Religion

NineTheoriesofReligionbyDanielL.Palsz-lib.org

The topic is based on chapter 7 in the book Nine theories of Religion by Daniel L Pals This is what my instructor says: Students are to write a 6-8 page summary paper on one of the chapters in Nine Theories of Religion by Daniel L. Pals. A brief introduction of the religious scholar from the chapter should begin the paper. The student will then share the most important aspects of the scholar’s work. The most successful paper will engage the arguments in the chapter with response statements from the student. In other words, say where you agree and where you disagree with the author and recount why you either agree or disagree. The style of paper is APA format times new romans 12 font, numbered pages top right hand corner. Please reference the book and chapter 7 in the paper. I have attached the book here and only chapter seven is to be used for the paper 

NINE THEORIES
OF RELIGION
Qt
THIRD EDITION
Daniel L. Pals
University of Miami
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Library of Congress Cataloging—in—Publication Data
Pals, Daniel L.
[Eight theories of religion]
Nine theories of religion / Daniel L. Pals, University of Miami.—Third Edition.
pages cm
Rev. ed. of: Eight theories of religion. 2006.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0—19-985909-2
l. Religion—Study and teaching—History. I. Title.
BL41.P36 2014
200.7—dc23
2014003980
Printing number:9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

To the memory of my father, Herbert H. Pals (1916—2004).
Filiis caritatem maiorem posset nullus pater habere.

10.
CONTENTS
Preface vii
Introduction 1
Animism and Magic 15
E. B. TYLOR AND J. G. FRAZER
Religion and Personality 49
SIGMUND FREUD
Society as Sacred 8]
EMILE DURKHEIM
Religion as Alienation 113
KARL MARX
A Source of Social Action 143
MAX WEBER
The Verdict of Religious Experience 185
WILLIAM JAMES
The Reality of the Sacred 227
MIRCEA ELIADE
Society’s “Construct of the Heart” 263
E. E. EVANS-PRITCHARD
Religion as Cultural System 293
CLIFFORD GEERTZ
Conclusion 325
Index 353

PREFACE
It is gratifying, certainly, to find that interest in this book—sustained by the
choices of fellow scholars and teachers, as well as the (good, one would hope)
reading experiences of their students—has persisted over an interval of
almost two decades. The self-referential side of me wants to compliment them
on their good taste in authors, but the truth clearly points elsewhere—to the
wisdom in their choice of subjects. For in my View, and I presume theirs as
well, there is no better way to be tutored into a field of inquiry than to engage
its most impressive analyses and arguments as offered by its classic figures:
the theorists whose ideas and interpretations have set the original terms of
debate, defined the primary borders of the subject, and offered the paradigms
that all who follow them must in one way or another engage, endorse, amend,
or challenge. Seven Theories of Religion took shape initially as a venture of
that kind; it sought to introduce the classic theorists of religion and their inter-
pretations in accessible summary form and nonspecialized language, accom-
panied by some measure of analysis and critique. When the book went to a
second edition, initiated by Oxford’s Senior Editor Robert Miller, it was
agreed that the great German sociologist Max Weber ought to be brought into
the mix, so a chapter on Weber was added. The incorporation of that addition,
along with a concluding chapter looking forward to more contemporary
developments, led to the publication of the second edition, as Eight Theories
ofReligion, in 2006.
Eight years have passed since then, and in the last several of those years
Robert Miller orchestrated a new set of outside reviews to see whether
another edition should appear, and if so, what changes should be made. As
always, opinions differed, but the reviewers’ thoughtful commentaries led
me to conclude—and Robert to concur—that among the classic early theo—
rists of religion, the voice of the American William James ought also to be
heard. Recognized in his day as the patriarch of both scientific psychology
and philosophical pragmatism in American universities, James established
vii

viii Preface
himself at the turn of the twentieth century as one of the nation’s foremost
intellectuals. In both psychology and philosophy he broke new ground, while
at the same time the paths of his inquiries turned him inevitably toward what
was his one lifelong interest: the claims and values of religion. In consequence,
James’s enviable legacy as a psychologist and philosopher has come to be
rivaled—some would even say, surpassed—by his achievement in the study
and theory of religion, where his pragmatic perspective culminated in the
book that well deserves its reputation as a theoretical and empirical Classic:
The Varieties ofReligious Experience, a capstone effort work that emerged from
the celebrated Gifford Lectures he delivered at the University of Edinburgh
in 1901—02.
NEW TO THIS EDITION
The addition of a Chapter on William James is the one major change in this
third edition of the book, which now becomes Nine Theories of Religion. As
will become clear, the views James developed as a psychologist of religion
offer a counterpoint to those of Sigmund Freud; further, they envision psy-
chology as ranging well beyond the province of psychoanalysis. Consequently,
consideration of James serves also to bring some balance into the book’s por-
trayal of the psychology of religion, which was somewhat skewed in the text
of the previous editions, where Freud stands alone as representative of the
discipline. In meeting James we meet the psychology of religion pursued
along lines very different from Freud’s. But in another sense we also meet a
welcome similarity. For in James, as in Freud, we encounter another of those
agile, ambitious, and inventive minds that made the decades before and
after the turn of the twentieth century so intellectually vibrant and fiercely
contentious. That in itself should make the new pages given to him worthy of
attention.
Beyond the new chapter, there are only minor changes and additions. Small
edits, elisions, or amplifications have been made throughout the book to
(1) include relevant comparisons and references to James in the existing chap-
ters, most often in the sections centered on analysis and critique; (2) achieve
greater economy of expression, and thereby slightly reduce chapter length
throughout; and (3) secure greater precision and clarity of exposition where
needed. Because certain useful studies and several major new biographies—
notably of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber—have appeared since Eight Theories
was published, I have also made some updates to the “Suggestions for Further
Reading” noted at the end of each chapter.

Preface ix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks need again to be extended to Oxford University Press, and especially
Robert Miller, for the editorial patience shown, especially as administrative
duties at the University of Miami kept putting me off the hours I could have
been spending with James, and thus delaying the new chapter “yet another
year” until now. I want also personally to thank Oxford Associate Editor
Kristin Maffei and Editorial Assistant Kaitlin Coats for their diligence and
hard work—invariably underappreciated—in bringing this new edition into
final form. The same must be said to Ms. Bev Kraus and her colleague
Ms. Wendy Walker, whose careful attention to detail, and keen eye for my
slips and errors, did so much to make light the tedious labors of copyediting
associated with this new edition. In Miami my longtime colleague—and
authority on religious conversion—David Kling has again provided both a
close critical reading and his characteristically wise conceptual assessment,
of the new chapter. Of course no one has been more patient, or, when impa-
tience was needed, put me more regularly and rightly in my place, than the
two lodestars of my life: my wife Phyllis and daughter Katharine. For them,
as before and ever, no measure of thanks is measure enough.

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 learn-
ing, and this one was no exception, though as it happened he had also become
very English. His name was Friedrich Max Mijller. 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, took a
proper English wife, and managed to acquire a position at the University. Miiller
was admired for his knowledge of Sanskrit, the language of early India, but he
also acquired a mastery of English, which he employed with admirable skill in
popular Writings on language and mythology that appealed widely to Victorian
readers. On this occasion, however, he proposed a different subject: he wished to
promote “the science of religion.”
Those words in that sequence doubtless struck some in Muller’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 quite curious combination. How could the age-old
certainties of faith ever mix with a program of study devoted to experiment,
revision, and change? How could these two apparently mortal enemies meet
without one destroying the other? These were understandable concerns, but
Miiller was of a different mind: he was quite certain that the two enterprises
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 later published as an
Introduction to the Science of Religion (1873), was designed to prove just that
point. He reminded his listeners that the words of the poet Goethe on language
could also be applied to religion: “He who knows one, knows none.”l 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 others false, the time had come to take a less partisan
approach, seeking out those elements, patterns, and principles that could be

2 Nine Theories of Religion
found uniformly in the religions of all times and places. Much could be gained
by proceeding as a good scientist, by gathering various facts—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 Muller’s view,
“and whoever knows it and its history, knows all.”2 He added, with more than
a trace of disdain, that it was pointless to go to the Indians or the Chinese, still
less the Africans or Papuans: Christian civilization alone was destined to
endure, so there was little need to bother. Harnack was unusually blunt, but his
view itself was not unusual. There was a fairly wide consensus among theolo-
gians and historians across Europe that Christian ideals and values, which
formed the spiritual center of the West, expréSsed 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. None of this
could discourage Muller, however: he was confident that serious study would
show how certain shared spiritual intuitions link the sages of Asia and other
distant lands to the saints and martyrs of the Church.
Ancient Theories
Muller’s program may have been unwelcome to some 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 BCE) 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 at least the beginning
of a general theory of religion. So was the writer Euhemerus (330—260 BCE)
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 BCE) was a thoroughly systematic
student of the customs and beliefs of as many tribes and races as his travels led

Introduction 3
him to encounter. Some Stoic philosophers accounted for the gods as person-
ifications 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
These philosophers 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. Both 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 ritu-
als, 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. As this God alone was real and all others were mere figments of the
human imagination, there was little about religion that needed either compar—
ison or explanation. The people of Israel were to trust in Yahweh, who 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 were victims of
the great deceiver Satan—their souls destined to pay a bitter eternal price 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 occa-
sional 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 chil-
dren of darkness. The beauty and truth of God’s revelation explained the faith
of Christendom; the machinations of the Devil and his hosts 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
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, mis-
sionaries, and adventurers to the New World and to the Orient brought

4 Nine Theories ofReligion
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 en-
gagement. Their aim was to bring “heathen nations” to Christ, and so they
certainly did. Many were converted, but the process also brought surprises.
When the scholarly Jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552—1610) took residence at the court of
the emperor in China, the missionary very nearly became the convert. The
Chinese, Ricci discovered, had a real civilization, with art, ethics, and litera-
ture. 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
the Hindu sages captured his imagination; he studied the sacred books so inten—
sively that he became known as “the white Brahmin.” Still other missionaries,
at work in the New World, discovered something like belief in a Supreme
Being among America’s “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 just might be premature. China’s Confucians may
not have known 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 might have admired it.
At the very same moment that these contacts were being made, the Christian
civilization that the Prince of Peace presumably had established found itself
plunged into bloody and violent turmoil. Led by Martin Luther in Germany
and John Calvin in Switzerland and France, the new Protestant movements of
Northern Europe challenged the power of the Church and rejected its interpre-
tations 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 more of different religious sects that began to
appear in once-unified Christendom. Amid the religious storms and political
struggles that gripped the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is no surprise
that concerned believers on all sides grew less certain that they alone held God’s
final truth in their hands. The deadly, destructive wars of religion, which per-
sisted for more than a hundred years in some lands, led people to believe that
the truth about religion 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 simpler and more universal framework of
belief and values that could be shared across the borders of confessions.5

Introduction 5
The Enlightenment and Natural Religion
It was this quest for a shared, simpler religion, set against the bloody back-
ground of the previous era, that inSpired thinkers of the eighteenth century, the
Age of Enlightenment. They embarked on a mission that led them to the idea
of a true 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, and 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 circle, who saw themselves as voices of reason, endorsed the idea of a
universal, natural religion. They affirmed belief in a Creator God who made
the world and then left it to its own natural laws, instituted a parallel set of moral
laws to guide the conduct of humanity, and offered 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 peeples—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 conflict and confu—
sion. Whatever the different beliefs of the various Christian sects, the rituals of
native Americans, the ancestral rites of the Chinese, or the teachings of the
Hindu sages, all could ultimately be traced back to the natural religion of the
first human beings and then followed forward as that ancient wisdom was grad—
ually transformed and dispersed into its modern versions and variations. China
especially offered proof of this point. As trading ships from the Orient began
to return regularly in the 17003, fascination attended all forms of chinoiserie.
Fabrics, spices, porcelains, teas, and furnishings gave evidence of China’s civil-
ity and elegance, its prosperity, deference, and piety, all plainly acquired without
any help from the Bible. These graces, and the ethics of Confucius especially,
displayed the virtues of natural religion.
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

6 Nine Theories of Religion
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, confessions, sacraments,
saints, and sacred texts in a language few 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‘iwas
natural and primeval—the one universal faith of humanity long before it had
been corrupted by churches, dogmas, and clerics. Moreover, 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
physicist 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. Faithful 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 Vicornte de Chateaubriand, whose book The Genius
of Christianity (1802) Savors the beauty and history of old 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 Muller and others. As a thinker, Muller 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 above and “the moral law within.” As a personality, however,
Mijller was a Romantic. His young life overlapped the later years of Chateau-
briand, and though he was a German Protestant rather 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
Muller and others like him with both a motive and rationale for the study of all

Introduction 7
religions. They believed that it was possible to find the root impulse 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. Muller 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 imag-
ined, largely because of great advances made in the study of archaeology, his-
tory, language, and mythology, complemented by the newfound disciplines of
ethnology and anthropology.7 In addition to his knowledge of the Vedas and
mythology, Muller 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 first decades of the nineteenth century had made significant discoveries
about early stages of human civilization; historians had pioneered new critical
methods for studying ancient texts; students of folklore were gathering infor-
mation on the customs and tales of Europe’s peasants; and the first anthropolo-
gists could 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 belief systems
arose and what purposes they served.
By the middle decades of the 18003, then, a small circle mainly of French,
German, and British scholars felt that both the methods and materials were on
hand to leave speculation behind and offer instead systematic theories about
religion’s origins that could claim the authority of science. Not only in Muller’s
lectures but in other writings of the time as well, we can notice an optimism, an
energy, and confidence about the tasks ahead. The aim was not just to guess about
origins, 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 frame generalizations that could be 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. Miiller 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 more brightly if it
were explained in the context of other religions. As we shall soon see, E. B. Tylor,

8 Nine Theories ofReligion
Muller’s contemporary and critic, took a different view, convinced that his
scientific inquiry gave support to his personal stance of agnostic skepticism.
Both, however, believed that a theory of religion could be developed from a
common ground of objective facts that would provide 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 hesita-
tion 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
who occupy center stage in this book) would later need to address.8
When we look back on it from the perspective of the present day, this hope
of forming a single theory of all religions somewhat astonishes by its vaulting
ambition. We are inclined now 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 more difficult than many
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, spur new inquiry
or reformulate issues in such a way as to promote fruitful new understandings.
Thus, even if most of what they say were found to be in error, the theorists who
appear in these pages would still deserve our time and attention. Their ideas
and interpretations are original. Further, they diffuse themselves beyond the
sphere of religion to affect our literature, philosophy, history, politics, art, psy-
chology, 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 well over a
hundred years old? Would they today recognize the name of either the author
or his once-revered book? Who among those who claim that science replaces

Introduction 9
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 insti-
tutional influence on the study of religion in the American academy over the
past half century has been remarkably widespread? How many know the role
that anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard has played in philosophical debates
over rationality and relativism? How readily can people who refer to the
Protestant work ethic in everyday conversation identify German sociologist
Max Weber, who first defined it? The views associated with the leading radical
thinkers, especially Marx and Freud, tend to be better known, of course, but
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 firm
grasp of the assumptions, evidence, and logic to be found in them. One service
this book can render is to help readers relatively new to this subject avoid
making just that mistake.
Nine Theories
The following chapters consider nine 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.
Principle of Selection
Out of a number of theories that might have been chosen for the purpose, this
book selects those that have exercised a shaping influence not only on religion
but on the whole intellectual culture of the twentieth century. The representa—
tive spokesmen for each are: (1) E. B. Tylor and James Frazer, (2) Sigmund
Freud, (3) Emile Durkheim, (4) Karl Marx, (5) Max Weber, (6),-William James,
(7) Mircea Eliade, (8) E. E. Evans—Pritchard, and (9) Clifford Geertz. Knowl-
edgeable readers will notice at once that several highly regarded figures, in—
cluding the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and even Max Muller 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,

8 Nine Theories of Religion
Muller’s contemporary and critic, took a different view, convinced that his
scientific inquiry gave support to his personal stance of agnostic skepticism.
Both, however, believed that a theory of religion could be developed from a
common ground of objective facts that would provide 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 hesita—
tion 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
who occupy center stage in this book) would later need to address.8
When we look back on it from the perspective of the present day, this hope
of forming a single theory of all religions somewhat astonishes by its vaulting
ambition. We are inclined now 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—0f 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 more difficult than many
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, spur new inquiry
or reformulate issues in such a way as to promote fruitful new understandings.
Thus, even if most of what they say were found to be in error, the theorists who
appear in these pages would still deserve our time and attention. Their ideas
and interpretations are original. Further, they diffuse themselves beyond the
sphere of religion to affect our literature, phi1050phy, history, politics, art, psy-
chology, 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 well over a
hundred years old? Would they today recognize the name of either the author
or his once-revered book? Who among those who claim that science replaces

Introduction 9
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 insti-
tutional influence on the study of religion in the American academy over the
past half century has been remarkably widespread? How many know the role
that anthrop010gist E. E. Evans-Pritchard has played in philosoPhical debates
over rationality and relativism? How readily can people who refer to the
Protestant work ethic in everyday conversation identify German sociologist
Max Weber, who first defined it? The views associated with the leading radical
thinkers, especially Marx and Freud, tend to be better known, of course, but
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 firm
grasp of the assumptions, evidence, and logic to be found in them. One service
this book can render is to help readers relatively new to this subject avoid
making just that mistake.
Nine Theories
The following chapters consider nine 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.
Principle of Selection
Out of a number of theories that might have been chosen for the purpose, this
book selects those that have exercised a shaping influence not only on religion
but on the whole intellectual culture of the twentieth century. The representa-
tive spokesmen for each are: (1) E. B. Tylor and James Frazer, (2) Sigmund
Freud, (3) Emile Durkheim, (4) Karl Marx, (5) Max Weber, (6) William James,
(7) Mircea Eliade, (8) E. E. Evans-Pritchard, and (9) Clifford Geertz. Knowl-
edgeable readers will notice at once that several highly regarded figures, in-
cluding the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung and even Max Muller 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,

10 Nine Theories of Religion
Max Muller has been left aside because his own theory 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 8, 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 psycho-
logical research. For just that reason, however, he offers a somewhat less rigor—
ously 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 right choice. The better theorist to place in this text along
with Freud is the American William James, now considered in Chapter 6. In
addition to taking a position on religion quite different from Freud’s, he illus—
trates well how in its early decades psychology was much more than psycho-
analysis. In the end any book must have limits, and some choices may well
appear to some readers more arbitrary than astute. The important thing is to
grasp that these classic theorists offer models of how some—admittedly not
all—0f the most influential interpretations of religion have made their mark
over the past century and more.
Definition of Terms
Before we begin, some comment is 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 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. It answers the 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 under-
standings of general terms such as “religion” and “theory” are indispensable

Introduction 1 1
for a book such as this—not only at the starting point, but to offer guideposts
as 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 cer—
tain people such as Buddhists, who worship no God, or for specific groups such
as some Jews, who think of their faith chiefly as a matter of activities rather
than beliefs. To accommodate such instances, which clearly belong to the
sphere of religion, a theorist might better follow the path chosen by Durkheim
and Eliade, who both 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 common—
sense approach. They define religion in terms of the beliefs or the ideas that
religious people affirm. Others think this approach just too restrictive and offer
instead a more functional definition. They leave the content, the ideas, of reli—
gion 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 psycho-
logically or for a group socially. Less concerned with the 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 issue 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
one moves into the actual business of explaining, the more complex it becomes.
Two brief illustrations can show why. 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 his-
torical origin—how, at a known 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

12 Nine Theories of Religion
theory, it is important to know what kind of origin it is seeking and what con-
nection one type of origin may have with the other types.
The second case has already been partly noticed: 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 some-
times described as interpretive rather than explanatory in their approach. Reli-
gions, they contend, are adopted by persons and are about things that have
meaning to human beings; accordingly, interpretations, which take account of
conscious 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 pro-
cesses rather than to humanly meaningful purposes. Functional theorists, by con-
trast, 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 psycho-
logical pressures are the real causes of religious behavior. Whether they are indi-
vidual, 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 serve
notice that with theories of religion, no less than with definitions, the seemingly
simple often masks the deceptively complex.
In the chapters to follow, we will attend to the definitions as well as the
explanations advanced by our theorists, taking note 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 suggest a pattern. After starting with the classic
intellectualist theories of Tylor and Frazer, we move next to explanatory ap-
proaches, tracing the lines of psychological, social, and economic functionalism
through Freud, Durkheim, and Marx, reSpectively. We then turn to Weber and
James, who offer qualified departures functionalist theories, and to Eliade, who
strikes a more assertive protest against their explanatory reductionism. We
finish with the more recent theories of Evans-Pritchard and Geertz, both of

Introduction 1 3
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 Muller, lectures on the Science ofReligion (New York: Charles Scribner and
Company, 1872), p. 11. This was also published under the title Introduction to the Science
ofReligion. On Muller’s interesting life, see Nirad Chaudhuri, Scholar Extraordinary: The
Life ofProfessor the Rt. Hon. Friedrich Max Miiller (London: Chatto & Windus, 1974).
2. Cited in Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer, “The Economic Ethics of the World Religions,”
in Hartmut Lehmann 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, CT: Yale University
Press, 1987), pp. 3—20.
6. On early Deism and later skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment, see the discus—
sions 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. 31 1—3 15; J. W. Burrow, Evolution and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge 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 anthropo-
logical 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. Sega]: Religion and the Social Sciences:
Essays on the Confrontation (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989) and Explaining and Inter-
preting Religion: Essays on the Issue (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1992).
Suggestions for Further Reading
Bellah, Robert. Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic t0 the Axial Age.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 201 1 . The last major effort of an eminent
American sociologist, this ambitious survey engages the difficult, seldom-ventured
task of reconstructing the early history of religion—from human beginnings through
the great civilizations of antiquity.

14 Nine Theories of Religion
Chaudhun’, Nirad C. Scholar Extraordinary: The Life of Professor the Rt. Hon. Friedrich
Max Muller. London: Chatto & Windus, 1974. A detailed study, by a native Indian
scholar, of the life and some consideration of the theories of Friedrich Max Muller.
Eliade, Mircea, Editor in Chief. The Macmillan Encyclopedia of Religion. New York:
Macmillan, 1987. At present the most useful and comprehensive English-language
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 study that shows
how the thinkers and ideas of the Enlightenment in England contributed to the
rise of the scientific study of religion.
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 ofNostalgia. 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.
Preus, J. Samuel. Explaining Religion: Criticism and Theory from Bodin to Freud. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987. A much-praised study that follows the
history of thinking about religion over most of the past three centuries.
Sega], Robert A. Religion and the Social Sciences: Essays on the Confrontation. Brown
Studies in Religion, no. 8. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989. Incisive essays by a
keenly analytical 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.
Van den Bosch, Lourens. Friedrich Max Miiller: A Life Devoted to the Humanities.
Numen Book Series 94. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2002. This recent in—depth study is
now the definitive account of Muller’s life and work.

1
Animism and Magic:
E. B. Tylor and J. G. Frazer
Are the forces which govern the world conscious and personal, or uncon-
scious 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 de-
termined, not by the passions or caprice of personal beings, but by the
operation of immutable laws acting mechanically.
James Frazer, The Golden Bough’
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 dif—
fering 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, or
15

16 Nine Theories of Religion
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 18005
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 a strong distaste for traditional
Christianity, especially Roman Catholicism.
Because both of Tylor’s parents died when he was a young man, he planned
to assist in managing 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 to 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 in a book entitled
Anahuac: 0r Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient and Modern (1861). On his
journeys, Tylor also met a fellow Quaker, the archaeologist Henry Christy,
who sparked his interest in 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 pres-
ent day. Soon he published a second book, Researches into the Early History
of Mankind and the Development of Civilization (1865). Six years later, after
much more work on these subjects, he published Primitive Culture (1871),
a large two-volume 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 who were inspired by
what was called “Mr. Tylor’s science.”
Tylor continued his work, and in 1884 was appointed Oxford University’s
first reader in the new field of anthropology. Later on he became its first profes-
sor in the discipline, enjoying a long career that extended all the way to World
War 1. Even so, none of his later writing matched the importance 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.

Animism and Magic: E. B. Tylor and J. G. Frazer 17
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 6,000 years that theologians had computed from their
readings in the biblical book of Genesis. The young Tylor was acquainted with
these discussions and 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. His theory of evolution by natural selection struck many as 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 contro-
versy over “evolution” was on almost everyone’s lips, and the idea of deve10p-
ment 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 belief, including the his-
torical accuracy of the Bible, the reality of miracles, and the divinity of 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 empha-
sis on “ethnography” and “ethnology.” These were the labels he and his associ-
ates 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 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 under-
stood as something miraculous in character, primarily because it had been
revealed as such by God in the scriptures and affirmed in Church traditions.

18 Nine Theories of Religion
Over against this orthodox view, Christian scholars of liberal inclinations pur—
sued a more naturalistic understanding of things, but still in a manner quite sup-
portive of traditional religious beliefs. They were led by Friedrich Max Miiller,
the learned and eloquent German whom we met in our opening pages.
Miiller 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. Muller felt that the key to religion, myth, and other as-
pects 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 singular 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; further, 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 ob-
jects came gradually to suggest personal beings. As Mijller put it in a clever
wordplay of his own, the nomina (Latin for “names”) became numina (Latin
for “gods”). Instead of noticing that every day as the dawn fades the sun rises,
people began to tell fanciful tales of the goddess Daphne dying in the arms of
the god Apollo. Through this process, which Miiller called a “disease of lan-
guage,” 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 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 Muller’s ideas
made sense and even incorporated them into his own. But he strongly dis—
agreed with Miiller’s method of building a theory almost entirely on little more
than language habits and word derivations. One needed 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

Animism and Magic: E. B. Tylor and J. G. Frazer 19
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, announc-
ing 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 network made up
of knowledge and beliefs, of art and morals, tools and technology, language,
laws, customs, legends, myths, and other components, all fused into a unitary
system. Ethnology 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 ethnolo-
gist gathers facts, classifies and compares them, and searches for underlying
principles to explain what has been found. Tylor was further convinced 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 (l) 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 psychic unity, 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 some of these likenesses may 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 similari-
ties are not coincidental; they 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 as-
sociates 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

20 Nine Theories of Religion
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 socie-
ties 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 devel-
opment 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,
civilization tells the story 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 ail-
ment 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 does so by outlining his much-discussed “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, fitting in their day, linger long after
the march of progress has passed them by. Among these are curious pastimes,
quaint customs, folklore, folk medicine, and assorted superstitions found in
almost every sphere of human endeavor. For example, no serious modern hunter
would still use a bow and arrow to kill game, but the skills of archery are still
with us—now as a sport or hobby. Archery “survives” from a bygone age when
hunting game was crucial to sustaining life. Again, nothing is more common
than to give a blessing after a sneeze; it seems trivial. Yet this was once a serious
gesture, governed by the belief that at that very moment a spirit, or demon, had
come out of the body. Today the blessing survives, but as a habitual response
whose original intent has been long forgotten. Again, in many lands, people
urge, strangely, that one should never try to save a drowning person. Though
to us such advice seems cruel and selfish, it was in earlier cultures perfectly
rational, for it was widely held that the river or sea, deprived of its almost cap-
tured 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 show that while the stream of social evolution is real and its
current strong, a trail of cultural “leftovers” floats in its wake.

Animism and Magic: E. B. Tylor and J. G. Frazer 21
If the principle of evolution shows why survivals exist, then it is the compan-
ion principle of uniformity that enables us to understand and explain them.
Since—regardless of race, language, or culture—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 be very different from our own. Modern
primitives, like ancient p60ples, know less than we do and fail to test their
opinions sufficiently, but they still think with the same mental mechanism as
ours. So even amid great differences, uniformity of the 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 that “lies at‘the very foundation of human reason.”9 If some—
how in thought peOple can connect one idea with another, then their logic moves
them to find the same connection 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 peo—
ples 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 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.
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 simply, with single words that
mimic the sounds of nature and with counting systems based on fingers and
toes. Over time, these concepts are slowly built up to produce the very compli-
cated systems of speech and number that today we master even in childhood
and apply with ease in everyday affairs. Across 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 amusing stories, is governed
by the logic of rational thinking. Myths arise from 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

22 Nine Theories of Religion
development.”lo Myths originate in the logical association of ideas. They ac-
count 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 Muller’s—myths arise under the influence
of language, which has gender, and out of the natural inclination to make anal-
ogies 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, these great forces of nature lend themselves to tales
in which their activities are made to resemble 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 explain 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 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.”” This formula, which others,
following Tylor, have adopted as well, has the merit of being simple, straight-
forward, 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 modem, 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 through—
out the entire history of the human race. So, Tylor suggests, if we truly wish to

Animism and Magic: E. B. Tylor and J. G. Frazer 23
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?
Asking 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 Mijller, appeals to
divine revelation are not acceptable. Such statements may be pleasing as per-
sonal 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 that early peoples acquired their first reli-
gious ideas through the same reasoning process they applied to other aspects of
their lives. Like us, they simply observed their world and 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 phenom-
ena, 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 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, early peoples rea—
soned first to a simple theory of their own lives: that each of us is animated by
a soul, a 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.”l3 From this premise, they next rea-
soned, 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

24 Nine Theories of Religion
objects they animate, why should 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 also
be such powerful beings as demons and angels who have no necessary attach-
ment 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, early humans ar-
rived at their first religious beliefs. Like their myths, their religious teachings
arose from a rational effort to explain how nature worked. From this perspec-
tive, 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 peo-
ples is apparent from the great variety of early beliefs and customs it could
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 resurrec-
tion and immortality of the soul. Animism explains both as ways of extending
the life of the soul beyond the death of the body. 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 narrow-minded
Christian missionaries used to describe them. They do not worship sticks and
stones; they adore the “anima” within, the spirit that—not wholly unlike the
god of Christians themselves—gives the wood of the stick 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 himself do this; he is “possessed” by a demon within.
To be cured, he needs an exorcism, not a medicine. The evil spirit must be
driven out.
Throughout most of the entire second volume of Primitive Culture, Tylor
fills his pages with examples to illustrate the full scope and scale of animism
in earlier centuries of human civilization. It was a system that Spread world—
wide, becoming the first “general philosophy of man and nature” ever devised.14
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 funer—
als and why the services, especially for great and powerful men, sometimes
even include human sacrifice, animism gives the answers/’fhe ifts provide
support for the soul in its new residence beyond the grave; the sacrifices

Animism and Magic: E. B. Tylor and J. G. Frazer 25
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 too
have 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 him-
self “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 dis-
posal, Tylor explores 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 exhibits 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 widens. The spirit of
one tree grows in power to become the spirit of the forest or of trees in general.
In time, that same spirit is gradually considered separable from the object it
controls, acquiring its own identity and character. At this stage, when people
worship, say, the goddess of the forest, they recognize the woodlands as 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 as—
sembled the gods in council.
Interestingly, Tylor approaches this later growth of a belief in the personal
gods of mythology much the way Max Muller 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 linguistic decay. 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, pe0ple hunted, gathered,
lived in small clans, 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, native Americans, Hindus, and Chinese. In these “higher” cultures,

26 Nine Theories of Religion
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 god—
dess of rain should 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. Monotheism forms
the logical end to the process of deveIOpment that began in the dark mists of
prehistory, when the man whom Tylor calls the first “savage philosopher” con-
cluded that souls like his own must animate the world around him.
The Decline of Animism and Progress of Thought
In one sense the story of animism is an encouraging one. Religion can be seen
to have gradually evolved upward from the first primitive belief in the spirits
of the trees and rocks to the later high plain of monotheism and ethics exhib—
ited in Judaism and Christianity. Higher civilization correlates with “higher
religions.” But that is not the full story. A clear-eyed look at animism and its
history in the dry light of science suggests a less cheerful view. Whatever
progress we find has been severely limited. For however great its spread and
wide its appeal through history, we cannot forget that animism at bottom is a
grand mistake. As we all know, the world is not animated by invisible spirits.
As any modern geologist can tell us, rocks do not have phantoms within them.
Any botanist can explain that plants are not moved to grow by some secret
anima in their stem. Science shows that the real sun and sea owe nothing to the
adventures of Apollo and Poseidon, that plants grow by the reactions of chemi—
cals within their fibers, and that the wind and water are only names for power-
ful flows of molecules governed by iron laws of cause and effect.
In its time, 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 ratio-
nally, one must also note that primitives think rationally only as children do.
Savages, Tylor reminds us, are

Animism and Magic: E. B. Tylor and J. G. Frazer 27
exceedingly ignorant as regards both physical and mental knowledge; want of
discipline makes their opinions crude and their action ineffective . . . the tyr-
anny of tradition at every step imposes upon them . . . much of what they believe
to be true, must be set down as false.‘6
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 today
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 none the less certainly, the falsehoods of savage and barbaric peoples must
withdraw before the spreading truths of the sciences. In sphere after sphere of
nature, animist spirits and deities must bow and defer to modern science’s
impersonal causes and effects. In the modern era, religion’s advance, 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.”” We now 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.
In the end, then, Tylor’s theory provides a mixed portrait of religion and its
development. As an effort of early peoples to understand the world, as a response
to its mysteries and uncertain events, animistic religion presents a natural paral-
lel to science. Both are inspired by the human search for understanding—the
deep urge to know just how things work. But clearly religion is earlier, more
primitive, less effective than science. Belief in spiritual beings represents a
natural stage in the evolution of human reason, but it is not the end stage, and
it is certainly no longer the most rational response to the world now that the
program and methods of empirical science have come our way. Like the other
odd customs and superstitions people are unwilling to part with, religion is
now a “survival.” In that connection, Tylor insists that the double mission of
ethnology, “the reformer’s science,” requires not only that it point the way of
progress but that it also take on “the harsher task” of clearing away the clutter
of animism that still persists. Destined to disappear, religion can only slow the
progress of mind for those who persist, unwisely, in clinging to its comforts. In
the final analysis, animist ideas belong properly to the childhood of the human
race, not to its maturity. And having entered adulthood, we must put away
childish things.
Further on, we can examine and assess this theory, along with the judgment
on the future of religion that follows from it. But first, we need to consider how
these ideas were adopted and further developed in the work of James Frazer,
Tylor’s most famous and influential disciple.

28 Nine Theories of Religion
J. G. Frazer
Early in his career, while still a promising young student in classics at
Cambridge University, James George Frazer became a “convert” to Tylor’s
ideas and methods. Thereafter, he devoted immense effort to anthropological
research, and through the rest of his long life, he promoted his own amplified
version of the animistic theory. The centerpiece of Frazer’s many labors was
The Golden Bough (1890—1915), a monumental study of primitive customs and
beliefs. As we shall see in chapters to come, this important book has exercised
a lasting influence on subsequent thinking about religion. More than that, in
the early years of the twentieth century it left a large imprint on almost every
field of modern thought, from anthropology and history to literature, philoso—
phy, sociology, and even natural science.[3
Like Tylor, Frazer came from a Protestant Christian family, but his was not
a home of liberal, affluent Quakers.19 Born on New Year’s Day, 1854, in
Glasgow, Scotland, he was raised by stern and devout Scottish Presbyterian
parents. His father’s daily habit of reading the Bible in family worship left him
steeped in its sacred stories and permanently affected by the beautiful imagery
and the stately rhythms of its language. Of course, the truth of the Bible—as
well as the Calvinist theology of his parents—was quite another matter. Frazer
rejected both. Early in life he took the stance of an atheist, or at least an agnos-
tic, in regard not only to Christian beliefs, but any religion. For him, religion
was to be always an interest but never a creed. During the years of his early
schooling, he much preferred to immerse himself in the non-Christian world of
ancient Greek and Roman civilization. He studied classical languages inten-
sively, winning multiple prizes in Latin and Greek at his preparatory school
and at Glasgow University while later earning a scholarship to Trinity College,
Cambridge. Eventually he became a fellow of Trinity, where he was to marry a
very protective spouse, remain childless, and live the quiet, private life of a
university don for the rest of his days. If ever a man fit the description of an
“ivory tower” scholar, it was James Frazer.
While at Cambridge, Frazer pursued his first interest: classical literature. He
wrote on the phi1030pher Plato and began to translate the writings of the ancient
Greek traveler Pausanias, who had compiled a rich record of Greek legend,
folklore, and popular custom. Pausanias would prove useful in considering
primitive religion.
At just about the time he was starting his work on Pausanias, two unexpected
encounters changed the course of Frazer’s thought—as well as his career. While
on a walking tour, a friend gave him a copy of Primitive Culture. As he began
to read, he was attracted at once to Tylor’s account of animism and its impor-
tance to primitive thought. Just as important, Frazer found his eyes suddenly

Animism and Magic: E. B. Tylor and J. G. Frazer 29
opened to the possibilities of anthropological research and the use of the com-
parative method. The second encounter was not with a book but a person: In
1883, the very same year that he came upon Tylor’s work, Frazer metW1111am
Robertson Smith (1846—1894), a brilliant and controversial Scottish biblical
scholar, who soon became his mentor and very close friend.20 Intellectually, Smith
was a perfect soulmate. Like Frazer, he was fascinated by the way in which
anthropology, through its study of modern tribal societies, could shed light on
an ancient subject, in his case the story of the ancient Israelites as told in the
Bible. Ahead of his time, Smith actually traveled to Arabia to observe the cus-
toms of desert communities and apply them in his research. In particular, he felt
that the use of “totems” by these tribal peoples was extremely important. Totem
use was associated with the tribal custom of dividing into different clans, or
kinship groups. Each of these clans commonly attached itself to a specific animal
(or occasionally a plant), which it recognized as its totem, according it worship
as a kind of divinity. Totemism was also linked to exogamy, the practice of
marrying only “outside” the clan. If within a large tribe a man belonged, say, to
the smaller clan of the bear, he was obliged to marry only a woman from another
clan (say, of the eagle or deer) and not from his own totem group. In addition,
because the totem was sacred, members of the clan were not allowed to kill or
eat their chosen animal—except (as Smith supposed, though there was no evi-
dence) on certain special occasions, when the rule might have been purposely
broken, perhaps for some ceremonial totem animal sacrifice. In The Religion of
the Semires (1890), his most important book, Smith drew on his observations
in Arabia and on Tylor’s concept of evolutionary survivals to argue that ancient
Hebrew practices, especially their sacrifices, fit with uncanny precision into the
category of tribal totemism that he observed in modern Arabia.
Frazer, for his part, was captivated by both the originality of Smith’s ideas
and the intellectual excitement that came through his personality in almost
every scholarly conversation. In return, Smith, who at this very moment was
editing the Encyclopaedia Britannica, wisely used his new position to encour—
age his friend. He asked Frazer to write the articles on the subjects of “totem”
and “taboo.” Frazer accepted, so long as Smith would help. It was not long
before Frazer’s work in preparing these articles won him over fully to the
anthropological perspective——and laid the groundwork for most of his later
research. Soon the two men were sharing research on primitive customs and
beliefs, each relying on the other in almost equal measure.
The Golden Bough
As he began his turn to anthropology, Frazer did not leave his classical studies
behind. His aim was still to read the Greeks and Romans, but now with an eye

//
30 Nine Theories of Religion
also on anthropology, looking for traces of the older, primitive world behind
the Cultivated poetry, drama, and philosophical writings of the classical au-
thors. Helped by Tylor’s doctrine of survivals, he felt that classical civilization
could be seen with new a clarity if one noticed the earlier primitive ideas and
habits that persisted within it. He was convinced that a blend of classics and
anthropology, of the well worn and the as yet untried, offered the prospect of a
virtual revolution in understanding the ancient world. This perspective was to
guide the broad research project that would become The Golden Bough. The
publication of this ever-expanding book occupied Frazer for most of his adult
years and became his definitive statement on the origin and nature of religion.
In time, The Golden Bough grew to three editions and twelve thick volumes,
requiring over twenty-five years of Frazer’s long days in his study to bring to
completion. It was first published in two volumes in 1890. A second, three-
volume edition appeared in 1900. New installments were added regularly until
it reached its full length in 1915. By then, what began as a book had ended as
an encyclopedia. Fortunately for us, in 1922 Frazer abridged The Golden
Bough into one very long single volume; in the discussion that follows, we can
take advantage of this helpful shorter version.21
The Golden Bough begins like a good mystery. It offers a riddle, some tan-
talizing clues, and a striking description of long-forgotten scenes and events.
Frazer explains that along the Appian Way, the ancient road that runs from
Rome to the villages of central Italy, there is a small town named Aricia; near
it, in a wooded grove by a lake called Nemi, stands the ruin of a temple dedi-
cated by the Romans t0 Diana, goddess of the hunt, as well as of both fertility
and childbirth. In the happy days of the empire, this lakeside shrine with its
woodland was both a country resort and a place of pilgrimage. Citizens of
Rome traveled often to the site, especially at midsummer, to celebrate a yearly
festival of fire. It was to all appearances a restful, civilized, and lovely place.
But the woods at the lakeshore also held a secret. The Roman poets told of a
second god, Virbius, who was also worshipped at the temple. He was some—
times identified with the young Greek hero Hippolytus, who, according to
other myths, had been murdered by one of the gods in a fit of anger, only to
be restored to life by Diana, who then chose to hide him here at her temple.
Virbius was represented by a very mysterious figure, a man who was under-
stood actually to live in the woods and was said to be both a priest and a king/if
He took it as his duty to keep constant watch not only over Diana’s temple but”
also over a sacred tree that grew in the forest—an oak with a distinctive yellow
branch, or “golden bough.” The man bore the title Rex Nemorensis, “Nemi’s
King of the Wood.” Though obviously human, this king was thought also to be
a god; he was at once both the divine lover of the goddess Diana and the ani-
mating spirit of the sacred oak tree near which he stood guard.

