Aryans were largely the same, and that, in

this large portion of the human race, religion began when people reacted to the great and powerful

workings of nature. In awesome natural processes like the sunrise and sunset, these ancient Aryans

experienced a dim “perception of the infinite,” the sense of a single divinity behind the world.

Unfortunately, when they expressed this feeling in their prayers and poems, their speech betrayed

them. They personified things. The Greeks, for example, belong to the Aryan family; for them the

word “Apollo” once simply meant “sun” and “Daphne,” the “dawn.” Over time these simple

original meanings came to be forgotten; at the same time, because the words were nouns with either

masculine or feminine gender and because they were used with verbs expressing activity, the names

for these natural objects came gradually to suggest personal beings. As Müller put it in a clever

wordplay of his own, the nomina (Latin for “names”) became numina (Latin for “gods”). Instead of

recalling that every day the dawn fades as the sun rises, people began to tell fanciful tales of the

goddess Daphne dying in the arms of the god Apollo. Through this strange process, which Müller

called a “disease of language,” words meant to describe nature and hint at the infinite power behind

it degenerated into silly stories of many different gods, along with their misdeeds and often comical

misadventures. Instead of framing a pure, natural religion drawn from an inspired and beautiful

perception of the infinite, people succumbed to the absurd stories of mythology.

Tylor, who had little training in languages, thought a few of Müller’s ideas made sense and even

incorporated them into his own. But he strongly

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disagreed with Müller’s method of building a theory almost entirely on little more than language

habits and word derivations. One needed much more than mere verbal misunderstandings of events

like the sunrise to explain the beginnings of the complex systems of belief and ritual that go under

the name of religion—or even the tales of mythology, for that matter. One purpose of Primitive

Culture, accordingly, was to present Tylor’s decidedly different approach. Even without knowing

the language, he felt, it was far better to study a given culture in all of its component parts—to

explore the actual deeds, habits, ideas, and customs that language describes—than to make far-

fetched guesses based only on the analogies and origins of certain words. Ethnology was clearly

better than etymology.

AIMS AND ASSUMPTIONS

It was against this backdrop—of evolutionary ideas at odds with the Bible and ethnologists opposed

to philology—that Tylor introduced his book, announcing it in quite grand fashion as an attempt to

pursue a new “science of culture.” The proper subject of such an inquiry, he claimed, is not just

language, but the whole network of elements that go into the making of what is commonly called

human civilization. Ethnology assumes that any organized community or culture must be

understood as a whole—as a complex system made up of knowledge and beliefs, of art and morals,

tools and technology, language, laws, customs, legends, myths, and other components, all of which

fit themselves into a singular whole. Ethnology further requires that these complex systems be

explored scientifically. It tries to find patterns, or laws, of human culture and expects these laws to

be “as definite as those which govern the motion of waves” and “the growth of plants and

animals.”6 Like the chemist or biologist, the ethnologist gathers facts, classifies and compares them,

and searches for underlying principles to explain what has been found. Tylor was convinced,

moreover, that when this work is properly done, and when the whole span of the human past is

placed under observation, two great laws of culture come clearly into view. They are (1) the

principle of psychic unity, or uniformity, within the human race and (2) the pattern of intellectual

evolution, or improvement, over time.

With regard to the psychic unity of the race, Tylor maintained that throughout the world many

things done or said by human beings at different times and places quite obviously resemble each

other. Though it may be true that some of these likenesses have come from “diffusion”—from one

people managing to teach another its good ideas—it is more often the case that different people

discover the same ideas and invent the same customs quite independently. In other words, the

similarities are not coincidental; they

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demonstrate the fundamental uniformity of the human mind. Unlike the “racialists” of his day, who

saw fixed and unalterable differences separating various groups within the human race, Tylor and

his associates contended that all human beings are in essence the same, especially with regard to

their basic mental capacity. When in different cultures we observe very similar things, they may be

presumed to be products of a single, universal rationality. With respect to logic—that is, the

capacity to follow certain formal and necessary procedures of reasoning—humans of all places and

times are the same. For Tylor, as one observer has put it, “all the world is a single country.”7 But if

this is true (and here the second principle plays its role), then whenever variations do occur, they

cannot be evidence of a difference in kind, only of a difference in degree, or a change in the level of

development. When two societies are seen to diverge, it is because one must be higher and the other

lower on the scale of cultural evolution. Tylor thought evidence of these grades of development

could be found everywhere. Because in all cultures each generation learns from the last, he believed

he could trace through human history a long pattern of social and intellectual improvement, from

the first savages, who hunted and gathered their food, through the cultures of the ancient world and

the Middle Ages, which were based on farming, up to the modern era of trade, science, and

industry. In history, each generation improves upon the last by standing on its shoulders and starting

where the earlier has left off. In brief, Tylor believed firmly that the story of civilization told the tale

of “the ascent of man.”

THE DOCTRINE OF “SURVIVALS”

With his assumptions in place, Tylor proceeds to the evidence. We cannot speak of progress, he

says, without noticing in some cultures certain things that do not look progressive at all. If a London

physician prescribes surgery for an ailment while a doctor in a rural village advises bloodletting, we

can hardly say that all of modern English medicine is progressive. We must account also for what is

backward. Tylor chooses to do so by outlining his muchdiscussed “doctrine of survivals.”8 He notes

that not all cultures and not all things in any one culture evolve at the same pace. Some practices,

proper at a given time, linger long after the march of progress has passed them by. Among these are

curious pastimes, quaint customs, folklore, folk medicine, and assorted superstitions associated with

almost every conceivable sphere of human endeavor. For example, while no serious modern hunter

would still use a bow and arrow to kill game, the skills of archery are still with us; now a sport or

hobby, archery “survives” from a bygone age when gathering food was the central task of life.

Again, nothing is more common than for people

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everywhere to give a blessing after a sneeze; it seems trivial. Yet this was once a serious gesture,

associated with the belief that at that very moment a spirit, or demon, had come out of the body.

Today the blessing survives, but as a meaningless custom whose original intent has been long

forgotten. In many countries, people urge, strangely, that one should never try to save a drowning

person. Though to a modern view such advice may seem cruel and selfish, it was in earlier cultures

perfectly rational, for it was everywhere held that the river or sea, deprived of its almost captured

victim, would take revenge on the very person who made the rescue! Tylor observes that the record

of human history is filled with superstitions such as these, which perfectly illustrate the fact that

while the stream of social evolution is real and its current is strong, a trail of cultural “leftovers”

always floats in its wake.

If the principle of evolution shows why survivals exist, then it is the companion principle of

uniformity, says Tylor, which enables us to understand and explain them. Since—regardless of race,

language, or nationality—all human beings reason the same, we can always enter the minds of

people in other cultures, even though the level of their knowledge may have been very different

from our own. Modern primitives, like ancient peoples, know less than we do and fail to test their

opinions sufficiently, but Tylor is certain they still think with the same mental mechanism as ours.

So even amid great differences, the uniformity of mind unites the human race.

ASPECTS OF HUMAN CULTURE

For Tylor the connection between basic rational thinking and social evolution is apparent in all

aspects of a culture if we only take time to look at them closely enough. He furnishes as a prime

example the use of magic, which is common everywhere among primitive peoples. Magic is based

upon the association of ideas, a tendency which “lies at the very foundation of human reason.”9 If

somehow in thought people can connect one idea with another, then their logic moves them to

conclude that the same connection must also exist in reality. Primitive people believe that, even at a

distance, they can hurt or heal others just by acting on a fingernail, a lock of hair, a piece of

clothing, or anything else that has been in contact with their persons. Or they think that a symbolic

resemblance matters. Some tribal peoples imagine that because certain diseases tint the skin yellow

and because gold is of the same color, jaundice in the body can be cured with a golden ring. Others

who practice primitive agriculture have been known to torture human victims brutally in the belief

that their tears of pain will bring showers of rain to the fields. To us such actions may seem stupid

or cruel; to believers in magic, they are rational efforts to influence the world.