Animism and Magic: E. B. Tylor and J. G. Frazer 31
Strange as this King of the Wood himself may seem, the way in which he
acquired his position was still stranger. It camegby way of a murder. Legend
held that this priest-king had taken over the wood by putting to death the previ-
ous one, and that he too would keep his power only as long as he remained
vigilant and strong, ready in a moment to defend his very life against other
would-be kings who might try to seize his place and power. To keep his life and
rule, the king had constantly to walk the temple woods, sword in hand, waiting
for the approach of any would-be assailant. Should his guard fail or his strength
weaken, an intruder might at any moment break through, duel the king to his
death, and tear away the golden bough, which then entitled the victor to both
the sexual favors of the goddess Diana and the priestly rule of the woodland.
On the victor also, however, fell the same wearying burden of vigilant self-
defense—the need to guard the oak without rest and to search the forest for the
threatening form of any new rival who might approach, ready to kill, and eager
himself to become the next King of the Wood.
With an opening scene such as this, so haunted with mystery and hidden
danger, curious readers found it hard to resist following Frazer into the long
trail of his narrative. But the reason for all of this drama was not just the wish
to tell an unusual story. Frazer’s purpose was rather to set the stage for his
study by unfolding a single, sharp contrast—one that discloses the outline of
an earlier, more brutal state of humanity lying just below the surface of the
societies we like to think of as civilized. How, he asks, could there be a place
as beautiful as the grove at Nemi, a temple and grounds so loved by visitors for
its peace and healing renewal, yet at the same time so steeped in a heritage of
savage violence? How 18 it that a center given over to the comforts of religion
could be the stage for a ritual murder? That 13 a riddle we should very much l/
like to see explained. In searching for solutions Frazer tells us that we will get
nowhere if we keep only to the evidence available from the days of classical
Greek and Roman civilization. The pastimes of cultivated Romans who visited
Diana’s temple offer no clues to explain the shadowy, foreboding personage of
the King of the Wood. To account for such a figure, we must look elsewhere—
into the deeper prehistoric past, when savage ancestors of the Romans walked
the very same woods and shores centuries before Diana’s temple was ever
built. If it should be that among these much earlier peoples we can find an ob-
scure custom or belief that continued down to Roman times, if :we should dis—
cover one of Tylor’s “survivals,” then we might very well have a way to identify
the King of the Wood and solve his deadly mystery. Doing so, however, re-
quires a great deal of searching and comparing, for prehistoric peoples have
left us no documents. The only thing we can do is reach out everywhere into
the folklore, legends, and practices of the most primitive peoples we know to
see if among them there can be found any old patterns or traditions into which

32 Nine Theories of Religion
the Roman legends may fit. If we can penetrate the system of primitive ideas
that lies behind it, the dark riddle of the King of the Wood and his murder can
perhaps be understood. But that task is not uncomplicated. It turns out that
primitive thinking (and here Frazer somewhat departs from Tylor) is governed
by two quite different systems of ideas: the one is magic, the other religion.
Understanding both of these, and the connection between them, is the key that
gives entry to the primitive mind.
Magic and Religion
Once introduced, the subjects of magic and religion become a central theme of
The Golden Bough, and though Frazer does finally return to it, the mystery of
the King of the Wood recedes into the background. A Study in Magic and Re-
ligion is in fact the subtitle given to the book in its second edition. To appreciate
the importance of these enterprises to primitive peoples, we must notice a
fundamental fact of early human life, whether lived in Diana’s woodland or
any other place on the globe. It centered on the struggle to survive. Hunters
needed animals to kill; farmers needed the sun and suitable rains for their
crops. Whenever natural circumstances did not accommodate these needs,
primitive peoples, being capable of thought, made every effort they could to
understand the world and change it. The very first of these efforts took the form
of magic. Frazer’s full name for it is “sympathetic magic,” since the primitive
mind assumes that nature works by sympathies, or influences. In words that
closely resemble Tylor’s, he explains that “savages” (like Tylor, he preferred this
word for prehistoric pe0ples) always suppose that when two things can in some
way be mentally associated—When to the mind they appear }‘/sympathetic”—
they must also be physically associated in the outside world. Mental connec-
tions mirror physical ones. Going beyond Tylor, however, he finds in magic
something more systematic, and even “scientific,” than his mentor did. He points
out that the main connections made by the sympathetic magician are basically
of two types: imitative, the magic that connects things on the principle of simi-
larity; and contagious, the magic of contact, which connects on the principle of
attachment. In the one case, we might say “like affects like,” in the other, “part
affects part.” When Russian peasants pour water through a screen in a time of
drought, they imagine that because the filtered falling water looks like a rain
shower, sprinkling of this sort will actually force rain to fall from the sky.
When a voodoo priest pushes a pin through the heart of a doll decorated with
the fingernails and hair of his enemy, he imagines that merely by contact—by
contagious transmission—he can bring death to his victim.
Frazer explains that evidence of this magical thinking can be multiplied in
countless examples drawn from primitive life around the globe, and he supplies

Animism and Magic: E. B. Tylor and J. G. Frazer 33
them in great number. When, as traders report, the Pawnee Indians touched the
blood of a sacrificed maiden to their field tools, they firmly believed that,
merely by contact, its life-giving power would be transferred to their seeds of
maize. When drought strikes certain villages of India, the people dress up a boy
in leaves, name him the Rain King, and at each house sprinkle him with water,
all in the belief that this ritual will bring the rains, making green plants to grow
again. When the Indians of South America bury lighted sticks in the ground
during an eclipse of the moon, they believe the darkening of its fire will also
put out all fires on earth, unless some, at least, are hidden from its influence. In
each of these cases, and many, many others that he cites, Frazer shows how
simple peoples everywhere assume that nature operates on the principles of
imitation and contact. They think of these principles as constant, universal, and
unbreakable—as firm and certain as any modern scientific law of cause and
effect. In India,rwhen the Brahmin priest makes his morning offering to the sun,
he firmly believes it will not rise without his ritual. In ancient Egypt, the Pharaoh,
who represented the sun, routinely made a solemn journey around the temple
to ensure that the real sun would complete its daily journey as well. Magic is
thus built on the assumption that once a proper ritual or action is completed, its
natural effects must occur as prescribed. Such rites form a kind of science for
primitive peoples. They offer knowledge of the natural world and control of its
processes.
Frazer also goes beyond Tylor, who tends to Speak of magical knowledge as
its own reward, in emphasizing the social power that accrues to people who
have command of the magical art. It is not by accident that in primitive cultures
the person who can claim mastery of its techniques—whether called a magician,
medicine man, or witch doctor—routinely holds a position of considerable
prestige and power. Usually the magician rises to the role of king, since he best
knows how to control the natural world for the good of the tribe or for the evil
of its enemies. Evidence from around the globe shows that among tribal
peoples, nothing is more common than for the magician to be also the village
Chieftain or king.
Of course the power that magical skills confer ought not blind us to a quite
fundamental problem: Magic may look like science, but it is a false science.
Primitives are deceived, but modems are not. As every modern person certainly
knows, the laws of imitation and contact do not apply to the real world. Magic
cannot work. The primitive magician, for all his shrewd magical skills, is
simply wrong. The real world does not operate by the pattern of sympathies
and similarities he mistakenly applies to it. Over time, therefore, the more criti-
cal and thoughtful minds even in primitive communities draw the reasonable
conclusion that magic is, at bottom, nonsense. The magician can try to explain
away failures or even take the blame upon himself, but the facts cry out loudly

34 Nine Theories ofReligion
that it is the system, not the man, that is mistaken. The general recognition of
that failure is for Frazer a momentous development in the history of human
thought; for as magic declines, religion comes to fill its place.
Religion follows a path quite different from that of magic. Here we may
recall that Tylor, after defining religion as belief in spiritual beings, found it
generally to resemble magic, both being built upon the uncritical association of
ideas. Frazer is perfectly content with Tylor’s definition of religion, but he is
more interested in the contrasts than the similarities it shows with magic. For
him the interesting thing about religion is precisely its rejection of the principles
of magic. Instead of magical laws of contact and imitation, religious people
claim that the real powers behind the natural world are not principles at all;
they are personalities—the supernatural beings we call the gods. Accordingly,
when truly religious people want to control or change the course of nature, they
do not normally use magical spells but rather prayers and pleadings addressed
to their favorite god or goddess. Just as if they were dealing with another
human person, they ask favors, plead for help, call down revenge, and make
vows of love, loyalty, or obedience. These things are crucially important, for
the personalities of the gods control nature; it is their anger that can start a
storm, their favor that can save a life, their compassion that can calm a troubled
sea. For Frazer, wherever there is belief in these supernatural beings and wher—
ever there are human efforts to win their help by prayers or rituals, we have
moved out of the realm of magic and into that of religion.
In addition, and though it may not seem so at first, this turn to religion should
be read as a sign of progress because it improves on magic and marks an intel-
lectual advance for the human race. Why? For the simple reason that religious
explanations are better than magical ones in describing the world as we actu-
ally experience it./ agic, we must recognize, asserts laws that are impersonal,
constant, and universal. If the rain ritual is done correctly, rain must actually
come; the rules of imitation and contact do not allow exceptions. Religion is
quite different. From the start it never claims to have iron-clad principles of
explanation. To the contrary, it confesses that the world is in the hands of the
gods, who control nature’s forces for their interests, not ours/Moreover, the
gods are many, with different personalities and often competing aims and
agendas. We worship the gods, we pray and sacrifice to them in the hope that.
they will bring rain, or give us children, or heal the sick, but we cannot forceff”:~
them to do these things. Religion offers no guarantees. And yet as Frazer sees
it, this very uncertainty is in its way commendable. Is it not a fact that most of
nature’s processes, great and small, do fall outside our control? To offer prayers
that sometimes are answered and sometimes are not, to ask favors that are
granted one day and denied the next—is not such a view of the world, which
places all things under the control of great and powerful beings beyond

Animism and Magic: E. B. Tylor and J. G. Frazer 35
ourselves, very close to the facts of our existence as we actually find them?
Does it not actually fit far better than magic to life as we actually encounter it,
filled with both its surprise pleasures and unexpected misfortunes? Like the
gods, the world sometimes gives us what we want—and sometimes it does not.
Magic, Religion, and the Divinity of Kings
With the coming of religion, there also appear certain related changes in soci—
ety. Gradually, the old magician-king gives way to the new priest-king, whose
power lies in the new religious type of thought—specifically, in his ability to
communicate with the gods or, just as often, in possessing a kind of divinity
himself. Divine kings are as natural to the age of religion as magician—kings
are to the age of magic, though we ought not to consider this transition between
the two periods to have been sharp or sudden. Frazer reminds us that cultures
evolve slowly and often unevenly through time. Even as they were gradually
turning over the control of the natural processes from the principles of magic
to the personalities of the gods, primitive peoples usuallyflcornbined the two
systems. Even as they embraced the gods, they still reserved a place for magic;
in fact, they often used magic on the gods, trying, as it were, to force them to
act favorably on human requests. Frazer finds magic and religion to have been
mixed so often and in so many cultures around the world that, in the moun-
tains of evidence he supplies, he scarcely even tries to disentangle the two. -“” ”
Examples of magic and religion in combination play a key role in some of
Frazer’s most important discussions. Ritual prostitution is an instance. Primitive
people, he says, believe that if the sexual encounter reproduces human life, a
ritual act of intercourse performed in the house of the gods will, by the law of
imitation, actually compel the divine Sky Father and Earth Mother to do the
same. With that, the rains will come, and crops will grow for another season.
Royal personages are seen in a similar light. While many tribal societies think
of their king in religious terms, as a god, they conceive of his powers and his
. relation to the tribe as magical. The king is seen as the divine center of the world.
JTHis mere words become law. From his person an energy radiates in all direc-
tions, so that any of his actions, or any change in his state of being, can affect
the whole balance of the natural order and the whole life of the tribe. At the same
time, it should be noted that this divine power is more magical than personal in
nature—so thoroughly magical, in fact, that even the king himself must bow to
it. Frazer notes how some African peoples do not allow the king to leave his
house, because the mere movement of his body would affect the weather. In
ancient Ireland, kings were forbidden to be in a certain town at sunrise or
in another on Wednesdays or to sail their ships on certain Mondays—all for
fear of the effects of their magical powers on specific places at specific times.

36 Nine Theories of Religion
The magical charge carried by the person of the king also explains why mon-
archs are often surrounded by taboos—sacred prohibitions meant as life pre—
servers for souls. In some cases, the king may not be allowed to touch certain
persons or things because of the effect his powers may have on them; in others,
persons must avoid the king for just the opposite reason—because of the ill
effects they may have on his use of his powers. Even into recent times, the
emperor of Japan, the divine Mikado, was seen as so filled with magical power
that his feet were not allowed to touch the ground.
In more general terms primitive peoples often insist that because the king is
a god, measures must be taken to preserve his divine energy, transferring it to
a new person whenever he shows signs of sickness, injury, or age. Nothing was
more startling to Victorian readers of The Golden Bough than the evidence it
furnished to show that when in some tribal cultures kings age or grow ill, they
must be ritually put to death, so that their divine spirit can be conveyed in full
strength to a new ruler. Hardly less shocking were its demonstrations that to the
primitive mind, such executions are not immoral acts of cruelty; they are sacred
acts of magical necessity. This was true, moreover, even though the form of
the ritual was subject to change. Since many kings did not relish the prospect
of being executed, often a slave or captive, an animal, an image, or even a son
was put forward as the king’s substitute. Indeed, Frazer at one point suggests
that the Jewish festival of Purim and the Christian remembrance of Christ’s
crucifixion at Passover both fall into the category of these royal substitutions.
It is of interest, he suggests, that both involve the sacrifice of a “pretend” king
and both show a similar intent: to preserve by magical transfer the power of the
divine life.22
The Gods of Vegetation
Of all the places where magic and religion converge, none is for Frazer more
common than the great, seasonal cults of vegetation and agriculture that are
found so widely around the world. Worship of vegetation gods like Osiris,
Tammuz, Attis, and Adonis was widespread not only in the ancient civiliza-
tions of Egypt, Greece, and Rome but almost every where that people practiced
the arts of agriculture. These agrarian cults were steeped in symbols of sexuality
and the cycle of birth and death. Ancient Cyprus provides an instance. There
the god Adonis was routinely paired with the goddess Aphrodite/Astarte,
whose rituals included prostitution and a bizarre sexual law requiring all virgins
to sleep with a complete stranger at the temple before their marriage. Strange
as it may seem, says Frazer, it was not perversion that inspired thisppflr’actice but
the sacred rules of imitative magic. The purpose of the rite was to compel the
“gods also to mate, so that all of nature could be reborn.

Animism and Magic: E. B. Tylor and J. G. Frazer 37
Rituals of death and rebirth served a similar purpose. In the cult of Attis, the
myth that recounted the bloody death of the god had to be reenacted each year
because it ensured the death of the crop at harvest time; then each Spring the
god was to be ritually reborn, so the plants could once again come to life and
grow. As Frazer explains it, worshippers in these religions “thought that by
performing certain magical rites they could aid the god who was the principle
of life, in his struggle with the opposing principle of death. They imagined that
they could recruit his failing energies and even raise him from the dead.”23
When the rites were performed, all of nature could be expected to benefit from
the return of life and growth. In Egyptian traditions, the god Osiris clearly was
a personification of the grain; the story of how, after death, his mangled body
was scattered across the land offers a mythical counterpart to the process of
planting, in which dead seeds are sown across the fields, later to be reborn and
“rise as growing plants. For nearly all who participate in these religious cults,
the sacrifice of some sacred animal identified with a deity, such as the bull
of Dionysus, is a way of pushing the gods, and thus the crops, forward in their
natural cycle. Similarly, when primitives sacrifice an actual human king as a
divinity, that horrible rite mirrors myths like those of Attis and Osiris, where
the magic of imitation is reinforced by the magic of contact. As in the myths,
so in the ritual: the body of the victim may be torn apart or burnt, while the
flesh and blood, or bones and ashes, are spread on the fields, releasing their
magical power to fertilize the soil.
In additional volumes of his study, Frazer brings forward still other primitive
customs that fit this magical-religious pattern of thought, most notably those
associated with the totem and the scapegoat. Robertson Smith, as we saw, first
called Frazer’s attention to the primitive practice of totemism, and this practice
was the focus of pioneering research at the very time the second edition of The
Golden Bough was in preparation. Working among Australian aboriginal
tribesmen, two field investigators, Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, made the
remarkable discovery that on certain special occasippsthe sacred totem animal
was indeed killed and eaten by its clan—just as‘Robertson-‘Smith had earlier
guessed!24 The Aborigines called the ritual of eating the intichiuma ceremony.
In it, says Frazer, we can see in perhaps their earliest form the rites of religious
sacrifice and the concept of the dying god. By killing the totem, primitives
protect against the decline of power in their animal god; by eating it, they take
its divine energy into themselves. A similar pattern is to be found in the custom
of the tribal “scapegoat.” Anyone familiar with the Bible knows how the scape-
goat was used by the Hebrews, who each year chose an animal for the specific
purpose of being sent away from the community in a solemn ritual and left to
wander until it died. Seen in the light of magical principles, this practice arises
from the belief that sins or illnesses can somehow be physically driven out of

38 Nine Theories ofReligion
the community by attaching them to an object like a stick or leaf and allowing
them to be carried on the animal’s back as it travels away. When placed in the
context of totem practice and royal executions, the underlying purpose of the
ritual becomes apparent: since the animal represents the divine, its banishment
is another way of killing the tribal god.
Tree Spirits, Fire Festivals, and the Myth of Balder
In explaining the role played by magical-religious ideas in the worship of veg-
etation gods, Frazer draws most of his evidence from the ancient Mediterranean
world. He was convinced, however, that these ideas and practices could be
found in the European countries as well. To prove this point, he relied heavily 5
on the work of a German student of folklore, Wilhelm Mannhardt (1831—1880), 5′;
who had gathered evidence of the archaic customs, rituals, and mythology of
European peasants into several important books.25 Among these, Frazer made
special note of certain traditions observed by the Celtic peoples of the British
Isles and by the Nordic cultures of Scandinavia. In northern Europe, the wor—
ship of tree spirits was prevalent; perhaps because of its great size, the oak tree
in particular was held sacred. Among the early Celts there were also dramatic
fire festivals like the great Beltane ceremony, which was celebrated every
spring and fall and called for human images to be thrown into its raging sacred -*
flames. In Norse tradition, again, there was the tragic myth of Balder, the beau—
tiful young god killed by an arrow made of mistletoe, the only thing in all of
nature that could do him harm. As with Osiris in Egypt, Nordic mythology
presented his death as an immense tragedy, and at the funeral, when Balder’s
body was burnt aboard his own ship in a huge fire at the ocean’s edge, there
was deep mourning in the assembly of the gods.
In general terms, these sagas and stories from the North provide still further
evidence of magic and religion in close association. But they also serve a
second purpose; they bring the long narrative of The Golden Bough to its end.
With these stories in hand, the riddle that began the tale can at last be solved,
though even at this point the path to the solution is not a simple one. It follows
a sequence of comparisons and connections too complicated to trace in detail,
so we shall have to be content with a short summary sketch.
If we look closely at the myths and rituals of the North, Frazer explains, it is
clear that Virbius, the king of Diana’s woodland, and the Norse god Balder,
who also may have been once a real person, are both human embodiments of
the great tree spirit, the soul of the sacred oak. This is not surprising, for among
primitives the spirit, or soul, of an object can always exist in external form. The
spirit of the tree need not remain in its trunk; it can also exist, outside its wooden

Animism and Magic: E. B. Tylor and J. G. Frazer 39
body, in these human forms. Conversely, the souls of deities like Balder and
Virbius are capable of traveling outside their quite human bodies as well; when
they do, they lodge, naturally enough as tree spirits, in the ever-green mistletoe,
which grows on the trunk of the oak even in the coldest winter. In this telltale
clue, says Frazer, we have at last an explanation for the golden bough said to
grow from the tree at Nemi; it is simply a poetic name for the mistletoe, which
turns a definite shade of yellow when cut from its tree. Further, the action we
find in the Nordic myth, the shooting of the arrow at Balder, closely parallels
that of the Roman tale, where the bough is broken by the assailant and in the
moment of challenge probably hurled (just like Balder’s arrow) at the King of
the Wood. Both stories thus describe the same kind of act: an assault on the god
in which his own soul (in the form of the mistletoe) is seized from him and
turned against his body to secure his death. The god is killed in order magically
to take from him his divine power.
If these parallels are valid, then anthrOpology can step in to make the final
connection. It seems clear to” Frazer that the tales of Balder and Virbius alike
must have originated in real events: the prehistoric murder of a tribal king to
transfer his divine powers as commanded by the laws of early magic and reli-
gion. So it is nothing less than the sacrificial murders of real human kings from
the deep past that lie behind the mortal figures of Balder and Lake Nemi’s King”
of the Wood. The midsummer festivals of fire that the Romans so innocently
enjoyed at Diana’s temple only confirm the connection. It is no accident that
these rites bear a striking resemblance to the midsummer fire rituals found also
in Scandinavia. In both there is the common fact of a fire ceremony held at
precisely the same time of year—and fueled probably by the sacred wood of
fallen oaks. In addition, there are, especially in the northern rites, those curious
hints of a victim in the fire: the ritual burning of Balder’s body and those human
images thrown into the flames of the Irish Beltane fires. Such clues tell us that
however innocent on their surface, these ceremonies too are survivals recalling
the hideous sacrifice of human beings envisioned as dying gods. Frazer inti-
mates that in the earliest centuries of human life together, there were countless
occasions when fires such as these were solemnly lit to welcome the bodies of
those unfortunate kings (or their unhappy substitutes) who were human prede-
cessors of Balder and Virbius—gods who had to be slain so that the powers of
nature would not weaken but be renewed.
From all of this it should be indisputably clear that the earliest humans lived
their lives by a system of ideas that was rational enough for them but fearfully
distant from our own. Behind the rites of Diana’ 5 temple and the Roman legend
of the King of the Wood lies the grim ordeal of human sacrifice, the ceremonial
murder of a man thought to be a god.26 Barbaric to us, such actions were

40 Nine Theories of Religion
nonetheless rational in the ages that knew them, for the laws of nature were
seen to require nothing less than this ultimate sacrifice. Better to kill the one
than risk the death of all. To the primitive mind, it was the voice not of revolu-
tion but of religion and reason that first uttered the cry: “The king is dead; long
live the [new] king.”27
Conclusion
Looking back on it when he had finished, Frazer described his book as a great
“voyage of discovery,” a journey backward in time to explore the mind of pre-
historic humanity. A long voyage it certainly was! Though he rarely left his
study, his investigations had taken him—in thought at least—to nearly every
place, time, and culture known to the human race. No corner of undiscovered
humanity could escape the global reach of his discussions. He gathered infor-
mation, seemingly, from everyone and everywhere, and he had the great good
fortune of being himself at the right place and time to do so. Writing in
Cambridge during the golden last decades of the British empire, he was ideally
positioned to gather stories from missionaries and soldiers, from traders and
diplomats, from travelers, scholars, and explorers who passed on personal ob-
servations from every odd and lonely corner of the world. Through their letters,
reports, and responses to Frazer’s own questionnaire, these sources—some
reliable, others less so—provided him with all that he could need and, indeed,
more even than he could want.28
This vast fund of information Frazer had at his disposal gave him great
confidence in the scientific merits of his theory and, with it, his account of the
origin of religion. In his view, worship of the gods had arisen, as Tylor first
suggested, in the earliest human attempts to explain the world, and it was
driven by the human desire to control the powers of nature—t0 avoid its haz-
ards and win its favors. Magic was the first such attempt, and it failed. As it
declined, belief in the gods arose, subtly combined with it, and over the centu-
ries moved more and more fully into its place. Religion put its hopes in prayers
and pleadings. But in the end, it too has been found wanting; its claims about the
gods have been found to hold no more truth than the laws of magic. Accordingly,
says Frazer, just as the age of magic was replaced by that of religion, so too the
present era of belief in the gods, one or many, must yield to the third and next
era of human thought—the age of science, which is now upon us. Like magic,
religion must be assigned to the category of Tylor’s survivals. Though it clings
to life among backward peoples, as a kind of intellectual fossil, its time has
passed. In its place has come science, a way of thought now very much alive,
which offers knowledge of the world that is both rational and faithful to facts.
Like a new and better magic, science abandons the belief in supernatural beings

Animism and Magic: E. B. Tylor and J. G. Frazer 41
and once again tries to explain the world by appealing to general and imper-
sonal principles. In the present age these” principles are no longer the secret
sympathies of imitation and contact but the valid laws of physical cause and
effect. As religion fades, science inevitably assumes its place, for it is the ratio-
nality of the present, and it knows the true laws of nature. For Frazer, it is
magic without the mistakes.
Analysis
If we stand back to observe the theories of Tylor and Frazer in broad outline,
several key themes come clearly into view:
1. Science and Anthropology
In terms of method, Tylor and Frazer both see themselves as scientific theorists.
They assume from the outset that any explanation of religion which appeals to
claims of miraculous events or to some supernatural revelation must be ruled
out. They will not allow a theory that might claim, for example, that the ancient
Hebrews followed the Ten Commandments because they were revealed by
God. Only natural explanations can be seriously considered. Accordingly, such
scientific’study requires the wide collection of facts, followed by comparison
and classification; only after that can one formulate a general theory that ac-
counts for all the instances. Both men feel they can do this best through their
new sciences of ethnology and anthropology, which gather samples of behavior
from every culture in the world and thus seem ideally suited to the purpose of
framing something so broad as a general theory of religion. Not surprisingly,
both Primitive Culture and The Golden Bough are very large books, their pages
crowded and bursting with examples, instances, parallels, and variations, all
meant to support the broad generalizations that are central to the theories they
advance.
2. Evolution and Origins
Tylor and Frazer both are committed to explaining religion primarily in
terms of its prehistoric origin, its beginning in ages long past and its gradual
evolution to present form in the centuries thereafter. They believe that the
key thing is to discover how it began, to observe it in its earliest, simplest
form, and then to follow the path from its beginnings to the present day.
Further, they are convinced that, broadly speaking, this origin is something
we can actually discover, though not in any single event.29 Religion, they say,

42 Nine Theories of Religion
arose in a set of circumstances faced by all prehistoric peoples, who re-
sponded in ways that, though mistaken, were the best their reason could
manage, given the limitations of their knowledge. Further, having arisen in
the past, religion has seen its status, along with its claims of truth and useful-
ness, change significantly over the long process of its intellectual evolution.
Through their own hard efforts, human beings have slowly improved them—
selves by creating ever more civilized communities, by learning the limits of
their knowledge, and by treating each other with greater measures of de’
cency and dignity. To be sure, religion—an agent of progress insofar as it
once took the mind of humanity a step beyond magic—has played its role in this
great evolutionary drama, but only for a time. With the arrival of science,
that role now is ended.
3. lntellectualism and individualism
Theorists today often refer to Tylor and Frazer as advocates of an “intellectualist”
approach to religion.30 By this they mean that both men think of religion as
first of all a matter of beliefs, of ideas that people develop to account for what
they find in the world. Religion is not seen as in the first instance about group
needs, feelings, structures, or activities. On the contrary, it originates in the
mind of the individual “savage philosopher,” as Tylor calls him, the lone pre-
historic thinker who tries to solve the riddles of life and then passes his ideas
on. Religion becomes communal or social only when an idea seen to be valid
by one person comes gradually to be shared by others. Religious groups, ac—
cordingly, are in the first instance viewed as collections of individuals who
happen to share the same beliefs.
Critique
In the prime years of their influence, which came in the last decades of the
Victorian era, Tylor and Frazer won many disciples within anthropology and
even more admirers outside of it—among them people who enjoyed the fasci-
nating application of their ideas to literature, art, history, philosophy, and even
popular opinion. To those who read them at the time, these two talented au—
thors seemed capable of shedding new light on almost every feature of religion
or society one might want to address. Even so, there were a few, like Max
Muller, who had serious doubts about how far one could really go with the
methods of anthropology and the principles of intellectual evolutionism. As
the years have passed, the ranks of the skeptics have grown, and the severity of
the criticisms has increased as well. Ironically, the most serious doubts now

Animism and Magic: E. B. Tylor and J. G. Frazer 43
surround precisely those things noted above as the key elements of the intel—
lectualist program. They include the following:
1. Anthropological Method
Though both Tylor and Frazer were pioneers in using anthropological data,
their methods have not worn well over time. Professional anthropologists in
particular grimace at the way in which these enterprising Victorians bring
together supposedly similar customs of different peoples in different times and
places without only minimal regard for their original social context.“ It is this
method, for example, that allows Frazer to associate Celtic fire festivals with
Scandinavian ones, and then to assume conveniently that a practice found only
in the former (tossing human images into the fires) must at some point have
occurred also in the latter. All the while, he overlooks that while the Nordic
fires occur in midsummer, as in the festival of Diana, the Celtic festival occurs
only in the spring and fall. After a close look at such loosely made connections,
we find ourselves asking what it is, apart from the coincidence of fire in each,
that enables Frazer to connect these festivals at all. Similar stretchings occur
throughout the argument of The Golden Bough, though less often in the pages
of Primitive Culture.
2. Evolutionism
This habit of using evidence loosely raises complications also for the doctrine
of intellectual progress, which Tylor and Frazer both make central to their
theories. When Tylor finds an example of religious monotheism, he assumes
it reflects a stage of thought later than polytheism. Yet the evidence brought
forward seldom shows such a sequence because it is mostly “timeless” in char—,
acter. Its source is an undatable oral tradition, which may be recent or ancient;
no one knows. Often it is impossible to tell whether, say, belief in one high god
developed in earlier or later centuries of a people’s history, or perhaps some-
where in between. When Frazer finds a report of purely magical practices, for
example, he naturally assumes that they are rooted in an era that historically
precedes the age of religion, But how does ‘h‘é’lifiawm The evidence usually
cannot tell him. Most ofFHE—e’iahiples ‘show””mag’ic and religion existing to-
gether, as if both arose in a long single span of history that was both magical
and religious at the same time. It is not surprising that Tylor and Frazer found
it difficult to respond when other scholars of the time, most notably critics like
Andrew Lang and Wilhelm Schmidt, pointed out the uncomfortable fact that
monotheism, supposedly the “higher” form of religion, was more common in
the simpler cultures of people who hunted and gathered food than in the later,

44 Nine Theories of Religion
advanced communities of those who farmed and kept herds of domestic ani-
mals while almost everywhere embracing polytheism.
3. The Individual and the Social
Finally, as we shall see in the chapters immediately following, strong doubts
have been raised about the intellectualist individualism that Tylor and Frazer
endorse. Is it really true that religious behavior arises only, or chiefly, from
intellectual motives, as the work of solitary thinkers seeking to explain life’s
riddles and mysteries? Is it true that the social and ritual elements of religion
are purely secondary—always dependent upon the intellectual factor, which is
supposedly more fundamental? Further, if the origin of religion lies in ages
and peoples far beyond the reach of the historical record and must be creatively
reconstructed from legends and folkways, how do we prove such Speculations?
They seem to lie beyond either proof or disproof. It was this issue that led
a theorist we shall meet later, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, to say that most explana—
tions of the sort given by Tylor and Frazer are “just so stories”——imaginative
reconstructions of what might have happened, but nothing more.32
However all of this stands, there is little doubt that, historically considered,
the intellectualist theories of Tylor and Frazer are of great importance. As we
shall see further on, their work has served as the starting point for most other
theorists both in their time and afterward. Their theories of animism and magic
have come to represent a theoretical stance that rival thinkers have felt free to
reject, endorse, or revise, but never to ignore.
Notes
1. Abridged ed., p. 51; see n. 21 below.
2. The only full-length biography of Tylor is R. R. Marett, Tylor (London: Chapman
and Hall, 1936). There is a short appreciation of Tylor’s life and work prepared in honor
of his seventy-fifth birthday by Andrew Lang, who regarded himself as more an associate
and peer of Tylor than a follower; see “Edward Burnett Tylor,” in Anthropological
Essays Presented to Edward Burnett Tylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), pp. 1—f5.
3. For Tylor’s associates, disciples, and influence on the study of folklore, see Richard
M. Dorson, The British Folklorists: A History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1968); on Tylor’s work in particular, see pp. 167—197.
4. On the influence of early evolutionary ideas on Tylor’s thought, see George W.
Stocking, Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987), pp. 46—109, and
Robert A. Segal, “Victorian Anthropology,” Journal of the American Academy ofReligion
58, no. 3 (Fall 1990): 469—477.
5. Muller developed his views over a period of more than four decades from the late
18508 to the end of the century. Among his most important works were the influential
essay “Comparative Mythology” in the Oxford Magazine (1856), Lectures on the Origin

Animism and Magic: E. B. Tylor and J. G. Frazer 45
and Growth ofReligion: As Illustrated by the Religions of India (1878), and the Gifford
Lectures, published as Natural Religion (1881). Muller’s subsequent works develop
in more detail the general themes of natural religion—deity, morality, and immortality.
Articles that Miiller published to the end of the century echo or offer variations of
themes developed in the books.
6. E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology,
Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom, 2 vols., 4th ed., rev. (London: John
Murray, [1871], 1903), 1: 2.
7. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, p. 162.
3. On the general doctrine of “survivals,” see Margaret T. Hogden, The Doctrine of
Survivals: A Chapter in the History of Scientific Method in the Study of Man (London:
Allenson, 1936).
9. Primitive Culture, 1: 115—116; on the association of ideas, see J. W. Burrow,
Evolution and Society (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1970),
pp. 248—251.
10. Primitive Culture, 1: 408.
1 1. Primitive Culture, 1: 424.
12. Primitive Culture, 1: 429.
13. Primitive Culture, 1: 429.
14. Primitive Culture, 2: 356.
15. Primitive Culture, 1: 414.
16. E. B. Tylor, “The Religion of Savages,” Fortnightly Review 6 (August 15, 1866): 86.
17. Primitive Culture, 1: 317.
18. For Frazer’s influence on historical studies and his role in the development of
anthropology, see Eric Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1975), pp. 87—96; Brian Morris, Anthropological Studies of Religion
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 103—106; and Robert
Ackennan, The Myth and Ritual School: J. G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists (New
York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1991). On the relevance of his work to issues in philos-
ophy and science, especially questions of epistemology, see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks
on Frazer’s Golden Bough, ed. Rush Rhees, tr. A. C. Miles (Nottinghamshire, England:
Brynmill, 1979). The two most important studies of Frazer’s great influence on litera-
ture in the twentieth century are John B. Vickery, The Literary Impact of The Golden
Bough (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), and the collection of essays
in Robert Fraser, ed., Sir James Frazer and the Literary Imagination: Essays in Affinity
and Influence (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990). An interesting study of The Golden
Bough as itself a work of literature more than science is Stanley Edgar Hyman, The
Tangled Bank: Darwin, Marx, Frazer & Freud as Imaginative Writers (New York:
Athenaeum, 1974), pp. 233—291.
19. There is an excellent biography of Frazer by Robert Ackerman, J. G. Frazer: His
Life and Work (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987); see also The
Macmillan Encyclopedia of Religion, under “Frazer, James, G.”
20. On the encounter with Robertson Smith and his influence on Frazer, see Ackerman,
J. G. Frazer, pp. 53—69, and Robert Alun Jones, “Robertson Smith and James Frazer on
Religion: Two Traditions in British Social Anthropology,” in George W. Stocking, Jr., ed.,

46 Nine Theories of Religion
Functionalism Historicized: Essays on British Social Anthropology, History of Anthro-
pology, vol. 2 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), pp. 31—58.
21. James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion,
abridged edition (hereafter cited as The Golden Bough) (New York: The Macmillan
Company, 1924). It needs to be pointed out that over the years of its composition, Frazer
changed his views on a number of important issues considered in The Golden Bough.
Myth proved an especially troublesome topic, as did totemism. On the latter, he wavered
from one theory to another and had to accommodate new information that kept coming
in from ethnographic field studies. On the differences between The Golden Bough’s
three editions, see Ackerman, J. G. Frazer, pp. 95—100, 164—179, 236—257, and Fraser,
The Making of the Golden Bough, pp. 117—155, 156—202.
22. On this thesis, which was developed chiefly in the second edition, see Ackerrnan,
J. G. Frazer, pp. 167—169.
23. The Golden Bough, p. 324.
24. On the work of Spencer and Gillen, see Ackerman, J. G. Frazer, pp. 154—157;
also Chapter 3 of the present volume, where the research of Emile Durkheim is
considered.
25. These were Die Kornda’monen (Spirits of the Corn) (1868); Der Baumkultus der
Germanen (The Tree-Worship 0f the Germans) (1875); and Antike Wald- und Feldkulte
( The Ancient Worship of Forest and Field) (1875—77). On Mannhardt’s influence on
British anthropology and the work of Frazer, see Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History,
pp. 50—51.
26. For further analysis of human sacrifice in religion, see René Girard, Violence and
the Sacred, tr. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977) and
The Scapegoat, tr. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986).
27. The Golden Bough, p. 714.
28. For examples of Frazer’s correspondence and methods of research, see Fraser,
The Making of The Golden Bough, pp. 75—85, and throughout. On Frazer’s question-
naire and the critical comment that he did not rely on it nearly as much as on the work
of other scholars, see two articles by Edmund Leach, “Golden Bough or Gilded Twig,”
Daedalus 90 (1961): 371—399, especially p. 384, n. 4, and “On the ‘Founding Fathers’:
Frazer and Malinowski,” Encounter 25 (1965): 24—36.
29. On the scholarly search for the origins of religion, see the study by Tomoko
Masuzawa, In Search of Dreamtime: The Quest for the Origin of Religion (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1993).
30. On the intellectualism of Tylor and Frazer, see my “Max Mtiller, E. B. Tylor, and
the ‘Intellectualist’ Origins of the Science of Religion,” International Journal of Com-
parative Religion, 1, no. 2 (June 1995): 69—83; for an assessment of recent attempts to
restate the Tylorian position, see Gillian Ross, “Neo-Tylorianism: A Reassessment,”
Man, n.s. 6, no. 1 (March 1971): 105—116.
31. These criticisms have come from many quarters of modern anthropology, and
they are the main reason why Frazer’s views, especially, have been almost universally
discarded. There is more respect for Tylor. For an appreciation of his work and a criti-
cism of the doctrine of “survivals,” see Burrow, Evolution and Society, pp. 244—245.

Animism and Magic: E. B. Tylor and J. G. Frazer 47
For a particularly stringent criticism of Frazer, see two articles by Edmund Leach cited
in n. 28 above.
32 E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Theories ofPrimitive Religion (Oxford, England: Clarendon
Press. 1965), p‘ 25′
suggestions for Further Reading
Ackerman, Robert. J. G. Frazer: His Life and Work. Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press, 1987. The definitive intellectual biography of Frazer.
Ackerman, Robert. The Myth and Ritual School: J. G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritu-
alists. London: Routledge, 2002. Explores Frazer’s association with the famous
and influential circle of classical scholars at Cambridge University.
Burrow, J. W. Evolution and Society. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press,
1970. A close study of E. B. Tylor and other early Victorian anthropological think-
ers who argued for a pattern of evolutionary growth in both society and religion.
Clack, Brian R. Wittgenstein, Frazer and Religion. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire,
England: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. Examines the influence of The Golden Bough
on one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century.
Dorson, Richard M. The British Folklorists: A History. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1968. Still the best study of the circle of learned amateurs whose work
provided a context for the researches of Tylor and Frazer and helped lay the
foundations for modern scientific anthropology.
Fraser, Robert. The Making of The Golden Bough: The Origins and Growth ofan Argu-
ment. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Published on the centennial anniver-
sary of the first printing of The Golden Bough in 1890, this study examines ideas
and influences that found their way into its pages as well as the changes that
occurred over the long interval of its composition.
Fraser, Robert, ed. Sir James Frazer and the Literary Imagination: Essays in Affinity
and Influence. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. A collection of essays also
published on the centennial anniversary of The Golden Bough, it explores Frazer’s
wide impact on modern literature and other spheres of intellectual life.
Horton, Robin. Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West: Essays on Magic, Religion,
and Science. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1993. A collection
of illuminating essays by the best-known current neo-Tylorian theorist.
Hyman, Stanley Edgar. The Tangled Bank: Darwin, Marx, Frazer & Freud as Imagina-
tive Writers. New York: Athenaeum, 1974. An interesting study of The Golden
Bough as a work whose greatest impressions were made in the arts and culture
rather than anthropology and social science
Lang, Andrew. “Edward Burnett Tylor.” In Anthropological Essays Presented to Edward
Burnett Tylor, edited by Andrew Lang. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1907,
pp. 1—15. A short appreciation of Tylor’s life and work by a brilliant contempo-
rary of Tylor, who also wrote extensively on the matter of explaining religion.
Leach, Edmund. “Golden Bough or Gilded Twig.” Daedalus 90 (1961): 371—399.
A severe critique of Frazer by a leading contemporary British anthropologist.

48 Nine Theories of Religion
Marett, R. R. Tylor. London: Chapman and Hall, 1936. Though now dated, the only
available biography of Tylor. Marett was one of Tylor’s disciples and an impor-
tant theorist of religion in his own right.
Riviére, Peter, ed. A History of Oxford Anthropology. New York: Berghahn Books,
2007. An instructive collection of essays charting the rise of anthropology in
Britain; discusses the university’s role in the early efforts and the later rise of
field anthropology.
Stocking, George W., Jr. Victorian Anthropology. New York: Free Press, 1987. A per-
ceptive and detailed study of the early British anthropologists in their nineteenth-
century social and intellectual context.
Vickery, John B. The Literary Impact of The Golden Bough. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1973. A study of the surprisingly wide and deep influence
Frazer’s book had on some of the greatest writers of the early twentieth century,
including, among others, T. S. Eliot and James Joyce.
Wheeler-Barclay, Marjorie. The Science ofReligion in Britain, 1860—1915. Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 2010. A thorough and thoughtful account of the
pioneers—MUller, Tylor, Frazer, Lang, and others—in the science of religion as
it took shape in the context of mid- and late-Victorian intellectual change and
cultural debate.

2
Religion and Personality:
Sigmund Freud
Religion would thus be the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity.
Freud, The Future ofan IllusionI
Few thinkers in modern times have stirred more episodes of fierce debate than
Sigmund Freud (1856—1939), the psychologist from Vienna, Austria, who at
the turn of the twentieth century stunned not only the field of medicine but
society at large with his unsettling new analyses of the human personality. To
this day, almost anyone who hears the name “Freud” associates it with two
things: psychotherapy and sex. That impression is not inaccurate as far as it
goes, but it does not go very far. Freud was a most unusual man, driven by
ceaseless curiosity, towering ambition, and a remarkably wide range of intel-
lectual interests. His original profession was medicine, especially brain re-
search. But the more he traveled this path of specialized study, the more it
branched in new and different directions. His neurological inquiries quickly
widened to an interest in the nature of mental illness and other puzzles of the
mind. Before long he had proposed a provocative new concept of the human
personality. From this platform, he moved confidently ahead, searching out
the psychological dimension in almost every aspect of human life, from seem-
ingly insignificant things like dreams, jokes, and personal quirks to the deep,
complex emotions that steer personal relationships and shape social customs.
Wherever he turned, he found yet another application of his ideas. They illu-
minated questions about the nature of the family and social life; they offered
clues to the explanation of mythology, folklore, and history; and they sug-
gested new interpretations of drama, literature, and art. To Freud and his fol-
lowers, it seemed at times as if he had found an explanatory golden key.
Analysis of the psyche opened a door on the innermost motives of human
thought and action, from the stresses placed on the individual personality to
the great forces that drive and shape civilizations. It could uncover the smallest
49

50 Nine Theories ofReligiOn
secret of a single, troubled self while at the same time offering a new perspec-
tive on the great endeavors of human history, among them society, morals,
philosophy, and—not least—religion.
Background: Freud’s Life and Work
Freud was born in 1856 in Moravia, a part of central Europe that then belonged
to the sprawling Austro-Hungarian empire.2 His family was Jewish, and his
father, a widowed merchant, already had two grown sons when he chose to
remarry. Freud was the first child born to his father’s much younger second
wife; he thus grew up in a complex extended family. His playmates as a child
were his own nephew and a niece, Pauline, a girl whom he liked to torment but
to whom he was also attracted. Looking back later on his childhood, Freud
found this experience to be evidence of ambivalence, a state of divided emo-
tion, which appears as a key theme in his writings, especially when he consid-
ers religion. Human beings, he believed, are often driven by contradictory
feelings of both love and aggression directed toward the same object or person.
While still a boy, Freud moved with his family to the capital of the empire,
Vienna, where he was to live and work almost all of his years. As a Jew, he
found it impossible to develop any real love for this predominantly Catholic
city, but his family did become comfortable in it. For almost his entire life, in
fact, he would remain there, raising his own children to adulthood and leaving
only in the year before his death, when the coming of the Nazis to Austria
forced him to take refuge in England. Freud’s parents were conscious of their
Jewish identity, observing Passover and giving the children some synagogue
instruction, but in other respects they were religiously indifferent. They did
not follow Jewish dietary laws, and they adapted to Christian holidays, such
as Christmas.
In secondary school Freud was a gifted student who took courses in Greek,
Latin, and Hebrew and finished at the top of his class. Alongside his native
German, he became fluent in both French and English, then went on to teach
himself Spanish and Italian. In 1873, when he was seventeen, he became a
medical student at the University of Vienna, where he began research in anat-
omy and physiology. After graduating as a doctor of medicine in 1881, he
began working in the Vienna General HOSpital, where he continued his brain
research. A few years later, he married Martha Bernays, who became the
mother to their six children and a loyal companion throughout their long
married life.
During his earlier years of medical work, Freud encountered Josef Breuer, a
man who had done careful case studies of mental illness and soon became a

Religion and Personality: Sigmund Freud 51
close friend. In addition, in 1885 he visited Paris to study nervous disorders with
Jean—Martin Charcot, a famous French physician. This visit was a turning point,
for it sparked Freud’s permanent interest in the psychological study of the mind
rather than purely physiological research on the brain. After Paris, he returned
to Vienna, continued his work with the mentally ill, and published his first book,
Studies on Hysteria (1895), which was written with his colleague Breuer. Sig-
nificantly for Freud’s later work, the two authors described in this study a pro-
cess of repression, by which troubled people seem to force themselves to forget
painful experiences. Freud also reported success in treating neurosis—the
irrational behavior of these troubled people—by using hypnotism or simply by
engaging them in discussions of their illnesses. With one patient in particular, a
woman he called Anna 0., he claimed success in curing her of hysteria by work-
ing back through word associations to an event that was the cause of her prob-
lem. This use of a conversational approach was a key step. Out of it Freud would
develop a way of investigating—and treating—the human mind, which he put
at the center of all his work. He chose to call it “psychoanalysis.”
As Freud envisioned it, the clinical practice of psychoanalysis consisted
mainly of listening to a patient, who at regular appointments was encouraged
to feel comfortable saying whatever came to mind, in whatever way it came,
without any logical sequence or storyline. Patients were to speak simply by
“free association” of ideas and memories. To many people (in Freud’s day
and ours), such a technique seems little more than a waste of a good physi-
cian’s time. But Freud felt differently; he found in psychoanalytic conversa-
tion an unexpected avenue into the most hidden part of his patients’
personalities. He began also to analyze himself, making special note of the
things that came up when he was dreaming, and he asked his patients to do
the same. Working in this vein with patients over a full five years of practice
and research, he listened, read, reflected, and then drew conclusions that
were put into a work entitled The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). It was this
epoch-making book, published on the very edge of the new century, that
launched the great “Freudian revolution” in modern thought. Among other
things, this study outlined for the first time Freud’s remarkable concept of
“the unconscious”—a notion to be examined more closely in a moment.
Though at first severely criticized by the medical establishment, Freud’s
work readily attracted a small circle of interested followers. In, 1902 he formed
a professional organization that became the Vienna Psychological Society. In-
cluded were several men who gained followers alongside Freud: Otto Rank,
Karl Abraham, Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, Ernest Jones, and others. Several jour-
nals were established, and psychoanalysis found itself gradually transformed
from a method and a few creative ideas to a path-breaking new field of schol-
arly investigation.