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Tylor finds the same pattern of rationality in two of humanity’s most basic and significant

accomplishments: the development of language and discovery of mathematics. In each case, the

process starts very simply, with single words that mimic the sounds of nature and with counting

systems based on fingers and toes. Then, through the centuries, these concepts are slowly built up to

produce the very complicated systems of speech and number that today we master even in

childhood and apply with ease in everyday affairs. Over the long span of history, Tylor explains,

this process has required countless trials and ended in many errors, but through them all the line of

progress makes itself visible. Even mythology, that storehouse of seemingly irrational ideas and

often comical stories, is in fact governed by a similar pattern of rational thinking. Myths arise from,

among other things, the natural tendency to “clothe every idea in a concrete shape, and whether

created by primitives of the remote past or those of modern times, they tend to follow orderly laws

of development.”10 Myths originate in the logical association of ideas. They account for the facts of

nature and life with the aid of analogies and comparisons, as when the Samoans recall the ancient

battle of the plantains and bananas to explain why the winners now grow upright while the losers

hang down their heads. In the same vein, a myth may connect suitable imaginary events to the lives

of legendary or historical figures; it may grow logically out of a play on words; or it may try,

through stories, to teach a moral lesson. In some cases— and here Tylor includes an idea of

Müller’s—myths arise under the influence of language, which has gender, and out of the natural

inclination to make analogies between human activities and processes in nature. If the noise of a

storm sounds like an angry human outburst and rainfall suggests tears of sorrow, it is easy to see

how, in myth, the great forces of the natural world lend themselves routinely to tales in which their

activities are made to look just like those of animals and human beings. Thus earthquakes are

attributed by the Scandinavians to the underground writhings of their god Loki, by the Greeks to the

struggles of Prometheus, and by Caribbean peoples to the dancing of Mother Earth. Though partly

works of the imagination, these personifications are just as clearly exercises in rational thought;

they are meant to be real explanations of how things happen. When primitives animate the sun,

moon, or stars, they honestly think of these objects as having personal characteristics.

THE ORIGIN OF RELIGION

Tylor’s comments on myth are important, for in his eyes they mark the path of inquiry that must

also be followed in searching for the origin of religion. He recognizes, of course, that we cannot

explain something unless we know what it is; so religion must first be defined. He further observes

that we

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cannot casually follow the natural impulse to describe religion simply as belief in God, though that

is what his mostly Christian readers might want to do. That approach would exclude a large portion

of the human race—people who are plainly religious but believe in more and other gods than do

Christians and Jews. He therefore proposes, as a more suitable place to start, his own minimal

definition: religion is “belief in spiritual beings.”11 This formula, which others, following Tylor,

have adopted as well, has the merit of being simple, straightforward, and suitably wide in scope. For

though we can find other similarities, Tylor feels the one characteristic shared by all religions, great

or small, ancient or modern, is the belief in spirits who think, act, and feel like human persons. The

essence of religion, like mythology, seems to be animism (from the Latin anima, meaning spirit)—

the belief in living, personal powers behind all things. Animism further is a very old form of

thought, which is found throughout the entire history of the human race. So, Tylor suggests, if we

truly wish to explain religion, the question we must answer is this: How and why did the human

race first come to believe that such things as spiritual beings actually exist?

Stating this question is easy; answering it is another matter. Devout people will want to say that

they believe in a spiritual being, such as God, because that being has actually spoken to them,

supernaturally, through the Bible or the Quran or some other scripture. For Tylor, however, as for

Müller, appeals to divine revelation are not acceptable. Such statements may be pleasing as personal

confessions, but they are not science. He insists that any account of how a human being, or the

whole human race, came to believe in spiritual beings must appeal only to natural causes, only to

considerations of the kind that scientists and historians would use in explaining an occurrence of

any sort, nonreligious as well as religious. We must presume, he says, that early peoples acquired

their first religious ideas through the same reasoning mechanisms they employed in all other aspects

of their lives. Like us, they undoubtedly observed the world at work and then tried to explain it.

What observations, then, did these primitives make? And what explanations did they choose? Tylor

at this point peers backward, deep into prehistoric times, to reconstruct the thoughts of the very first

human beings:

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 a difference between a living body and a dead one; what causes

waking, sleep, trance, disease, death? In the second place, what are those

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,

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a life and a phantom as being its image or second self; both, also, are perceived to be things

separable from the body.… The second step would seem also easy

for savages to make, seeing how extremely difficult civilized men have found

it to unmake. It is merely to combine the life and the phantom. … the result is

that well-known conception … the personal soul, or spirit.12

From their vivid encounters with both death and dreams, in other words, early peoples reasoned

first to a simple theory of their own lives: every human being is animated by a soul, or spiritual

principle. They thought of this soul as “a thin, unsubstantial human image, in its nature a sort of

vapour, film, or shadow; the cause of life and thought in the individual it animates.”13 From this

premise, they then reasoned, as we all do, by analogy and extension. If the concept of a soul

explains the movements, activities, and changes of the human person, why should it not also be

applied more widely to explain the rest of the natural world? Why should not plants and trees, the

rivers, winds, and animals, even the stars and planets also be moved by souls? Further, since souls

are separable from the objects they animate, why may there not also be, behind the visible scene of

nature, beings who do not even need to be connected to physical objects—why not spirits, pure and

simple? If there are souls in humans, could there not actually be such powerful beings as demons

and angels who have no necessary attachment to normal physical objects, though they certainly can

enter and “possess” them if they wish? Last, and above all, could there not perhaps be certain

supreme spirits, the beings we call gods?

Through this natural, almost childlike chain of reasoning, says Tylor, early humans arrived at their

first religious beliefs. Like their myths, their religious teachings arose from a rational effort to

explain how nature worked as it did. And from this perspective, all seemed quite clear: as souls

animate persons, so spirits must animate the world.

Tylor further argues that the value of this animistic theory to primitive peoples is apparent from the

great variety of early beliefs and customs it can readily explain. Doctrines of a future life provide an

example. In Oriental cultures there is widespread belief in reincarnation, while in religions of the

Western world, like Christianity and Islam, there are the doctrines of resurrection and immortality

of the soul. All of these can be understood, in animist terms, as ways of extending the life of the

soul beyond the time of death. Being separable from the flesh, the soul has an afterlife and destiny

of its own. Animism also explains why sacred objects and trinkets—things called “fetishes”—are

important to primitives. Such people are not “idol-worshippers,” as narrowminded Christian

missionaries used to describe them. They do not worship sticks and stones; they adore the “anima”

within, the spirit which—not wholly unlike the god of Christians themselves—gives the wood of

the stick

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or substance of the stone its life and power. Knowing the nature of animism, we can also make

sense of tribal medicine. When a man shakes uncontrollably with fever, he knows that he does not

make himself do this; he believes he is “possessed” by a demon within. To be cured, he needs not a

medicine but an exorcism. The evil spirit must be driven out of his body.

Throughout most of the entire second volume of Primitive Culture, Tylor provides detailed

demonstrations to show just how far-reaching was the doctrine of animism in the earlier centuries of

human civilization. He describes it as a system that spread worldwide, becoming the first “general

philosophy of man and nature” ever devised.14 Moreover, as it was absorbed by a tribe or clan or

culture, it spread into every aspect of daily life. If one asks why, across almost all cultures, the gods

have human personalities, the answer is that they are spirits modeled on the souls of human persons.

If we want to know why gifts are given to the dead at primitive funerals and why the services,

especially for great and powerful men, sometimes even include human sacrifice, animism gives the

answers. The gifts provide support for the soul in its new residence beyond the grave; the sacrifices

furnish the king or prince with the souls of servants to wait upon him in the realm of death, just as

they did in life. Why do the Indians of America talk to animals as they would to each other?

Because, like themselves, animals are owners of souls. Why does the water move, or the tree grow?

Because nature spirits inhabit them. Why does the medicine man fast or use drugs? To qualify

himself “for intercourse with the … ghosts, from whom he is to obtain direction in his craft.”15

In this systematic, sequential fashion, with scores of examples at his disposal, Tylor proceeds

through the whole range of primitive life, thought, and custom. At each point he shows how the

doctrine of animism makes sense of ideas and behaviors that otherwise would strike us as nothing

more than irrational and incomprehensible nonsense.

THE GROWTH OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT

Tylor further explains that once these spiritual ideas acquired their grip on the minds of ancient

peoples, they did not remain in a fixed form. Like everything else in history, animism also follows a

pattern of growth and development. At first people think of individual spirits as small and specific,

associated with each tree, river, or animal they happen to see. Later on, their power begins to widen.

Gradually, in tribal thought, the spirit of one tree grows in power to become the spirit of the forest

or of trees in general. Over time, that same spirit also comes to be thought of as more and more

separable from the object it controls; it acquires its own identity and character. At this stage, when

people worship a goddess of the forest, they recognize that the

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woodlands are her home, but they know she can also leave this home if she wishes. Among the very

earliest Greeks, for example, Poseidon was at first simply the spirit of the “divine sea”; later he

acquired his trident, beard, and distinctive character, so that by the time of the poet Homer, he had

become a mighty and personal deity who could leave the sea and travel swiftly to Mount Olympus

when Zeus assembled the gods in council.