52 Nine Theories of Religion
During this same interval and through the hardships of World War I, Freud
continued to work. In several highly productive years just after the turn of the
century, he explored the wider implications of psychoanalytic theory, publish-
ing such works as The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) and Three
Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905). A number of journal articles also
appeared in the decade, including one on religion and neurosis and several
others on primitive religion.3 The latter efforts became the book Totem and
Taboo (1913). In the following years, while fighting raged elsewhere in Europe,
he completed his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1916—1917). As
peace returned, he added new works, among them Beyond the Pleasure Prin-
ciple (1920), The Ego and the Id (1923), and The Question of Lay Analysis
(1926). All along, he energetically promoted the field of psychoanalytic study
by continuing to see patients, corresponding with colleagues, arranging schol-
arly congresses, and supportn two academic journals.
In the last two decades of his life, Freud added to his more specifically
psychoanalytic studies several controversial works on general subjects related
to society, science, and religion. They included The Future of an Illusion
(1927) and Moses and Monotheism (1938), two books that, along with the
earlier Totem and Taboo, express his main ideas on religion. We will consider
them here.
Freudian Theory: Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious
We can best understand Freud by beginning where he himself does—with the
discoveries reported in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900).4 In this impor-
tant book he observes that human dreams have always attracted curiosity, fig-
uring widely in myth, literature, folklore, and magic. Tylor, as we saw, thought
it was the experience of dreams that led primitive people to believe in souls.
Freud accepts these claims but makes it clear that he is prepared to say more.
He insists that dreams are more significant than mere curiosity or even theo-
ries of the soul would ever lead us to guess. Among other things, dreams show
just how much more there is to the activity of the mind than what appears on
the surface. We all can grasp the role of everyday consciousness; when we
speak to a friend, write a check, play a game, or read a book, we not only use
our minds but know that we are doing so. We also recognize that beneath our
surface awareness lie other ideas and concepts that seem best described as
“preconscious.” These are memories, ideas, or intentions that we are not aware
of at the moment but can easily call upon as needed—things like the ages of
our children, what was served for dinner yesterday, or where we intend to be
on the weekend. Though not immediately aware of such things, we can easily

Religion and Personality: Sigmund Freud 53
retrieve them as needed. In the experience of dreams, however, Freud contends
that we come upon something quite unlike either conscious or preconscious
mental activity. We draw upon another layer, a different region of the mind that
is deep, hidden, huge, and strangely powerful. This is the realm of the uncon-
scious. Like the great underside of an iceberg, this deep sector of the self,
though unrecognized, is enormously important. It is the source, first, of our
most basic physical urges, our desires for food and sexual activity. Second,
bundled together with these drives is a quite extraordinary assemblage of
ideas, impressions, and emotions associated with everything a person has ever
experienced or done or wished to do, from the first days of life up to the most
recent minute. If we want an image of it, we might call this realm of the uncon-
scious the mind’s mysterious cellar, a dark storehouse necessary for life up-
stairs, but filled down below with a jumble of half-formed urges that blend
with images, impressions, and trace memories of past experience. Up above,
the conscious mind is unaware of these things, but they do exist, and they ex-
ercise a powerful indirect influence on all that we think and do.
When he first wrote of it, Freud acknowledged that his idea of an uncon-
scious mind was not entirely new. “Everywhere I go,” he once said, “I find the
poet has been there before me.” Since antiquity, philosophers too have sug-
gested a hidden dimension of the mind, but their writings were intuitive, not
scientific. Though they perceived something mysterious that was deep in the
self and sensed its power, they had no way of explaining why such a thing
should exist or how it might work. Psychoanalysis is very different. It proposes
a rational method for discovering the contents of this hidden realm and ex-
plaining what purpose it serves. Freud claimed that basic biological drives, for
example, are found there because they cannot be anywhere else; they are by
nature without consciousness. Images and emotions, on the other hand, sink
down into it from the conscious mind up above. They come into the uncon-
scious in two ways: either they drift in quietly as a kind of faint transcript of
past experience, or they are forced down, as it were, for quite specific and un-
usual reasons. In this second case they have traveled down into hiding because
of a complex sequence of events that first occurred up on the plane of con-
scious thought. The forcing mechanism is repression, the remarkable process
Freud and Breuer managed to identify in their intense conversations with dis-
tressed patients.5 Most of these people possessed a common characteristic.
Some earlier event or circumstance in their lives produced an emotional re-
sponse so powerful that it could not be expressed openly; it was therefore
pushed down into the unconscious and out of mental view. On the surface, says
Freud, an event repressed is an event forgotten, but in fact it has not disap-
peared. Unconsciously it remains very much in the mind, only to work itself
back out in quite puzzling ways. Repressed thoughts and emotions release

54 Nine Theories ofReligion
themselves in forms of action that no rational person would engage in: point—
less movements, unfounded fears, irrational attachments, obsessive personal
rituals, and other strange behaviors. Freud labeled them “neurotic.” Victims of
such neuroses cannot be treated with medicines, but they could be helped by
psychoanalysis. A skilled therapist can bring the repressed thought up into con-
sciousness, allow all of the neurotic emotions to be properly released, and
through this process bring the behavior to a level of awareness that allows it to
be controlled.
In first framing these central concepts of repression and the unconscious,
Freud relied heavily on his early encounters with neurotic people, some of
whom were suffering from serious personality disorders. But the evidence he
drew from dreams, which, of course, everyone experiences, suggested to him
that all human activity—normal as well as abnormal—could be shown to be
powerfully affected by the unconscious. Dreams indicated that to a degree, all
persons are neurotic. Freud chose to describe dreams as “wish fulfillments.”
They are states of mind created by the fact that we feel certain powerful drives—
such as the craving for a sexual encounter—that are rooted in the needs of the
body. These drives naturally have no sense of time; they want satisfaction im-
mediately. And though we might like to accommodate them exactly as felt, the
rules of normal life usually make this impossible. In most waking hours, when
the conscious mind is in control, they must be repressed—driven down into the
unconscious. And yet so powerful are these urges and emotions that, as soon as
we sleep, as soon as our consciousness fades, they begin to “leak out” in the
form of dreams—just as the mentally disturbed person’s repressions leak out as
neurotic behavior. For the psychoanalyst, then, the interpretation of a dream
achieves a purpose similar to that of a conversation with a neurotic person; both
offer paths into the secret corridors of the unconscious.
Nor is this all. Freud came to believe that many things we do even in waking
life are ruled by the hidden energies of the unconscious. In further books like The
Psychopathology ofEveryday Life (1901) and Wit and Its Relation to the Uncon-
scious (1905), he sought to show that such routine happenings as jokes, slips of
the tongue (the well-known “Freudian slip”), absentmindedness, memory lapses,
doodling, and even bodily quirks and gestures all originate in the unconscious.
He pointed also to the power of the unconscious in the achievements of great
artists, dramatists, and writers. In the light of psychoanalysis, the works of
Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Dostoyevsky, Sophocles, and Shakespeare all
could be seen as affected by forces rising up from the unconscious.6 It is no acci-
dent that the familiar stories found in mythology and folklore and the recurring
themes of art, literature, and religion bear a strong resemblance to the subjects
and images that keep returning in human dreams. All testify to the secret, subter—
ranean power of the unconscious.

Religion and Personality: Sigmund Freud 55
The Personality in Conflict
In these writings Freud traces so many different things to the unconscious that
one may wonder whether the idea is pressed to an unbalanced extreme. But he
insists not. The unconscious is central to thought because it serves as the cru—
cial link between what is physical and what is mental in the human person.
After all, there are no pure spirits in the human race. Every personality is
rooted in a physical body, which is driven by certain basic biological instincts,
or drives. Hunger is instinctive and so is the sex drive; these physical impulses
preserve both the self and the species, the human individual and the race. Both
operate on the “pleasure principle.” We feel a need, and we feel pleasure when
it is satisfied. By our very nature as physical beings, we seek pleasure and turn
away from the opposite.
In themselves the physical drives are simple things. Strains and tensions
arise, however, because these drives are of different kinds: they can come into
conflict when they collide with each other or when they meet the unchangeable
set of facts that make up the outside world. IfI see an apple when hungry, I eat
it and satisfy the pleasure principle in doing so. But should another person, also
hungry, be holding the apple, then I face a conflict. The circumstance forces me
to repress my urge. Since the risk of losing the apple altogether is too great, I
must agree to share it. In the face of reality or the claims of other drives, it is
unavoidable that some drives on some occasions must be repressed. Such re-
pressions feed the unconscious.
Freud struggled long and hard to determine just what were the most basic
human drives and to describe how they Operated. At first he thought there were
only the “ego instinct,” represented by hunger, and the libido (the Latin word
for “desire”), which represented sexuality. Later on he spoke of both of these
as forms of one drive he called eras (the Greek for “love”) and suggested an
opposite drive, aggression, as the other. Later still, and without discarding the
idea of aggression, he settled upon eras as the drive to continue life and thanatos
(the Greek for “death”) as the drive to end it.
Whatever the labels, the fundamental thing about the drives is the idea of
conflict, of struggle that takes place both among the drives and between the
drives and the outside world. This idea of an unavoidable tension at the center
of the self is what led Freud to come up with perhaps the best known of all his
concepts—the threefold division of the human personality into the ego (Latin
for “1”), the superego (Latin for the “I above”), and the id (Latin for “it”).7 In
this scheme, the id is considered the earliest and most basic of the three ele-
ments. Rooted in the early, animal stage of human evolution, it is unconscious
and unaware of itself; it is where the raw, physical drives of the body translate
themselves into wishes—to eat, to kill, or to engage in sex. At the other

56 Nine Theories of Religion
extreme, the top of the personality so to speak, lies the superego. It represents
a collection of influences that, from the moment of birth, begin to be imposed
on the personality by the outside world. These are the expectations of society
as framed first by the family and then by larger groups, such as the tribe, the
city, or the nation. Finally, suSpended in a position between the demands of
society and the desires of the body, we find the third element of the self—the
ego, or “reality principle.” The ego might best be called the “choosing center”
of the human person. Its delicate task is to perform a continual balancing act
within. It must on the one hand satisfy the desires of the id and, on the other, be
ready to curb or deny them whenever they clash with the hard facts of the phys-
ical world or the social restraints imposed by the superego.
As some have noticed, this sketch of the mind bears an interesting resem-
blance to that of Plato, the Greek philosopher who explained the self on the
analogy of a charioteer trying to control the contending horses of reason and
passion. Freud, too, suggests that the personality is the scene of a continuing
struggle. “Action by the ego,” he writes, “is as it should be if it satisfies simul-
taneously the demands of the id, of the superego, and of reality—that is to say,
if it can reconcile their demands with one another.”8
Infantile Sexuality and the Oedipus Complex
The most fascinating application of this conflict model of the personality ap-
pears in Freud’s now-famous theories of infantile sexuality and the Oedipus
complex. As most know, Freudian theory places great importance on child-
hood, especially the earliest years—from birth to age six. If he had merely
claimed that this is the age when much of what he calls the superego is
formed—that is, the age when parents plant the rules of reality, family, and
society in the child’s mind—Freud would have pleased many and disturbed
no one; that only confirms common sense. What he actually puts forward,
however, is a stunning idea that many people found not just wrong but per-
verse. He boldly insists that early childhood, no less than adult life, is strongly
shaped by the sexual desires of the id. In Three Essays on the Theory ofSexu-
ality (1905), he argues that from the moment of birth onward, physical, sexual
urges govern much of the behavior of an infant child. In the first eighteen
months of life, there is an oral phase, in which sexual pleasure comes along
with nourishment from sucking at a mother’s breast; from that time up to age
three, there is an anal phase, when pleasure comes from control of excretion;
from age three onward, the genital organs assume importance. This phallic
stage (from the Greek phallos, meaning “penis”), which includes masturba-
tion and sexual fantasies, reaches to the age of six, at which point a nonsexual

Religion and Personality: Sigmund Freud 57
stage of latency sets in. This phase lasts until the early teens and the arrival of
full adult sexual capacities. ‘
As a person passes through this development, the earlier sexual stages do not
completely disappear; they are instead overlaid by the new ones. Accordingly,
cases of abnormal behavior are best understood as fixations, as the failure to
move on to the next level of growth, or in other cases as regressions, in which
people move backward into earlier stages. A person obsessed with ordering the
trivial details of life, for example, might be described as suffering a fixation in
the anal stage, when behavior is excessively control—oriented, and could con-
ceivably even regress to the infantile oral stage. This view of human develop-
ment turns out to be especially important when Freud turns to religion, for one
of his main concerns is to find the place of religious belief in the sequence of
normal emotional growth: Does it belong to an adult stage of personality devel—
opment or to an earlier phase? A great deal, obviously, hinges on the answer to
this question. Moreover, when Freud discusses the history of human civiliza-
tions, he prefers to use the analogy of individual growth, as if he were talking
about an individual person. Clearly, anyone who accepts Freud’s pattern will
be inclined to take one view of religion if it is seen as belonging to the child—
hood of the human race and quite another if it is taken as a mark of adulthood,
of civilization in its maturity.
Probably no one needs to be told that infantile sexuality—and its link to
religion—is on clearest display in what Freud calls the Oedipus complex. This
well-known term comes from the celebrated tragedy (which Freud translated
as a schoolboy) by Sophocles, the great dramatist of ancient Greece. It tells the
story of King Oedipus, a proud, good man whose fate it was quite unknowingly
to kill his father and then marry his own mother. In a way that is remarkably
parallel to the story of Oedipus, Freud tells us, children in the phallic stage
experience a desire to displace one of their parents and become the lover of the
other. The boy, discovering the pleasure given him by his penis, wants to
become the sexual partner of his mother, thereby taking the place of his father,
whom in a sense he “hates” as his rival. Sensing these feelings, the mother,
with supporting threats from the father, discourages her son from touching his
sexual organ; there is even the threat it could be cut off. The son, in turn, is
genuinely frightened, and surmising from girls’ lack of a penis that such a
thing could actually happen to him, experiences a castration, complex—“the
severest trauma of his young life.”9 The son therefore finds that he must submit
to his father, give up hope of possessing his mother, and get his satisfaction
from sexual fantasies instead. Still, he never entirely gives up his desire for his
mother or ends his jealous rivalry with his father. Young girls experience simi—
lar emotions but along a different path. They envy the male penis, imagine they
have the same organ, and at first seek a similar encounter with the mother, only

58 Nine Theories of Religion
later to accept their feminine role and acknowledge the rightful authority of
their father.
Even after the contemporary sexual revolution, Freud’s account of the
Oedipus complex still comes to many people as something of a shock. They
find it inconceivable that the innocence of childhood could be shaded by such
powerful drives and dark emotions. But Freud is convinced of it. Even more,
he feels that the Oedipus complex is actually “the central experience of the
years of childhood, the greatest problem of early life, and the main source of
later inadequacy.”IO Indeed, Oedipal conflicts are a problem for society as well
as the individual. If this deep incestuous urge were to be acted upon, it would
be exceedingly damaging to the entire family unit, which is crucial to the
child’s own survival. If carried out, the urge toward incest would ultimately be
destructive of both the self and society, just as it certainly was for King
Oedipus in the play. It follows, then, that already in the earliest phase of life, a
struggle arises in the child between the drive for sex and the need of a family.
In their very first years, all human beings begin to discover that unless they find
a balance, unless they can control their colliding desires, there can be neither a
family nor society and hence no framework of security for the self. Restraints
must be placed on our urges, for without them we cannot have a civilization,
and without civilization we cannot survive.
Later Developments and Writings
In his mature years, Freud developed and refined his theories, looking always
for new dimensions and wider applications of his core ideas: the unconscious,
the Oedipus complex, neurosis, and the three-part framework of human
personality. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), he revised his earlier
understanding of the basic drives, which to him centered on sex and self-
preservation—the two urges that create and sustain life—and elaborated on
thanatos, the “death instinct,” as the backward urge to restore the world to its
primal state, to the time when there was no life at all. Such a concept, he felt,
was the only thing to account for such behaviors as masochism and sadism, in
which people avoid pleasure and actively seek pain. In Group Psychology and
the Analysis of the Ego (1921), he expanded the concept of the libido, or
sexual desire, to include the broader idea of diffused emotional attachment,
such as is found in a family. Then he applied it to explain how an organized
community like a church depends on personal attachments to a leader; in
Christianity, for example, devotion to the person of Christ shared with one’s
fellow believers is what gives this huge, varied community such a sense of
binding solidarity.

Religion and Personality: Sigmund Freud 59
With the outbreak of World War I and the difficult decades afterward, Freud
reflected at length on the themes of death, human weakness, and the limits of
civilization. His commitment to psychoanalysis remained strong, and he
placed great faith in the progress of science. Still, a general sense of melan—
choly, of pessimism about the plight of humanity began to come forward. We
find this attitude especially in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), where
he explores the unhappy conflict between our instinctive personal desires,
most notably the power of human aggression, and the strong restraints that
society must place upon them if humanity is to survive.
Freud and Religion
Once he had developed the basic ideas of psychoanalysis, Freud found religion
3 most promising subject of study.“ In childhood, of course, he had gained a
basic acquaintance with the teachings of Judaism. Although his family was
largely nonreligious, he knew well the stories and favorite texts of the Hebrew
Bible. He also developed a useful working knowledge of Christianity, drawn
partly from the facts of life in staunchly Catholic Vienna and partly from his
own wide reading in the history and literature of Western civilization. Further,
religious ideas, imagery, and parallels figured prominently in the neuroses of
some of his first patients. His personal stance, however, was one of complete
rejection of religious belief. The biographer who knew him best tells us bluntly
that “he went through life from beginning to end a natural atheist.”l2 Freud
found no reason to believe in God and therefore saw no value or purpose in the
rituals of religious life.
In light of this background, it is not surprising that Freud’s approach to reli-
gion, like that of Tylor and Frazer, is quite the opposite of that taken by people
who are themselves religious. In most cases religious believers say that they
believe as they do because their God has spoken in a sacred book, or because
what their church or synagogue teaches is the truth. Freud, by contrast, is quite
sure that religious ideas do not come from the Judeo-Christian God or other
gods, for gods do not exist. Nor do religious teachings arise from the sort of
sound thinking about the world that normally leads to truth. Like Tylor and
Frazer, he is certain that religious beliefs are superstitions. At the same time, he
notes that they are interesting superstitions, which raise important questions
about human nature. Why, if they are so obviously false, do so many people
persist in holding these beliefs, and with such deep conviction? If religion is
not rational, how do people acquire it? And why do they keep to it? Tylor
shows almost no interest in these questions, and Frazer, though he does some-
what explOre the attractions of magic, largely ignores them as well. Freud,

60 Nine Theories of Religion
however, does consider them—and with good reason: in psychoanalysis he
claims to have found the answers.
In an early article published under the title “Obsessive Actions and Reli-
gious Practices” (1907), we can find a first clue to Freud’s approach. He ob-
serves that there is a close resemblance between the activities of religious
people and the behaviors of his neurotic patients. Both, for example, place
great emphasis on doing things in a patterned, ceremonial fashion; both also
feel guilty unless they follow their rituals to perfection. In both cases too, the
ceremonies are associated with the repression of basic instincts: psychologi-
cal neuroses often arise from repression of the sex drive; religion demands
the same, as well as repression of selfishness in general and control of the
ego-instinct. Thus, just as sexual repression results in an individual obses-
sional neurosis, religion, which is practiced widely in the human race, seems
to be “a universal obsessional neurosis.”l3 This comparison suggests a theme
that is fundamental to almost everything Freud writes on religion. In his
view, religious behavior always resembles mental illness; accordingly, the
concepts most suited to explaining it are those that have been developed by
psychoanalysis.
All three of the books Freud devotes to religion take this basic approach,
but they do so in distinctive ways. As it happens, all three are also fairly brief.
So instead of choosing just one, we can give some consideration to each of
them, all the while noticing the pattern of psychoanalytic explanation that is
common throughout.
Totem and Taboo
Totem and Taboo (1913) is a book Freud regarded as one of his best. It presents
a psychological interpretation of the life of primitive peoples. It employs the
concepts of psychoanalysis, but like other books of the time, it is also influenced
by evolutionary thinking—not just Darwin’s theory of biological evolution but
the general ideas of intellectual and social evolution as well. Freud accepts the
opinion of his age that more than just our physical selves are attributable to
evolution; he also adopts the idea, shared by Tylor and Frazer, that we have
evolved intellectually; through the ages our social institutions, like our animal
species, have traced an unsteady but still upward line of progress. Consequently,
just as we find clues to the personality of individual adults in their earlier char-
acter as children, so we find in the character of past cultures important clues to
the nature of civilization in the present. This past, moreover, includes not just
our civilized ancestors like the Greeks and Romans but—now that Darwin has
shown the connection—even prehistoric cultures and peOples, those communi-
ties of humans who first descended from their animal ancestors.

Religion and Personality: Sigmund Freud 61
With this premise in hand, Freud turns next to two practices of primitive
peoples that strike modern minds as especially strange: the use of animal
“totems” and the custom of “taboo.” Tylor, Frazer, and other anthropologists
were fascinated by these customs, as we have noticed. In the first case, a tribe
or clan chooses to associate itself with a specific animal (or plant), which
serves as its sacred object, its “totem.” In the second, some person or thing is
called “taboo” if a tribe wants to declare it “off limits” or forbidden. According
to the oldest and strongest known taboos, most early societies seem to have
strictly prohibited two things. The first is incest: marriage must always be “ex—
ogamous” (i.e., outside the immediate family or clan). Among primitives there
is almost always what Freud calls a “horror of incest.” Second, there could be
no killing or eating of the totem animal; eating the “totem” was also “taboo.”
Freud then goes beyond other theorists to add that there could be no point in
making taboos unless somehow, at some time, people wanted to do what they
prohibit. Presumably, these are crimes that people did try to commit. But if so,
Why make them crimes in the first place? Why make everyone miserable by
creating rules that no one really wanted to keep?
Here in Specific form we meet the kind of question that does not appear in
the works of theorists like Tylor and Frazer. From their intellectualist stand-
point, human religious behavior is a conscious endeavor; it represents an effort
to use reason to understand the world while, at the same time, it demonstrates
a failure to reason correctly. Religious people try to be rational but do not suc—
ceed; their rites of “taboo” and rituals of totemism cannot achieve what they
suppose. But then the question remains: If it is a mistake to believe in totems
and taboos, why should anyone continue to do so? Freud finds the answer in
the unconscious. He claims that experience with neurotic patients shows the
personalities of both disturbed and normal people alike to be strongly marked
by ambivalence—by the clash of powerful Opposing desires. Obsessively neu-
rotic people, for example, will sometimes feel extreme grief when a loved one,
a father or mother, dies. Yet on probing the unconscious, we often find that it is
not love but guilt and hate that actually cause their emotion. Remarkably, tribal
peoples show just this trait, thinking of their dead ancestors as demons, or
“wicked spirits,” who deserve their hate. In their use of magic, too, they imag-
ine that the world is just an extension of their own selves. By thinking about the
sound of thunder and imitating it, they suppose they can make: real rain.
The practices of totemism and taboo thus present us with a particularly strik-
ing display of psychic ambivalence—one that opens a window on the power of
human emotions in the very earliest age of humanity. After all, says Freud, if
Darwin is right about our descent from the apes, we should think of the first
human beings as living, like their animal ancestors, in “primal hordes”—
extended families of women and children dominated by one powerful male.

62 Nine Theories of Religion
Within these groups there would have been loyalty, affection, and security
against danger; for the young males, however, there was also something else:
frustration and envy. Though they feared and respected the stronger father, they
also sexually desired the females, all of whom were his wives. Torn between
their need for the security of the horde and their suppressed sexual urges, they
were at length driven to a fateful act. In a fearsome turn of events, which un-
doubtedly occurred many times in different hordes, the sons banded together,
murdered their father, and (since they were cannibals) consumed his body,
even as they proceeded to take possession of his wives. At first, this murder in
the primeval horde brought a sense of joy and liberation, but grave second
thoughts soon followed. The sons were overcome with guilt and remorse.
Wanting desperately to restore the master they had killed, they found in the
totem animal a “father substitute” and symbol; they agreed to worship it, and
before it they then swore the oldest of all taboos: “Thou shalt not kill the
totem.” Over time, this rule was generalized to the entire clan and became the
universal commandment against all murder. “Thou shalt not kill” thus un-
doubtedly became the first moral rule of the human race.
The same powerful feelings of remorse led to the second taboo, the com-
mandment against incest. Regretting their act and recognizing at once that
seizing the father’s wives would only create new conflict among themselves,
the sons agreed to a second commandment: “Thou shalt not take thy father’s
wives.” To live together, the sons had to agree to find any new wives only “out-
side the clan.” Freud suggests that these prehistoric agreements of the brothers
may have been the real events that lie behind the mythical “social contract” that
philosophers have often presented as the foundation of human society.
The case of the first taboo is more complicated than the second, and to ex-
plain it Freud draws on the work of William Robertson Smith, the very same
biblical scholar who influenced Frazer and first suggested the idea of the prim-
itive “totem sacrifice.”l4 Though normally the totem’s life was sacred, the
newer Australian research had shown that there were certain sacred occasions
on which the pattern was reversed: the totem animal then was killed and con-
sumed by all in a ritual feast. From the standpoint of psychoanalysis, says
Freud, this too is highly significant. The totem sacrifice makes sense only as a
deeply emotional ceremony in which the community reenacts the primeval
murder of the first father, who, through death, has now become its god. In the
ritual, the sons publicly reaffirm their love for him and—quite unconsciously—
also release the hate caused by the sexual renunciation they now endure.
The totem sacrifice thus confirms that the original murder of the father—a
crime committed, fittingly, in the childhood of the human race—is nothing less
than the acting out in history of the powerful, double human emotions that
converge in every male’s infancy to form the Oedipus complex. The brothers’

Religion and Personality: Sigmund Freud 63
assault upon their father is in essence the crime of Oedipus enacted thousands
of years before Sophocles ever wrote his play! Out of jealous desire for their
father’s wives—a desire for their own mothers—the first sons committed a
murder that was followed by a great ritual of remorse and affection. To the
human race, these extraordinary events have left a legacy of profound emo-
tional ambivalence. On the level of conscious activity, the members of the tribe
identify the animal in the totem sacrifice with their dead father and, by projec—
tion, give him the status of divinity; they confess that they are all his children
and offer him their worship by eating the totem flesh and restraining their
sexual desire. On the deeper plane of the unconscious, however, they express
quite the opposite emotions, for the ritual by its very nature recreates their
original deed of rebellious murder and cannibalism, thereby releasing the frus-
tration and hate that arise from the ongoing denial of their Oedipal urges.
Seen in this light, moreover, a modem sacrament like the Christian commu-
nion shows its true character. Like the ancient totem ritual, it reenacts, and seeks
to reverse, the original crime of humanity. In the communion, the flesh and blood
of Christ, God’s son (symbolizing the eldest brother, leader of the rebellion), are
eaten in remembrance of his crucifixion, a death suffered as punishment for the
“original sin” of the primeval rebellion. On behalf of his brothers, Christ atones
for their prehistoric crime. Yet the atonement is also reenactment. Since, in
Christian theology, the father and son are one, the sacrament of the son’s death is
symbolically at the same moment the sacrament of the father’s murder. Thus the
communion secretly recalls Oedipal hate as well as love.
Freud of course recognizes that a long process of evolution stands between
the totem rites of early cannibals and the communion meal of Christianity. He
suggests that, over time, the totem animal was reduced to a simple sacrificial
gift. Its place was taken by others, first by animal-human deities, later by the
gods of polytheism, and finally by the father God of Christianity. But these are
details. Freud’s main concern, like Frazer’s, but now from the standpoint of
emotions rather than intellect, is to show the striking connection between
present-day religion and the dark ceremonies of the primitive past. If we want
to find the origin of religion, he insists, we need look no farther than these grim
prehistoric events and deep psychological tensions. The birth of belief is to be
found in the Oedipus complex, in the powerful, divided emotions that led hu-
manity to its first great crime, then turned a murdered father into a god and
promised sexual renunciation as a way to serve him. In Freud’s own words,
“Totemic religion arose from the filial sense of guilt, in an attempt to allay that
feeling and appease the father by deferred obedience to him. All later religions
are seen to be attempts at solving the same problem.”’5
For Freud the murder in the prehistoric herd is an event of momentous im-
portance in the history of human social life. In the powerful emotions it

64 Nine Theories of Religion
produced, we find the origin of religion. In the incest taboo—the agreement to
protect the clan in its aftermath—we can see the origin of morality and the
social contract. Taken together, totem and taboo thus form the very foundation
of all that has come to be called civilization.
The Future of an Illusion
Totem and Taboo met with approval from Freud’s associates in psychoanalysis~
and with outrage from just about everyone else. Christian critics found the
book particularly insulting. For his part, Freud ignored much of the debate and
turned to other interests. Not until fourteen years later did he return to the
subject of religion in The Future of an Illusion (1927), a book he chose to de-
scribe as a continuation of the earlier study. He notes that while Totem and
Taboo looks backward into the prehistoric past, The Future of an Illusion con-
siders religion in the present and looks forward. It centers not on an event
hidden in prehistoric times but on the “manifest motives” of religion in all
places and times. In addition, the second book puts a focus less on rituals than
on ideas and beliefs—particularly Western monotheistic belief in God.
Freud begins The Future of on Illusion with certain facts recognized by
almost everyone. Human life has arisen, or evolved, out of the natural world,
an arena that is not necessarily friendly to our enterprises. Though it has pro-
duced our species, nature constantly threatens also to destroy us, whether
through predators, disasters, disease, or physical decline. For protection, there—
fore, we have from the first joined into clans and communities, thereby creat-
ing what we call civilization. Through it we gain security, but at a price. As the
events recounted in Totem and Taboo show us, society can survive only if we
bend our personal desires to its rules and restraints. We cannot just kill when
anger seizes us, take what we do not own, or satisfy sexual desires as we want.
We must restrain our instincts, compensating ourselves (though never enough)
with other satisfactions we can hope to find in, say, the joys of art and leisure
or the ties of family and community. Yet even with these sacrifices and com-
forts, civilization cannot fully protect us. In the face of disease and death, we
are all ultimately helpless. In the battle between nature and culture, nature’s
laws of decay and death will always finally win.
Freud next observes that none of us finds this unhappy truth easy to accept;
it runs counter to all we treasure most. We would rather face things as we did
in the sunnier days of our childhood. Then there was always a father to reassure
us against the dangers of the storm or darkness of the night. Then there was
always a voice of strength to say that all would be well in the end. As adults, in
fact, we all continue to crave that childhood security, though in reality we can
no longer have it. Or can we? The voice of religion makes us think that indeed

Religion and Personality: Sigmund Freud 65
we can. Following the childhood pattern, religious belief projects onto the ex—
ternal world a God, who through his power dispels the terrors of nature, gives
us comfort in the face of death, and rewards us for accepting the moral restric-
tionS imposed by civilization. Religious belief claims that “over each one of us
there watches a benevolent providence which . . . will not suffer us to become
a plaything of the over-mighty and pitiless forces of nature.”16 In the eyes of
such faith, even death loses its sting, for we can be certain that our immortal
spirits will one day be released from our bodies and live on with God. In deny-
ing our desires, therefore, we can be sure we are not just helping society; we
are obeying the eternal laws of a just and righteous Lord.
The best word we can use to describe such beliefs, Freud contends, is “illu-
sion.” By this he means something quite Specific. An illusion for him is a belief
whose main characteristic is that we very much want it to be true. My belief
that I am destined for greatness would be a case in point. It could turn out
someday to be true, but that is not why I hold it. I hold it because I strongly
wish it to be true. An illusion is not the same as a delusion, which is something
I may also want to be true but which everyone else knows is not, and perhaps
never could be so. If I were to claim that I will one day be eight feet tall (which,
being now fully grown, I most certainly will not), I would be holding to a delu-
sion. Rather shrewdly, Freud claims that he is not here calling belief in God as
Father a delusion; in fact, he insists otherwise: “To assess the truth—value of
religious doctrines does not lie within the scope of the present enquiry. It is
enough for us that we have recognized them as being, in their psychological
nature, illusions.”’7
Religious teachings, therefore, are not truths revealed by God, nor are they
logical conclusions based on scientifically confirmed evidence. They are, on
the contrary, ideas whose main feature is that we dearly want them to be true.
They are “fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of man—
kind. The secret of their strength lies in the strength of those wishes.”I8
We should notice here that, though it may be helpful for some, for Freud
himself this distinction between “illusion” and “delusion” comes to very little.
In his view, it hardly makes a difference which term we use, because even if
they cannot be absolutely proven such, religious beliefs are in the end delu-
sions; they are teachings we have no right to believe because they cannot pass
the test of the scientific method, which is the only way we have of reliably
determining what is true and what is not. It is the habit of believers to draw on
mere personal feelings and intuitions, and these are notorious for being often
mistaken. Hence, we ought never to put our trust in religion, even if its teach-
ings can be shown to have provided certain services for humanity in the past.
Freud concedes that, at times, religious beliefs may have been of some small
assistance in the growth of civilization. Certainly the early totem made a

66 Nine Theories of Religion
contribution through its role in the denunciation of murder and incest, and later
religion did its part when these and similar crimes were discouraged by pre-
senting them as offenses deserving of punishment in Hell. But civilization is
now mature and established. We would no more want to build today’s society
on such superstition and repression than we would want to force grown men
and women to obey the rules of behavior we lay down for children.
Religious teachings should be seen in this same light—as beliefs and rules
suitable to the childhood of the human race. In the earlier history of humanity,
“the times of its ignorance and intellectual weakness,” religion was inescap—
able, like an episode of neurosis that individuals pass through in their child—
hood. However, when there is a failure to overcome the traumas and repressions
of earlier life and the neurosis persists into adulthood, then psychoanalysis
knows that the personality is in disorder. The same is true for the growth of
civilization. Religion that persists into the present age of human history can
only be a sign of illness; to begin to leave it behind is the first signal of health.
In Freud’s words:
Religion would thus be the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity; like the
obsessional neuroses of children, it arose out of the Oedipus Complex, out of the
relation to the father. If this view is right, it is to be supposed that a turning-away
from religion is bound to occur with the fatal inevitability of a process of growth,
and that we find ourselves at this very juncture in the middle of that phase of
development.’9
Echoing Tylor, Freud concludes it is best “to view religious teachings . . . as
neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it
does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the re-
sults of the rational operation of the intellect.”20 In short, as humanity grows
into adult life, it must discard religion and replace it with forms of thought
suitable to maturity. Mature people are guided by reason and by science, not by
superstition and faith.
An interesting feature of The Future of an Illusion is its dialogue format.
Freud routinely stops along the way of his discussion to answer the objections
of an imaginary critic who takes the side of religion. Among other things, this
critic insists that it is wrong to talk of religion as arising merely from our
emotional needs, that religion ought to be believed on the basis of tradition,
and—perhaps most important—that if religion is discarded as the ground for
morals, society will collapse into violence and chaos. These criticisms are of
course designed to strengthen Freud’s case, and in each instance he offers a
skillful and persuasive reply. In one of these objections, Freud is asked why he
seems to have changed his theme since Totem and Taboo. That book was also
about the origin of religion, but its subject was totemism and the father—son

Religion and Personality: Sigmund Freud 67
relationship; this one talks mainly about human helplessness. Has the theory
now changed? Freud’s answer to this question is instructive if not quite con-
vincing. He explains that Totem and Taboo explored only one element, though
it was deeply concealed, of what goes into religion. That was the two-sided
feeling of both love for and fear of the father, who ruled the primeval horde.
The present book, he says, explores “the other, less deeply concealed part”—
the realization of adults that in the face of nature’s crushing power, they will
always be as weak as children and in need of a loving Father to defend them.
Freud does not address the puzzling fact that while God is presented in the
first book as a figure about whom human beings have very mixed emotions, in
the second He is the Father who only loves—and is only loved in return. Still,
whatever the motives, the result in Freud’s eyes is always the same. The God
whom people call upon in prayer is not a being who belongs to reality; he is
an image, an illusion projected outward from the self and onto the external
world out of the deep need to overcome our guilt or allay our fears.
Moses and Monotheism
Freud’s interest in religion did not end with The Future of an Illusion, even
though it offers perhaps the most important statement of his views. At the very
end of his career, while struggling with the cancer that eventually took his life
and finding himself driven from Vienna by the Nazi takeover of Austria, he
returned to the subject for one final effort—writing this time on Judaism, his
own religious tradition. In a series of essays undertaken between 1934 and
1937, he focused his attention on the figure of Moses, examining his founda-
tional role in Jewish life and thought. These essays were then brought together
in a single volume and published as Moses and Monotheism (1937) two years
before his death.
As in Totem and Taboo, so in this quite unusual book, Freud puts forward a
set of startling new claims about certain events in religious history—in particu-
lar Jewish history—and tries to show how the concepts and comparisons drawn
from psychoanalysis can help to explain them. In the Bible, he observes, we
learn that Moses is the great Hebrew pr0phet who inspired the people of Israel
by his leadership and shaped their lives by giving them the law of God. True
enough perhaps, but how do we know that Moses was really a Hebrew? A close
look at the texts gives reason to believe that he was actually an Egyptian prince,
a ruler and follower of the radical Pharaoh Akhenaten, who tried to replace the
many gods of ancient Egypt with a strict devotion to one and only one deity—
the sun god Aten. Unlike the other cults, the worship of Aten employed neither
images nor superstitious rituals; it stressed a purely spiritual God of love and
goodness, who was also revered as the strong guardian of an eternal moral law.

68 Nine Theories of Religion
When Akhenaten died, his new religion failed in Egypt, but not entirely. It was
kept alive by this same man Moses, who adopted the Hebrew slaves as his
people, united them behind the new faith, and with great courage led them out
of their captivity.
Initially Moses’ followers prospered under his leadership. Later on, how-
ever, buffeted by their misfortunes in the desert, his chosen people rebelled
against his leadership, renounced his God, and put him to death. His monothe-
istic religion was then overlaid by a new cult dedicated to a violent volcano-
deity named Yahweh, whom Israelites chose to worship as they fought bloody
battles to win the land of promise. Later, in writing their scriptures, Jewish
scribes attached the name of Moses also to the founder of this second faith, but
this sleight of hand could not disguise the differences between the new religion
and the monotheism of the original Moses, their first and true spiritual leader.
The new faith replaced the pure spirituality and morals of the earlier creed with
the rituals, superstitions, and bloody sacrifices we find in Israel during the age
of the great Hebrew kings. Degraded as it was, says Freud, the new religion
managed almost completely to push out the old, leaving behind little more than
a faint memory of the original Moses and his faith.
Yet that is not where the story ends. Centuries later in the life of the com-
munity, and against all probability, the people of Israel found themselves con-
fronted by the great monotheistic prophets, men seized with the mission to
recover and revive the old faith of the tribe. These prophets—Amos, Isaiah,
and others—denounced the religion of sacrifices; they demanded worship of
the one universal God announced by the first Moses, and they called again for
obedience to his stern moral law. Their words thus marked a decisive turn that
affected not just Jewish history but the entire world. For it was out of the soil
of this revived Jewish monotheism that Christianity would one day rise to
become a great world religion. From the time of the Hebrew prophets forward,
faith in the awesome, righteous God of Moses took its place as the immovable
center of both Jewish and Christian belief.
There is no question that this quite extraordinary retelling of Hebrew history
as Freud sees it rests on a number of adventurous connections and eye-opening
historical conjectures that would trouble both the historian and the biblical
scholar. It is not easy to find in the Bible any clear proof that Moses was an
Egyptian, that he was murdered, that two persons were given his name, or that
the early Hebrews ever had two different religions. To Freud, however, these
problems are not a concern. Much more interesting to him is the mystery of
how, over many centuries, a true monotheism was somehow born, apparently
died, and then came back to life. How can it be, he asks, that the faith of the
original Moses virtually disappeared from the life of his people, only to return
centuries later in dramatic fashion and win back the hearts and minds of the

Religion and Personality: Sigmund Freud 69
entire Jewish community? Theologians may be at a loss to answer such a ques-
tion, but psychoanalysis certainly is not, Freud asks us to suppose once again
that a parallel can be found between what happens psychologically to an indi-
vidual person over the course of a life and what happens in history, over a much
longer time, to an entire community of peOple like the Jews. And he restates his
view that religion is best conceived along the lines of a neurosis. That said, he
offers the following ingenious argument.
Psychoanalytic theory has clearly demonstrated that cases of personal neu-
rosis follow a familiar pattern. They start, often in early childhood, with a trau-
matic, disturbing event that is pushed out of memory for a time. There follows
a period of “latency,” when nothing shows; all seems normal. Then at a later
point—often at the onset of puberty or in early adulthood—the irrational be-
havior that is the sign of neurosis suddenly makes its appearance. We find that
there is a “return of the repressed.” Now if these stages are indeed identifiable,
Freud suggests that we can compare them with the sequences discovered in the
history of Judaism. And as we do, let us recall as well the points made in the
earlier books about ambivalent emotions, tribal murder, and religion as child-
like desire for the figure of a father. Do they not fit with an almost uncanny
accuracy? The message of monotheism spoke to the Jews’ natural human long-
ing for a divine father. The powerful personality of Moses, whom the people
may even have identified with his God, recalled the imposing figure of the first
father in the primeval horde. His death in a desert rebellion was more than a
mere historical accident; it can be read as a reenactment of the primeval murder
of the great father, an event no less traumatic for the Jews than the first murder
was for the sons and brothers in the prehistoric human tribe. Fittingly, once the
murder had been committed, the Hebrew community, in an act of collective
repression, sought to relieve its guilt by striving to erase the entire memory of
Moses—~both the monotheism and the murder—from community life, thereby
allowing the crude Yahweh religion of the second Moses to take its place. For
the true Mosaic religion, this was the period of its latency, a long era when it
lay submerged and almost forgotten in the Judaic communal mind. And yet the
law of neurosis is clear: Whatever is repressed must return. After centuries in
eclipse, the pure and ancient creed of the founder made its powerful return in
the oracles of the prophets. Henceforth, pure monotheism, the religion of
loving devotion to the Lord of the Covenant, became again the faith of all Jews,
who on those terms rightfully and to the present day claim the honor of being
his chosen people.
Significantly, Freud adds, even the role of Christianity as Judaism’s succes-
sor comes into clearer focus once we read its history through the eyes of psycho-
analysis. It is clear from the discussion in Totem and Taboo that the revolt
in the primeval horde had a two-sided emotional outcome: love and fear.

70 Nine Theories of Religion
Judaism recalls the urge to idealize the Father, to make him into a loving God
and repress the guilt left behind by his murder. Christianity feels the same mix
of affection and guilt but responds by declaring the need for atonement. As
framed by its chief thinker, the Jewish rabbi Paul, Christian theology centers
not on God the Father but on Christ the Son and his death—in other words, on
God who, in the form of the firstborn Son, goes to his death to atone for the
original sin committed by the first sons in the prehistoric horde.
Never modest in his claims, Freud here offers a psychoanalytic portrait of
both Jewish and Christian monotheism that few theologians or historians would
dare attempt. Along the same bold lines of analogy laid out in his earlier works,
he argues that the appeal of these—and other—religions lies not in the truth of
their teachings about a god or a savior, their claims about miracles or a chosen
people, or their hopes of a life after death. Those doctrines are empty because
they lie beyond any chance of proof. The concepts of psychoanalytic science,
however, are very different. And they show in ever-so-interesting ways that the
real power of religions is to be found beyond their doctrines, in the deep psycho—
logical needs they fill and the unconscious emotions they express.
Analysis
1. Psychology and Religion
In commenting on the twentieth century, the great English poet W. H. Auden
once said, “We are all Freudians now.” This remark pays tribute to the enormous
influence that Freud’s ideas have had on all spheres of thought in our time. Reli-
gion is no exception. Freud’s analysis of the hidden forces within the human per-
sonality has compelled not just those concerned with the theory of religion but
almost everyone associated with its practice—theologians, clergy, counselors,
and teachers—to look beneath the surface of accepted doctrines and discover
the deep, unnoticed elements of personality that shape human religious faith and
are in turn shaped by it. Interestingly, though Freud himself takes a decidedly
negative view of religious behavior, other leaders in psychoanalysis—and even
entire schools of thought in contemporary psychology—have been eager to
adapt his insights to their own much more sympathetic views. Among others,
perhaps the most notable figure in this tradition has been the Swiss psycholo-
gist Carl Jung (1875—1961), one of the most important voices in the circle of
Freud’s earliest associates. For Jung, religion draws on a deep fund of images
and ideas that belong collectively to the human race and find expression in
mythology, folklore, philosophy, and literature. Religion, like these other
endeavors, draws on the resources of this “collective unconscious” not as a
form of neurosis but as the healthy expression of true and deep humanity.

Religion and Personality: Sigmund Freud 71
Others, such as contemporary ego psychologists and object relation theorists,
have followed a similar path, developing an entire field of studies in religion
and personality and producing a rich literature of theory and therapy. It seems
to matter little on this account whether analysts share Freud’s distaste for belief
or Jung’s approval; both perspectives have contributed greatly to the contem-
porary understanding of religion.
2. Freud’s Explanation of Religion
The importance of Freud’s theory of religion is closely connected to the context
in which he wrote. His views actually follow a line of thought developed early
in the 18003 by Ludwig Feuerbach, a German philosopher who gained fame in
his day for a book called The Essence of Christianity (1841). In this controver-
sial study, he claimed that all of religion is just a psychological device by which
we attach our own hopes, virtues, and ideals to an imaginary supernatural
being we call “God” and in the process only diminish ourselves. Feuerbach,
whom we shall meet again in this book because of his impact on Karl Marx,
might well be called the first modern thinker to offer a purely “projectionist”
explanation of religion. That is to say, he explains religion by showing not what
truth or rationality believers find in their ideas but rather what is the psycho—
logical mechanism that creates religious beliefs, regardless of whether they
are true or false, rational or irrational. Though briefly popular, Feuerbach was
not able to keep his following, and his theory faded from view. Marx devel-
oped it further, as we shall see, but he too was largely ignored in his age. By
Freud’s day, however, the time for just such a functional projectionist theory
was again ripe. And that was largely because of the work of Tyler and Frazer.
As we saw previously, both of these thinkers conclude that religion is some-
thing primarily “intellectual”; it is a system of ideas once sincerely believed
and now known to be mistaken and absurd. But again, assuming all of this to
be so, we must still try to explain how and why the human race has held so
firmly to this collection of superstition and error throughout its history and
into the scientific present. Why, if it is so absurd, do people insist upon reli-
gion? In the eyes of some, that is the puzzle that Freud, who knew well the
work of these English anthropological writers, brilliantly managed to solve.
On his view, if we want to know why religion persists even when it has been
discredited by science or better philosophy, we need only turn to psychoanaly-
sis, which tells us quite clearly that the true source of religion’s appeal is not
the rational mind but the unconscious. Religion arises from emotions and con-
flicts that originate early in childhood and lie deep beneath the rational, normal
surface of the personality. It is best seen as an obsessional neurosis. Accord-
ingly, we can no more suppose that believers would give up their faith because

72 Nine Theories of Religion
it has been proved irrational than that a neurotic would give up continuous
hand-washing because it has been pointed out that his hands are already quite
clean. The normal causes we see on the surface of things are not the real
causes of the behavior.
Freud is quite prepared to push this functional account of religion as far as it
can possibly go. He does not just say that, among other things, religion seems
to have certain psychological functions. He asserts that religion arises only in
response to deep emotional conflicts and weaknesses; he insists that these are
in fact its true, fundamental causes and, consequently, that once psychoanaly-
sis has scientifically resolved such problems, we can expect the illusion of
religion quite naturally to disappear from the human scene. Freud thus presents
us with a particularly vivid instance of an explanatory strategy that has had
great influence in the twentieth century—the approach theorists today describe
as functionalist reductionism. In what he sees as a radical unmasking of the real
truth about religion, Freud claims not just to explain it but to explain it away.
In his view, religion in its entirety can be “reduced” to little more than a
by-product of psychological distress, dismissed as a collection of ideas and
beliefs that, once their surface appearance has been penetrated, turn out to be
illusory wish fulfillments generated by the unconscious.
We do need to add here that Freud is not always consistent in his judgments;
in some places he seems not quite so exclusively committed to this psychologi—
cal reductionism as in others. But in the main, he furnishes us with a clear and
outspoken version of the reductionist approach, which strongly insists that reli—
gion is never a reality on its own terms; it is always an appearance, an expres-
sion of something else. It is not a genuine agent in human behavior or thought
because its fundamental character is always passive; its nature is to reflect other
realities—more powerful and more basic—that underlie it. Outspoken and in—
fluential as he has been, moreover, Freud is by no means alone in pursuing this
particularly aggressive functionalist strategy. As we shall see in the chapters that
immediately follow, the same kind of approach is evident in the work of two
other theorists whose views on religion have been of major importance to the
present day. We find versions of it both in the sociology of Emile Durkheim,
Freud’s French contemporary, and in the economic materialism of Karl Marx.
Critique
Any appraisal of Freud requires comment not only on his theory of religion but
also on the larger framework of psychoanalytic science that serves as its sup-
port. We have space here to raise just a few pertinent questions about the first,
then to note an ongoing, animated debate about the merits of the second.

Religion and Personality: Sigmund Freud 73
1. The Problem of Theistic and Nontheistic Religions
The first thing to observe is that Freud offers us not so much a theory of reli-
gion in general as a theory of Judeo-Christian, or at least monotheistic, religion
in particular. In all three of the works we have examined, the ideas of the
Oedipus complex and the need for a father image are so central to the discus-
sion that it is hard to see how the arguments could be applied to any form of
religion that is not monotheistic. Though he does mention them in a few places,
religions that affirm many gods, that propose mother gods, or that articulate a
faith in divine powers that are not personal in character fall largely outside the
embrace of Freud’s discussion. Since he chooses not to consider such religions,
we cannot say for certain how Freud would have explained them had he made
the attempt. But even if we were to try, on his behalf, to extend his explanations
to cover them, it is not easy to see how this could be done. Much of his theory
seems constructed specifically to account for those religions that affirm one,
and only one, all-powerful Father God. Others just do not fit.
2. The Problems of Analogy and History
Assuming we could find a way past the focus on monotheism, there is the issue
of Freud’s reasoning by analogy. For example, as we have seen in Totem and
Taboo and Moses and Monotheism, the argument of both books turns on an
extended comparison between the psychological growth of an individual and
the historical development of a large social group. The one takes place over at
most the sequence of decades that makes up the life of a single individual; the
other takes place over the course of centuries in the history of an entire com-
munity. What ground do we have, logically, to assume any real similarity or
clear connection between these two quite different things? It may be true that
from childhood onward a neurotic person passes through the several stages
Freud depicts. But outside of coincidence and Freud’s ingenuity, what grounds
do we have to suppose that the entire history of the Jews conforms to the pattern
. of development found in a single disturbed human personality?
Again, by what logic do we conclude, as Freud does in Totem and Taboo,
that the Christian rite of communion is somehow created from the hidden com—
munal memory of an Oedipal murder that took place thousands ,of years earlier
in the first animal-like hordes of humans? We can perhaps understand how an
early trauma could stay with one person for the rest of a life. But how can an
ancient murder be unconsciously “remembered” by the whole human race?
Freud feels that there are such collective memories, but that is mainly because
he relies on a version of evolutionary theory, put forward by the French scien-
tist Lamarck, who held that an experience acquired during one’s life can be

74 Nine Theories of Religion
biologically inherited by descendants. Unfortunately, in the decades after
Darwin, this version of evolution came under severe challenge from those who
saw far better grounds for concluding that natural selection was the key to the
evolutionary process. It is disconcerting to discover that Freud, who often ad-
vertised his solemn commitment to science, rested his analyses of religion so
heavily on a form of evolutionism that other important scientists of his day had
given good reasons to reject.
A further point also needs notice here. Even if we were to grant everything
Freud says about human individuals in his analogical arguments, very large
historical questions remain about their cultural side. From almost their first
encounters with Moses and Monotheism, historical critics have found in the
biblical and archaeological evidence little support for Freud’s highly imagina-
tive reconstruction of the early history of the Jews. If anything, anthropologists
have been even more skeptical of the conjectures about the original human
hordes and the murder of the first fathers. The plain fact is that most of these
events are simply lost in the fog of prehistory; reconstructing them requires a
great deal of imaginative guesswork. It is not a matter of uncertainty, as if some
evidence supports Freud and the rest does not; it is really a matter of ignorance
and inaccessibility. About such matters we often have little evidence of any
kind to support a theory of the sort Freud advances.
3. The Problem of Circulan’ty
As we saw in his very first essay on religion and at the core of the argument in
The Future of an Illusion, Freud argues that religion is very similar to a neu-
rosis. Just as neurotic people believe and do irrational things, so religious
people also believe and do irrational things. The kind of obsessional neurosis
discovered by psychoanalysis appears mainly in individual persons. The kind
of obsessional neurosis seen in religion afflicts entire cultures; it is universal.
Here again, however, we must inquire about Freud’s curious uses of analogy,
for context is crucial in explaining behavior. As a number even of critics
friendly to Freud have pointed out, a nun who spends hours at devotions
moving her prayer beads and a neurotic who spends hours counting the buttons
on his shirt are both engaged in the same form of behavior, but only one is
mentally disturbed. For nuns it is normal, not neurotic, to pray. Freud chooses
to find unconscious motives for such action only because from the start he has
assumed that prayer is an abnormal behavior. But of course he cannot do that
without claiming that it arises not from rational motives but from irrational
ones located in the unconscious—the very thing he sets out to prove. To put the
matter bluntly, some of Freud’s discussions wear the look of arguments that are
decidedly circular.

Religion and Personality: Sigmund Freud 75
Furthermore, the idea of projection itself is open to some question. The mere
fact that people project things from their minds out onto the world is hardly
proof that they are engaged in neurotic wish fulfillment. The symbols of sci-
ence and mathematics belong, strictly speaking, to numerical and conceptual
systems that we project upon the world not out of neurosis but simply because
they help us describe and understand that real world better. The obvious fact
that every day these “projections” of ourselves are successfully applied to real
life shows that they do, in fact, reflect something of the character of the world
as we experience it. But if that is true for the conceptions of mathematics and
natural science, there is no reason why, in principle at least, we cannot allow
that certain religious projections might also be true and might originate not
from neurosis but from a reasonable and appropriate understanding of the real
world as we perceive it.
4. Psychoanalysis as Science
We must finish this brief critique by raising finally the problematic position
of psychoanalysis itself as a form of science. Freud was trained in the natural
sciences; he began his career with research on the physiology of the brain.
When he turned to psychoanalysis, he stressed from the beginning, and in
definitive terms, that its methods were those of science. Psychoanalysis was
to be built on in-depth consultations with patients, on the careful framing
and testing of hypotheses, on the search for general theories, and on the ex—
change of criticism in scholarly journals. In The Future ofan Illusion Freud
proudly compares the slow, steady progress of sciences like psychoanalysis
with the backward dogmatism of religion. And today, certainly, the wide ac-
ceptance of psychoanalysis rests mainly on the common View that it is a
science of the mind.
It is just this accepted view, however, that in recent decades has come under
severe scientific attack. Over the past forty years especially, critics in many
quarters have subjected the entire enterprise of psychoanalysis—from Freud
onward—t0 a rigorous and searching reassessment. Their common verdict,
which is not friendly, can be summarized in two sentences: Whatever his tal-
ents, Freud was not a scientist. And whatever its claims, psychoanalysis is not
a science. The weightiest charges against the discipline were leveled by an
American philosopher of science, Adolf Grtinbaum, who argues that psycho-
analysts regularly assume the very things they hope to prove in their work
with patients, that their techniques for gathering evidence are scientifically
unsound, and that when usable evidence is, in fact, brought forward, it does
not support the elaborate Freudian conclusions conventionally drawn from it.
Griinbaum does not say that the field is unscientific in principle, but he does

76 Nine Theories of Religion
state that it has yet to establish truly scientific methods for testing its claims.2|
Others, looking on from a different perspective, have joined in these criti-
cisms, noticing that the principles at the core of the science—Freud’s theories
of the personality and neurosis—are constructed out of vague comparisons
and questionable inferences, most of which cannot be either proved or dis-
proved because, again, there is simply no scientific way even to test them.22
Still other observers have turned a sternly critical eye upon Freud himself,
only to find someone quite different from the man his disciples presented to
the world as a disinterested, pioneering scientist, the spokesman for truth in a
world of Victorian repression. They point out that while his talents of imagi-
nation and persuasion were certainly quite formidable, Freud was also a
shrewd promoter of his own interests as well as a man willing to bend evi-
dence, ignore valid criticism, and even misuse people when such actions
served the purpose of his program.23
In the light of these criticisms, it must be said that the scientific future of
psychoanalysis does not look especially promising. Freud’s theory of religion
is unlikely to fare better—unless (and that is always a possibility) it is refitted
to a new frame and placed on a less uncertain footing. At the same time, it
should be duly noted that psychoanalysis is only one strand of modern psy-
chology. Later in these pages we will trace a different strand in Freud’s con-
temporary William James, honored by some as “the father of psychology” in
America.
Notes
1. The Future of an Illusion, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological
Works ofSigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey with Anna Freud (London: Hogarth Press.
1961), 21: 43.
2. The classic older biography of Freud, written by an Englishman who belonged to
the circle of his original followers, is Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund
Freud, 3 vols. (New York: Basic Books, 1953—1957). An authoritative later biography is
Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for our Times (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988). There are also
numerous thematic and shorter biographical studies.
3. “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices,” in Standard Edition, 9: 116—127.
4. Much in this book was based on self-analysis, especially Freud’s interpretations
of his own dream experiences. See Gerald Levin, Sigmund Freud (Boston: Twayne
Publishers, 1975), p. 28.
5. Much has been written on Freud’s concept of repression. A good, brief account of
this idea and its place in Freud’s thought can be found in Philip Rieff’s Freud: The Mind
of the Moralist, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), pp. 37-44,
314—320.

Religion and Personality: Sigmund Freud 77
6. Freud’s study Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910) and his
articles on “The Moses of Michelangelo” (1914) and “Dostoyevsky and Parricide”
(1928) continue to fascinate historians of art and literature.
7. Freud first presented this formulation in The Ego and the Id in 1923.
8. See Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, in Standard Edition, 23: 146.
9. Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, in Standard Edition, 23: 190.
10. Freud, An Outline of Psychoanalysis, in Standard Edition, 23: 191.
11. Among a number of instructive works on Freud’s Jewish background and his reli—
gious opinions, see Howard Littleton Philp, Freud and Religious Belief (New York:
Pitman, 1956); G. Zillboorg, Freud and Religion: A Restatement of an Old Controversy
(Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1958); Earl A. Grollman, Judaism in Sigmund Freud ’s
World (New York: Appleton-Century, 1965); Hans Kung, Freud and the Problem of God
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979); Edwin R. Wallace IV, “Freud and Reli-
gion,” in Werner Muensterberger et al., eds, The Psychoanalytic Study of Society, vol. 10
(Hillsdale, NJ: The Analytic Press, 1984), pp. 113—161; and Peter Gay, A Godless Jew:
Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1987). Wallace and Gay also provide substantial recent bibliographies.
12. Jones, Life and Work ofFreud, 3: 351.
13. Freud, “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices” (1907), in Standard Edition,
9: 126; this famous phrase, which heads this chapter, appears again in The Future of an
Illusion.
14. Totem and Taboo, in Standard Edition, 13: 132-142.
15. Totem and Taboo, in Standard Edition, 13: 145.
16. Freud, The Future of an Illusion, in Standard Edition, 21: 19.
17. The Future ofan Illusion, in Standard Edition, 21: 33.
18. The Future ofan Illusion, in Standard Edition, 21: 30.
19. The Future ofan Illusion, in Standard Edition, 21: 43.
20. The Future of an Illusion, in Standard Edition, 21: 44.
21. See his important work, The Foundations of Psychoanalysis (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1984).
22. See especially Malcolm Macmillan, Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc
(New York: North Holland, 1991).
23. On Freud’s literary talents, especially in the area of expository nonfiction, see
Patrick J. Mahony, Freud as a Writer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987).
The scientific criticisms, along with appreciations, of Freud are put with Special force
in Frank Sulloway, Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend
(New York: Basic Books, 1979); see also Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, The Assault upon
Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory (New York: Farrar, Straus, and
Giroux, 1984), and Frederick C. Crews, Skeptical Engagements (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1986). For summaries of these criticisms and the heated debates they
have elicited, see Paul Robinson, Freud and His Critics (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1993), and Frederick C. Crews, “The Unknown Freud,” New York
Review of Books 40, no. 19 (November 18, 1993): 55—66.

Suggestions for Further Reading
Bernstein, Richard J. Freud and the Legacy ofMoses. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998. Reappraises Moses and Monotheism, claiming this much-criticized
book is Freud’s most important because it offers a new conception of religion.
Capps, Donald, ed. Freud and Freudians on Religion: A Reader. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2001. Assembles writings on religion from the perspective of
psychoanalysis as advanced by both Freud and a number of his most prominent
followers.
Crews, Frederick, ed. Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend. New York:
Viking Press, 1998. One of Freud’s harshest contemporary critics collects further
challenges from prominent figures who continue to place the methods of both
Freud and psychoanalysis under scrutiny.
Dufresne, Todd. Against Freud: Critics Talk Back. Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2007. A collection of interviews with the leading contemporary critics of
Freud, his methods, and Freudian theory.
Flem, Lydia. Freud the Man. Translated by Susan Fairfield. New York: Other Press,
2003. A newer biography that centers on the personal interests and concerns of
Freud alongside his professional work in psychology.
Gay, Peter. A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987. A brief, insightful assessment of Freud’s
perspective on religion by an authoritative biographer.
Griinbaum, Adolf. Validation in the Clinical Theory of Psychoanalysis: A Study in the
Philosophy of Psychoanalysis. Madison, CT: International Universities Press,
1993. An amplification of the critique first advanced by Griinbaum with The
Foundations of Psychoanalysis in 1984.
Kerr, John. A Most Dangerous Method: The Story ofJung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein.
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993. Raises questions, both moral and scientific,
about the aims and methods of Freud and Jung in dealing with one of their first
patients.
Kramer, Peter D. Freud: Inventor ofthe Modern Mind. New York: Harper Collins, 2006.
A recent reappraisal of Freud that steers a middle path between disciples and
critics.
Ku’ng, Hans. Freud and the Problem of God. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1979. A thoughtful analysis of Freud’s theological opinions by a distinguished
modern Catholic theologian.
Lear, Jonathan. Freud. New York: Routledge, 2005. A reinterpretation of Freud’s career
with particular focus on his achievement in creating psychoanalysis and the
status of his work viewed from the perspective of philosophy.
MacIntyre, Alasdair C. The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1958. Now quite dated, but uniquely valuable as a clear and brief
study of the idea that gave birth to psychoanalysis. Written by an influential
philosopher in the tradition of language analysis.
Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff. The Assault upon Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduc-
tion Theory. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1984. A controversial expose

Religion and Personality: Sigmund Freud 79
of Freud’s methods that attempts to show how he mishandled one of his early
patients in psychoanalysis. ‘
Merlino, Joseph P. et al., Freud at 150: 21st Century Essays on a Man of Genius.
Lanham, MD: Jason Aronson, Inc.. 2007. Lectures measuring Freud’s world
stature and achievement; contributed to a conference sponsored by the Austrian
government on the 150th anniversary of Freud’s birth.
Neu, Jerome, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Freud. New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1991. Instructive essays on Freud by various scholars of strong pedigree
active in writing on his life and thought.
Palmer, Michael. Freud and Jung on Religion. London: Routledge, 1997. Explores the
fundamentally Opposite appraisals of religion offered by the two founders of
psychoanalysis.
Rieff, Philip. Freud: The Mind of the Moralist. 3rd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1979. A widely read and much appreciated study of Freud’s ideas in their
biographical and cultural context.
Rizzuto. Ana-Maria. Why Did Freud Reject God? A Psychodynamic Interpretation.
New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. Argues that Freud’s childhood
development and family circumstances made serious consideration of belief in
God impossible for him.
Roazen, Paul. Encountering Freud: The Politics and Histories of Psychoanalysis. New
Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1990. An exploration of the controver-
sies surrounding the aims of both Freud and his new field of study.
Robinson, Paul. Freud and His Critics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.
Summarizes and evaluates issues in the heated debate over Freud and the validity
of psychoanalysis as a science.
Sulloway, Frank. Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend. New
York: Basic Books, 1979. A comprehensive study by a scholar who, since this
book, has gradually grown more critical of Freud’s science.

3
Society as Sacred:
Emile Durkheim
The idea of society is the soul of religion.
Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life’
In the very years during which Freud put forward his controversial views in
Vienna, an equally original thinker in France, Emile Durkheim, set to work
on a theory of religion that was just as revolutionary, though in quite a differ-
ent way. If Freud is the first name that people associate with modern psychol-
ogy, then that of Durkheim—though less widely known—should be one of
the first that comes to mind at the mention of sociology. Durkheim champi-
oned the central importance of society—of social structures, relationships,
and institutions—in understanding human thought and behavior. His distinct
perspective consists in his determination to see almost every major enterprise
of human life—our laws and morality, labor and recreation, family and per-
sonality, science, art, and certainly religion—through the lens of their social
dimension. Without a society to give them birth and shape them, he claimed,
none of these things could exist.
At a first glance, of course, a theorist who sounds this social theme hardly
seems revolutionary. In the present climate of thought, few discussions of any
kind take place without some reference to the “social environment.” Hardly a
day passes without some comment on ” “K ‘social decay, social engineering,”
“social reform,” or “social context.” A century ago, however, such language
would have been almost as rare as it is common now. “Society” was a word
mostly associated with upper-class manners and the dinner parties of the
wealthy. The leading systems of thought were quite individualistic, with a ten-
dency to see any social arrangement—from a single family to a village, a
church, or an entire nation—as little more than a collection of separate persons
who happened to be brought together by a common location or shared inter-
ests. Durkheim’s view was emphatically different. He went so far as to say that
81

82 Nine Theories of Religion
social facts are more fundamental than individual ones—that they are, in their
Way, as real as physical objects, and that individuals are more often than not
misunderstood when the powerful imprint of society upon them is ignored or
insufficiently noticed. Human beings, after all, are never just individuals; they
always belong to something—to parents or relatives, a town or city, a race, a
political party, an ethnic tradition, or some other group. In Durkheim’s view, it
is futile to think that we can really comprehend what a person is by appealing
only to biological instinct, individual psychology, or isolated self-interest. We
must explain individuals in and through society.
In accord with this social premise, Durkheim insisted, very much like
Freud, that his subject required nothing less than a new scientific discipline to
investigate it. This field he chose to call “sociology,” even though he was not
the first to use the word and was not himself very fond of it. Simply put, soci-
ology was to be the science of society. In a significant measure it is because of
Durkheim’s strong advocacy and guiding influence that social science holds
such a prominent place in modern life, whether we appeal to it in matters of
government, economics, education, or in any other forum of public discus-
sion, from the university lecture room to the television reality show. Today,
our instinctively social view of the world is an index of just how thoroughly
successful Durkheim’s revolution in thought has turned out to be.2
Durkheim actually presents us with two parallels to Freud. Not only did
both men feel the need to promote special fields of study——psychology in the
one case and sociology in the other—but both also found that their new
perspectives led them unavoidably back to the very old question of religious
behavior and belief. Like Freud, Durkheim too was driven to ask: What is
religion? Why has it been so important and central in human affairs? What
does it do for both the individual and society? Freud, as we saw, thought he
could not fully explain the individual personality without also accounting for
the appeal of religion. Durkheim felt precisely the same about society. In the
course of trying to understand “the social” in all of its hidden and powerful
dimensions, he found himself drawn steadily and repeatedly to “the religious.”
For Durkheim, religion and society are inseparable and—to each other—
virtually indispensable.
Life and Career
Durkheim was born in 1858 in the town of Epinal, near Strasbourg in north—
eastern France.3 His father was a rabbi, and as a young boy he was also strongly
affected by a schoolteacher who was Roman Catholic. These influences may
have contributed something to his general interest in religious endeavors, but

Society as Sacred: Emile Durkheim 83
they did not make him personally a believer. By the time he was a young man,
he had become an avowed agnostic.
In secondary school Durkheim was a brilliant student, and at the age of
twenty—one he was admitted to the demanding Ecole Normale Supérieure,
one of France’s finest centers of learning, where he studied both history and
philosophy. His experience there was not a completely happy one, in part
because he did not like the rigid way in which the programs of study were
designed. Yet his response at the time, which offers a clue to his tempera-
ment, was not to withdraw or complain; he had too keen an appreciation for
social order to abandon an institution just because he was personally un-
suited to its rules. After finishing his program and writing the two disserta-
tions required of all students at the Ecole Normale, he began teaching at
secondary schools in the vicinity of Paris. He also took a year to study in
Germany with the noted psychologist Wilhelm Wundt. In 1887 he married
Louise Dreyfus, a woman who devoted herself lifelong to his career and their
two children. In the same year he became a professor at the University of
Bordeaux, which created a new chair of social science and education specifi-
cally for his sociological research.
Over the next fifteen years, while working at Bordeaux, Durkheim diligently
pursued his sociological inquiries and developed his ideas. His first major book
was The Division of Labor, published in 1893. It was followed in 1895 by The
Rules of Sociological Method, a theoretical work that stirred a great deal of
debate. He also published an important study, Suicide (1897), which looked for
the public, social factors behind what others of his day commonly regarded as
a strictly private act of deSpair. At about the same time, he established with
other scholars L’Anne’e sociologique, a new academic journal that published
articles and reviewed other writings from a sociological perspective. This jour-
nal, which became famous throughout France and the world, did as much as
any of Durkheim’s own books to promote the discipline of sociology. Other
talented scholars were drawn to contribute their work to its pages and in the
process deve10ped Durkheim’s perSpective into an identifiable “school of
thought.” Not surprisingly, on the strength of these impressive achievements
(and with the help of some political maneuvering in the government), Durkheim
was named a professor at the University of Paris. At the age of forty—four, he
could boast the supreme achievement of a French academic career.
At Paris, Durkheim passed through years of triumph and later of tragedy.
Already in Bordeaux his interests had begun to turn strongly toward an ex-
ploration of religion’s role in social life, but after his move, new commit-
ments and tasks slowed the progress of this research. Nonetheless, he kept to
his plan and a decade later published The Elementary Forms of the Religious
Life (1912), his best-known and most important book. Durkheim’s chief

84 Nine Theories of Religion
claim to importance as a theorist of religion—and his great influence on
other thinkers—rests largely on this impressive study, which we shall exam—
ine closely in this chapter. As its date indicates, The Elementary Forms ap-
peared just two years before Europe was shaken by World War I. This
enormous catastrophe fell hardest on Belgium and France, where much of
the fighting took place, and it left its sad mark on Durkheim’s personal life,
as it did on so many others. Though he believed that scholars should preserve
their scientific objectivity by avoiding comment on current affairs, he made
an exception during the war, speaking out fiercely for the cause of France
against Germany. Then, early in 1916, he learned that his only son, Andre’,
himself a promising young scholar, had been killed on a military campaign
in Serbia. Broken by grief, Durkheim struggled to work and write, only to
suffer a debilitating stroke some months later. His own death came just over
a year thereafter, in 1917, at the relatively young age of fifty-nine.
Ideas and Influences
Durkheim’s great interest in society was not some sudden creation of his own.
As he would have been the first to point out, a sequence of French thinkers
before him had shown similar interests, and his ideas could be seen as a de-
velopment of theirs.4 One of his two dissertations had been written on the
Baron de Montesquieu, the French philosopher of the eighteenth century who
carefully observed and analyzed European culture and political institutions.
Montesquieu’s work showed that social structures could be examined in a
critical scientific fashion. Durkheim also read the writings of the Comte de
Saint—Simon, a socialist thinker of the early 18003 who believed that all pri-
vate property should be given over to the state. And he was equally impressed
by the most famous French thinker of the early nineteenth century, August
Comte (1798—1857), who proposed, like Tylor and Frazer, an evolutionary
pattern of civilization. In this grand scheme, earlier stages of human thinking,
governed first by theology and then by the abstract ideas of philosophers, are
eventually surpassed by the current, “positive” age of scientific thought, in
which close study only of observable facts provides the key to all knowledge.
During the present epoch of science, a new “religion of humanity” replaces
the discredited religions and philosophies of the past. From Comte, Durkheim
took an appreciation of the human need for communal ties and a deep com-
mitment to scientific analysis of social phenomena. He was somewhat less
taken with the notion of evolutionary social progress.
In addition to these earlier figures, we must not forget two of the most cele-
brated scholars in France during Durkheim’s youth: the great biblical critic

Society as Sacred: Emile Durkheim 85
Emest Renan, who took a keenly social interest in both ancient Judaism and
early Christianity, and an extraordinarily gifted classical historian who was one
of Durkheim’s own greatly admired university teachers at the Ecole Normale.
This was Numa Denys Fustel de Coulanges, whose influential book The An-
cient City (1864) was to become a classic study of social life in the ancient
world. In this fascinating work, Coulanges presented his readers with a close
social analysis of the Greek and Roman city-states, showing not only how or-
dinary life was governed by deeply cherished traditions and rooted in conser-
vative moral values but also how thoroughly these traditions and values were
steeped in classical polytheistic religion.
Durkheim built naturally upon the ideas of these thinkers in framing his
own perspective, but the circumstances of modern French life contributed
something as well. As most well know, by the later 18003 France and Europe
had passed through two great revolutions. One was economic (the Industrial
Revolution); the other was political (the French Revolution and its several
successors). In Durkheim’s estimate, the joint impact of these two momen-
tous developments permanently changed the pattern of life in Western civili—
zation. Europe had long relied for stability on its agriculture, its well-defined
social classes, its property—owning aristocracies and monarchies, and the in-
timate community ties of its villages and towns, along with the overarching
truths, traditions, and structures of the Christian church. In the aftermath of
the twin revolutions, these fixtures of Western culture were shaken as never
before and so altered as never again to be the same. The effect was to create
a new and different kind of civilization, which saw its people moving to fac-
tories and cities, its wealth moving from titled lords to enterprising mer-
chants, its power shifting from the old privileged classes to radical movements
or popular causes, and its religion everywhere facing disputes, indifference,
or open disbelief. In specific terms, Durkheim noticed especially the follow-
ing four trends, or patterns:
1. In place of Europe’s traditional social system, laced together as it was by
ties of family, community, and religious faith, a new “contractual” order
was emerging, in which private concerns and money-related interests
seemed to predominate.
2. In the realm of morals and behavior, the sacred values once sanctioned by
the Church were now challenged by newer ideals, which stressed reason
over religious faith and a desire for a happiness in this life over any hope
of Heaven (or fear of Hell) in the life to come.
3. In the sphere of politics, the emergence of the democratic masses at the
bottom of society and a powerful central state at the top had changed the
nature of social control. Individuals were finding themselves disconnected

36 Nine Theories of Religion
from their old moral teachers—the family, village, and Church—and were
left to find what guidance they could from political parties, mass move-
ments, and the state.
4. In the area of personal affairs, this new freedom of individuals released
from their old frameworks presented great opportunity and great risk.
With it came the chance of greater prosperity and self-realization but also
the serious threat of loneliness and personal isolation.
Sociology and “the Social”
Looking over these momentous changes, Durkheim felt that there was only
one way to approach them—scientifically. Only a fully scientific sociology
could help people comprehend the tremors of an entire world that was moving
beneath their feet. Accordingly, he laid down for his scholarly investigations
two fixed and fundamental principles: (1) that the nature of society is the most
suitable and promising subject for systematic investigation, especially at the
present moment in history, and (2) that all such “social facts” should be inves—
tigated by the most purely objective scientific methods attainable.
The Nature of Society
In The Division of Labor, Durkheim’s first major book, he shows how easily
one can go wrong by ignoring the first of these principles. Social life, he ex-
plains, has shaped the most fundamental features of human culture, but that is
not how previous thinkers tended to see it. If they considered it at all, they did
so as a kind of afterthought. When they looked at the past, they proposed ideas
like the famous “social contract,” which held that society began when some
individuals agreed to hand power to another, stronger individual—the king——
in return for his protection. When this primeval agreement was sealed, society
was born. Such stories offer an interesting exercise in imaginative fiction, says
Durkheim, but the real history of humanity was never so. Even in prehistoric
times, individuals were always born first into groups—into families, clans,
tribes, nations—and raised in that context. Their languages, habits, beliefs,
and emotional responses—even the very concept they had of their individual
selves—always came from a social framework that was there to shape them
from the first moment they appeared in the world. Ancient contracts, for ex-
ample, always had to be sworn with a sacred religious oath, which showed that
such agreements were not just a matter of convenience between the parties
involved but were to be enforced by the gods, for all of the community had an
interest in the outcome. So too with the concept of private property. It too is

Society as Sacred: Emile Durkheim 87
thought to have developed individually; conventional thinking holds that the
idea of a person’s right to own an object or piece of ground arose because these
things could be seen as extensions of the individual self. But again, Durkheim
claims the facts of history show otherwise. The first possessions were not in-
dividual but communal in character, starting with the sacred ground that early
peoples regarded as belonging not to the priest or any other single person but
to the whole tribe. These common holdings provided the earliest ideas of prop-
erty and ownership. Only out of the notion of public rights to things owned or
possessed by all—things sacred to the whole clan—did cultures ever develop
the idea of something that could be privately possessed by one person alone or
by some apart.
Social solidarity, then, has always been primary. Out of an underlying sense
of the group have come such basic structures of life as moral obligation and
ownership of personal property. That having been said, Durkheim observes
that the main difference between ancient and modern societies pertains to the
ways in which they try to achieve their unity. Study of legal codes, for example,
shows that early communities tend to rely on “mechanical solidarity.” Good
behavior is secured by punishments (often severe) for anyone who breaks the
moral code of the group. This is external enforcement. In more modern times,
on the other hand, a different pattern of “organic solidarity” tends to take over.
Because there is the division of labor, because different people can do different
things, the sense of moral commitment develops in another way; it comes not
from the threat of punishment but from the need that each person acquires for
the work of the others. Here enforcement must become internal. A wrong done
by any one person must be seen as damaging to the others on whom that person
depends. Ancient societies also have a broad and strong “collective con—
science”; in them, there is uniform agreement as to what is right and what is
wrong in almost all matters of human conduct. Modern societies, by contrast,
are marked by moral individualism; they still need a foundation, a common
moral basis, but because they allow for more individual diversity and personal
freedom, their collective conscience is smaller in scope. It is limited to a few
commands and obligations rather than many.
This last fact is especially significant because Durkheim believes firmly that
morality, the obligation of each to others and all to the standards of the group, is
inseparable from religion. Further, as we shall shortly see, both religion and
morals are inseparable from a social framework. We cannot have either without a
social context, and as that changes, so must they. When, as has happened espe-
cially in Western civilization, a society gives up the collective conscience it had
in more primitive times and through division of labor replaces it with a morally
individualistic system like that of the present, we should not be surprised to see
that religion and morals have changed right along with the rest of the social order.