Interestingly, Tylor approaches this later growth of a belief in the personal gods of mythology much

the way Max Müller does, though he refuses to see it as arising from some unfortunate “disease of

language.” In the animistic view, the more complex polytheism that we see among the Greeks

belongs to an age of cultural progress rather than decline. In ancient Greece, from about the time of

Homer forward, a new era of civilization—Tylor calls it the “barbaric” stage— takes over from the

earlier “savage” stage. In the savage era, people hunted, gathered, lived in simple villages, and

never got beyond their first simple ideas of spirits. With the coming of the barbaric age, we find

agriculture, cities, and literacy—all the main elements of the great civilizations built by the

Babylonians, Greeks and Romans, the Aztecs, Hindus, and Chinese. In these “higher” cultures,

there are divisions of labor and complex structures of power and authority, and their religions show

the same characteristics. We find the spirits of local trees and rivers on one level, while above them

stand the much greater spirits of the wind, rain, and sun. The local spirit of the river can do nothing

about it if the god of the sun should decide to bake dry the streams that feed him or the goddess of

rain should choose to transform him into a raging flood. Just as a king and council of nobles rule

their subjects, so the sun (or heaven) as king and the earth as queen rule the natural world with the

wind, rain, and seasons as their powerful agents or advisers.

Such complex polytheistic systems are quite typical of the barbaric age. They reach their highest

form, however, when they are organized in such a way that one god, one supreme being, stands at

the top of the divine society. And gradually, by different paths, most civilizations do move to this

last, highest stage of animism—belief in one supreme divinity. Needless to say, Judaism and

Christianity are the leading examples of the last stage. They form the logical end to the process of

development that began centuries ago, in the dark mists of prehistory, when the man whom Tylor

calls the first “savage philosopher” concluded that souls just like his own must animate all of the

world around him.

THE DECLINE OF ANIMISM AND PROGRESS OF THOUGHT

In one sense, Tylor declares, the story of animism is an encouraging one. Religion can be seen to

have gradually evolved upward from the first primitive belief

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in the spirits of the trees and rocks to the later high plain of monotheism and ethics exhibited in the

Judaism and Christianity of the present day. Higher civilization seems to correlate with “higher

religions.” But that is not the whole of the story. A clear-eyed look at animism and its history in the

dry light of science actually suggests a less cheerful view. Whatever progress we find has been

severely limited, and for a simple reason. However great its spread and wide its appeal through

history, we cannot forget that animism at bottom is a grand mistake. As any thoughtful modern

inquirer knows, the world is not animated by invisible spirits. As any modern geologist can tell us,

rocks do not have phantoms within them. As any botanist can explain, plants are not moved to grow

by some secret anima in their stem. Science has shown that the real sun and sea owe nothing to the

adventures of Apollo and Poseidon, that plants grow by the reactions of chemicals within their

fibers, and that the wind and water are only names for powerful flows of molecules governed by

iron laws of cause and effect.

In its time, Tylor concedes, the animist explanation of things was reasonable enough. But the better

methods of today’s science show us that the reasoning of early peoples has always had its element

of unreason as well. Though they can think rationally, one must also remember that primitives think

rationally only as children do. Savages, Tylor reminds his readers, are

exceedingly ignorant as regards both physical and mental knowledge; want of

discipline makes their opinions crude and their action ineffective. … the

tyranny of tradition at every step imposes upon them. … much of what they

believe to be true, must be set down as false.16

It follows from this that whereas the course of reason once led people naturally toward the system

of animism, in the modern era, the age of science, that same course of reason ought now to lead

away from it. Intellectual progress in the present day must be measured by an opposite movement—

the retreat of animist theory from all of those very realms of life it was once thought to explain.

Gradually, but nonetheless certainly, Tylor concludes, the falsehoods of savage and barbaric

peoples must withdraw before the spreading truth of the sciences. In sphere after sphere of nature,

animist spirits and deities must now give way to modern science’s impersonal causes and effects. In

the modern era, religion’s growth, like that of its close friends magic and myth, “has been checked

by science, it is dying of weights and measures, of proportions and specimens.”17 Today we truly

understand our world only to the degree that we can pull ourselves away from animism’s powerful

but misguided embrace. A few of its ethical principles may linger as still useful, but its gods must

die and disappear.