The Scientific Study of Society
The second of Durkheim’s two principles of inquiry is developed in The Rules
of Sociological Method (1895), where he explains how sociology must be
pursued as an objective, independent science. In France, many people knew
the perceptive analyses of society carried out by Montesquieu, Alexis de
Tocqueville, and August Comte; these were admirable and insightful narratives
in the style of traditional historical study. When Durkheim, in contrast, insisted
that his “science” of society was really quite another thing, reasonable people
naturally wondered: What kind of other thing? How can there be a science of
an abstraction like the social order, of something we really cannot see or touch
in the way a chemist or botanist can observe the visible, solid objects of nature?
Durkheim’s answer was to think of society in a manner similar to that of Tylor
and the British anthropologists when they spoke of “culture” but then to go
even further. He insisted that social facts, no less than stones or seashells, are
real things, as solid in their way as physical objects are in theirs. A society is
not just a passing thought in someone’s head; it is an accumulated body of
facts—of language, laws, customs, ideas, values, traditions, techniques, and
products—all of which are connected to one another and exist in a manner
quite “external” to individual human minds. They are in the world before we
individuals arrive; the moment we are born, they impose themselves on us; as
we grow through childhood, they mold us; in adulthood, they animate and
guide us; and, just as surely, in death they survive us. Moreover, it stands to
reason that if there indeed are such real and independent social facts surround—
ing us, then there ought to be a distinct scientific discipline devoted to the
study of them. We do not imagine that we can explain a living organism only
through physics or chemistry; we also need biology. In the same way, we
cannot explain society if we look only to biology and psychology or even eco—
nomics. Society requires sociology; other disciplines are not sufficient.
None of this means for Durkheim that the actual methods of sociological
study will be dramatically different from those of other sciences. The key to
any science, physical or social, is the gathering of evidence, followed by com-
parison, classification into groups, and finally the framing of general princi-
ples, or “laws,” that can in some way be tested for their validity. In this
connection, sociology not only does what other sciences do but in some ways
hOpes even to do it better. For example, Durkheim takes care to separate him-
self from the well-known comparative method as it was practiced by Tylor,
Frazer, and the other Victorian British anthropologists. We have seen how, in
their searches for significant patterns, they preferred to travel globally, choos-
ing customs or ideas at will and placing them into a general category, such
as “imitative magic,” with little attention to their context. Such determined

Society as Sacred: Emile Durkheim 89
gathering of facts from the remotest ends and ages of the world does make for
large, impressive books like The Golden Bough, but in Durkheim’s view it is
not science. It rests everything on surface similarities and very little on sub-
stance. Sociology is more cautious. It knows that comparisons can be made,
and general laws laid down, only when two societies are very closely examined
and can be seen to fit clearly into a common type.
Though we cannot here follow his account of sociology’s methods in detail,
we can briefly take note of at least some of the categories Durkheim puts into
play in his approach to religion. Among other things, he believes that we can
determine, for any society, what is normal behavior and, consequently, what is
also pathological, or abnormal, behavior. This is certainly not a matter of abso-
lute values, of what is good or evil at all times and places. The normal is always
determined from within a group, never from outside of it. Suicide, for example,
is more “normal” for some societies, like Japan, than for others. Polygamy is
more normal for primitive societies than for modern ones. We must always
judge the normal from within the social. In addition, whether normal or not, the
category of function in a society is for Durkheim also extremely important in
explaining behavior. And it must be kept separate from the idea of cause. The
cause of an inner-city religious revival might be the spellbinding sermons of a
storefront preacher, but the revival’s social function may be something that
goes entirely unnoticed by those who join it. From the sociologist’s standpoint,
the preacher’s success can be traced not to the number of sinners brought to
conversion but to something wholly unnoticed by those who are kneeling in
prayer: the event as a whole has restored a sense of community, of shared iden-
tity and purpose, to a neighborhood of otherwise poor, isolated, even disillu—
sioned individuals.
A good illustration of these categories can be found in Durkheim’s famous
study Suicide (1895), which was published not long after The Rules. After
examining and closely comparing the suicide rates in the major countries of
Europe, he noticed that the figures were highest in Protestant countries, were
lowest in Catholic ones, and fell in between for countries of mixed religious
population. In light of these ratios, it is possible to say that a certain kind of
suicide, which Durkheim labels “egoistic,” is more normal—that is, more
typical—for Protestant countries than Catholic ones. We cannot account for
this circumstance, he says, directly from the differing religious belief systems
because both groups think suicide is wrong. Sociologically, however, there are
certain definite and interesting differences. Protestant societies offer the indi-
vidual greater freedom of thought and life; in them, people are “on their own”
before God. Catholics, by contrast, belong to a more strongly integrated social
community, where priests mediate between God and the believer and ties
within the parish are strong. It would seem, therefore, that the rate of suicide in

90 Nine Theories of Religion
a community is inversely correlated to the degree of its social integration: the
tighter the social ties, the lower the rate of suicide. Another kind of suicide—
Durkheim called it “anomic” (from the Greek anomia: “lawlessness”) to sug-
gest a feeling of dislocation and aimlessness—tends to occur most in times of
great economic and social instability. Clearly, to the trained sociologist the
phenomenon of suicide appears in a light very different from that which strikes
the eye of the ordinary observer.
Politics, Education, and Morals
Durkheim felt that his sociological perspective offered special insight into the
nature of political systems, education, morals, and especially religion. In the
sphere of political philosophy he gave lectures on socialism and communism,
describing both as responses to the unsettlement of modern life but rejecting
their ideas of class struggle and their theories of a powerful state.5 In other lec-
tures, especially Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (published after his
death), he recognized that the state does need certain extensive powers, which
can even be good for the lives of individuals. At the same time he stressed the
importance also of what he called “secondary,” intermediate groups, such as
local brotherhoods and professional associations, to help protect the rights and
well-being of individuals lest national governments become too strong. A key
task of the state is the promotion of moral values, which is why it must also play
a central role in a society’s system of education. Durkheim addressed this subject
often, writing, among other works, a two-volume history of education in France.
As he describes it, the purpose of schools is not just to give technical training in
certain skills but also to pass along the values of self-discipline and community
welfare and to promote them over the selfish personal interests of individuals.
Such instruction in moral values is not a luxury or an option; it is vital to the
health and harmonious operation of any society. These Opinions, which have had
considerable influence on modern French educational theory, are at least partly
responsible for the wry observation that, on any given day, the minister of educa-
tion in Paris knows precisely what page in their textbooks all the children of
France are reading. Against this backdrop, it is not surprising to find that along-
side his treatments of both politics and education, Durkheim also makes the
analysis of moral theory and legal traditions a key part of his program.6
The question of morals, as we have already noticed, is in Durkheim’s view
impossible to answer without at some point turning also to the question of reli-
gion. This he had done in the earlier years of his career indirectly, through
essays, articles, and reviews of the work of others. But he reserved his complete
and definitive discussion of religion for his last and most important book,

Society as Sacred: Emile Durkheim 91
The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. It was published in 1912, after
more than ten years of research and reflection. Since it presents the heart of
Durkheim’s theory of religion, we need to consider its arguments in some detail.
The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
Perhaps the two most important things to notice about this lengthy, pioneering
book are its title and the way it begins. The Elementary Forms (1912) is con-
cerned to find certain fundamentals—the “basic elements,” as a nuclear physi-
cist might say—out of which all of religion has been formed. And it starts off
in a fashion a nuclear physicist might well approve—by apparently setting
aside all the usual and customary ways of thinking about its subject. We may
recall that Tylor and Frazer, and Freud as well, were largely content with the
conventional idea that religion is belief in supernatural beings, such as a god or
gods. Durkheim is not. From the start he claims that primitive peoples nor-
mally do not really think of two different worlds, one supernatural and the other
natural, in the way that religious people living in developed cultures do. Mod—
erns are heavily influenced by the assumptions and natural laws of science;
primitive people are not. They see all events—miraculous and ordinary—
as basically of the same kind. In addition, the concept of the gods itself is a
problem, since not all religious people believe in divine beings even if they do
believe in the supernatural. Certain Buddhists deny that there are gods, while
other people routinely observe rituals that have nothing to do with spirits or
deities. Clearly, the subject needs a new definition, and clearing away 01d
views is a necessary first step. But where do we go after that?
Durkheim next observes that the chief characteristic of religious beliefs and
rituals is not the element of the supernatural but the concept of the sacred, which
is actually quite different. Wherever we look, people who are religious do divide
the things of their world into two separate spheres, but they are not the natural
and supernatural. Rather, they are the realms of the sacred and the profane.
Sacred things are always set apart as superior, powerful, forbidden to normal
contact, and deserving of great respect. Profane things are the opposite; they
belong to the ordinary, uneventful, and practical routine of everyday life. The
overwhelming concern of religion is with the first. In Durkheim’s words, “reli-
gion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is
to say, things set apart and forbidden.”7 If we then ask what is the purpose of
these sacred things, that is answered in a second part of the definition: these
practices “unite into one moral community called a church, all those who adhere
to them.”8 The key words here are “community” and “church.” Sacred things
always involve large concerns: the interests and welfare of an entire group of

92 Nine Theories of Religion
people, not just one or a few. Profane things, on the other hand, are little matters;
they reflect the day-to-day business of each individual—the smaller, private
activities of the immediate family and personal life.
Though it is tempting to do so, Durkheim warns us not to make the mistake
of thinking that this division between sacred and profane is a moral one—that
the sacred is good and the profane evil. That line of separation actually runs
through the division between the sacred and the profane. The sacred can be
either good or evil, but the one thing it can never be is profane; the profane can
be either good or evil, but the one thing it can never be is sacred. The sacred
arises especially in connection with whatever may concern the community; the
profane is more naturally the realm of private and personal matters.
This stress on the sacred as something communal leads Durkheim to another
disagreement with his predecessors, which centers on the puzzling question of
magic. In Frazer’s Opinion, as we saw, magic and religion are cut from the same
cloth; they try to do the same thing but in different ways. Both try to explain the
way the world works, so that it can be controlled for human benefit. The human
race first followed the rules of magic, and when that failed, it turned to religion
as a better way. With this too Durkheim disagrees. For him, religion does not
come along to replace magic when it fails, because the two are not concerned
with the same thing. Magic is an exclusively private matter, which has little or
nothing to do with the sacred and its concerns. The magician, like a doctor,
heals my sickness or puts a spell on your enemy; but that is purely personal.
I may not even know that my magician is also helping you, because each of us
is going to him to satisfy separate, mainly private needs. That is not the case
with the much greater matter of religion. Religious rituals and beliefs come into
play whenever group concerns are foremost in the mind; the sacred functions as
the focal point of the claims that affect the entire community. Accordingly,
magic and religion can exist quite comfortably side by side; the one is the place
for the personal, the other the sphere of the social. A magician, as Durkheim
puts it, has clients but no congregation: “There is no church of magic.”9
These two points of disagreement—on the definition of religion and the
nature of magic—lead on to the third and most important of Durkheim’s quar-
rels with other theorists. In his view, they have all misunderstood just what it is
about religion that really needs to be explained.
Previous Theories: Naturism and Animism
Durkheim contends that a Close look at the leading theories of the day will
show a common theme throughout: all claim that religion is simply a natural
instinct of the human race; it is assumed that in all cultures people have devised

Society as Sacred: Emile Durkheim 93
their systems of belief as quite logical responses to the world as they encounter
it. The most prominent of these theories are the naturism of Friedrich Max
Muller, whom we met in our introduction, and the animism of E. B. Tylor.
Muller holds that people came to believe in gods by trying to describe the great
objects and events of nature. Tylor, as we have seen, holds that belief in gods
developed out of the idea of the soul. In framing these views both of these theo-
rists have tried to go backward in time to the earliest peoples and guess how
they thought. But this is really an impossible enterprise. If we truly want to be
scientific about religion, we must try to look instead for “the ever-present
causes” on which it rests, the factors that shape it at all times and places. In-
stead of making a grand guess about the distant past, we should look firsthand
at a real example of religion in action. And for this purpose, what better method
could there be than to locate the simplest society we know of and rely on some-
one who has actually observed it? A religion linked to the simplest social
system that exists might well be regarded as “the most elementary religion we
can possibly know.”’0 If we can explain this religion, we have a start on explain—
ing all religion. We will have in hand religion’s “elementary forms.”
Australian Tribal Religion: Totemism
Durkheim further thought that on just this point—finding a specimen of a
truly simple civilization—recent researches had provided a remarkable break—
through. We have already noticed how Frazer took an interest in the work of
Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, two field anthropologists who had been able
to observe closely certain primitive aboriginal tribes in the remote hinterlands
of Australia. Their work—along with that of the German fieldworker Carl von
Strehlow and others—furnished a detailed portrait of social life in these
extremely simple communities. And to all appearances they found that the
religion of these peoples was none other than totemism, the very practice that
so captivated Robertson Smith, Frazer, Freud, and others.
Durkheim was no less fascinated than the others by this new Australian re-
search, but he felt also that they had not graSped its full importance. None had
really appreciated how fundamental to primitive culture totemism really is. All
recognized that tribal peoples divide themselves into different clans, each of
which claims its separate totem animal or plant. And all noticed that the totem
itself, whether it be the bear or the crow, the kangaroo or the tea tree, is tightly
bound to its clan. But none had detected the genuinely important thing: how
totemism impressively illustrates the concepts of the sacred and the profane.
In each of these primitive societies, Durkheim observes, animals other than
the totem, which are profane, can ordinarily be killed and eaten by the clan; the

94 Nine Theories of Religion
totem animal cannot. Because it is sacred, it is absolutely forbidden to the
clan—except on those select occasions when, as a part of specially designated
ceremonies, it is ritually sacrificed and eaten. In addition, the clan itself is re-
garded as sacred because it is considered to be one with its totem. And perhaps
most important, the emblem, or logo, of the totem animal is always extremely
important; it is not just sacred but the very model, the perfect example, of a
sacred thing. When the clan gathers, it is always the totem symbol, carved into
a piece of wood or rock, that holds center stage. The totem is supremely sacred
and communicates its sacred character to all around it.
Totem beliefs, moreover, are so fundamental to the life of these simple soci-
eties that everything of importance is ultimately shaped by them. One can
hardly find anything more basic than the very categories of human thought and
experience. Among the Aborigines, these are provided by totemism. For ex-
ample, totemic concepts govern their most basic perceptions of nature, so that
not only groups of people but the entire world of natural objects is divided into
categories based on totem clans, or clusters of clans, called phratries. One
tribe, for example, places the sun in the clan of the white cockatoo, while the
moon and stars are assigned to the clan of its black counterpart. In addition,
natural objects are placed in a hierarchy of power, which could only have been
devised on the basis of the levels of authority that primitives experience first in
the structures of the family and clan. The concepts of the totem and the clan
thus find their way into every significant aspect of tribal life. There are even
cases of individual totems—those that a clan member can choose as a sort of
personal friend—and sexual totems, which group people by gender. Both of
these types undoubtedly derive from more basic and general clan totems.
In casting about for explanations of totemism, earlier theorists have fol-
lowed their own quite predictable paths. Tylor, as we might have guessed, in-
sists that the custom arises out of animism; others derive it from nature worship;
still others, like Frazer, have claimed that it is magical, or that it may have no
connection at all to either religion or magic. Where these theories go wrong is
for Durkheim not hard to see: each attempts to trace totemism to something
else that is supposedly earlier and more fundamental. But that is a critical mis-
take. Finding a form of religion older than totemism is quite impossible, for the
simple reason that there is none. Totemism, which appears in the very simplest
societies, is itself the simplest, most basic, and original form of religion; all
other forms can only grow out of it. Totemism is not a product, not a derivative
of some more basic form of religion; it is itself the source from which all other
kinds of religious worship—whether it be of spirits, gods, animals, planets, or
stars—~ultimately arise.
It is true that at first glance totemism seems to be merely another of the usual
religious types: a kind of animal or plant worship and nothing more. But

Society as Sacred: Emile Durkheim 95
Durkheim insists that when we look at it in detail, it turns out to be something
considerably different. Followers of totem cults do not actually adore the crow,
the frog, or the white Cockatoo; they commit to the worship “of an anonymous
and impersonal force, found in each of these beings but not to be confounded
with any of them. No one possesses it entirely and all participate in it.” If we
want, we can of course speak loosely of a “god” adored in the totem cult, but
“it is an impersonal god, without name or history, immanent in the world and
diffused in an innumerable multitude of things.”“ To speak accurately we
should call it “the totemic principle,” which stands at the center of all of the
clan’s beliefs and rituals. Behind the totem is an impersonal force that pos-
sesses enormous power, both physical and moral, over the life of the clan.
People respect it; they feel a moral obligation to observe its ceremonies; and
through it they feel tightly bound to each other in deep and abiding loyalty.
Here we can see why Durkheim thinks it misleading, at least at the outset,
for theorists to define religion as belief in gods or supernatural beings. In his
view, before we ever get to belief in gods, there is always this first and more
basic thing, the sense of a hidden, impersonal, and powerful force—the
totemic principle—that is the original focus of the clan’s worship. It is signif-
icant, moreover, that the evidence we find for this totemic principle is by no
means limited to Australia. Under different names, Durkheim claims to find it
as well in other tribal societies. Among the Melanesians, there is the similar
concept of mana; and among native Americans, we find it described in such
words as wakan, manirou, and orenda, all of which convey the same idea of
an all-pervading, impersonal force, a dominating power that is the real center
of clan or tribe worship. It follows, then, that if we want to account for reli-
gion, we must explain more than surface beliefs in the gods or spirits; we need
to explain this more fundamental reality. We must show what this worship of
“the totemic principle” really is.
Society and the Totem
The totem is in the first instance a symbol—but a symbol of what? An initial
answer, as we now see, is the totemic principle, the hidden force worshipped
by the clan. At the same time—and here Durkheim makes his pivotal turn—
the totem is also the concrete, visible image of the clan. It is its flag, its banner
or logo, its very self in a symbol, just as one might say that the American
eagle, “Old Glory,” or “Uncle Sam” is the visible emblem of the United States.
But if the totem “is at once the symbol of the god and of the society, is that not
because the god and the society are only one?” “The god of the clan, the to-
temic principle, can therefore be nothing else than the clan itself, personified
and represented to the imagination under the visible form of the animal or

96 Nine Theories of Religion
vegetable which serves as totem.”12 The totem, in brief, is simultaneously the
symbol of both the god and the clan, because both the god and the clan are in
reality the same thing. Devotion to a god or gods is how primitive peoples
express and reinforce their devotion to the clan.
It is true, of course, that in their rituals, which are always communal, the
members of these aboriginal clans themselves think they are worshipping
some divinity, some animal or plant, “out there” in the world, who can control
the rain or make them prosper. But what is really happening is something else,
something that can best be grasped in terms of social function. Society needs
the commitment of the individual. It “cannot exist,” Durkheim observes,
“except in and through individual consciousness”; that is why the totem prin-
ciple must somehow always “penetrate and organize itself within us.”’3 More-
over, we can know exactly when and how this occurs; it happens on those
awe—inspiring ceremonial occasions when the whole community assembles
for its general rites of the clan or tribe. In these great and unforgettable cere-
monies, the worshippers seal their commitment to the clan. In their moments
of great excitement, in the wild emotional ecstasies of chanting and dancing,
individuals manage to lose themselves in the heaving mass of the crowd; they
allow their private—that is, profane—selves to sink into the great single self
of the clan. In the middle of these thrilling assemblies, individuals acquire
sentiments and undertake actions they would never be capable of embracing
on their own. They leave behind what is most distinctively their own and
merge their identities joyfully into the common self of the clan. In such mo-
ments they leave the everyday, the humdrum, the selfish; they move with ela-
tion into the domain of what is great and general. They enter the solemn
sphere of the sacred.
Durkheim vividly describes the sentiments that “bubble up” in the excite-
ment of these group ceremonies. They are filled with energy, enthusiasm,
joy, selfless commitment, and complete security. “It is in the midst of these
effervescent social environments and out of this effervescence itself that the
religious idea seems to be born.”14 At such moments the profane is left
behind; only the sacred exists.
The Implications of Totemism
Once Durkheim has made his key point—the idea that worship of the totem is
nothing less than worship of society itself—he feels that all other pieces in the
puzzle of Australian religion fall naturally into place. The role of the totem
symbol, for example, now seems clear. Carved in wood or stone, it is a concrete
object that conveys to each person the fact that the clan, which claims the loy-
alty of all, is not just something imagined; it is a real thing, which imposes

Society as Sacred: Emile Durkheim 97
itself on everyone’s life and thoughts. The totem symbol also conveys the senti—
ment that society, like itself, is something fixed and permanent; it remains as a
focus of inspiration long after the excitement of the religious ceremonies is
over. If we ask why animals and plants should be the most common totems,
that too is clear. The clan does not want as its symbol something distant and
vague; it needs an object that is specific, concrete, and near at hand, something
closely tied to its daily experience. If we ask how such primitive societies de-
veloped their systems of thought, their ways of ordering and classifying the
world, that process too becomes clear. The aim of totemism is to notice the
interconnectedness of things, the intricate web of ties that bind each person to
the next in the clan, the clan as a whole to the natural world, and different parts
of the natural world to each other. This urge to embrace and connect all things
is in fact so strong that it enables primitive totemism, simple as it is, to lay the
groundwork for the closely connected systems of language, logic, and science
that develop in later stages of civilization.
Properly understood, the totemic principle can account for the components
of religion as well. Totemism shows how beliefs in souls and spirits have de-
veloped. The idea of the soul is really just the totemic principle implanted in
each individual. Since the clan exists only because individuals think about it in
their minds, it is only natural for its members to think of the totemic principle
as somehow infusing itself into each one of them. As it distributes itself
throughout the clan, the fragment of it that each individual comes to own serves
as his or her separate soul; it is “the clan within.”’5
This “social” idea of the soul is quite enlightening, Durkheim adds, when we
think of the age-old religious (and philosophical) problem of its relation to the
body. If the soul is, in effect, the clan idealized and implanted within the self,
then in that capacity its task is to represent society’s demands and ideals to the
individual. The soul is the conscience of the self, the voice of the clan within,
informing each of his or her personal obligation to the group. The body, on the
other hand, naturally asserts its own self—centered desires, which can and often
do clash sharply with the constraints of social life. No wonder, then, that reli-
gion has always been suspicious of the desires of the flesh! They satisfy the
individual and are profane; religion asserts the claims of the social and is there—
fore sacred.
The doctrine of the immortality of the soul is also a natural development
from totemism. To speak of the soul as immortal is for totem peoples only an-
other way of saying that while individuals die, the clan lives on. Ancestral
spirits appear as fragments from the clan’s past that have survived into the
present. Interestingly, these spirits often associate themselves with living mem-
bers of the clan in a way that gives each person a kind of double soul: “one
which is within us, or rather, which is us; the other [in the form of the ancestral

93 Nine Theories of Religion
Spirit] which is above us, and whose function it is to control and assist the first
one” in doing its duty to the clan. Over time, these guardian spirits begin to
grow in power and prestige. They become more important; their sphere of in—
fluence widens; and they acquire “mythical personalities of a superior order.”
In short, as the concept of the soul and its immortality gradually arises out of
the worship of the totemic principle, so, over time, the worship of the gods
arises in its turn from the immortality of ancestral souls.
With the emergence of the gods from original totemism, Durkheim comes at
last to the realm of religion as it has been more traditionally understood. Even
in Australia, he admits, clan religion has developed to the point where it has
numerous gods, most of whom are associated not with the smaller clan cere-
monies but with the larger tribal rites of initiation, which make young men and
women full members of adult society. The best way to understand these greater
gods, in fact, is to think of them as personifications of these wider tribal units.
And the same is true for that other well—known feature of primitive religion that
is on exhibit in Australia: the belief in a high god who rules over all. Modern
scholars have been fascinated to find among early peoples a belief such as this,
which is so strikingly similar to the Jewish and Christian faith in a creator and
moral ruler of the world. But in Australia, says Durkheim, the idea of such a
god is just a natural extension of the same thinking that accounts for tribal
gods. As contacts increased among tribes that lived in a certain region, and as
they exchanged ideas, they began to suppose that there was one ancestor of
special importance whom they all shared. That ancestor was the high god. His
status is grand, but he comes into being like all other gods—as a further exten—
sion of the original totemic principle. For whatever the level we observe, the
process that gives rise to belief in the gods has left us clear traces of its opera-
tion. The gods grow out of the totemic principle as it filters gradually through
the clan, first into souls, next to ancestors who become clan spirits, and finally
beyond them to the higher and highest of gods.
Totemism and Ritual
The last part of the Elementary Forms turns from the matter of beliefs to take
up the other side of Australian religion: its ritual performances. Here we must
note Durkheim’s earlier observation that religious sentiments and emotions
first arise not in private moments but in the great group ceremonials of the
clan. It follows from this that the beliefs found in totemism are not the most
important thing about it; rituals are. In Durkheim’s view, the “cult” (from the
Latin cultus: “worship”), which consists of emotional group ceremonies held
on set occasions, is the core of the clan’s life together. Whenever they occur
and however they are performed, these cultic acts of worship are of supreme

Society as Sacred: Emile Durkheim 99
importance. They are sacred; all else is profane. Their purpose is always to
promote the clan, to make people feel apart of it, and to keep it in every way
apart from the profane.
In totem practice, the cult breaks into two main forms, negative and positive,
while a third type, called “piacular” (from the Latin piaculum: “atonement”),
plays a role of its own alongside the first two. The rituals of the negative cult
have one main task: insulating the sacred from the profane. They consist chiefly
of prohibitions, or taboos. Taboos of location protect certain sacred places,
usually rocks or caves. They are the source of the belief, common in later reli-
gions, that a temple or church stands on holy ground or encloses a sacred space.
The sacred and the profane must also be kept from colliding in time. The nega-
tive cult therefore sets aside certain holy days for sacred festivals; one of the
most common taboos on such days is the prohibition of any routine activities
from profane life. Normal work and play are prohibited; only rest or sacred
activity is permitted, just as more developed religions like Judaism and
Christianity require on the Sabbath or Sunday. If such rules have often seemed
inconvenient and annoying, no one should be surprised, for that is what they
should be. Their role is to press upon everyone the need to deny the self, or
even endure pain, for the sake of the group. Indeed, Durkheim continues, that
is precisely why almost all religions point with pride to certain people—
“ascetics” as they are commonly called—who make a point of extreme self-
denial. Invariably such people are highly respected. Their excessive pain and
self-restraint, their refusal to enjoy sex, good food, or other luxuries, is meant
to serve as an ideal for everyone. They are models of what, to a lesser degree,
is required of everyone for the good of the clan. Without sacrifice of self, the
clan can neither prosper nor survive.
Normally, then, the sacred is off limits, and the point of the negative cult is to
keep it so. When the time and place are right, however, and the clan does move
into the realm of the sacred, the means for doing so are then provided by the
rituals Durkheim describes as belonging to the positive cult. For Australians, the
central rite is the intichiuma, the ceremony that, as we may recall, Robertson
Smith, Frazer, and Freud found so uncannily similar to the Christian commu—
nion meal. At the beginning of every rainy season, men of the clan start a
sequence of ceremonies to promote the welfare of their totem. They begin with
rituals done over certain consecrated stones; a period of keen religious excite-
ment comes next; then amid a solemn ritual the totem creature itself is seized,
killed, and eaten in a sacred meal. Why is this done? asks Durkheim. It is, as
Robertson Smith correctly saw, the earliest form of the rite of sacrifice, which
has assumed such a central place in so many later religions. In worshipping the
totem, each person publicly celebrates its existence and declares that he or she
will be loyal to it; in return, by eating the totem, each receives back from the god

an infusion of divine power and a renewal of the divine life in the soul.
Durkheim describes it, ingeniously, as a sacred exchange. In the inrichiuma
rite, the worshippers give life to their god, and the god returns it to them.
On the level of appearances, there can of course be little doubt that the
Australian intichiuma is a strictly religious ritual—a transaction between the
people of the clan and their god. Underneath, however, and in reality, it is none
other than the social renewal of the life of the clan. Beneath the surface of the-
ology lies the substrate of sociology. Durkheim explains it thus:
If the sacred principle is nothing more nor less than society transfigured and
personified, it should be possible to interpret the ritual in lay and social terms.
And, as a matter of fact, social life, just like the ritual, moves in a circle. On the
one hand, the individual gets from society the best part of himself, all that gives
him a distinct character and a special place among other beings, his intellectual
and moral culture. . . – But, on the other hand, society exists and lives only in and
through individuals. If the idea of society were extinguished in individual minds
and the beliefs, traditions and aspirations of the group were no longer felt and
shared by the individuals, society would die. We can say of it what we just said of
the divinity: it is real only insofar as it has a place in human consciousness, and
this place is whatever one we may give it. We now see the real reason why the
gods cannot do without their worshippers any more than these can do without
their gods; it is because society, of which the gods are only a symbolic expression,
cannot do without individuals any more than these can do without society.”
In this important paragraph, we can see as clearly as anywhere else in The
Elementary Forms the thesis that stands at the heart of Durkheim’s theory.
Religious beliefs and rituals are in the last analysis symbolic expressions of
social realities. Worship of the totem is really a statement of loyalty to the clan.
Eating the totem is really an affirmation and reinforcement of the group, a
symbolic way for each member to say that the clan matters more than the indi-
vidual selves that it comprises.
Totem rituals thus put us in a position to explain religious practice in the
same way that totem ideas can explain religious belief. The concept of society
once again furnishes the key. The function of religious rituals, which are more
fundamental than beliefs, is to provide occasions where individuals renew their
commitment to the community, reminding themselves in the most solemn fash-
ion that they depend on the clan, just as it depends on them. Feast days and
festivals exist to put society, the community, back in the foreground of people’s
minds, and to push personal, self—oriented concerns back into a secondary
place, where they belong.
Other rituals besides the intichiuma ceremony are included in the positive
cult. There are, for instance, imitative rituals of the sort Frazer classified as a

Society as Sacred: Emile Durkheim 101
type of magic. In the rites of certain clans, people mimic the cries of their totem
birds, thinking that this will make them reproduce and thrive. In other cases,
there are what Durkheim calls “representative” rites, or rituals of remem-
brance, in which one clan member simply recites the myth of a great ancestor
to a group of listeners, apparently just to provide entertainment and instruction.
But even so, the underlying motive is social. Telling the story of an ancestor is
a way of binding the past members of the community to those alive in the pres-
ent. And people naturally believe that certain rituals can make the totem magi-
cally reproduce precisely because of the power those ceremonies have already
shown in uniting the clan. The social effects of ritual lead to the thought that it
has physical effects as well.
Piacular Rites
In addition to both the positive and negative cult there are, finally, certain im-
portant rituals Durkheim calls “piacular.” These are the clan’s rites of atone-
ment and mourning, which follow upon a death or other tragic event. Tylor
thought that primitive peoples held such rituals in order to make peace with the
spirits of the dead, who were angry that their life had ended. But once again,
Durkheim provides a social reason. In cultures where funeral mourners weep
loudly and beat themselves in despair, these acts are not spontaneous. They are
quite formal gestures, required by custom from all clan members, even those
who hardly knew the deceased person. Why? Because when someone dies, it
is not just the immediate family that has been weakened; the whole clan has
lost a member, a portion of its strength. At such a time, it needs, through the
cult, to regroup, revive, and reaffirm itself. In the earliest ages, the rites
performed—processions, wailings, breast-beatings—were not even directed
to spirits or gods. Belief in these supernatural beings actually developed later
in time and only as a result of the ritual, just to give people a better mental
image for their action. Originally, there were no gods to command a ritual;
there was only the ritual, which over time itself created the gods.
Piacular rites, finally, show the double-sided power of the sacred, which can
be dark and distressed as well as bright and affirming. Just as the positive cult
is a celebration of the clan in the full vigor of its joy and confidence, it falls to
the piacular cult to carry it through its shadowed passages—TIhe moments of
grief, catastrophe, fear, or uncertainty that can descend on a community at any
place or time. An example of Durkheim’s point can here be supplied from
American political history. Few Americans who were living in November
1963, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, can ever forget the
overwhelming emotional impact on the nation of the elegant, somber funeral
procession that moved through the streets of the capital and was followed by

102 Nine Theories of Religion
the heartbreaking rites of burial at Arlington National Cemetery. For those in
every- town and state who watched on television, it could well have seemed that
an entire nation was a single, grieving family. Durkheim’s concept of a piacular
rite well explains why this should have been so. Whatever the mood of society,
the rites of religion will invariably reflect and reinforce it.
Conclusion
Durkheim contends that if his analysis is correct, there is a great deal to be
learned from the primitive peoples of Australia. In the totemism of their tribes
and clans, one finds on clear display all of the truly “elementary forms” of the
religious life: a separation between the sacred and the profane; ideas of souls and
spirits; the beginnings of mythology and the gods; and a full array of rituals, in-
cluding those of prohibition (taboo), celebration, imitation, remembrance, and
sorrow. With these building blocks in hand, it becomes possible to construct a
theory that can be applied throughout history and across cultures to explain reli—
gious behavior of any kind wherever we may find it. Durkheim holds that no
matter where we look for the determining causes of religion—all religions—
those causes invariably turn out to be social. Though more subtle to detect in the
great religions of the world, they are as unmistakably present in these complex
traditions as they are in the simplest totemism. East or West, ancient or modern,
beliefs and rituals always express a society’s needs—its constant call upon all
members to think first of the group, to sense its importance, feel its power, and
sacrifice personal pleasures for its continued welfare. Religion’s role, accord—
ingly, is not to make claims about “the outside world,” not to teach what it thinks
are truths about the creation of the cosmos, the existence of a god, or a life after
death. On all of these subjects, which people once thought proper for faith, it has
had to yield to science, a more valid system of thought that, in fact, religion helped
to create. Religion’s true purpose is not intellectual but social. It serves as the car-
rier of social sentiments, providing symbols and rituals that enable people to ex-
press the deep emotions that anchor them to their community. Insofar as it does
this, religion, or some substitute for it, will always be with us. For then it stands
on its true home ground, preserving and protecting the very “soul of society.”
Analysis
In following Durkheim’s approach to religion, we have naturally had to pass
over certain details, but the main outlines of his theory should now be fairly
clear. From almost the moment it appeared, The Elementary Forms stirred

Society as Sacred: Emile Durkheim 103
keen interest, especially in France, where Durkheim had associates and disci-
ples already disposed to look at religion through sociological lenses. Even
beyond France, however, Durkheim’s originality was widely recognized. In
Britain, the study of anthropology was shaped by his influence, as was the new
field of social psychology in the United States. Across the social sciences,
Durkheim’s work has been able to win new admirers and open fresh lines of
inquiry to the present day.
Why all of this recognition? The answer lies partly in the scope of his ideas;
like Freud, Durkheim is a wide-ranging theorist. He finds in sociology a new
way of understanding almost every aspect of human behavior. In the case of
religion his analyses offer a variety of fertile and intriguing insights, at least
four of which deserve notice here.
1. Society and Religion
As we have seen throughout this discussion, the core of Durkheim’s view lies
in his claim that “religion is something eminently social.”” He insists that
although as individuals all of us make choices in our lives, we make them
within a social framework that is a “given” for us from the day of birth. “We
speak a language that we did not make; we use instruments that we did not
invent; we invoke rights that we did not found; a treasury of knowledge is
transmitted to each generation that it did not gather itself.”la Religion is in all
cultures the most prized part of that social treasury. It serves society by provid-
ing from infancy onward the ideas, rituals, and sentiments that guide the life
of every person within it. In the present circumstance, discussions of “social
influence” exerted on or by religion are so routine as to seem habitual; every-
one speaks in such terms. But to see the originality in this perspective, we need
only remind ourselves of how Tylor wrote on religion less than half a century
before Durkheim. When he considers primitive religion, Tylor speaks of a single
“savage philosopher,” thinking his way all alone to the ideas of the soul and the
gods. Similarly for Freud: though he does grasp the roles of family and society,
his focus, too, is primarily on the personality of the individual. Durkheim’s
view, however, is decidedly different. He is not the first or only thinker of his
age to have glimpsed the power of “the social” in human life, but he is unique
in understanding its full importance and in pushing it to the forefront of study.
2. Scientific Method
Durkheim takes great pride in being scientific. Like earlier theorists, he wants
to gather data, compare it, classify it, and make generalizations, or laws, to
explain it. In a quite limited way, he also embraces social evolution. He assumes

human societies do evolve from the elementary to the complex. And he agrees
that the best place to start is with cultures that are simple—with so-called prim-
itive peoples. He does not, of course, like the idea of some broad scheme of
human progress, mostly rejecting this idea when he met it in the philosophy
of Comte. He also dismisses Frazer’s version, which presents the portrait of
humanity marching steadily upward through the ages of magic, religion, and
science. Against the British anthropologists, he insists that we must not use the
comparative method to pick out customs and beliefs casually from around the
world and then arrange them, out of their contexts, into some predetermined
scheme of historical progress. That will not work. What he says we must do—
and here The Elementary Forms serves as a model—is center on a single soci-
ety, examine it carefully, and attend to details. Only after that close work has
been done may theorists begin to make very limited comparisons with other
societies, and even then, only if they are societies of the same type. True sci-
ence, he insists, works slowly—from a few specimens carefully examined, not
from many gathered in haste.
In the years after World War I, this important feature of Durkheim’s method
was taken very much to heart in the field of anthrOpology, eSpecially in Britain
and America. In England, it was promoted especially by the social theorist
A. R. Radcliffe-Brown and by the field anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski,
who wrote on religion and other features of primitive cultures in the South
Pacific. The principle of investigating one and only one society in depth before
going on to comparisons is now widely approved in social science. It has
brought a kind of final closure to the grand ambitions of Tylor, Frazer, and the
Victorian age of anthropology.
3. Ritual and Belief
Durkheim also parts from the ways of Tylor and Frazer on the question of the
relation between religious ritual and belief. Their “intellectualist” approach
holds that beliefs and ideas about the world are the primary elements in the reli-
gious life. Religion’s practices—its customs and rituals—are seen as secondary;
they follow from the beliefs and depend upon them. The belief is the cause of the
practice. In Durkheim’s thinking, just the opposite holds. For him rituals have
priority; they are basic and occasion the beliefs that accompany them. If there is
anything “eternal” about religion, it is that a society always needs rites—
ceremonial activities of renewal and rededication. Through them, people are re-
minded that the group always matters more than any of its single members. Be-
liefs, by contrast, are not so eternal. While the social function of religious rituals
has always remained constant, the intellectual content of religious beliefs has
always been changeable. Beliefs are the “speculative side” of religion. They may

Society as Sacred: Emile Durkheim 105
serve to separate the Christian from the Jew and the Hindu, but in reality the
particular ideas they assert make little difference. Ideas always change from re-
ligion to religion and even from age to age in the same religion. But the need for
ceremonies always remains; they are the true source of social unity, and in every
society they are the real ties that bind. They disclose the essence of religion.
4. Functional Explanation
The matter of ritual takes us to the heart of Durkheim’s theory: the functional
explanation of religion. Durkheim, like Freud, sees himself as presenting not
just a different theory but a theory different in kind from those that came
before him. In explaining religion, he thinks he can go beneath the surface of
things. Tylor and Frazer try to explain religion as it appears; they take more or
less at face value the beliefs that religious people hold and then ask how those
beliefs explain their lives and deeds. In this intellectualist approach, ideas and
beliefs—what Durkheim calls the speculative side of religion—are the key to
explaining other cultures. For the follower of Tylor, a primitive ritual makes
sense once we know that the Indian rainmaker believes an imitation of thunder
can create a storm and send showers on his fields. The principle of imitative
magic may be absurd to us, but not to him; it explains why he acts as strangely
as he does. Like Freud, however, Durkheim wants to ask another question. If
we agree that these beliefs are absurd, then why do people hold them? If such
ideas are silly superstitions, why do they survive?
For Durkheim, the answer to this riddle can be found only in one place: not in
the content of the beliefs, not in what they claim about gods or the world, but in
their fimction—in what they do, socially, for those who live by them. The true
nature of religion is to be found not on its surface but underneath. As the case of
Australian toternism clearly shows, religion’s key value lies in the ceremonies
through which it inspires and renews the allegiance of individuals to the group.
Ritual is primary, symbolism secondary. Moreover, if a society truly needs such
rites to survive and flourish, it follows that there can never be a community without
either a religion or something similar to fill its place. Religious ideas can be dis-
carded and changed, but religious rituals, or something very much like them, must
endure. Society cannot exist without ceremony; community requires religiosity.
Critique
Needless to say, Durkheim’s ambitiously social approach presents us with
a most original and intriguing theory of religion. Unlike Tylor’s animism,
it claims to show how the roots of religious behavior run much deeper than

106 Nine Theories of Religion
the purely intellectual need to understand how the world works. And unlike
Freudian personality theory, it appreciates in all its wide scope the powerful
shaping influence that social structures exert when people declare some things
sacred and others profane. Yet compelling as it appears in these respects,
Durkheim’s argument is less persuasive in others. The very first reviewers of
The Elementary Forms were quick to notice some of these difficulties, and
more recent critics have not hesitated to multiply the complaints. The criticisms
tend to cluster about three main issues: Durkheim’s assumptions about the
nature of religion, his Australian evidence, and his reductionist conclusions.
We can examine each in its turn.
1. Assumptions
With Durkheim, as with our other theorists, a great deal depends on what the
Greek thinker Archimedes called his pou sto, the place “where I stand” at the
start of the argument. Consider in this connection the definition of religion laid
out in the opening pages of The Elementary Forms. Religion, we are told, is
rooted in the basic distinction all societies make between the sacred and the
profane. The main concern of religious rites is with the first (that is, with the
sacred), which is to be kept separate from the profane. Further, the sacred is
always tied up with the great social events of the clan, while the profane is the
realm of private affairs. This root conception serves as the foundation on
which the full framework of Durkheim’s imposing theory is then erected. If we
look at it very closely, however, surely the pivotal role of this definition in the
theory creates something of a problem. If, already at the start of the discussion,
Durkheim envisions the sacred as the social, is it not quite easy—rather too
easy—to reach the conclusion that religion is nothing more than the expression
of social needs? The inquiry would seem to begin at the very place where
Durkheim wants to finish. The sacred is the social, he writes, and the religious
is the sacred; therefore, the religious is the social. To be sure, Durkheim is not
the only theorist whose reasoning tends toward a certain circularity; we have
seen something of the same in Freud, and others too are inclined to offer defi-
nitions that most easily accommodate the theory they hope to defend. But
Durkheim’s way of starting the analysis very near the place where it ought to
end is, logically, a cause for some concern.
This problem becomes more pressing when we recall Durkheim’s own
rather summary dismissal of other definitions. He tells us, for instance, that we
may not define religion as belief in the realm of the supernatural because prim-
itive peoples of the world, who are clearly religious, have no such concept. For
them, all events are the same; there is no supernatural realm separate from the
natural. But more than a few scholars both in Durkheim’s day and since then

Society as Sacred: Emile Durkheim 107
have insisted—with evidence—that this is just not so; primitive peoples may
not have exactly our concept of the supernatural, but they do hold ideas about
mystical or extraordinary kinds of events that are quite similar to our modern
conceptions. At the same time, interestingly enough, many of them do not in all
cases manage to separate the sacred from the profane, especially in the abso-
lute way that Durkheim says they must. Considerations such as these, which
tend to count in favor of more traditional notions of religion and against
Durkheim’s conception, could perhaps be dismissed if the questions of the
supernatural and the sacred were minor matters. Unfortunately, they are not.
Durkheim’s choice of definitions is quite central to his entire strategy of expla-
nation. It does not meet us at the fringes of the theory, where adjustments could
be made without loss. It stands out in front and at the center.
2. Evidence
Durkheim contends that the great merit of his study, unlike those of earlier
theorists, is his determination to study only one type of culture, the Aborigine
communities of Australia, and explain religion in that context. He relies on
the widely acclaimed ethnographical reports of Spencer and Gillen, along
with those of other firsthand observers, and he rests his theory squarely on the
evidence they provide. The scientific value of such an approach is clear and
undisputed—but so is its potential weakness. Should reason arise to question
the value of these reports, or Durkheim’s readings of them, what would be left
of his theory, linked as closely as it is to this Australian evidence? Signifi-
cantly, several of the very first critics to comment on The Elementary Forms
made this point in forcible terms. One, a sociologist named Gaston Richard,
who had earlier worked with Durkheim, carefully examined the Australian
reports and showed how, in a number of places, the evidence could be read to
prove quite the opposite of what Durkheim concludes. Richard also claimed,
rather persuasively, that most of Durkheim’s theory had been assembled
before he ever looked at the Australian reports.‘9 Other critics now question
whether even the Australian reports themselves were completely accurate.20
Perhaps the harshest words on this subject were to come from Arnold van
Gennep, the famed Dutch anthropologist of Africa. In a strongly worded
review written soon after The Elementary Forms appeared, he wrote, “In ten
years the whole of his analysis of the Australian material will be completely
rejected.” He then added that it was based on “the most unsound group of
ethnographical facts I have ever encountered.”21 Though overstated, these
words have proven at least partly prophetic. Today, more than a little of the
evidence and more than a few of the inferences drawn from it have come to be
questioned.22

3. Reductionism
Just as psychological functionalism is the cornerstone of Freudian theory,
sociological functionalism is the key to Durkheim’s explanatory method. In a
certain sense, of course, the value of such an approach seems beyond question.
Who can really doubt that, beneath the surface of things, religious beliefs and
rituals often accomplish social purposes that believers themselves may not be
aware of? Who would wish to deny that for devout Catholics, a requiem mass,
which on its face is a plea to God to save the souls of the dead from Hell, is,
underneath that surface, also a powerful ritual of group solidarity and renewal?
Such socially functional readings of religion seem so natural and appropriate
that no one is any longer likely to dispute them.
But even if we agree in a general way that religion and society are thus func—
tionally inseparable, we need still to ask how this relationship really works. In
discussing this matter, Durkheim invariably claims that society determines,
while religion is the thing determined. Society controls; religion reflects. In
each Australian instance he considers, Durkheim insists that social need power-
fully shapes religion, while religion seems unable to do the reverse. In each in-
stance social structure is reality, while religion is appearance. It seems at least
reasonable to ask why this should have to be so. It is one thing to say that along-
side its other claims and purposes, religion also has a social function; it is quite
another to say that religion has only a social function. As we saw in the case of
Freud, “reductionism” is the theoretical term for this particularly aggressive
form of functionalist explanation. Freud explains religion as “nothing but” a
surface appearance, a set of neurotic symptoms produced by an underlying psy-
chological trauma. Durkheim’s agenda is similar; he accounts for religion as
nothing but the surface foam—his own word actually is “effervescence”—given
off by an underlying social reality. He differs from Freud, of course, in that he
is much more reluctant to pass a negative judgment on religion from this per-
spective. Freud sees religion as a sign of disorder, a symptom of mental dys-
function. Durkheim is not so sure; even if we may find the beliefs mistaken,
religion and its rites would seem indisPensable to social health.
Despite that difference, Durkheim’s theory, like Freud’s, fits the mold of
an aggressively reductionist functionalism; his program essentially reduces
religion to something other than what its adherents think it to be. Although
functionalist explanations have proven their merits through the years, the ques-
tion of such reductionist versions of functionalism is a different matter—one
that leaves present-day theorists sharply divided. Some applaud such
approaches, finding in reductionist theories the very model of a strong scien-
tific method.23 Others find them one-sided and fundamentally misleading.24 In
that connection, it should not come as a surprise that most actual religious

Society as Sacred: Emile Durkheim 109
believers find the reductionist theories of both Freud and Durkheim generally
unacceptable. In the eyes of religious faith, these approaches, though they may
offer insight into aspects of belief, simply misunderstand what religion at bot-
tom is all about. Even at that, however, the views of Freud and Durkheim are
probably less offensive to religious ears than those expressed, well before
theirs, in one of the most militant and aggressive of all reductionist theories:
that of the German socialist philosopher Karl Marx. His unsparing and com-
bative account of religion is the one we consider next.
Notes
1. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, tr. Joseph Ward
Swain (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1915), p. 419.
2. Durkheim was, of course, not the only contributor to the “sociological revolution”
in modern thinking. On the matter of Durkheim’s influence, see Albert Salomon, “Some
Aspects of the Legacy of Durkheim,” in Kurt H. Wolff, ed., Essays on Sociology and
Philosophy: Durkheim, et al. with Appraisals of His Life and Thought (New York:
Harper Torchbooks, [1960] 1964), pp. 247—266.
3. The authoritative biography of Durkheim is now Marcel Fournier, Emile Durkheim:
A Biography, tr. David Macey (Malden: MA: Polity Press, 2013); prior to Fournier the
best English biography was Steven Lukes, Emile Durkheim, His Life and Work:
A Historical and Critical Study (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). An excellent in-depth
study of Durkheim’s thought on religion is W. S. F. Pickering, Durkheim’s Sociology of
Religion: Themes and Theories (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984).
4. For Durkheim’s own appreciation of the French sociological tradition in which he
stood, see his “Sociology in France in the Nineteenth Century,” tr. Mark Traugott, in
Robert N. Bellah, ed., Emile Durkheim: Morality and Society: Selected Writings
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 3—22.
5. On Durkheim as a political theorist, see Steve Fenton, Durkheim and Modern
Sociology (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 81—115.
6. See Ernest Wallwork, Durkheim: Morality and Milieu (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1972).
7. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, p. 47. On the importance of this distinction, see
Nisbet, The Sociology of Emile Durkheim (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974),
pp.l72—176.
8. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, p. 47.
9. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, p. 44.
10. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, p. 168.
ll. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, p. 188.
12. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, p. 206; on this crucial linkage between the clan,
the totem, and the totem symbol, with each as sacred, see Anthony Giddens, Emile
Durkheim (New York: Viking Press, 1978), p. 94.
13. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, p. 209.
14. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, pp. 218—219.

110 Nine Theories of Religion
15. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, p. 249.
16. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, p. 347.
17. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, p. 10.
13. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, p. 212.
19. “Dogmatic Atheism in the Sociology of Religion,” in W. S. F. Pickering, ed.,
Durkheim on Religion, tr. Jacqueline Redding (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975),
pp. 228—276; first published in Revue d ’histoire et de philosophie religieuse (1923).
20. W. E. H. Stanner, “Reflections on Durkheim and aboriginal Religion,” in Pickering,
ed., Durkheim on Religion, pp. 277—303.
21. Arnold van Gennep, review of The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, in
Pickering, ed., Durkheim on Religion, pp. 205—208; first published in Mercure de
France (1913).
22. See in particular Stanner, “Reflections on Durkheim and aboriginal Religion,”
and A. A. Goldenweiser, review of The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, both in
Pickering, ed., Durkheim on Religion, pp. 277—303, 209—227. Goldenweiser’s article
was first published in American Anthmpologist (1915).
23. See, for example, the writings of Donald Wiebe, especially “The Failure of Nerve
in the Academic Study of Religion,” Studies in Religion 13 (1984): 401—422; also the
following works by Robert Sega]: “In Defense of Reductionism,” Journal of the
American Academy ofReligion 51 (March 1983): 97—124; Religion and the Social Sci-
ences: Essays on the Confrontation (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1989); and Explain-
ing and Interpreting Religion: Essays on the Issue, Toronto Studies in Religion (New
York: Peter Lang, 1992).
24. Daniel L. Pals, “15 Religion a Sui Generis Phenomenon?” Journal of the American
Academy ofReligion 55, 2 (1987): 260—282.
Suggestions for Further Reading
Alexander, Jeffery C., and Philip Smith. The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Essays by leading authorities on
Durkheim’s career, methods, and shaping influence on sociology.
Allen, N. J ., ed. 0n Durkheim ‘5 Elementary Forms ofReligious Life. London: Routledge,
1998. A collection of instructive analytical essays reappraising the background,
design, and influence of Durkheim’s landmark study.
Bellah, Robert N., ed. Emile Durkheim: Morality and Society: Selected Writings.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973. An instructive selection of Durkheim’s
more important shorter writings, chosen and introduced by a leading American
sociologist of religion.
Fenton, Steve, ed. Durkheim and Modern Sociology. Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press, 1984. Essays by recognized authorities who assess Durkheim’s
role and influence in the development of contemporary sociological research.
Fournier, Marcel. Emile Durkheim: A Biography. Translated by David Macey. Malden,
MA: Polity Press, 2013 [2008]. The first comprehensive biography of Durkheim

Society as Sacred: Emile Durkheim 111
in three decades; now the definitive resource, drawing on newly available manu—
scripts and archival materials; addresses all aspects of Durkheim’s career.
Giddens, Anthony. Emile Durkheim. New York: Viking Press, 1978. An insightful, brief
study by a leading modern sociological theorist.
Jensen, Henrik. Weber and Durkheim: A Methodological Comparison. New York:
Routledge, 2012 [2005]. A detailed comparison of the quite different methods
adopted by the two founding figures in modern sociology; examines general
questions about the aims and limits of sociology and the nature of sociological
explanation in light of these differences.
Jones, Robert Alun. Emile Durkheim. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1936. An
illuminating short study by a scholar familiar with Robertson Smith, Frazer, and
other early interpreters of religion.
Jones, Susan Stedman. Durkheim Reconsidered. Cambridge, England: Polity Press,
2001. A reappraisal of Durkheim that seeks to clear away misconceptions and
place his achievement in the context of French society and the politics of the day.
Lukes, Steven. Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work: A Historical and Critical Study.
New York: Harper and Row, 1972. Though no longer definitive. still a valuable
resource.
Mestrovic, Stjepan G. Emile Durkheim and the Reformation of Sociology. Totowa, NJ:
Rowman & Littlefield, 1988. An assessment particularly of Durkheim’s role in
creating the modern discipline of sociology.
Nisbet, Robert. The Sociology of Emile Durkheim. New York: Oxford University Press,
1974. Excellent on the historical context of Durkheim’s work and on the social
thinkers, especially in France, who preceded Durkheim and influenced his
thought.
Pickering, W. S. F. Durkheim ’s Sociology of Religion: Themes and Theories. London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. An excellent in-depth study of Durkheim on
religion.
Pickering, W. S. F.. and Massimo Rosati, eds. Sufiering and Evil: The Durkheimian
Legacy: Essays in Commemoration of the 90th Anniversary of Durkheim ’5
Death. New York: Berghan Books, 2008. A milestone collection of essays recog-
nizing Durkheim’s significance while also addressing an issue often overlooked
in studies of Durkheim; considers also the views of Durkheim’s colleagues and
followers associated with L’Anne’e sociologique.
Tiryakian, Edward A., ed., For Durkheim. Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2009. An inter-
national collection of essays reflecting the current state of scholarly discussion
within the lineage of Durkheim and engaged especially with current issues of
religion, morality, and society
Turner, Bryan. Religion and Modern Society: Citizenship, Secularisation, and the State.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. A general discussion by an ac-
complished British sociologist that addresses the theories of both Durkheim and
Weber in connection with debates over secularization and religious revival.

4..
Religion as Alienation:
Karl Marx
Marx discovered . . . the simple fact . . . that mankind must first of
all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics,
science, art, religion.
Friedrich Engels, “Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx”l
If the order of this book were strictly chronological, the theorist we take up in
this chapter would have appeared at the beginning, not here in the middle. Karl
Marx (1818—1883), the German social philosopher and guiding spirit of the
movement that has come to be known as communism, had lived much of his life
before the other figures in our survey had even begun their work. His major
writings were completed well before Tylor published Primitive Culture in 1871,
and Frazer’s Golden Bough did not appear until some seven years after Marx’s
death in 1883. It would be still another twenty years before Freud and Durkheim
developed their leading ideas. Nonetheless, it makes sense to consider Marx
here and not earlier in our survey. For though he wrote in the middle years of
the nineteenth century, his ideas drew little notice in his day beyond a small
circle of his own radical associates—and the suspicious eyes of public authori-
ties. Only late in his life, after he published Das Kupital2 (in English, Capital),
the first volume of his imposing critical study of economics, did people in the
“mainstream of thought begin to pay closer attention to his views. From that
point on, however, his influence did begin to grow enormously, as anyone now
alive certainly knows. In Russia, he won a convert in Vladimir Lenin, the mov-
ing force behind the Russian Revolution of 1917, which destroyed an empire and
shocked the world. Later, in the 19403, the same shock went through China
when another Marxist, Mao Tse-tung, led an army of poor peasants to an
equally shattering victory. As similar revolts unfolded around the world in
lesser lands, intellectuals in both Europe and America found themselves com-
pelled to grapple with Marx’s explosive and all-embracing vision of society.
Some have been strongly attracted, others thoroughly repelled. In the present
113

114 Nine Theories of Religion
circumstance, even after the major communist systems have suffered to collapse,
all would readily agree on at least one thing: Marx’s own century could ignore
him, but its successors cannot.3
About Marx, two things must be noticed from the very start. First, as the
shaper of communism, he presents us less with a theory of religion than a total
system of thought that itself resembles a religion. Though some have said the
same even of Freud’s psychoanalysis, the impact of the Marxist creed around
the world has been much greater. For a time in the last century, Marxist thought
in one form or other was the ruling philosophy of governments in many parts
of the world, though—since the great collapse of communism in Eastern
Europe and the Soviet Union—just a few major outposts remain. Marx’s writ-
ings are as sacred to some communists as is the Bible to the most sincere and
devout of Christians. Communism offers a system of doctrines with authorized
interpretations. It has its own ceremonies, sacred places, and sacred persons. It
has missionaries who in the space of one century have won (and now lost) mil-
lions of converts; and it has conducted persecutions more fearsome even than
those of the Middle Ages or Wars of Religion. Communism in essence claims
to present not just a broad theory of politics, society, and economics but a com-
pelling total vision of human life, complete with a philosophical stance on
humanity’s place in the natural world, an explanation of all that is past in his-
tory, and a prophecy of what is still to come.
Second, because Marx’s philosophy is so far-reaching, what he offers as a
“theory” of traditional religion makes up a rather small—and not necessarily
central—part of his thinking. In this respect, he is quite unlike Durkheim or
Freud or our other theorists. The views he held were clear and outspoken, as we
shall shortly see; they have also had tremendous influence in the modern world,
especially in officially communist societies. But among all of Marx’s volumi-
nous writings, it is significant that none addresses specifically or in systematic
fashion the subject of religion. Though he touches on it often enough in his many
books, letters, and articles on other subjects, he almost always does so in indirect
fashion, commenting here on religion in general, there on churches, sacraments,
or clergy, and at other places on this belief or that practice. Consequently, this
chapter calls for a plan slightly different from the one we followed in the others.
Instead of tracing the argument of a single book, as we could do with figures like
Tylor and Durkheim, we will have to reconstruct Marx’s view of religion mainly
from certain early philosophical and social writings, where he addresses the sub-
ject most explicitly, and from occasional comments he makes in later books on
politics and economics. With that exception out of the way, we can still keep to
our pattern. We shall look first at Marx’s life and intellectual background, next at
the overall framework of his thinking, and then at his view of religion. After that,
we can devote the remaining space to analysis and criticism.

Religion as Alienation: Karl Marx 115
Background: Marx’s Life, Activities, and Writings
Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818, the second of eight children in the
family of Heinrich Marx, a Jewish lawyer who lived in the small and beautiful
Rhineland city of Trier.4 During this era, when Germany was not yet a single
nation, Trier was under the control of Prussia, the most powerful in a cluster of
separate German states ruled by Christian noble families. Marx’s grandfathers
on both sides were rabbis, but because of Prussia’s anti-Jewish laws, his father
had converted to Christianity, in name at least, shortly before Marx was born.
The father’s gentle temperament contrasted sharply with that of his son, who
was intellectually gifted but also stubborn, blunt, and fiercely independent; he
rarely showed personal emotion. Though his secondary school record was un-
spectacular, Marx found an informal mentor in a cultivated Prussian state of—
ficial and family friend, Baron von Westphalen, who kindled his early interest
in literary classics. Marx later married the baron’s daughter Jenny, with whom
he was to have six children.
For a year Marx studied philosophy and law at the University of Bonn,
where he did his share of drinking and dueling. He was able to avoid military
service on grounds of bad health. He did not become a truly serious student
until he transferred to the University of Berlin, where he adapted at once to its
thriving cultural life. The university was a great center of learning in a large
city, which was itself a gathering place for scholars, government officials, and
serious intellectuals, some with very radical ideas. Berlin and most other
German universities were at the time dominated by the towering figure of one
man, the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich von Hegel (1770—1831).
Hegel’s system of thought is extremely important for understanding Marx, but
it is not easy to explain in simple terms; we will need to return to it later on.
Here we can say, in a word, that Hegel was an idealist, a thinker who solved the
age-old philosopher’s question of matter and mind by deciding that mental
things—ideas, or concepts—are fundamental to the world, while material
things are always secondary; they are the physical expressions of an underly—
ing universal Spirit, or absolute Idea. Any thinker who wished to be taken
seriously in Germany had to respond in some fashion to this idealist system.
Marx did so by placing himself in a circle of thinkers—known as the Young
Hegelians—who were not just disciples but also critics of their master. Also
known as Hegelians of the left wing, they claimed that though Hegel was right
to see the problem of matter and mind as fundamental, his solution was pre-
cisely the reverse of the truth. Matter is primary, while mind—the realm of
concepts and ideas so important to thinkers—is, in fact, just the reflection,
like the color red in an apple, of a world that is fundamentally material in
nature. Marx defended this view with vigor. In 1841 he completed a doctoral

1 16 Nine Theories of Religion
dissertation devoted—significantly—to two decidedly “materialist” ancient
Greek phi1030phers, Democritus and Epicurus.
This general principle, that what is fundamentally real about the world can be
found in material forces rather than mental concepts, became the philosophical
anchor for all of Marx’s later thinking. In particular, it underlies two themes that
took center stage as his thought developed: (1) the conviction that economic reali-
ties determine human behavior and (2) the thesis that human history is the story
of class struggle, the scene of a perpetual conflict in every society between those
who own things—the rich—and those who must work to survive—the poor.
Marx had hoped for a career as a university professor, but his association
with the Young Hegelians and his own increasingly radical ideas made that
impossible. He turned therefore to journalism, first writing for a German politi-
cal newspaper, then moving to Paris, where he read the works of French social
and economic thinkers and began to develop his own theories in depth. This
early period was, in fact, the key phase of his career as a thinker. Over an inter-
val of about seven years from 1843 to 1850, during which he moved from Paris
over to Brussels, then back to Germany, Marx wrote a cluster of his most im-
portant political essays and philosophical treatises. Among these were 0n the
Jewish Question (1843), Toward the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right:
Introduction (1843), Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts (1844), The Holy
Family: Or a Critique of all Critiques (1845), and others. In these writings he
formulated his overarching materialist view of human nature and destiny. In
them he also framed his key ideas on history and society, on economics and
politics, on law, morals, philosophy, and religion. As for the general perspec-
tive he adopted, we can take a clue from the motto on the masthead of one of
the newspapers be edited: “The reckless criticism of all that exists.”5
What Marx wrote in this period was truly decisive for the rest of his life, but
he did not do it entirely on his own. For at just this key moment he met and
began a lifelong friendship with Friedrich Engels, the son of a German factory
owner. Living in England, where he observed the depressing lives of factory
workers, Engels had independently developed materialist economic and social
views that closely resembled those of Marx. In 1845, Marx and Engels found
their way to something that rarely happens among intellectuals: a nearly per-
fect collaboration. They were men of like minds, but with very different tal-
ents. Marx, the more original thinker, served as the philosopher and oracle, on
occasion obscure but also profound. Engels was the interpreter and communi-
cator, readily able to express ideas in ways that were clear, direct, and persua-
sive. Over the years, they visited factories together; they shared the results
of their studies; they criticized each other’s ideas; they joined in writing
for their common cause; and they combined to support and advise new politi-
cal parties. Together in 1848 they wrote the celebrated Communist Manifesto.

Religion as Alienation: Karl Marx 117
Consequently, it is not really Marx alone, but Marx and Engels jointly, who
are the fathers of “Marxism” as we know it today. Together they promoted
their message of materialism, class struggle, communism, and revolution in a
way that neither could have managed as effectively on his own.
Though ordinary people knew little about them, the “revolutionary” ideas of
Marx and Engels were no secret to authorities. When in 1848 revolutions broke
out across Europe, Marx came under immediate suspicion. Arrested and ex-
pelled from Belgium, he returned to Germany to take part in the revolution that
was beginning there; arrested again, he had the good fortune to be acquitted of
all charges in court. In 1849 he left the European continent for London. There
he chose to live for the rest of his life—in exile but emphatically not in retire-
ment. Despite grinding poverty and a family not far from the edge of starva—
tion, he worked tirelessly on further studies in politics and economics.
Returning regularly to a favorite chair in the reading room of the British
Museum (where today a plaque marks his place), he wrote two works on
French revolutionary politics, two more on political economy, and several
others on economic history and theory. Capital (1867) was of course the most
important of these studies. In it Marx assembles a wealth of factual data, sub—
jects it to social analysis, and adds his acute insight into political and social
structures—all to show how the facts of economic activity support his materi—
alist view of history and point the way to a revolutionary communist future.
During this time Marx also tried to remain active in what he regarded as the
ongoing class struggle, the battle of workers against their capitalist oppressors.
He gave advice and assistance to socialist parties in France and Germany. He was
a leader in organizing the Workingmen’s International Association (more simply,
“the International”), whose aim was to represent the common interests of the
workers, regardless of their national home. All the while he continued his writ-
ing. Capital was the first of three volumes on that subject. He continued work on
two others, which were in manuscript but not complete, and which were to be
part of the great project he envisioned under the genera] title Economics. His
work habits were strange. Some days he would be drunk or asleep, while on
others he would work fanatically through the night and into the day despite a
house full of noisy children. He was fortunate to have almost limitless energy,
and when he wished, he could apply it with a mental discipline made of iron.
Only during the last ten years of his life did his energies abate, as illness began to
take its toll. A timely inheritance and some financial help from Engels had at
least taken his family out of poverty. Although he continued to read and corre-
spond with friends, all of his major writing was by then behind him. His wife,
Jenny, died in 1881, and two years later he followed. With Engels at the grave-
side, he was buried in London—largely unmourned and unnoticed in the land
where he lived, studied, and wrote for the last thirty years of his life.

118 Nine Theories of Religion
Marxism: Economics and the Theory of Class Struggle
Few thinkers have ever presented their main thesis in words as blunt or as dis-
turbing as those of Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto:
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and
journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to
one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight
that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large,
or in the common ruin of the contending classes.6
The message of these ringing sentences is unmistakably clear. If we wish to
understand what humanity and its history are all about, we must recognize
what is truly fundamental. And what is fundamental is the following: from
their first emergence on earth human beings have been motivated not by grand
ideas but by very basic material concerns, the elementary needs of survival.
This is the first fact in the materialist view of history. Everyone needs food,
clothing, and shelter. Once these needs are met, others, like the drive for sex,
join them. Reproduction then leads to families and communities, which create
still other material desires and demands. These can be met only by developing
what Marx calls a “mode of production.”7 The necessities and even comforts
of life must in some way be produced—by hunting and gathering foods, by
fishing, growing grain, or entering on some other labor. Moreover, because
various people are involved in these activities in different ways, they sooner or
later fall into a division of labor; different people do different things. Marx
calls the ties or connections among those who divide their labor in this fashion
“relations of production.” I may be a boat maker; you may make nets to fish
with. In the earliest, simplest form of society, the kind Marx calls primitive
communist, both the boat and the net are commonly owned by everyone in the
village, where each shares all things as need may arise.
For Marx this original tribal communism was in a sense the most natural of
human organizations. It allowed people to enjoy variety in their lives by par—
ticipating in a healthy mix of meaningful work and refreshing leisure. They
belonged to the group but also knew the worth of their separate selves. A fate-
ful turn occurred, however, once the notion of private property was introduced,
and its effects are most markedly evident in the stage of history known as
classical civilization. Here, Marx explains, the relations of production are
greatly changed. The maker of the boat claims it as his own property, as does
the maker of the net. They can deal with each other only by exchanging what
they have made—that is, by selling the products of their labor. And before

Religion as Alienation: Karl Marx 119
long, by talent, crime, or good fortune, some acquire more and better private
property while others are left with little or nothing. In addition, as the mode of
production changes from hunting and gathering to the growing of grain, those
who happen to hold property find themselves in a position of great advantage.
They own not just products but also the very means of production—the land on
which crops are grown. Since others do not, the landowners are masters; the
rest must fall in as their dependents, assistants, or even slaves. Private property
and agriculture—two hallmarks of early civilization—thus help to frame the
central conflict of all humanity: the separation of classes by power and wealth,
and with it the beginnings of permanent social unrest. Later, in the medieval
era, the mode of production remains largely the same. It is agricultural, and the
strains of class conflict continue largely unaltered. The feudal lord and serf
simply replace the ancient master and slave. Even among craftsmen, the master
artisan and his lowly apprentice reenact the old conflict between the Roman
patrician and plebeian.
In the final, modern stage of development, this age—old conflict of classes
persists, but it acquires a new intensity and a darker coloring. Modern capital-
ism introduces a new mode of production: commercial manufacturing; and
with it comes also a profound change in the relations of production. Owner and
worker are still with us, but the conflict between them becomes more intense.
By introducing commercial activity and the profit motive on a large scale, capi-
talism produces great wealth for some, for those whom Marx calls the bour-
geoisie, or “middle class.” (By this term Marx means what we would call today
the affluent upper middle class, the owners and managers of corporations.)
Meanwhile workers, those whom Marx calls “the proletariat,” are left with
almost nothing; they must sell their precious daily labor to the owner-managers
in return for wages on which they simply subsist. This grim situation is made
even worse because capitalism has also become industrial. It has given birth to
the factory, the place where workers spend long, exhausting hours at machines
that make objects in huge quantities and bring a fabulous return of wealth—but
of course only to their owners. The spread of this industrial capitalism thus
raises the conflict between classes to a fever pitch, ushering in its last and most
desperate phase—a period of proletarian misery so great that workers find their
only hope in revolution. They lash out, bitterly, in an attempt to overthrow by
force the entire social and economic order that oppresses them. Violence in this
situation is to be expected, for the rich will never give up what they have unless
it is taken by force. Confrontation is unavoidable, for it is driven by deep his—
torical forces that no one group, nation, or class can resist.
In such a world, it is quite clear that communism has a double mission. Part
of its job is education: it must explain these realities to people who cannot see
them. The other part is action: it calls proletarians everywhere to prepare for

120 Nine Theories of Religion
revolution. With the commanding voice of an ancient Hebrew prophet, the
Communist Party denounces the state and the ruling class. It urges workers to
organize, to swim with history’s powerful current, to add their weight to its
waves, and to throw themselves forward until the day comes for them to crash
down upon the edifice of capitalism, shattering its frame and very foundation.
Only then, only after this stormy surge of destruction, will justice and peace
return to the social order of humanity. To achieve this paradise, there will first
have to be a phase of transition, a preliminary interval marked by what Marx
calls the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” The poor, once powerless, will be
truly in control. Their rule will then gradually give way to the final phase of
history, in which true human harmony arrives and the evils of class division
and private property cease any longer to exist.
Materialism, Alienation, and the Dialectic of History
In outlining his great scheme, Marx did not himself invent the concept of
social classes or even social struggle; he did feel, however, that he had discov-
ered the connection between the social class divisions and certain stages of
economic development, and he believed that he alone had seen how, in the
future, this struggle would lead to revolution and the end of classes altogether.
But if so, where did he get these ideas? How did he reach the unusual notion
of human history moving toward a happy future, but only after passing
through a sequence of oppositions marked by ever more bitter and violent epi-
sodes of struggle?
To answer this question we must recall Marx’s early years in Berlin and,
again, the influence of Hegel. We have already noticed Hegel’s idealism;
he found material objects to be secondary things. He spoke of ultimate
reality as “the absolute Spirit,” or “absolute Idea”—what religious people
call God. In his system, this “Absolute” is a being that constantly strives to
become ever more aware, more conscious, of itself. It does so by pouring
itself into material forms and events, just as, let us say, the mind of an archi-
tect might express itself in a beautiful building. But because the actual never
fully captures the ideal (as every dissatisfied architect knows), the material
form is always inadequate, or, in Hegel’s language, “alien” to Spirit. Try as it
may, the material cannot match the ideal. So over against the initial event,
which Hegel calls a “thesis,” the Absolute generates an opposed event—an
“antithesis”—to correct it. The tension is then resolved by yet a third event,
the “synthesis,” which blends elements of both, only to serve as the new
thesis for yet another sequence of opposition and resolution. Again, think of
an architect who adjusts and readjusts his design. Hegel calls this process the

Religion as Alienation: Karl Marx 121
“dialectic” of history—the “give and take”—of absolute Spirit and its mate-
rial forms. He thought of this alternation as happening not just in small ways
but in very large social patterns. In his scheme, an entire culture, such as the
civilization of classical Greece or that of Renaissance Europe, can serve as a
great, single expression of the Absolute—a thesis that, after an interval, calls
forth as its antithesis a new form of civilization, their conflict being resolved
by yet another form as the synthesis. The entire world unfolds through this
great alternating sequence that ties nature, history, and absolute Spirit into a
grand, unitary whole.
We noted above that Marx rejected Hegel’s idealism. However, he did not
reject either the concept of alienation or the idea that history moves along by a
vast process of conflict. On the contrary, he folded both of these ideas into his
materialism and put them at the very center of his own View of the human story.
History, he says, is indeed a great scene of conflict, and Hegel is right to see
“alienation” at the core of it. But he fails to see just how deeply alienation is
rooted not in ideas but in the basic material realities of life. When Hegel speaks
of alienation, he thinks chiefly of how the physical world never lives up to the
perfection of its spiritual source, the Absolute. But in fact things are just the
other way around; it is concrete, actual, working human beings who create
their own alienation, and precisely by attributing to others the very things that
properly belong to themselves. That is the real alienation and the true injustice.
In religion, God is always being given the praise, the worship that properly
belongs to human beings. In philosophy, Hegel credits his Absolute for what
human sweat and toil actually accomplish. Even in politics he makes this mis—
take; he sees government—the modern nation-state—as a great and recent ex—
.pression of Spirit, with the naturally conservative conclusion that human
beings must resign their individual interests and desires to those of a king or
some ruling elite. But why should people give all this glory to God or Spirit
and all this power to kings? Not because there really is a God or because there
are peOple deserving to be called royal, but because something is fundamen—
tally wrong with human thinking—because at the very core of our being, we
suffer from self-alienation, a deep sense of inner separation from our natural
humanity.
If we truly want to understand alienation, Marx continues, we must notice
how singularly important the everyday economic fact of labor is to everyone
who lives. Labor is the free activity of human beings as they generate and sup-
port their social lives over against the world of nature. It ought to be rich, cre-
ative, varied, and satisfying—an expression of the whole personality. But
unfortunately, it is not. It has in fact become something apart, something alien
to ourselves, partly because of the evil notion of private property. As we no—
ticed with the boatman and the net maker, alienation begins once I think of the

122 Nine Theories of Religion
product of my labor as an object apart, as something other than the natural
expression of my personality for the benefit of a community. From that moment
I am alienated from my product; it is something I can sell and another person
can buy. I am also alienated from my own self; rather than expressing my
unique talents, my weaving of nets is just the making of a commodity, some-
thing I can use to barter or buy other commodities. The net maker is also fur-
ther alienated from what Marx calls the “species-life” of humanity: dealing in
a mere product, I have nothing meaningfully human to show for my work. And
finally, I am alienated from other individual people because my personality, the
thing that is essentially human about me, no longer engages yours; we just
trade the objects each of us has made. In these multiple forms of alienation we
find the true misery of the human condition.
Exploitation of Labor: Capitalism and Surplus Value
The cure for this corrosive alienation cannot be applied without first finding
the cause. And here it is plain that however bad in itself, alienation has been
made cruelly worse by the coming of modern industrial capitalism. Marx tries
to provide an explanation for all of this in the many pages of Capital. Though
no short summary of this long book can be fair to it, we can at least notice what
Marx says in it about labor and value. He explains that the value of something
I make or want to buy is created by the amount of work that goes into it. If it
takes a day to make a pair of shoes and twenty days to make a precision clock,
the value, or cost, of the clock will be twenty times that of the shoes. The shoe-
maker who needs a timepiece will have to make at least twenty pairs in order
to buy or barter for one clock. This sort of example offers a fairly close
approximation of how, in the past, economics actually tended to work———by
even exchange of value for value.
Unfortunately, capitalism and property ownership are all about profit, rather
than the equal exchange of value; they are about trading and investing to come
out ahead rather than coming out even. And if we ask, “Where does this profit
come from?” there can be only one answer. In capitalism the very thing about
the clock or shoes that gives them their worth—the quantity of human labor
they carry within them—is being under-valued. Of this sober truth there is
abundant evidence almost anywhere one looks. While workers must put into
goods at least enough value to earn wages that will support their families,
modern machinery allows them to do this in the mere fraction of a day. But
they actually work a full day, or even (in the London Marx knew) much more
than a full day. In addition, entire families often worked for as many as ten,
twelve, or more hours at machines; yet they were extremely poor. What was

Religion as Alienation: Karl Marx 123
happening? Each day, Marx claims, each of these workers was creating an
enormous amount of surplus value for the capitalist factory owner. After work—
ing a short time to earn their wages, they continued to create value—surplus
value—all of which was taken directly from them and sold for profit by the
factory owner. Surplus value, in other words, is quite simply that which is left
over after the workers’ wages (which they use to pay for shelter, clothing, and
food) are subtracted from the much greater value they produce in their daily
work. In each of the farms and factories of Marx’s Europe, therefore, one
owner who possessed fields or operated a plant was each day harvesting the
surplus value created by scores or hundreds of workers, taking it as his profit
and using it to build a country estate complete with servants, foxes, and hounds.
All the while, his workers were squeezed into cramped, dirty apartments in the
city center, befriended by boredom, disease, and virtual starvation.
Regrettably, this unjust circumstance is not just a matter of personal greed.
Even if he did not like foxes and hounds, the owner’s hand would still be
forced by the brutal competition of the capitalist market. To keep his company
alive, he must take most of the surplus funds it generates in order to invest in
new, bigger factories that will exploit still more workers, so another factory
owner does not begin to undersell and ruin him. Since he must keep his costs
down to compete, every capitalist tries to use better and bigger machines; and
he tries to center everything in one bigger and better company—into a trust or
monopoly—so as to produce and sell his products on ever more favorable
terms. The effect of these actions on the worker is not hard to notice. His life
becomes ever more dismal as his position weakens in the brutal economic
arena. As population grows and factories become more efficient, workers find
that they themselves are a surplus; there is always a “reserve” of unemployed
proletarians reminding those who do have jobs that they can be replaced—and
more cheaply—at any moment.
To make matters worse, even the excess of workers is not the most serious
problem. The fierce rule of competition in capitalism, the drive to get greater
production from workers, leads eventually to a strange new dilemma—the
“overproduction of capital.” Workers and machines make more products than
can actually be sold. Owners in that unfortunate circumstance then have no
choice but to reverse their path and reduce production, thereby bringing on
periods of economic crisis marked by layoffs, downturns, and crippling unem-
ployment. Here is how Marx describes the circumstance:
Within the capitalist system . . . all means for the development of production
transform themselves into means of domination over, and exploitation of, the
producers; they mutilate the laborer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to
the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his

124 Nine Theories of Religion
work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual poten-
tialities of the labor-process . . . they distort the conditions under which he
works, subject during the labor-process to a despotism the more hateful for its
meanness; they transform his life-time into working-time, and drag his wife and
child beneath the wheels of the Juggernaut of capital.3
In this way, the excesses and misfortunes of economic life fuel the fires of
social conflict and lead capitalism finally to its own self-destruction. Amid
their awful degradation and economic misery, says Marx, the proletarians dis-
cover something: they “have nothing to lose but their chains.” Out of their fury,
and with all the weight of history on their side, the workers are finally driven
to plan, to organize, and in the end to act against the entire capitalist system.
When the time is right, they can be expected to revolt. In that moment, the day
of reckoning for the capitalist world will at last have arrived.
Base and Superstructure
For Marx, then, the central drama of history is the struggle of classes, a con-
flict controlled from below by the hard realities of economic life. In a world of
private pr0perty, the rich own the means of production, while the rest—
overwhelmingly the poor—do not. But even so, economics is not all of exis—
tence. What about the types of activity that form the other dimensions of our
social life? What about politics and law? What about morality, the arts, litera-
ture, and various other intellectual endeavors? And what about religion? Where
do all of these fit in?
Marx has much to say on each of these topics, and his starting point for all
of them is to make a distinction between what he calls the “base” of society and
its “superstructure.” Throughout history, he insists, economic facts have formed
the foundation of social life; they are the base that generates the division of
labor, the struggle of classes, and human alienation. By contrast, the other
spheres of activity, the things that are so visible in daily life, belong to the
superstructure. They not only arise from the economic base but are in signifi-
cant ways shaped by it. They are created by the underlying energies and emo-
tions of the class struggle. The institutions we associate with cultural
life—-family, government, the arts, most of philosophy, ethics, and religion—
must be understood as structures whose main role is to suppress or provide a
controlled release of the bitter animosities arising from the clash between the
powerful and powerless.
Consider the case of government. The state exists in all ages to represent the
wishes of the ruling class, the dominant group. In a capitalist society built on

Religion as Alienation: Karl Marx 125
the principle of private property, it therefore passes strict laws against theft, so
that the mother of a starving child can be jailed for stealing a loaf of bread even
from a factory owner so wealthy that he has enough food to feed a village.
Government creates and pays a police force to make sure that the laws are en-
forced; thieves must be caught and brought to trial. And it establishes a judi-
ciary to make certain that those laws are upheld; the accused must be convicted
and sentenced for her offense. The breakdown of law is a constant threat to any
society that, like the capitalist order, is made up of just a few oppressors and so
many who are oppressed. So the presence of a strong state, one that will impose
laws and crush any threat of deviation, is essential.
Although the state uses force to achieve control, other authorities in the cul-
tural superstructure achieve the same end by distraction or persuasion. In each
age of the past, ethical leaders—theologians, philosophers, and moralists—
have helped to control the poor simply by preaching to them, by telling them
what is right and what is wrong. The particular virtues they promote depend,
naturally, on the kind of society they live in, for “the ideas of the ruling class
are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”9 In the Middle Ages, when farming was
the chief means of production, all lands were owned by bishops of the Church
or by feudal lords, who defended their property with armies of vassals and
serfs sworn to their service. Should we be surprised, then, that the moral code
of the day stressed devotion to the Church, along with warrior virtues such as
obedience, honor, and loyalty to one’s feudal master? In modern industrial so-
ciety, capitalist owners need a huge pool of movable workers, people with few
ties beyond their immediate family and no claim to social privilege or status.
Should we be shocked, then, that in the present era the moral watchwords are
individual freedom and social equality? Modern philosophers and theologians
promote these new moral values because they serve the new economy. Like
their medieval counterparts, they claim that the morals they preach are eternal
truths, that they belong to a fixed order of nature when in fact they are deter-
mined by the economic realities of their own specific place and time. Nor are
the creative arts much different. For all their talk of individualism and original-
ity, writers and artists depend on the accepted ideas of the age for their success,
so even when they seem to protest, they in reality give unwitting, silent ap-
proval to society under the Oppressors’ control.
For historical support of these views, Marx turns to the recent revolutions in
modern Europe: the English Civil War of the 16003 and the later revolutions in
France, which he studied all of his life and discussed in three separate works.10
On the surface, these fierce conflicts seem to be purely matters of politics
and religion; the underlying realities, however, look considerably different. In
seventeenth-century England dawning capitalist motives led the London mer-
chants and middle-class gentry to challenge the political authority of the king,

126 Nine Theories of Religion
whose power lay with established landowners. It is capitalism that leads the
rising middle class to adopt a new form of religion, Protestantism, which is
much better suited to its interests in trade, investment, and individual enter-
prise. And, we might add, it is urban capitalism that leads artists like Rembrandt
and Frans Hals to paint portraits of Dutch townsmen and their families instead
of the saints, princes, and kings whom we find in the frescoes of medieval
chapels. In France of 1789 it is the rising middle class (the urban bourgeoisie) of
professionals and bureaucrats who engineer the overthrow of the king and lead
the attack on the Church in the name of human rights. Once the upheaval
subsides, economic interests again prevail as the same middle class unites to
hold back the revolutionary aspirations of the impoverished masses. In each
case we can see that the superstructure of politics and religion is really
controlled by the economic base and the dynamics of class warfare.
Marx has a special word for all of the intellectual activity that makes up this
superstructure: the endeavors of artists, politicians, and theologians all amount
to “ideology.”” Such people produce systems of ideas and creative works of art
that in their minds seem to spring from the desire for truth or love of beauty.
But in reality these products are mere expressions of class interest; they reflect
the hidden social need to justify things as they stand. The thinkers are always
the servants of the rulers.
Critique of Religion
Mention of such things as ideology and superstructure brings us at last to the
sphere of religion, where by now Marx’s basic view should hardly come as a
surprise. There are, in truth, few subjects on which he is as brief or as blunt.
Religion, he says, is pure illusion. Worse, it is an illusion with most definitely
evil consequences. It is the most extreme example of ideology, of a belief
system whose chief purpose is simply to provide reasons—excuses, really—
for keeping things in society just the way the oppressors like them. As a matter
of fact, religion is so fully determined by economics that it is pointless to con-
sider any of its doctrines or beliefs on their own merits. These doctrines differ
from one religion to the next, to be sure, but because religion is always ideo-
logical, the specific form it takes in one society or another is in the end largely
dependent on one thing: the shape of social life as determined by the material
forces in control of it at any given place and time. Marx asserts that belief in a
god or gods is an unhappy byproduct of the class struggle, something that
should not just be dismissed, but dismissed with scorn. In fact, no thinker con-
sidered in this book—not even Freud—discusses religion in quite the same
mood of sarcastic contempt as that of Marx.

Religion as Alienation: Karl Marx 127
The settled hostility in this attitude undoubtedly has roots that go beyond
mere intellectual disagreement. Marx’s first steps toward a fierce rejection of
religion were taken in his youth. Early on, he made clear in absolute terms that
he was an atheist. Whether the reasons for this original stance were social, in-
tellectual, purely personal, or some combination of several such factors is hard
to know. He may well have resented his father’s weakness in converting to
Christianity just to save his law practice, and certainly he had no love for the
often anti-Semitic, militantly Christian ethos of the Prussian communities. Yet
his absolute repudiation of belief ran deeper than his denial of Christianity. In
the preface to his doctoral dissertation, he took as his own the motto of the
Greek hero Prometheus, “I hate all the gods,” adding as his reason that they “do
not recognize man’s self-consciousness as the highest divinity.”12
Of course a simple rejection of religion is one thing; a full intellectual cam-
paign to unmask its falsehood is quite another. Marx did not begin to develop
an explanatory account—what he called a “critique”—of religion until the
decade of the 18403, which was, as noted, the decisive period in his thinking
and the time when he read the important writings of Ludwig Feuerbach, who
was closely associated with the Young Hegelians in Berlin. Feuerbach, like the
others, was at first a disciple of Hegel, but later he reversed course to become
a stern critic of idealism. In 1841, he created a sensation with The Essence of
Christianity, a frontal attack on orthodox religion. The furor over this book
was still going strong when he astonished German opinion with two other
works that proceeded to launch a parallel attack on the almost equally sacred
system of Hegel.I3 Predictably, Feuerbach at once became a cult hero to the
more radical students in the German universities.
Though he too wrote in the difficult philosophical language of his day, which
spoke of “consciousness” and “alienation,” Feuerbach’s basic point was not
hard to grasp. Both Hegel and Christian theology, he said, make the same error.
Both talk about some alien being—about God or the Absolute—when what
they are really talking about is humanity, and nothing more. Christian theolo-
gians notice all of the personal qualities we most dearly admire—ideals like
goodness, beauty, truthfulness, wisdom, love, steadfastness, and strength of
character—and then proceed to strip them from their human owners and proj-
ect them onto the screen of heaven, where they are worshipped—now in a form
separate from ourselves—under the name of a supernatural being called God.
Hegel does the same thing. He notices abstract ideas like freedom, reason, and
goodness, then feels he must “objectify” them by claiming they are really ex-
pressions of the Absolute, which operates as an invisible stage manager behind
the scenes of the world. But this too is mistaken: concepts like “rationality” and
“freedom” merely describe features of our own natural human life. Christian
theology and Hegelian philosophy are thus both guilty of “alienating” our

128 Nine Theories ofReligion
consciousness. They take what is properly human and assign it, quite wrongly,
to some alien being called the Absolute or to God.
When he read these arguments of Feuerbach, Marx found himself com-
pletely convinced; in fact, they merely expressed in greater detail the view that
he had already begun to adopt. He hailed Feuerbach as “the true conqueror of
the old philosophy of Hegel” and described his books as “the only writings
since Hegel’s . . . which contain a real theoretical revolution.”I4 And in his own
Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction, written a year after
Feuerbach’s book, he followed him almost to the letter: “Man, who looked for
a superman in the fantastic reality of heaven . . . found nothing there but the
reflexion of himself.” He then added: “The basis of irreligious criticism is: Man
makes religion, religion does not make man.”15
Persuasive as Feuerbach’s arguments were, Marx saw two places where they
could be made still stronger. First, if we ask why human beings refuse to take
credit for their own accomplishments, if we ask why they insist on calling them-
selves miserable sinners and offer instead all praise and glory to God, Feuerbach
really has no answer beyond an empty generality. He tends to say, in effect, that
is just the way pe0ple are; it is human nature to be alienated—unhappy with
ourselves yet pleased with God. This will not do for Marx. There is a real answer
to the question of alienation, he insists, and it fairly leaps out at us the moment
we look at things from a materialist and economic perspective.
Marx observes that there is a parallel between religious and socio-economic
activity. Both are marked by alienation. Religion takes qualities—moral
ideals—out of our natural human life and gives them, unnaturally, to an imagi-
nary and alien being we call God. Capitalist economies take another expression
of our natural humanity—our productive labor—and transform it just as un-
naturally into a material object, something that is bought, sold, and owned by
others. In the one case, we hand over a part of our selves—our virtue and sense
of self-worth—to a wholly imaginary being. In the other, we just as readily
deliver our labor for nothing more than wages to get other things that money
will buy. As religion robs us of our human merits and gives them to God, so the
capitalist economy robs us of our labor, our true self-expression, and gives it,
as a mere commodity, into the hands of the those—the rich—who are able to
buy it. Nor is this unhappy combination just a coincidence. Religion, remem-
ber, is part of the superstructure of society. Economic realities form its base.
The alienation we see in religion is, in actuality, just the expression of our more
basic unhappiness, which is always economic. The surface alienation evident
in religion is simply a mirror image of the real and underlying alienation of
humanity, which is economic and material.
In these terms it is easy to understand why for many people religion has such a
powerful and lasting appeal. Better than anything else in the social superstructure,

Religion as Alienation: Karl Marx 129
it addresses the emotional needs of an alienated, unhappy humanity. Here is how
Marx puts it in the famous lines that, depending on the reader, are now among the
most widely hated or admired in all of his writings:
Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real [economic] distress
and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed crea-
ture, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the Spirit of a Spiritless situation.
It is the opium of the pe0ple.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required
for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition
is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.“
It is not clear how much Marx understood about opium use in his day, but
certainly he knew it was a narcotic and hallucinogenic substance; it eased pain
even as it created fantasies. And that, for him, is precisely the role of religion
in the life of the poor. Through it, the pain people suffer in a world of cruel
exploitation is eased by the fantasy of a heavenly world where all sorrows
cease, all oppression disappears. Are the poor without jewels? No matter; the
gates of Heaven are inlaid with pearl. Are the Oppressed without money? The
very streets of Heaven are paved with gold. Are the poor jealous of the rich?
They can read Jesus’ parable of poor Lazarus, who died and went to father
Abraham, while the soul of the rich man who ignored him in life traveled
down to Hades at his death. To “fly away” one day and go home to live with
God, as the old slave spiritual declares, is to enjoy in the next life a well-
deserved consolation for the sufferings endured in this one.
From Marx’s standpoint, it is just this unreality, this leap into an imaginary
world, that makes religion such a wickedly comforting business. After all, if
the truth is that there is neither a God nor a supernatural world, being religious
is no different from being addicted to a drug, like opium. It is pure escapism.
Worse, in terms of the struggle against exploitation in the world, it is also fun-
damentally destructive. What energies will the poor ever put into changing
their circumstance if they are perfectly content with the thought of the next
life? How will they organize, plan their attack, and begin their revolt if their
hope of heaven leaves them no more wish to change their life than the “sigh of
protest” we find in otherworldly rituals and ceremonies? Religion shifts their
gaze upward to God when it should really be turned downward to the injustice
of their material, physical situation.
It is in just this connection that Marx offers his other improvement on
Feuerbach, whose major problem is that, like most thinkers, he prefers restrict-
in g himself merely to the life of the mind, passively commenting on the human
situation. He rightly observes that human beings are alienated and therefore

130 Nine Theories of Religion
turn to religion. But mere observation is not enough. Feuerbach and other intel-
lectuals must be awakened to the fact that the purpose of analyzing the problem
of religion is not just to have a new subject for discussion; the purpose is to find
an active strategy that will solve the problem. This emphasis on action, in con-
trast to the purely theoretical concerns of so many thinkers in his day (and
ours), is a crucial point in Marx’s communist program. As he puts it in the last
of his famous Theses on Feuerbach, “The philosophers have only interpreted
the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”17
Escape, then, is the main thing religion offers the oppressed. For those who
are not oppressed, for those lucky enough to control the means of production, it
offers something far better. Religion provides the ideology, the system of ideas
that they can call upon to remind the poor of God’s will: that the owning rich
and laboring poor remain where they are, which is just where they belong. Re-
ligion’s role in history has been to offer a divine justification for the status quo,
for life just as we find it. “The social principles of Christianity,” Marx insists,
justified the slavery of Antiquity, glorified the serfdom of the Middle Ages and
equally know, when necessary, how to defend the oppression of the proletariat,
although they make a pitiful face over it.
The social principles of Christianity preach the necessity of a ruling and an
oppressed class, and all they have for the latter is the pious wish [that] the former
will be charitable. . . .
The social principles of Christianity declare all vile acts of the oppressors
against the oppressed to be either the just punishment of original sin and other
sins or trials that the Lord in his infinite wisdom imposes on those redeemed.
The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abase—
ment, submission, dejection.18
There is nothing half-hearted about Marx’s verdict on religion, as these
scathing words clearly show. For him, belief in God and in some heavenly
salvation is not just an illusion; it is an illusion that paralyzes and imprisons. It
paralyzes workers by drawing off into fantasy the very motives of anger and
frustration they need to organize a revolt. Expectation of Heaven makes them
content with Earth. At the same time, religion also imprisons: it promotes
oppression by presenting a system of belief that declares poverty and misery to
be unavoidable facts of life: realities that ordinary people must simply accept
and embrace.
It must be noted here that for all the force of Marx’s original words and judg—
ments on these matters, Marxism does exhibit variations in doctrine not unlike
those found within a broad economic system like capitalism or a religion like
Christianity. Engels, for example, and the later Marxist historian Karl Kautsky,
in his Foundations of Christianity (1908), both suggested that communism

Religion as Alienation: Karl Marx 131
could be the friend of religion, not just its enemy. The rise of Christianity in the
ancient world could be seen as the expression of a proletarian revolutionary
protest against privileged Roman oppressors. Since the later decades of the last
century, theologians in Latin America also have drawn on Marxist analysis to
frame the protest against economic injustice known as “liberation theology.”
While these forms of Marxism that are more in sympathy with religion have
come into existence, it is unlikely that Marx himself would have thought much
of them. He would have wondered why anyone should even try such salvage
efforts, for his own final verdict is as much dismissive as it is contemptuous.
Fierce as the fury of his rhetoric may be, it is significant that Marx does not try
to make religion into communism’s great public enemy, as religious people,
conversely, often have done with communism. And that is because in his View
of things, religion, for all its evil doings, really does not matter very much.
Though it certainly aids the oppressors, there is no need to launch hysterical
crusades against it, for it is just not that important. It is merely the symptom of
a disease, not the disease itself. It belongs to society’s superstructure, not to its
base—and the base is the real field of battle for the oppressed. As Marx puts
the plight of the poor in one of his characteristic reversals of phrase, “The call
to abandon their illusions about their condition is a call to abandon a condition
which requires illusions.“9
He is fully confident that, in time, the attack on those conditions will suc-
ceed. And when it does, religion, like the state and everything else in the super-
structure of oppression, will “wither away” entirely on its own.
Analysis
Marx’s explanation of religion has exerted wide influence in our century, in part
because it is not just another remote scholarly theory. It is tied to a philosophy
of political action that, until recently, was embraced by nearly a third of the
contemporary world, including not only nations as great as the Soviet Union
and mainland China but multiple smaller ones as well. For countless people
born in these cultures, Marxism and its relentless critique of religion are the
only philosophy of life they have ever known. It is partly because of this politi-
cal success, of course, that Marxism has had its equally great impact on modern
intellectual life. During most of the last century, Marxist thinkers and theorists
have played a leading role in virtually every modern field of study outside the
natural sciences. Fifty years ago, more than a few serious intellectuals were
convinced that communism had caught the flow of history’s irreversible tide. To
them, its ultimate triumph was assured. Over the last three decades, however,
the world communist experiment has come into considerable eclipse. The not

132 Nine Theories of Religion
surprising consequence is that, in the current moment, communism’s own
“ideology”—including its view of religion—stands under a cloud of doubt.
Marx himself might not have been as disturbed by all of this as we may sup-
pose, for in his dialectical view of history, any one episode of capitalist success
can still be read as preface to its later collapse amid the great proletarian revo-
lution of a more distant future. Nonetheless, the almost blindly enthusiastic
approval Marxist theory once enjoyed has been replaced by a comparable scale
of current misgiving.
Between these two extremes, objectivity about either Marx or his View of
religion is difficult to achieve.20 Perhaps the best that one can do, at least at the
start, is to lay aside the issue of praise or blame and try to be merely descrip-
tive. In that regard, two elements of Marx’s theory deserve our notice: (1) his
strategy of functional explanation, which ends in its own distinctive form of
reductionism, and (2) his stress on the ties that link religion to economics.
1. Functional Explanation and Reductionism
Although he began writing more than half a century before either of them,
Marx’s general approach to religion is similar in form to the functional expla-
nations we have observed in both Freud and Durkheim. What interests him is
not so much the content of religious beliefs—not so much what people actually
say is true about God, Heaven, or the Bible as the role these beliefs play in
the social struggle. He agrees with Tylor and Frazer that the main religious
beliefs are, of course, absurd superstitions. But he also agrees with Freud and
Durkheim that we still have to explain why people hold to them. Like them, he
insists that we find the key to religion only when we discover what its function
is. Marx’s stress on society puts his View in one respect closer to Durkheim
than to Freud, for Freud’s emphasis, as we saw, falls mainly on the individual
rather than the group. Even so, the contrast is not a sharp one because Freud’s
theory also has social features, with the individual personality being shaped by
the influences of the family and community.
At the same time, Marx and Freud are closer together—and farther from
Durkheim—on another side of the issue. Since for Durkheim religion is in a
very real sense simply the worship of society, he thinks it impossible to
imagine human social life without some set of either religious rituals or their
near equivalent. Marx and Freud, by contrast, believe no such thing; both
think religion expresses a false need for comfort and security, and they are
perfectly happy to predict the disappearance of religion once the cause of its
fantasies has been detected and removed. Freud thinks people would be
much better off without the neurotic illusions of faith, but he seems to

Religion as Alienation: Karl Marx 133
realize many will still cling to them. Marx goes farther; he thinks people
cannot be better off until they are without them—that is, until revolution has
done away with the exploitation and misery that have created religion in the
first place. Because religion endorses a social order that is deeply unjust, he
cannot just dismiss it, with Freud, as neurosis in need of cure; it is an evil
that must be destroyed.
2. Economics and Religion
Whatever our judgment on Marx’s reductionism, one thing is beyond debate.
His emphasis on economic realities has now made it impossible to under-
stand religious life anywhere without exploring its close ties to economic and
social realities. In the century and more since his death, Marx’s disciples
have brought great insight to our understanding of relationships between the
spiritual and material dimensions of life. They have cast a whole new light
on the connections between economic needs, social classes, and religious
beliefs, especially in the case of such pivotal events in history as the Protes-
tant Reformation, the English Civil War, the French Revolution, and similar,
more recent social upheavals. In addition, they have produced provocative
studies of the connections between religion and such subjects as modern
imperialism, colonialism, and slavery. In this respect, whatever happens to
Marxist political regimes, Marx’s materialist economic perspective will no
doubt continue to furnish insight wherever theorists address the role of reli-
gion in economic, social, and political affairs.
Critique
Marx’s economic reductionism offers a wealth of insight into the ties that bind
religion to socioeconomic life. Insight, however, is not persuasion. Insofar as
Marx gives us a theory of religion, how compelling is it? That question is an
especially large one in this case, because Marx’s judgment on religion is almost
impossible to separate from the other aspects of his thought. We saw this to
some degree also in the case of Freud, whose conclusions about religion rest
heavily on his claims about psychology. In the same way, it is very hard to
evaluate Marx’s theory of religion without at the same time making judgments
on his claims about economy, politics, and society. So, in the following, we
start with some critical comments on the role of religion as Marx sees it but
then move to the broader contours of his thinking on nature, history, and
human social endeavor.

134 Nine Theories of Religion
1. Christianity and Religion
If we focus specifically on the theory of religion as explained above, two prob—
lem areas in Marxist thought require special notice. First, what Marx actually
presents is not an account of religion in general but an analysis of Christianity—
and of similar faiths that stress belief in God and an afterlife. In part, this may
be due to the influence of Hegel, who saw Christianity as the highest form of
religion and felt that whatever he said about Christianity applied automatically to
all “lesser” religions as well. Feuerbach took this position, and Marx, as we saw,
closely follows Feuerbach’s analysis. But, more importantly, the main focus of
Marx’s thinking is not so much world civilization as the culture and economy of
Western Europe, which is of course the historical homeland of Christianity.
It is chiefly Christianity that Marx has in mind when he depicts religion as an
opium-like escape for the poor from economic misery and oppression. We can
of course imagine a similarly Marxist explanation of, say, the Hindu doctrine of
rebirth, which also offers people hope of a better next life, or the teachings of
certain Buddhists who stress the joys of sheer nirvana over the miseries of the
present world and life.21 But Marx’s thesis cannot be very well applied to certain
primitive tribal religions, which have almost no meaningful doctrine of an after-
life, or to the religions of ancient Greece and Rome, which were disposed to
offer hope of an afterlife on terms just the Opposite of Marx’s: immortality for
the great and powerful and a mere shadow existence for simple folk. Further,
according to Marx, the phenomenon of alienation—which creates religion——
came about only as human societies were introduced to the division of labor and
private property. It would seem to follow that there was a time in human history
before all of these things when human beings needed no religion and, in fact,
had none. But while it is possible that in some deep prehistoric age this was true,
there is no historical evidence to support such an idea. Nor is there any evidence
available from modern tribal peoples, whose form of life often comes closest to
Marx’s idea of an original communism, that would show them to be without
religion or even exhibit less of an inclination to it than others.
2. Religion, Reduction, and the Superstructure
Whether Christian or not, religion in Marx’s view is an ideology. Like the
state, the arts, moral discourse, and certain other intellectual endeavors, it be-
longs to the superstructure of society, and it depends in a fundamental way on
the economic base. Thus, if there is a change in economic life, a change in re-
ligion must follow. The problem with this position as stated is that Marx expli-
cates it in an extremely elusive fashion. He insists that his own research is
strictly scientific in nature, yet when he reduces religion to economics and the

Religion as Alienation: Karl Marx 135
class struggle, he does so in terms so broad and variable that his theorems are
exceedingly difficult to test in any systematically scientific fashion. For ex-
ample, we could agree with Marx’s view that the rise of capitalism at the end
of the Middle Ages caused a shift away from Catholicism and toward Protes-
tantism. But then, what about more specific, small-scale changes? Does the
religious superstructure change with them as well? When in certain areas of
Europe we find evidence of capitalism earlier on, say in the medieval period,
why are there no developments of a Protestant sort in the social superstructure
to reflect that change as well? And why, after the rise of capitalism, do we find
this new bourgeois economic system in some cities and countries that clearly
did not become Protestant? Throughout the later Middle Ages and early
modern era, certain Italian city—states moved toward capitalism, but they did
not give up Catholicism. Why? Moreover, even in those countries where Prot-
estantism did arise, can we be sure it was economics that changed the religion?
Could it not be that the new religion actually changed the economics? Two
decades after Marx’s death, German sociologist Max Weber, whom we will
meet in our next chapter, framed an intriguing argument for just this point. We
can consider it more carefully later, but at a minimum it suggests that few such
historical connections are as clear or certain as Marx supposes them to be.
Outside the realm of religion as well, there are multiple cases in which ideas
from the spheres of art, literature, and morals as well as from politics and law
have changed or shaped economics in important ways, rather than the reverse,
as Marx contends. Indeed, the whole formulation of the problem, which sug-
gests that in these complex cultural interactions one element—economics—
must always be the cause while all of the others are simply effects, seems
overly simplified. Religion fits into society as part of an intricate network of
causes and effects that act and react on each other in complicated ways. To
suggest, as Marx does, that economics is always the agent in these transactions
and that ideologies are always mere expressions of it is to take a stance that
does not fit easily with the record of either culture or economics as they have
evolved even in the Western civilization Marx knows, quite apart from the
paths of development that may have been followed in other societies.
3. Marxist Political Theory: A Contradiction
A theory is only as strong as its assumptions. Since Marxist thinking reduces
religion to economics, we cannot leave it without examining, at least briefly,
the general theory of economy and society on which it rests. This is, to be sure,
no simple task. In both communist and noncommunist countries, entire librar—
ies are needed to hold all the appreciations and critiques of Marx and Marxism
in their multiple variations. What we can do briefly is point to at least two

136 Nine Theories of Religion
central difficulties that bear on the issue of religion and seem knitted to the
inner fabric of Marxism. These are not just charges hurled by political enemies
but apparently congenital disabilities that in candid moments Marxists them—
selves recognize the need to overcome.
The first is a fundamentally social and political problem, and to see it we
must remember that Marx recommends his system not just as a theory but as
a living course of action. The working class—the proletariat—is the great
agent of revolution; out of its desperation, it must rise up to destroy bourgeois
capitalism. Its leaders, whether they be the members of a communist party,
self-styled revolutionary strongmen, or elected representatives, embody the
singular, uniform interest of “the people” as a whole. They and they alone
speak and act for the revolution. Moreover, because there can be only one
such “collective will” of the people, there is no place for disagreement about
its purposes. Though it is elected, there can be only one political party. Nor
can there be such a thing as “individual freedom” for artists, scientists, and
intellectuals, since the only purpose in any of these pursuits is to serve the will
of the proletariat. Though families exist, parents too must recognize that their
children belong ultimately to the state. Religion, of course, cannot be toler-
ated because it saps revolutionary energies and demands an ultimate loyalty
that should be given only to the cause of revolution.
If this is a fair portrait of Marx’s revolutionary social program, then it is very
hard to see how it could ever achieve the end of a perfectly classless, harmoni-
ous community that he sets for it. Marx seems to assume that the workers in all
of their millions will, on any important social issue, have only one point of
view—a stance determined fully by their fate as the oppressed class. But why
should this necessarily be so? At the outbreak of World War 1, some communist
leaders expected that proletarians in each of the European nations involved
would actually refuse to fight their fellow workers in enemy lands. But this
obviously did not happen: French, German, and British workers discovered
that the ties of language, nation, and culture were stronger than class solidarity.
They fought for country, not class.
Second, and more alarmingly, Marxist theory seems to assume that some
smaller group—some elite, elected or otherwise—will, in fact, be making the
important decisions in the name of the workers, but apparently without any
institution in the society that has a right to examine or question that claim. If I
as Communist Party leader say, “You must die because the cause of revolution
demands it,” the one question that apparently no one—no artist, theologian,
opposing politician, or ordinary citizen—has a protected right to ask me is:
“Why do you alone speak for the cause of revolution?” Since I assume I speak
for the party, the mere fact that someone questions me already suggests that she
or he is an enemy of the revolution. I must respond to such challenging

Religion as Alienation: Karl Marx 137
questions not with an answer or a persuasive argument but with force. The
practical consequence of this impossible situation, borne out in almost every
modern communist state, is the dark turn toward absolute rule by parties or
dictators, along with the willing destruction of basic human rights. And why
not? Marx himself was never swayed by appeals to human rights, for, as he
pointed out in the case of the French Revolution, they are only bourgeois
values—ideals imposed on all by the middle class, the group that, in modern
Western nations, happens now to hold the power. In other ages, other masters
did the teaching, but always it has been power, the “might” of wealth, that de-
termined the “right” of morals. Ironically, however, this unsparingly radical
view of moral rights as relative has grave consequences for the very workers
whose interests Marx supposedly has at heart. Since it places no independent
moral restraints upon those people who, now in the name of the revolution,
have acquired power and claim to speak on its behalf, it leaves ordinary people
just as open as before to brutalization, though now under the new banner of
revolution and their own (future) well-being. All of which is troubling. There
seems to be a basic conflict at the heart of Marxist social theory, a paradox
some critics have perceptively described as the problem of “totalitarian
democracy.”22
4. Marxist Economic Theory: A Contradiction
Marx spent the latter portion of his life writing on economics in the several
volumes of Capital and other books. He regarded this as extremely important
work, providing the solid foundation in economic fact and theory for his doc-
trines of the class struggle and worker exploitation. In Capital, as we have
seen, he argues that human labor creates the only real value to be found in
products and that exploitation occurs when capitalists pay workers just enough
to stay barely alive and then “steal” for themselves the remaining surplus value
in the products the workers have made. To Marxist theoreticians, this analysis
seems fundamentally correct. Others are not so sure.
Writing just over a decade after Marx’s death, Eugen Bohm-Bawerk, an
Austrian economist, discovered in Capital what he regarded as a “massive
contradiction” between its theories of value and the actual facts of capitalist
life as we see it.23 In simple terms, he argued as follows: Marx holds a labor
theory of value; only workers (and never machines) create the value that goes
into their products. If that is so, it should be the case that very labor-intensive
industries will always create more value (that is, be more profitable) than
others; they provide more surplus value for the owner to steal. The actual facts
of capitalism, however, show that regardless of the industries we consider,
their rate of return on investment—that is, their profit—is almost always just

138 Nine Theories of Religion
about the same. It makes no difference whether they have a few workers run-
ning many machines or many workers and few machines; the profit margin
remains basically constant. Toward the end of the first volume of Capital,
Marx himself appears to have realized this problem and promised a solution.
111 health, however, prevented him from ever fully addressing the issue, though
he did what he could and in later volumes actually moved away from his
notion that value is defined solely by the amount of human labor in products.
Nonetheless, as Bohm-Bawerk observes, this labor theory of value is crucial
to Marx’s related theory of surplus value; the one cannot be given up without
losing the other. But the theory of surplus value is the very pivot on which
Marx’s central claim of worker exploitation is made to turn. Without it, his
fundamentally moral complaint against capitalism seems weakened, with a
problematic result for all that follows from it. In brief, if Marx’s theories of
value must be given up, if the footing crumbles, it is hard to see what could
remain of the rest of Marxist economic theory. The doctrine of exploitation,
the thesis of class struggle, the claims about base and superstructure, and cer—
tainly also the theory of religion as a dire, dismal symptom of alienation—all
of these become difficult to defend. If Bohm-Bawerk is right, it would seem
that the contradiction he notices cannot be dismissed as a side issue. Later
Marxists have worked hard to refute this critique or revise Marx, but without
notable success.
We thus end our encounter with Marx at a place that seems considerably
removed from religion—in the details of economic theory. From the material-
ist perSpective, however, any distance we claim to see between the two realms
is mostly a matter of appearances and not reality. Marx, in fact, is certain of
their connection. For him, the key to religion clearly is to be found in econom—
ics. He follows what is to him a clear and direct path from religious belief
down through alienation and exploitation to the class struggle and from there
to the root evils of private property and the theft of surplus value. If this ex-
planatory road shows turns and twists similar to those followed by Durkheim
and Freud, that should hardly surprise us. Like them, Marx is committed to
the route of reductionism, though for him it ends at a different destination——
with class struggle and economic alienation rather than the needs of society or
the neurotic personality. In their differing ways, and sometimes taken to-
gether, all three of these ambitious reductionist theories have exercised an
enormous shaping influence on modern thought.24 Their tide of influence on
interpreters of religion can be said to have reached a crest in the decades of the
19603 and 19705, and while it has in a measure receded, it has by no means
disappeared. They still have much to say, but they certainly do not have the
last or only word—as our next chapters will show.

Religion as Alienation: Karl Marx 139
Notes
1. Friedrich Engels, “Speech at the Graveside of Karl Marx,” in Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels: Selected Works, tr. and ed. Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, 2 vols.
(Moscow 1951), 2: 153.
2. Marx’s major work in economic theory, Capital, was published in 1867 as the first
of three volumes to be printed by a German publisher in Hamburg; the initial edition
was 1,000 copies. Most of Volume 3 and much of Volume 2 had already been written
before the first volume appeared. Marx continued his work on revisions of these
volumes after 1867, but he never finished them.
3. For an appraisal of Marx from the long perspective of a century after his death, see
Betty Matthews, ed. Marx: A Hundred Years On (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1983);
on the changing critical estimate of his system, see Paul Thomas, “Critical Reception:
Marx Then and Now,” in Terrell Carver, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Marx
(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 23—54.
4. There are, of course, numerous biographical studies of Marx. The authoritative work
in English, recently published, is now Jonathan Sperber, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-
Century Life (New York: Liveright Publishing Group, 2013). Among other works David
McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers,
1973) is still of considerable value. An earlier and classic intellectual biography that
analyzes the development of Marx’s thought in the context of the Europe of his day is
Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx (New York: Time Inc., [1939] 1963).
5. Karl Marx, A Correspondence of 1843, in The Early Texts, ed. David McLellan
(Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 82.
6. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, in Selected Works
(Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House [1935] 1955), 1: 34.
7. A work that is especially helpful on such key concepts in Marxist theory as “mode
of production” and “relations of production” is Terrell Carver, A Marx Dictionary
(Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1987).
8. Karl Marx, Capital, 3 vols., ed. Friedrich Engels (New York: International Publishers,
1967), 1: 645.
9. Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, Parts 1 and 3, ed. R. Pascal (New York:
International Publishers, 1947), p. 39.
10. The Class Struggles in France (1850); The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte (1852); On the Civil War in France (1871).
1 1. For the meaning of the term see, again, Carver, Marx Dictionary, under “ideology,”
pp. 89—92.
12. Karl Marx, “Doctoral Dissertation,” in McLellan, Early Texts, p.i 13; see also
McLellan’s comments in Karl Marx (1973), p. 37.
13. These were Preliminary Theses on the Reformation of Philosophy and Principles
of the Philosophy of the Future, both published in 1843.
14. Karl Marx, “Preface,” Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in T. B.
Bottomore, ed., Karl Marx: Early Writings (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company,
1964), p. 64.

140 Nine Theories of Religion
15. Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Intro-
duction,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on Religion, intr. Reinhold Niebuhr
(New York: Schocken Books, 1964), p. 41.
16. Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in Niebuhr, Marx and Engels
on Religion, p. 42.
17. Karl Marx, “Theses on Feuerbach,” in Niebuhr, Marx and Engels on Religion, p. 72.
18. Karl Marx, “The Communism of the Paper Rheinischer Beobachter,” in Niebuhr,
Marx and Engels on Religion, pp. 83—84.
19. Marx, “Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” in Niebuhr, Marx and Engels
on Religion, p. 42.
20. One of the most thorough recent expositions of Marx on religion, accompanied
by a penetrating analysis, can be found in Alistair Kee, Marx and the Failure of
Liberation Theology (London: SCM Press, 1990), particularly Chapters 1 through 5.
21. Marx did briefly address this in several articles written while serving as a corre-
spondent for the New York Daily Tribune; see Trevor Ling, Karl Marx and Religion in
Europe and India (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), pp. 68—80.
22. On this point, see R. N. Carew Hunt, The Theory and Practice of Communism:
An Introduction (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Pelican Books, [1950] 1963).
A thorough study of this problem both in the French Revolution and in other radical
revolutionary movements in the West is J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian
Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1952).
23. Eugen Bohm-Bawerk, “Unresolved Contradiction in the Marxian Economic
System” [1896], in Shorter Classics of Eugen Bohm—Bawerk, tr. Alice Macdonald
(South Holland, IL: Libertarian Press, 1962).
24. See the study by J. Samuel Preus, Explaining Religion: Criticism and Theory
from Bodin to Freud (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), which argues that
the most convincing scientific, naturalistic explanation of religion to date is to be found
in a combination of the theories of Durkheim and Freud.
Suggestions for Further Reading
Albritton, Robert. Economics Transformed: Discovering The Brilliance 0f Marx.
London: Pluto Press, 2007. A major figure in political philosophy today, Albritton
shows the continuing relevance and importance of Marx and argues for the value
of Marxist concepts and theory in present-day political debate.
Arnold, N. Scott. Marx’s Radical Critique of Society: A Reconstruction and Critical
Evaluation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. A sophisticated, thorough,
and detailed modern analysis of Marx’s economic concepts and formulations.
Barnett, Vincent. Marx. Routledge Historical Biographies. London: Routledge, 2009.
A recent biography that offers Marx without the distortions of the left and the
right; integrates thought with personal life and shows how Marx’s thinking
developed over time; oriented toward nonspecialist readers.
Bohm-Bawerk, Eugen. Karl Marx and the Close of His System, ed. Paul M. Sweezy.
London, England: Merlin Press, 1974 [1896]. Analyses by the foremost early
economic critic of Marxism.

Religion as Alienation: Karl Marx 141
Carver, Terrell, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Marx. Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press, 1991. Instructive essays bn the changing estimates of Marx, his
political theories, views of science, economic analyses, and other topics.
Carver, Terrell. A Marx Dictionary. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble Books, 1987. A useful
reference work especially for key concepts in Marx’s thought.
Eagleton, Terry. Why Marx Was Right. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011.
One of several spirited current defenses of Marxism challenging theorists who
have buried it in the wake of the Soviet collapse and the Chinese turn to
capitalism. Cites the recent Western financial crisis and argues that the most
common critiques of Marxism arise from distortions of communist theory and
history.
Goldstein, Warren. Marx, Critical Theory, and Religion: A Critique ofRational Choice.
Leiden: Brill, 2006. Though Marx was dismissive of religion, this collection
offers the work of scholars who use Marxist and critical theory to assess religious
belief and practice sociologically and frame an alternative to rational choice
theory.
Gottlieb, Roger S. Marxism, 1844—1990: Origins, Betrayal, Rebirth. London:
Routledge, Chapman, & Hall, Inc., 1992. An earlier attempt by a sympathetic
mind to rehabilitate Marxism in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse.
Kee, Alistair. Marx and the Failure of Liberation Theology. London: SCM Press, 1990.
A wide-ranging recent critique of Marxism and the mostly Latin American
theology that seeks to combine Marxist theory with Christian belief.
Knapp, Peter, and Alan J. Spector. Crisis & Change: Basic Questions of Marxist
Sociology. 2nd edition. London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011. Introduces
Marxist theory using a question-and-answer format that is especially suited to
students. Addresses a wide variety of themes with a global perspective and in a
manner that invites energetic debate.
Le Blanc, Paul. Marx, Lenin, and the Revolutionary Experience. New York: Routledge,
2006. A wide-ranging discussion of democratic revolutionary movements in
action from the 1930s to the present; argues for the ongoing importance of Marx
and Lenin; considers the American civil rights movement and the global encoun-
ter between Marxism and religion.
McLellan, David. Karl Marx. Modern Masters Series. Harmondsworth, Middlesex,
England: Penguin Books, 1976. A brief biographical account of Marx’s career,
controversies, and ideas; provides a clear and succinct overview.
McLellan, David. Marxism and Religion. New York: Harper & Row, 1987. One of the
best accounts of the subject in English, this analysis extends beyond Marx and
his early followers to recent Marxist theory.
Plamenatz, John. Karl Marx ’s Philosophy of Man. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press,
1975. A subtle, scholarly examination of the ideas and arguments at the core of
Marx’s thought.
Rockmore, Tom. Marx After Marxism. Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishers, 2002.
Another attempt, occasioned by the great collapse of 1939, to recover the voice

142 Nine Theories of Religion
of Marx the political philosopher who reacted against Hegel and thereby free the
real Marx from later “Marxisms.”
Sperber, Jonathan. Karl Marx: A Nineteenth-Century Life. New York: Liveright
wPublishing Corp., 2013. This expansive, ambitious biography has been widely
praised and is destined to be the standard discussion for years to come. Written
by a leading historian of Europe, it draws on the recently released complete
edition of the writings of Marx and Engels and covers all aspects of Marx’s life
and personal affairs, along with his work as a theorist, brilliant controversialist,
formidable intellectual colleague, and committed activist.

5.
A Source of Social Action:
Max Weber
Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has
spun.
Clifford Geertz on the guiding theorem of Max Weber’
If we take Freud, Durkheim, and Marx together, one thing seems clear: each
develops a decidedly functional view of religion. From their several perspec-
tives, it is not enough to say that some Hindus worship Shiva because they
believe in his power or that a Muslim follows the Quran because it holds truths
revealed by God. They choose instead to show how these beliefs are traceable
to conditions or needs that lie deeper—below the surface of the mind’s assent.
They further believe that such functionalist approaches lead logically to reduc-
tionist conclusions. This is not just a matter of explaining one aspect of religion
while other theories explain other aspects. The premise of such functionalism
is that it has found what is basic and fundamental. Religion—all of religion—
can be fully accounted for by tracing it to a single underlying circumstance or
elemental cause: to humanity’s universal state of neurosis, to the universal
claims of society on the individual, or to the world dynamic of class struggle.
Such explanations reach wide to sweep evidence from all cases into the embrace
of a single formula. That is the key to their appeal. Even so, we can still ask
whether such acCounts are the best accounts? Do these reductionist theories
perhaps come to their bold conclusions too easily? What if we were to start
instead from the stubborn complexity of religious behavior and ask whether
such a dense compound can be so easily distilled to a single substrate?
At the turn of the last century no theorist was more intrigued by the baffling
intricacy of human behavior than the German social scientist Max Weber, a
man who began his studies, like Marx a half century earlier, at the University
of Berlin, where his main interest was not in religion but in economics and
law. Though he is often paired with Durkheim as one of the twin founders of
143

144 Nine Theories of Religion
modern sociology, the term “sociologist” does not do justice to the wide array
of Weber’s intellectual interests. His mind was encyclopedic and absorbent,
steeped in learning that embraced not only law and economics but also his-
tory, philosophy, art, religion, literature, and music. As he read and wrote, he
worked methodically to find connections and outline contexts. He traced the
links between politics, geography, and cultural history; explored the roots of
class conflict; described the features of social status groups; distinguished
types of human action and forms of social authority; examined the role of
administrative institutions; and intuitively grasped the power of religious
behavior and belief in social life. Society, as he saw it, is best understood as a
tapestry of quite different but tightly interwoven strands of human activity,
each strand twisting over and under the next. The status of religion in this
regard is equivalent to that of other human behaviors. For Freud, Durkheim,
and Marx, it seems obvious that religion should always be considered an
effect and never identified as a cause. For Weber, that is not so obvious. In
human affairs, causal trains do not travel on one-way tracks; explanation is
more complicated. As a thoroughly human endeavor, religion is neither always
cause nor always effect; it may be either or both as only the specific circum-
stance can determine.
Background: Family, Politics, and Scholarship
Karl Emil Maximilian “Max” Weber (1864—1920) was the oldest of eight
children born to Max (senior) and Helene Fallenstein Weber. Although the
Weber family had long prospered as linen manufacturers in the region of
Westphalia, Max senior chose a career in law and became active in govern-
ment. While his first son was still a young child, he moved to Berlin, where
he enjoyed a long parliamentary career, serving first in the Prussian House of
Deputies and later in the German Reichstag as a member of the National Liberal
party. Outgoing, self-assured, and supportive of the empire’s “Iron
Chancellor” Otto von Bismarck, he fit well into the social and political life of
the city, opening his home regularly to colleagues and friends. Helene, the
daughter of a government minister in Berlin, also came from wealth. Highly
educated for a woman of her time, she was more introspective than her hus-
band and devoutly religious, with a strong social conscience keenly attuned to
the hardships of the poor.
These contrasting parental temperaments converged, somewhat uneasily, in
the personality of their son. Max junior shared his father’s active interest in
politics and government but inherited his mother’s reflective demeanor, as well
as her ethical sensitivity and humanitarian idealism. To describe his early life
as “cerebral” would be an understatement.2 From early on, reading was as

A Source of Social Action: Max Weber 145
routine as breathing. At age thirteen, his idea of a Christmas gift to his parents
was a pair of essays: one on medieval German history, another on the later
Roman Empire. The Weber household made little distinction between learning
and leisure. Visits from Berlin’s political and intellectual elite were a regular
occurrence. In rooms alive with intersecting discussions of economics and
society, politics, law and history (suitably spiced with society gossip), Weber
as a teen met some of the most glittering figures in a golden era of German
learning. The philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, the eminent Roman classicist
Theodore Mommsen, historian Heinrich von Treitschke, theologian Ernst
Troeltsch—all of these and others were not just authors on a page; they were
family friends personally encountered.
Weber’s formal education was no less stellar. At preparatory school in Berlin,
he took an interest in philosophy and in both ancient and medieval history. He
read widely in classical authors—Homer, Herodotus, Virgil, and Cicero—
while also working his way through all the works of Goethe, mostly as a per-
sonal diversion from unexciting classwork. In 1882 he entered Heidelberg
University to study legal and economic history as well as philosophy and the-
ology. He also joined a fraternity, where, like Marx, he learned to duel and
drink—both with more Vigor than wisdom, to judge by his mother’s unhappy
reports. After a year of combined study and military service in Strasbourg,
where he formed a friendship with the historian (also his uncle) Hermann
Baumgarten, Weber returned to further university work in Berlin. There, over
the next eight years and while still living with his parents, he pursued advanced
studies in legal and economic history. In 1889 he took a doctoral degree with a
dissertation on medieval Italian trading companies; soon afterward, he com-
pleted his work in law and took a position in the Berlin courts. In 1892 he
earned his Habiliratz’on, or license, as a university lecturer with a study of agri-
culture and law in ancient Rome. At about this time he also became engaged to
Marianne Schnitger, a distant cousin; they were married a year later, just as
Weber was entering professional life.
With his marriage at age twenty-nine, Weber’s life story divides into a tale
of two selves. Professionally he had established himself as a scholar of excep—
tional promise; positions awaited him in both government and the academy. He
had become active in the Verein ft’t’r Socialpolitik, or Union for Social Policy,
an organization of professional economists for which he prepared an important
study of immigration and farm labor in eastern Germany. He also published an
analysis of the newly established German stock exchange.3 In 1895 he accepted
a university appointment (remarkable for a scholar of his age) as a full profes-
sor of political economy in Freiburg, and in the following year he accepted a
similar post, with greater prestige, at the University of Heidelberg.
On a personal level, however, his life took a disturbing turn. The marriage to
Marianne turned out to be unusual, at least by normal measures of affection.

146 Nine Theories ofReligion
Though he and his new wife were ideal personal and intellectual companions,
they chose, apparently by mutual consent, a marital relationship that was to be
not just childless but almost certainly also asexual. It is not clear just why.
Weber’s capacity for self-denial was well known, and it appears to have con-
verged with something similar in his wife—an apparent aversion to physical
sexuality. The full truth of this intimate matter is probably beyond discovery.
(Marianne, who wrote the first biography of her husband, had all personal
papers burned after his death.4) But it doubtless set the stage for emotional
unsettlement, which was further complicated by other tensions. Though he
respected both of his parents, Weber as an adult drew closer to his mother and
felt a need to support her against his father, who could be personally domineer-
ing. On the occasion of a fierce quarrel over his mother’s right to visit her
newly married son and daughter-in-law, now living away from Berlin, Max
junior took his mother’s side, angrily opposing his father. A few months later,
before they could reconcile, his father suddenly died of a heart attack. Whether
or not feelings of guilt were involved, Weber soon found himself slipping into
serious emotional collapse. From 1897 to 1901 and even beyond, he struggled
with episodes of paralyzing anxiety that left him by turns exhausted, restless,
sleepless, and unable to function in his role as a professor. After taking several
leaves for health reasons, he resigned his appointment at Heidelberg, effec-
tively withdrawing from any professional position.5 Not until 1918 did he bring
himself again to accept an academic post, this time at the University of Vienna.
Less than two years later, he was stricken with pneumonia. Inadequately
treated, it took his life at the young age of fifty-six, in the very prime of his
intellectual career.
Although the nervous disorder deflected him from his university duties,
Weber over time managed gradually to regain his capacity for scholarly labor.
He coped well enough to travel in both Europe and the United States, where he
participated in conferences on social theory and policy. While no longer in a
professorial position, he was able by 1904 to accept an editorship (alongside
economists Werner Sombart and Edgar Jaffe) at an important scholarly journal,
the Archivfu’r Sozialwissenschaften und Sozialpolitr’k (Archivefor Social Sciences
and Social Policy). This step was both emotionally therapeutic and intellectu-
ally opportune. Aided by family funds and (after 1907) by a comfortable inher-
itance, Weber began to work as a private scholar, pursuing a program of
research that grew more productive each passing year, even amid the occa—
sional nervous relapse. He made the Archive the forum where some of his
work, including most of his important research on religion, was published.
During sixteen remarkably productive years from the date of his editorship to
the day of his death in 1920, he produced in its pages and elsewhere a steady
stream of articles, critical reviews, and extended essays of extraordinarily high

A Source ofSocial Action: Max Weber 147
quality. Not all were intellectual landmarks, but they routinely advanced strik~
ing and original ideas, supported by close historical analysis and thorough
social research. The more important of these will claim our attention in a
moment. Before turning to them, however, we should attend to a preliminary
matter that Weber held to be of paramount importance: the methods employed
in sociological research.
Three Tools of Sociological Inquiry
Methods are to scholars what tools are to craftsmen. All need them; few give
them much thought. Weber, however, is one of those few. Amid the recovery
from his illness, he wrote a number of articles, including a first editorial essay
for the Archive (1904), which centered on the main issue of sociological
method: How do we proceed when we try to explain human social actions?
Weber developed his answers to this question in several technical essays that
outline three guiding principles of social inquiry.6
Verstehen
Weber’s first and fundamental principle is best stated in the single word
Verstehen, the German term for “understanding.” He was not the first or only
scholar of his time to stress this idea, the hallmark of what would later be
known as interpretive sociology, but he made it decidedly central to his labors.
On the surface, it is a notion easy enough to grasp. The principle of Verstehen
presumes that we cannot explain the actions of humans as we explain occur—
rences in nature. Natural science centers on non-mental objects and processes;
social science explains the mentally driven activities of human beings. It is
true that within nature, humans too can be called objects, but clearly they are
objects of a special kind. Unlike stones and trees, they are conscious; they
assign meaning to the things they do. Their behavior is guided not just by
external forces such as gravity but by internally held ideas such as the belief in
freedom and inwardly experienced emotions such as the feeling of love. This
distinction may seem a matter of mere common sense, but applied to complex
social issues and institutions, it can become controversial. c
In Weber’s day, scholarly debate over this issue of explanation grew so
heated that it acquired its own name: the great Methodenstreit, or “dispute
about methods.” At the center of the argument stood the undeniable success
achieved in fields like chemistry and physics by framing universal laws of
cause and effect. Why, some asked, could not laws like these, with their won—
drous applications in medicine and industry, also be framed to explain human

148 Nine Theories of Religion
affairs? Economists were the first to make this case, claiming some success in
applying scientific “laws of the market” to human action. Similar views soon
sprouted elsewhere, suggesting that perhaps an entire natural science of all
human behavior could be created. Others sharply dissented. The philosopher
Wilhelm Windelband asserted that while science deals with processes that
repeat themselves, allowing us to explain things “nomothetically” (Greek for
“making rules”), human actions are singular events, requiring explanations that
are “idiographic” (Greek for “uniquely descriptive”) in character. On this View,
there is a fundamental divide between Natur— or Gesetz-wissenschafi (“sci-
ences of nature or of laws”) and Geistes— or Kultur-wissenschafl (“sciences of
the spirit or of human culture”). Wilhelm Dilthey went even further, contend-
ing that we cannot really “explain” such things as human action at all, at least
in the scientific sense of the word “explain.” We must use Verstehen to “feel
our way” intuitively, one might say, into the minds of others. By acts of imag-
ination rather than reason, we recreate their thoughts in our own minds.
Weber participated in this spirited quarrel by taking a position somewhere in
the middle. His views leaned toward those of Dilthey, but he felt it a mistake to
suppose the process of Versz‘ehen is purely intuitive, an exercise in the art of
imagination. We cannot possibly recreate by imagination the complicated mix-
ture of ideas and motives that may have played in the mind of, say, Socrates
while on trial in ancient Athens or of Lincoln when he decided to free the
Southern slaves. The only thing we can do is proceed rationally. We describe a
historical circumstance or set of conditions, and based on that knowledge we
envision a probable sequence of next events; we try to isolate what it was that
made one sequence occur when the others did not. Verstehen is thus a form of
science: a systematic, rational method of accounting for human actions by dis—
cerning the role of motives or meanings where they figure as causes.
To say Verstehen is a rational procedure is not to say that human beings
always act in rational ways. Weber was well aware that there are very different
forms and degrees of rationality. In his later landmark work Economy and
Society, he observes that actions can be either instrumentally rational (seeking
the means to achieve a goal) or value-rational (seeking a goal as good in itself);
they can also be affectual (driven purely by emotions) or traditional (done
purely out of habit).7 In this way social science reaches useful explanations; it
infers the inner motives that affect outward actions.B
Although Weber’s main interest was to explain social rather than personal
behavior, his stress on the inner motives of human actions has led others to
describe his perspective as “methodological individualism”—a term that is
instructive. For him, social values or beliefs acquire reality only insofar as they
gain assent in the minds of individuals. Whenever he refers in abstract terms to
a moral value such as, say, physical courage, Weber reminds us to think of the

A Source ofSocial Action: Max Weber 149
specific individuals or subgroups in a society whose leadership or influence
makes them what he calls the “bearers” of such an ideal. Ideas and values, in
other words, have effects only because certain people embrace them and induce
others to follow their lead. This accent diverges from that of Durkheim, who
tends to think of society as an abstract entity, standing apart from its individual
members and imposing duties upon them from above. Weber is disposed
instead to think of the community as a mixed assemblage of individuals in
which the many defer to the few, to those who by tradition, privilege, or per-
sonality claim the authority to lead them. They are the custodians of cultural
values; they shape society as much as it shapes them and others.
Ideal-Types
Individuals may carry the ideals of society, but sociology does not center only
on individuals; if it did, it would be neither social nor scientific. Making valid
statements about general classes of things is the entire purpose of the endeavor.
To clarify the role of these general categories in social research, Weber employs
another technical German term—Ideal-Typus. An ideal-type is a general con-
cept, but it is different from what is known as a generalization in natural sci-
ence. Generalizations identify a single trait or characteristic common to a
group, as when we say, “All kings have countries.” A country to rule is a kind
of bare minimum qualification for a king. When we create an ideal-type of a
king, however, we form almost the very opposite of a generalization. We frame
a sort of purposeful exaggeration, or maximum outline, of what a ruler should
be, adding to the country he rules a large set of further attributes: royal birth,
male gender, rule by “divine right,” a queen, a palace with courtiers, nobles
sworn to fealty, and so on. No real-world monarch, past or present, will possess
all of these characteristics. Some have most of them and others only some, but
that does not matter. The key is that the ideal—type furnishes a conceptual
framework into which all cases can be brought for analysis. With it, we can
compare kings over time and across locales. We can trace changes from one
type of monarchy to another, and we can make inferences about cause and
effect, as in the French Revolution, when an assault on religion demolished the
idea that kings rule by “divine right.”
Almost everything we meet in social analysis can be fashioned into an
ideal-type, and the formulas can vary greatly in kind and scope. A concept like
“revolution” is an obvious example from politics; “democracy” might be
another. So are the forms of rational action we noted earlier. Broad historical
concepts such as “Greek civilization” and “modern capitalism” and terms such
as “Renaissance” and “Impressionism” from the history of art can all serve the
purpose, but so can quite specific types comparable to “king,” such as “artisan”

150 Nine Theories ofReligion
or “merchant.” The same is true in the realm of religion for types like “priest,”
“mysticism,” “church,” or “sect” or any similar conception that supports the
explanatory process.
One of Weber’s most celebrated ideal-typologies offers an apt illustration. In
Economy and Society, he singles out three main types of social authority: tra-
ditional, legal, and charismatic. All three express what he calls “legitimate
domination.” In the case of traditional authority, people acknowledge a pattern
of power that seems to have “always existed,” as in tribal societies where rule
of the elders has been accepted from time immemorial. Similar forms include
“patriarchalism” and “patrimonialism,” where a single person or family inher-
its power to rule. Conversely, the authority most common to modern societies
can be defined as legal, or rational. It finds purest expression in the modern
bureaucracy, which presumes consent among all to abide by a set of rules con-
sistently applied by trained, specialized, paid officials who work in a graded
hierarchy and with a sense of professional duty. Weber’s writings on bureau—
cratic authority have generated serious discussion among analysts of public
and corporate administration. He finds bureaucracy the most rationally ordered
form of authority, offering great efficiency, though often by suppressing cre-
ativity. By contrast, the third of the types*charismatic domination—is the
most dynamic, and it holds special importance in the sphere of religion. It is on
clear display in the prophets and sages of world history, though it applies as
well to warriors or to statesmen. In such cases, leadership is acquired through
a single characteristic: the compelling personal magnetism of one or a few
individuals. The prophets of Israel, Gautama and his community of monks,
Confucius and his followers, Jesus and his apostles—all of these cases demon-
strate the social impact of an exceptional personality, the spiritual hero, the
singular gifted person who alone can work miracles, deliver an oracle, or ener-
gize disciples. When such a figure appears in a society, he or she can, on the
sheer strength of a claim to power, wisdom, or divinity, win a following and
alter the course of civilization. Charisma is the most compelling agent of
change in society and history.
Abstractions like “bureaucracy” are not the only kind of ideal-type; histor-
ical processes qualify also. One of Weber’s widely cited types defines the
process of cultural “disenchantment,” by which faith in the supernatural realm
of magic and the gods, long anchored in a traditional society, gradually dis-
solves under the pressure of systematic and rationalized patterns of thought.
Another is the “routinization” of charisma, the gradual transformation that
occurs when, after a prophet’s passing, the fiery intensity of his message
begins to cool and fix itself into institutions if it is to survive. Types like these,
which depict historical developments, can naturally be blended with types of
other kinds to frame cause-and—effect explanations when social or cultural

A Source of Social Action: Max Weber 151
changes occur. An illustration (though not one of Weber’s own) might be the
process of Christianization of the ancient Roman Empire. Around the year
100 CE, the dominant religions of Rome were polytheistic; by about 500 CE,
they had been almost entirely replaced by Christian monotheism. If we think
of polytheism and monotheism as differing ideal-types of religious belief, we
can frame an explanation of the change. Between the two pure ideal-types, we
can locate a kind of bridge belief that figured in the transition. Some converts,
such as the Roman general Constantine, were superstitious and opportunistic;
he embraced “Christos” as the one god out of many most able to help his army
in battle. Neither his faith nor his monotheism was very pure, but the
ideal-types of each enable us to understand the form-in-between that drew the
emperor and others along the path from pagan polytheism to Christian mono-
theism. Here, as elsewhere, the explanatory benefit lies not so much in the
kind of ideal-type we use as in the service it provides in framing comparisons
and explaining actions.
Values
Weber’s third principle of inquiry addresses the issue of values. From early on
he took the position that social science, like other sciences, must be a
value-free endeavor. Like others of his day, he held that facts and values are
quite separate things; confusing them is an error of the first order. Every true
scientist (natural or social) seeks a factual account of the real world as he expe-
riences it, and personal value judgments should be kept out of the process. The
purpose of science is to describe things as they are, not to promote personal
views on what ought to be. The same distinction applies in the university class-
room; the vocational duty of a professor requires that personal value judg—
ments not be mixed into classroom lectures.
If this were all to be said on values, we could end here and move on. But
almost always for Weber, things are not as simple as they may seem. He recog—
nizes that there are certain value-relevant considerations no one can avoid. The
basic decision even to become a social scientist expresses a value choice. To
choose sociology over, say, medicine or carpentry is-a decision to place a career
value on social science rather than another vocation. The choice of what to
study within sociology is the same. To make a study of class differences rather
than suicide rates is to make a value-relevant decision about the issue most in
need of one’s attention. If we think about it carefully, the commitment to fol—
low the principle of “value-freedom” is itself a value—conditioned choice. In
promising to explain reality as accurately as possible, without inserting per-
sonal opinions into the accounts, we affirm the value that science places on
factual truth over the value of our personal or political interests.

152 Nine Theories of Religion
Value choices appear also to affect social science more than natural science.
Physicists and mathematicians work with closed sets of concepts—like the
axioms of algebra or theorems of geometry—that remain fixed over time.
Euclid in ancient Greece used the same postulates as those applied by a geom—
etry student in a modern high school. But it is not the same, says Weber, in
open-ended disciplines like social science, where new ideas, issues, and for-
mulations continuously appear as new observers bring in the perspectives of
later ages and differing cultures. Further, as the principle of Verstehen shows,
when we try to explain human activities, we find ourselves negotiating
between at least two sets of values: those of the people whose actions we are
interpreting and those of the culture—our own—within which we are
working.
Consider in this regard the early years of the Industrial Revolution, when
workers known as Luddites (followers of the folk hero King Ludd) raided fac-
tories to destroy the new textile machines, which had left them jobless and
poor. They saw no future for laborers in a world ruled by machines. A Marxist
historian of the early 19003, writing their story with an ear attuned to worker
exploitation, might well regard the Luddites as prophetic; they alone foresaw
the coming final phase of corrupt capitalism and worker enslavement. Today’s
neoliberal free-market historian, on the other hand, is inclined to see them as
sadly deluded souls, vandalizing the very technology that would spare their
grandchildren long hours of hard labor and make them prosperous, not poor.
Certainly, Marxist and free—market interpreters can both try to put personal
views aside, but the questions they bring and explanations they offer seem
almost unavoidably shaded by value—relevant factors tied to the culture of their
own time and place.
This point is underscored by what we know of Weber’s own deepest convic—
tions about society and values. He had been influenced by Marx and by the
philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, both of whom fiercely rejected any thought
of universal moral values binding on all of humanity. In wrestling with their
radical ideas, he developed a more complex stance on these questions that has
generated pages of commentary from later theorists. Some say his views are
contradictory; others say he failed to show how values affect social more than
natural science.9 Still others contend that “value-freedom” of any kind is a
myth, citing Weber himself as a proof of the point. When he joined the Union
for Social Policy, he strongly argued that its research must be strictly
“value-free.” But the study of farming in East Prussia that he did for the Union
actually passed a severe judgment on the landowners, whose self-centered
practices encouraged Polish immigration and weakened German ethnic iden-
tity.[0 Clearly, that verdict—offered by an intense German nationalist—hardly
qualifies as “value-free.”

A Source of Social Action: Max Weber 153
Writings on Religion
Criticisms aside, Weber put his principles of method diligently to work as he
turned to his main program of research. Its guiding theme, as we have seen,
was the interweaving of economics and society. Yet the closer he looked at this
issue, the more it appeared that the role of religion in that relationship was
pivotal. This fact came to light decisively in the first of his major works, The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904—1905). It can be said to
have become even more central to his interests as time went on.“ Since here,
as in other chapters, our discussion must center on a few signature texts, The
Protestant Ethic is an obvious first choice. Its title alone is recognized widely
in popular conversation. Quite apart from the agenda it set for so much of
Weber’s subsequent work, it remains his most famous and widely debated
book. The second choice—less obvious, but no less important—is the blue-
print he laid down for scientific study of religion in a long section of Economy
and Society. Later translated and published separately in English as The
Sociology of Religion, this analysis has become a standard reference for cur-
rent theorists of religion. It outlines some of Weber’s most suggestive typolo-
gies and conceptual comparisons. Third and finally, we can take some
notice—admittedly brief—of an ambitious multipart series of studies Weber
projected as “The Economic Ethic of the World Religions.” Less than half this
work was finished at his death, but the three books that did appear offer a
window on the wider landscape of his thinking.
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904—1905)
Few scholarly books have made their authors more of an intellectual celebrity
than this striking venture in cultural analysis, which Weber first published as
a pair of articles in the Archive just after becoming one of its new editors.12
Debate over its famous argument, known almost everywhere as “the Weber
thesis,” has continued for more than a century, with little reason to think it will
not go on for another. At its core is a startlingly bold but fundamentally simple
thesis. It claims there is a close connection between religion, the rise of eco-
nomic capitalism, and the birth of modern civilization in Western Europe.
Weber begins by noticing, as had others, an odd fact of life in modern
Germany: in proportion to their numbers, Protestants were much better repre-
sented than Catholics among the class of business leaders, capital investors, and
skilled corporate managers. To account for this fact, some had suggested that
perhaps Catholics are just more spiritually inclined people, while Protestants
tend to be more materialistic. Such explanations, says Weber, will not satisfy
anyone who intimately knows Protestant attitudes, both past and present. If we

154 Nine Theories of Religion
look closely at their history, we see that the most successful of these enterpris-
ing Protestant businessmen have often also been the most intensely religious,
keeping diaries that carefully recorded their daily efforts to follow the will of
God in their lives. If anything, we could better suppose that something in the
religiosity itself of these Protestants is what urged them toward serious enter—
prise in business. So inquiry can better begin with Protestantism’s founders:
Martin Luther in Germany and the French theologian John Calvin in
Switzerland.
Though religiously revolutionary, Luther was socially and politically con-
servative. He did not directly advance new ideas about business, but he did
assert the equality of all people before God—a principle that entailed a quite
unconventional view of everyday human labor. In the Catholic culture of medi-
eval Europe, the daily labor of ordinary people received no special recognition;
it was merely what people must do to eat and have shelter. Specifically reli-
gious work of the kind undertaken by monks, nuns, and priests was another
matter. People who choose lives such as these do much more than everyday
labor. They are specially called by God to their duties. They take solemn vows
of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Their divinely appointed vocation (from
the Latin vocare, “to call”) assures them of exceptional rewards in heaven. To
Luther, this notion that some believers are more religious than others was unac-
ceptable; he insisted adamantly on the complete equality of all believers before
God. The effect of his teaching was to dissolve the Catholic concept of a spe-
cial religious vocation simply by expanding it to include everyone. In Weber’s
words, Luther “secularized” the idea of vocation, thereby giving as much
importance to the everyday work of a peasant or tradesman as the Church had
given to the devotional exercises of the parish priest or cloistered nun. This
idea—that even the humblest tasks are solemn duties assigned by God
himself—invested everyday work in the world, no less than prayer in the con-
vent or chapel, with real religious importance, a spiritual value that it had never
before held. All work, not just religious work, was a calling from God; it should
not just be done but done well, as faithful service carried out (in the words of
the great Puritan poet John Milton) under “the great Taskmaster’s eye.”
Luther’s idea of a “secular calling” offers a start in understanding Protes-
tant energy and success in business, but only that; it does not explain how a
particular kind of economic activity seems to have predominated. Protestants
chose a distinctive lifestyle marked not only by habits of discipline, thrift,
simplicity, and self-denial, but also by a systematic lifelong pattern of effort
in enterprises designed to earn a profit. Moreover, it is just this kind of
endeavor, whose sole motive is the orderly and incremental increase of wealth,
that expresses the frame of mind we associate with the modern, and uniquely
Western, economic phenomenon of capitalism. Is there, then, a connection?

A Source of Social Action: Max Weber 155
Weber says emphatically “Yes.” But to explain it, to account for the distinctive
ethic behind the spirit of capitalism, he turned from Luther to Calvin, the most
cerebral of the reformers.
Calvin was a brilliantly systematic thinker, the main architect of the Protes-
tant doctrinal system. But it was he eSpecially who also stressed the dark teach—
ing of predestination, which held that God, and God alone, determines the
eternal fate of all mankind, choosing some (“the elect”) to reach Heaven and
eternally condemning others (“the reprobate”) to Hell. Calvin was not the first
to hold this view; St. Paul, St. Augustine, Luther, and numbers of others taught
the doctrine, but it was Calvin who made it a centerpiece of his system. He also
found it a personal source of deepest assurance. No matter the circumstance, he
knew with certainty that he could never be separated from the love of his God,
whose divine decree could never be undone. For Calvin’s followers, however,
things were more unsettling. Not sharing his natural self-confidence, many
were subject to intense anguish about their eternal fate, which God alone deter-
mined. The deep psychological effect of this anxiety, says Weber, must be
properly appreciated. We need to realize that the early Protestants occupied a
unique time and place in Western history. Like medieval Catholics before
them, they lived in an intensely religious world, well before the modern era,
with its now weakened sense of the supernatural. For them there was a fear—
some reality in the prospect of an eternity spent either in Heaven or in Hell. On
the other hand, Protestants were no longer fully medieval. They were disciples
of reformers—again, Luther and Calvin—whose revolt had stripped out of
Catholicism its supporting web of “magical” beliefs and customs through
which the Church affirmed God’s presence and mediated his love and forgive-
ness to his people.
Here we should recall Weber’s ideal-type depicting the disenchantment of
the world. The medieval church was a nursery of the supernatural. Relics, pil-
grimages and indulgences, stained glass and sculpture, the wonders of the mar—
tyrs and saints, priestly absolution dispensed in the confessional, the miracle of
the wafer and wine turned to Christ’s body and blood in the Mass—all of these
formed a vast supernatural support system that mediated God’s forgiveness to
the simplest believer. To Luther and Calvin, conversely, this entire system was
little more than a mass of Satanic superstition. They systematically reduced it
to rubble. Consequently, the ordinary Protestant was left without the usual
mechanisms to reassure the soul or channel divine love to the heart. They felt
instead only the deep inner anxiety of the individual soul, alone in fear before
a God who in sovereign mystery decides the destiny of all. This keen personal
anxiety was so troubling that Calvinist pastors in later generations groped for a
way to offer at least some reassurance. They counseled their congregations to
live in the world as true faith requires—soberly, frugally, and with discipline,

156 Nine Theories of Religion
offering themselves up wholly to God through hard work as his servants in
their worldly tasks. If they so lived, they could be reasonably expected to pros-
per, and prosperity amid simplicity could be taken as the sign of election.
This pastoral guidance, framed to reassure troubled religious souls, was
momentously important. Within it, says Weber, lay the psychological key to
the economic future of EurOpe. For indirectly (and quite without intention) it
ushered in a profound change of attitude toward worldly effort and the acqui-
sition of wealth. Prior to the Reformation, in almost every place and age of
Catholic Christendom, any activity aimed at an increase of money or property
stood under the shadow of moral disapproval. In the eyes of the Church, the
pursuit of riches was at best regarded as neutral, but more commonly as vile
avarice, one of the seven deadly sins. It was the poor whom Jesus loved and the
rich he condemned. Both the Bible and the Church strictly prohibited usury
because a loan of money and its return with interest amounted to exploitation
of the poor by those who are rich. The Church’s discomfort with the pursuit of
great wealth by those not born into it could be read in its cathedral architecture.
Why were cathedral walls lined with chantries where prayers could be said for
the souls of those who endowed them? So that those who had committed them-
selves to the pursuit of wealth in this life could secure unceasing prayers of
forgiveness for the sin of avarice that had brought them their gold. In Catholic
theology, the poor always are near to the heart of God, while the rich live under
suspicion.
Among the theological disciples of Calvin, however, this moral framework
was subjected to a most remarkable reconstruction. The pursuit of wealth
acquired an entirely new moral status: What was once a vice now became a
virtue. The clearest evidence of the change is apparent—in varying degrees, of
course—among the main branches of Protestantism in Europe of the early
modern era. Weber specifically cites the Puritans, Presbyterians, and Method—
ists in Britain and America, as well as other Calvinist groups in Germany,
Switzerland, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. In these communities we find
aphorisms that urge thrift and self—discipline; diaries and autobiographies that
record entire lives lived in private struggles against softness and self-
indulgence; and sermons that strike the recurring themes of restraint and sober
self-denial, discipline and hard work, thrift and investment, the wise use of
both time and money. It is a frame of mind aptly depicted in the adages that
Benjamin Franklin made popular across colonial America: “Time is money;
sloth is sin.” “A penny saved is a penny earned.” These homespun phrases dis-
till the essence of the Spirit of capitalism, even as they mirror the moral reversal
that produced it.
Weber’s chosen term for this new ethic was “inner-worldly asceticism”—
self-denial within everyday society rather than apart from it. The “otherworldly

A Source of Social Action: Max Weber 157
asceticism” of the medieval Church idealized withdrawal from the world to the
seclusion of the convent or monastery. The ,new ethic of Protestantism was just
as ascetic, just as self-denying, just as intense and lifelong as the sacred vow of
any medieval monk, but its execution was different. It required disciplined
mastery of the self within the arena of the everyday world. God’s call was not
to a spiritual practice performed while in hiding from the world but to a disci—
plined mastery of the world while active in it. That inner-worldly asceticism is
the Protestant ethic. As applied to economics, it is hard to mistake; it is the
spirit that drives all of modern capitalistic enterprise.
As he unfolded this argument, Weber was careful to address certain objec-
tions and clarify points of confusion. One obvious problem centers on the
meaning of the term “capitalism.” If all we mean by that concept is “striving to
get rich,” then what is so special about the Protestant connection? Old—
fashioned greed certainly can be found anywhere in the world, long before
Protestants came along and far from Europe.
Weber answers this point by making a distinction. Loosely speaking, capi—
talism can indeed mean any effort to gain wealth; driven by greed or opportun—
ism, it can even take criminal forms like piracy or theft, and these, certainly, are
things we find in all times and places. Long before the Reformation, ancient
merchants and conquerors practiced buccaneer capitalism, traveling “through
hell itself should it singe the sails” to get rich. But true capitalism, the eco—
nomic ethic created in EurOpe at the dawn of modern times, is something quite
different. The merchant or buccaneer seeks wealth for one purpose—to indulge
it, to live in luxury and buy pleasures. The principles that guided the Calvinist
businessman in London or Rotterdam of the 16003 are virtually the exact oppo-
site. He eams money with the intent to save it, not to spend it. God calls him to
a serious, restrained life of self—denial, so he has no interest in luxuries or expen-
sive personal pleasures. His focus is on making a profit as a duty of his calling
and a mark of divine election, not on spending money on self-gratification.
It is true that this habit of saving leads to the creation of even more wealth—
what modern economists call new capital formation—because there is no other
place for it to go. But that comes not because of any vice in the heart of the
Calvinist; it is, on the contrary, a natural (if unintended) consequence of his
virtues. Instead of spending, he saves, reinvests, and thus increases his wealth.
Modern capitalism, therefore, is not the everyday greed of all people and
places; it is a distinct and different phenomenon that first appeared in one
place, Western Europe, and for historical reasons quite specific to the faith and
values of Protestantism.
Weber was clear also about another issue. This Spirit of capitalism is the key
thing, but not the only thing, that makes up this unique modern form of eco-
nomic activity. In framing the ideal-type that guides his discussion, he lists

158 Nine Theories of Religion
other elements that define it: rational bookkeeping, separation of the workplace
from the home and of corporate from personal property, decisions based on
careful calculation, use of free (rather than slave) labor, dependence on mathe—
matical and experimental science, and reliance on a social structure shaped by
the rule of law and orderly administration. All of these elements belong to a
wider pattern of “rationalization” in Western society, on which Weber placed
great importance. Although it is intimately tied to this larger process, it is clear
nonetheless that capitalism could not have appeared without the specific
impulse that came from the Protestant ethic. It is this idea that has led some to
refer to Weber as the theorist who “stood Marx on his head.” Weber himself
found that assessment too simplistic. But it bears a kernel of truth—applicable
as well, we might add, to the reductionism of Freud and Durkheim. In the case
of one of the most important socioeconomic revolutions in world history,
Weber concludes not that religion is a mere reflection of social structure or
economic forces, but precisely the reverse. For him, it is the new religious ideas
and behaviors of Protestantism that usher in a reversal of attitudes toward
acquiring wealth, and from that reversal has come the culture of commerce,
markets, and capitalism that defines Western civilization as we know it today.
Finally, Weber is careful to distinguish the original capitalism of the early
modern centuries (1550—1750) from capitalism of his own day and ours. Today
Catholics as well as Protestants are capitalists, and among Protestants, most
have no awareness or even memory of the old religious motives. The new ethic
is now ingrained and thrives purely on the power of its own economic effi-
ciency; once introduced to a culture, it drives out all rivals, as history has
shown. Over the centuries from 1500 to 2000, capitalism has traced a steady
rise to dominance both in the West and the world beyond it. Today it governs
all economic practice, long after its original Protestant coloring has faded.
From almost the moment it appeared, The Protestant Ethic sparked a vigor-
ous intellectual debate that has never really ended. It is quite alive today, a full
century after the essays were first published. Weber himself participated in the
first phase of discussion, offering various responses and clarifications to cn’ti-
cisms that appeared, mainly in Germany, over the next five years. By 1910,
however, he had run out of patience with the critics and turned from defending
his ideas to developing them.
The Sociology of Religion
The Sociology of Religion is a more difficult text to summarize than The
Protestant Ethic. It does not so much assert a thesis as embark on an explo-
ration. It moves far beyond Protestantism to offer a broader set of interpretive
categories—Weberian ideal-types—and applies them to the whole spectrum

A Source of Social Action: Max Weber 159
of world religions. Weber had written most of this discussion by 1914, but it
was not published on its own; he chose instead to include it as a book-length
chapter in Economy and Society, which was published after his death.‘3 The
exposition in these pages is at times densely tangled and makes multiple turns;
it wanders on occasion into intriguing side roads and sometimes loses its way.
Here we will follow only its main path, which travels through four general
topic areas. It begins with the role of religious leaders and then addresses the
influence of social classes and groups; it turns next to the forms of religious
belief and behavior; and it last explores the interaction of religion with other
aspects of social life. Each of these topics merits some comment here.
Religious Leaders: Magician, Priest, and Prophet
Magician. Religion for Weber is rooted in special experiences, what he calls
“ecstatic states,” that put people beyond the realm of everyday activity and
disclose to them another level of reality. Anyone may have such an experience on
occasion, but those who can manage it on a regular basis are naturally regarded
as having special talent in spirituality. They have “charisma” (a key term for
Weber, as we have seen); they possess a gift that gives them a claim to the role of
religious leader. In early societies, the magician was the person the tribe regarded
as “permanently endowed with charisma.” When the need arose, people called
on the magician to cure illness, to make the hunt succeed, or to assist the crops in
their growth. Frazer, we may recall, spoke in a similar fashion, but Weber does
not see magic as a form of primitive science, different from religion. Magicians,
he says, do not rely only on impersonal principles of contact and imitation; and
they do engage the gods or spirits, something Frazer reserved only for religion.
Nor is there a sequence in which religion emerges after magic fails. Magical
interest in miracles and healings may be more common in earlier, simpler
cultures, but it can appear at any time, even in complex, modern religious
systems, because it offers things ordinary people need or want in everyday life.
Priest. Magic tends to be an occasional thing, focused on immediate concerns;
normally people call on the magicians when the practical need arises. That is
not the case with religious leaders who function as priests. In general, we find
a religious priesthood where there is some kind of permanent system of wor—
ship at fixed times and places and associated with a definite religious commu—
nity. If we encounter the same ritual performed in a certain temple daily at
dawn or weekly at dusk, we normally find a specialized priesthood in charge.
The priest, even in most primitive societies, is a permanent, paid official. We
can think of him as having charisma, like the magician, but it is something
derived from his office rather than from his personal magnetism. The priest’s

160 Nine Theories of Religion
“professional” status is defined by the rites he controls and by the religious
commLinity of ordinary people, the laity, he directs. In more complex societies,
as we might expect, priests fit into Weber’s category of bureaucratic domina-
tion. They are “professionals” in religion; they have assigned duties and are
arranged in ranks with differing levels of responsibility; they are conscious of
their special status, dispensing religious guidance and benefits to clients; and
above all, they prize social and religious order. In ancient India, for example, it
was the community of priests that promoted Varuna and Mitra, the gods of
cosmic law and order, against Rudra, the chaotic god of storms.
This concern of priestly religious leaders with structure and stability is one
source of a key development in most civilizations: the emergence of the con-
cept of a vast cosmic order that imposes on human beings a universal ethic, or
value system, leaving behind the narrow ethic of the primitive village, in which
good and evil are defined entirely by the interests of one’s own family or clan.
The precise concept of cosmic order may vary from one culture or civilization
to the next, but whatever the form, priests have often played a part in either
shaping it or conveying it to a wide community of followers.
Prophet. The notions of cosmic order and a universal ethic bring us to the third
ideal-type: the prophet. Among those who become social leaders, says Weber,
there is hardly a single type—statesman, artist, intellectual, or conqueror—
more consequential to the course of civilizations than the commanding figure
of the prophet. He is a person recognized as “a purely individual bearer of
charisma.”14 The prophet may appear at any time in a culture, acting on
a powerful sense of mission, to proclaim for all a comprehensive “religious
doctrine or divine commandment.” A prophet is not a magician, centered on
securing everyday practical benefits—foretelling the future, curing illness,
changing the weather. He may have some magical appeal, but the center of his
life is his mission; he has been specially called by either the voice of God or a
vision of Truth to proclaim a life-altering message. He would find it absurd to
be paid for his labors. His calling sustains him, and he is content if need be to
live in poverty, accepting only what people voluntarily give him to subsist.
A prophet is also unlike a priest. His authority is not derived from his religious
office. It anchors itself in the revolutionary power of his personality and his
message. It is clear that most of the great world religions trace their origin to a
transforming prophetic figure whose charismatic life and compelling message
revolutionized the world of his day.
Historically, prophets have been of two main types. The “exemplary
prophet”—the wise man who teaches by his own powerful example—has pre—
dominated in the Far East. In India, Gautama the Buddha belongs to this type,
as do the teachers Lao-tzu and Confucius in China. Each offers a path of

A Source ofSocial Action: Max Weber 161
wisdom and truth meant for all, even if only some have the full capacity to
follow it. In contrast, the “ethical prophet” has predominated in the Near East
and in Western civilization. Zoroaster in ancient Persia, the prophets of Israel,
Jesus of Nazareth, and Muhammad in Arabia fall within this distinctive type.
Here too the prophets offer a universal ethic, reachn beyond self-interest and
the ties of family or tribe. But on an essential point they differ from the great
Oriental sages, who shared the world views of Asian civilizations that found
the ultimate Reality of the universe to be impersonal, as in the Chinese Tao, or
“Way of Nature.” Western prophets embrace monotheism. They present them-
selves not as wise men modeling the life of wisdom but as instruments chosen
by an almighty and personal God to proclaim his will. Their mission is to
deliver his oracles and to demand obedience to the universal ethic he imposes.
They reject magic as a useless exercise, addressed only to petty interests; they
are suspicious also of priests, whose concern with ritualized ceremonies and
orderly administration tends to smother the vital flame of religion. That holy
fire is something found only in a deep inner commitment carried out in obedi—
ence to a moral code; it is neither selfish nor tribal but is anchored in the sov—
ereign universal will of the world’s Creator and Lord.
Prophets, of course, are exceptional people—capable of living an entire life
at the highest level of personal commitment. The prophet’s followers, being
normal human beings, are less likely to possess such total dedication. So in any
religious community, if it is to sustain itself over time, the charisma of the
founder must somehow be kept alive by successors. As noted earlier, the
ideal-type Weber frames for this important process is the “routinization” of
charisma—the transformation of the prophet’s inspirational gift into some-
thing permanent, something fixed in the bureaucracy of an institution.15 After
the death of Jesus, for example, it fell to the twelve apostles, then to the Church
fathers, and later to the priests and bishops of the Catholic Church to make his
charisma routine by molding it into institutional systems, by giving it fixed
forms that would make it last. In this way, the priestly bureaucracy, by nature
opposed to the unpredictable inspirations of prophecy, can become the proph—
et’s best ally after his death. Only a conservative bureaucratic system—aimed
at maintaining the prophet’s truth (now that it has won a following)—can frame
his message into a system of teaching and administration that will be able to
guide an ever—enlarging community, or “congregation” (Weber’s preferred term
for this ideal—type), of followers through the ages. This structural support comes
at a price, for bureaucracies do tend to smother the fires of the spirit. Reformers
with charisma of another kind will on occasion need to challenge priestly
authority and restore the original vigor of the prophet’s message. Episodes of
tension are to be expected, for the vitality of the original message is always put
at risk by the “dead hand” of bureaucracy.

162 Nine Theories of Religion
Social Classes and Groups
In speaking of the religious congregation, Weber calls attention to the key role
of the laity—ordinary people who hold no offices but form the vast majority of
participants in any religious community. Charisma, in prophetic or any other
form, does not exist unless a community of laypeople comes to recognize and
reinforce it, so an appreciation of their role is essential. It is important to grasp
not only the place of social classes and groups in religious communities but
especially the role they play in responding to the demands of the great pro-
phetic religions. Weber’s dissent from Marx in this connection is significant.
For Marx, one issue, the division of classes into rich and poor, determines all
others; for Weber, things again are considerably more complex. Social group-
ings are formed not just by economic separation according to class but also by
such things as location (rural or urban), vocation (craftsman, farmer, or war-
rior), and, notably, social respect or honor (status group). As we saw earlier,
one element of bureaucracy as an ideal-type is the claim to respect made by
those who belong to it; they are “professionals.” In Weber’s analyses, intellec-
tuals, or “literati,” who earn honor for their impressive learning or cultivation
often acquire distinctive status as a bureaucracy in the same manner as the
elders in a tribal society.
Depending on the place and time, each of these varied social groups has a
distinctive part to play in the religious enterprise, and social science can dis-
cern certain typical patterns of action. Rural peasants, for example, live close
to nature and depend on the weather. Almost always, therefore, they are drawn
toward magical practices, looking for help in day-to—day life and labor. Even
where a great prophet has established an ethical type of congregational reli-
gion, peasants find themselves subtly drawn back toward magic and miracles.
Despite Confucius’ promotion of prophetic ethical religion, magic has for cen—
turies mattered most to the simple farmers of China. Despite the moral precepts
of the Sermon on the Mount, the Christian Church’s relics, icons, and miracles
of the saints have long been the main interest of Europe’s rural classes: peas-
ants, serfs, and day laborers. Rarely do they give undivided loyalty to a pro-
phetic faith; more often, they mix it with magic.”
As it happens, the privileged classes, protective of their advantages, have
also shown resistance to prophetic religion, though from other motives. Their
sense of honor and prestige is easily affronted by the demand that they change
the course of their lives or ask forgiveness from a priest or some other social
inferior. Similarly, bureaucratic elites do not always welcome the prophet or
his message; they are disposed to find it irrational unless, as among China’s
Confucian mandarins, it can serve the useful purpose of taming the masses.
Even so, prophetic religion does sometimes show the power of breaking

A Source of Social Action: Max Weber 163
through such resistance. Especially among warrior nobles and knights, who
must summon the courage to face death, prophetic religion has been enlisted to
give an ultimate meaning and purpose to warfare. This was especially the case
with Islam, where the warrior class became the main bearer of the crusade
mentality that has left its mark on most Muslim civilizations. The middle class,
on the other hand, shows considerable diversity in its religious responses. The
“commercial patriciate,” composed of wealthy upper-middle-class merchant
families, normally shows little serious interest. But a different response appears
farther down the social scale among the artisans and craftsmen of the cities, the
heart of the populous lower middle classes. Among these industrious groups-—
separated enough from nature to be freed of interests in magic and motivated
strongly by an ethical sense of fair reward for fair labor——pr0phetic religion
has had its most powerful appeal. From its earliest centuries, Christianity was
known as the religion of the cities, not the countryside.
With the exception of Confucianism, prophetic religions have also devel—
oped into what can be called “salvation religions.” They offer people a compre—
hensive program for achieving inner spiritual resolution or final escape from
life’s limitations and sorrows. This element is so central for Weber that we
need to revisit it shortly. For the moment, we should note that while a salvation
religion does not necessarily need to present some specific savior at its center,
someone of that kind almost always appears among the masses. The lower the
social class, the more intense becomes the need to frame a redemption story
in which a god takes human form to bring deliverance to the faithful. Thus, in
later Buddhism the concept of a bodhisattva, a divinity who assists people
in the search for enlightenment, replaces the austere original practice of medi-
tation, which leaves all of humanity entirely on its own. Similarly in India, the
savior cults of Rama and Krishna replace the old and obscure Vedic rituals.
Because ordinary people have traditionally found it hard to align themselves
with some abstract and impersonal cosmic order, or have feared intimacy with
a transcendent all-powerful God, most religions, both East and West, have also
developed various cults of the saints, heroes, or minor gods and goddesses to
give people assistance in their spiritual searches and struggles. (The two main
exceptions seem to be Judaism and Protestantism, both of which place an
emphasis on self-reliant individual enterprise.)
The poor are drawn to savior cults in part by the hope of a future reward,
righting life’s injustices either in the immediate present or in a future life.
Another motive, not unlike the hope of reward, appears wherever there is a
status group of elite intellectuals:
The intellectual seeks in various ways . . . to endow his life with pervasive
meaning. As intellectualism suppresses belief in magic, the world’s processes

164 Nine Theories of Religion
have become disenchanted, lose their magical significance, and henceforth
simply “are” and “happen” but no longer signify anything. As a consequence,
there is a growing demand that the world and the total pattern of life be subject
to an order that is significant and meaningful.17
Nearly everywhere among educated elites there is a deep yearning to find
some true cosmic purpose to human existence in the world as we encounter it.
In Asia most notably, “all the great religious doctrines . . . are creations of
intellectuals,” and they tend to become the special possession only of intellec—
tuals.18 The West strongly resisted elitism of this kind. Christianity, though it
certainly has had an intellectual component, rejected the Gnostic teaching that
true knowledge of God is the exclusive preserve of an intellectual elite. The
urban craftsmen and tradesmen, who were the main bearers of Christian ideas
and values in ancient Rome, declared their Gospel open to all classes, groups,
races, and nations.
Belief and Behavior
Whatever the interests of intellectuals as a group, all of the world’s prophetic
religions must deal with one overriding intellectual problem—the mystery of
evil or theodicy (Greek for “justifying God”). They need to explain how any
idea of ultimate goodness can fit together with a day-to-day world that is so
deeply flawed and filled with suffering. With this challenging topic as the
transition, Weber turns to examine religious belief and behavior. His discus-
sion is, again, difficult and inaccessible in places, so we will follow just the
main themes.
The responses that religions make to the problem of evil divide into three
ideal-types. One formula proposes that the problem will be solved either within
this world at some future time when justice at last will triumph (as held by
early Judaism) or outside of this life in another realm or a future existence
when all will be made right (as held in later Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and
other faiths). Alternatively, one can say with the Book of Job and some of
Islamic theology that God, or the universe, is simply inexplicable; our moral
reasoning can never fathom ultimate questions. Or one can claim that there are
two ultimate realities in the universe: two gods—one evil, one good, as the
ancient Zoroastrians held, or a realm of spirit that is pure and eternal and a
realm of material things that is subject to death and decay, as Hindu Brahmins
have long maintained. Few religions offer these choices in the pure forms of
these ideal-types. Most tend to mix different elements from each type in dis-
tinctive ways, and most (as we have noted) do so by offering as part of the
solution a comprehensive program of human salvation, a formula that describes

A Source ofSocialAction: Max Weber 165
how everyone can find final peace or deliverance either in this world or beyond
it. Weber thinks it possible also to divide these salvation programs into types—
two in particular: the first assumes the need for some kind of human effort; the
other declares that human effort is pointless and that salvation must come from
the outside, as a gift from some extraordinary hero or from a divine being who
assumes human form to assist.
Salvation Through Human Effort. One of the oldest avenues to salvation is
ritualized action. Performing a ceremony or achieving a mental state, as in
ancient Buddhist meditation, brings a person at that instant into enlightenment,
or near to a god. Since these moods are momentary, the emphasis more often
centers on various good works done over time. Credits are either tallied up at
the end of life and weighed in the balance, as the prOphet Zoroaster taught, or
seen as expressions of an “ethical total personality.”l9 Across almost all cul-
tures, this pattern comes to clearest expression in certain exceptional people
who practice what Weber calls “virtuoso sanctification”; they seek to be su-
preme artists of the moral life. In their differing ways, Buddhist and Christian
monks, Pharisaic Jews, saints like St. Francis, Sufi mystics in Islam, and
Puritans driven by the Protestant ethic all exhibit this trait. They claim an ele-
vated status as spiritual athletes; disdaining “average morality,” they seek
living perfection instead.
Among these perfectionists, says Weber, we need to make some further dis-
tinctions, for not all heroes are the same. The term “asceticism” best describes
one type of perfectionist practice, while “mysticism” better fits the other. The
kind of strenuous ethical activity practiced by most Catholic monks in the
Western world illustrates ascetic perfectionism. They see themselves as “instru-
ments of God,” actively engaged in a spiritual struggle that demands all of their
strength to overcome weakness and resist temptation. Others, like the monks of
earliest Buddhism, are just as perfectionist but adopt instead a passive, contem-
plative spiritual posture, and they are better described as practicing mysticism.
They see themselves as vessels that receive spirituality rather than as instru-
ments that actively achieve it. Their mission is not to follow a path of spiritual
striving, but to contemplate, to achieve a quiet state of profound peace, filled
with either truth or divinity.
There are, further, two settings in which each of these two forms of spiritual
heroism can be pursued: either within the world of daily life or in isolation
from it. The natural preference of the mystic is to reject the world and seek
escape to a place of isolation, such as the forest retreat or the hermit’s cave.
There one can be alone and claim the joy of nothingness or swim in the oceanic
peace of the divine being. Asceticism faces the same pair of options: it can
either reject or embrace the everyday world as the scene of its activities. Most

166 Nine Theories ofReligion
medieval Christian monasteries housed monks who worked together in isola—
tion from the outside world and saw themselves as spiritual heroes actively
engaged in the service of God. They were not passive mystics in the manner of
Buddhist monks. They cleared forests, planted fields, and took the vow of
St. Benedict that required them both to pray and to work—0m er labora—as
they built their spiritual communities separated from the rest of society. The
self-perfecting Calvinists who conducted their business in cities like London
and Amsterdam were equally ascetic and spiritual—but with a crucial differ—
ence: their arena was not the monastery, but the everyday workplace. Like the
medieval monk, the Puritan merchant enlisted in a life of spiritual struggle and
self-restraint, but it came to expression through an “inner—worldly asceticism,”
a program of disciplined spiritual living that he applied within the realm of
everyday life and business. In practical effect, the Calvinist Protestant sought
nothing less than “to transform the world in accord with his ascetic ideals.”20
We can recall here for the purpose of comparison Durkheim’s picture of the
ascetic who by his self-denial serves as a model of how others too should give
up selfish desires for the sake of society. The Protestant spiritual hero is differ-
ent. The worldly ascetic denies himself in the service of God, but the unin-
tended effect of this act is not to preserve the existing social order but to
overturn it through a revolutionary change of attitudes toward both wealth and
labor.
For Weber, this distinction between asceticism and mysticism is of major
cultural importance. It highlights a central difference between religions of the
East and the West. Typically, the Oriental religious ideal is mystical contem—
plation, while the West throughout history has tended toward activist asceti-
cism. Even where mystics do appear in the West, they lean still toward a stress
on conduct—what people actually do with their lives. Weber offers a complex
set of philosophical and historical reasons for this circumstance, stressing
especially a fact we noted earlier: Western salvation religions (Judaism,
Christianity, Islam) all affirm a transcendent all—powerful Creator God who is
wholly separate from the world that he has made. God and his creatures cannot
be merged. The mysticism of the East is different; it promises a pathway of
spiritual ascent by which humanity can, in the end, either merge with the divine
or know the joy of perfect escape from the world.
Salvation as a Gift. Weber gives less attention to the belief that salvation is a
gift (the other of the two formulas that religions apply to describe how salva-
tion is secured), and we can spend less of our time on it as well. Some voices
in the salvation religions have insisted on the claim that humans can do utterly
nothing to win their own salvation. Ultimate peace comes only, and completely,

A Source of Social Action: Max Weber 167
from the outside. It can arrive as an unmerited gift, earned for us by a divine
savior such as the Buddhist bodhisattva:or Christianity’s risen Christ. It can
also arrive as an act of “institutional grace,” such as the absolution given the
sinner by a Catholic priest. Or, as in religions that affirm a God, it may come
as divine grace bestowed in response to a simple, heartfelt, and utterly personal
faith of the type seen in early Islam and some Protestant sects, such as German
Pietism. Or, again, it may come to certain people and not to others through a
mysterious act of divine predestination, as in later Islam and the austere
Calvinist predestinarian doctrine of “divine decrees” enacted “before the foun-
dations of the earth.”
Religion and Other Spheres of Life
The fourth and last set of topics Weber addresses in The Sociology of Religion
is the interaction of religion with certain other aspects of social life—namely,
economics, politics, sexuality, and the arts. In the Sphere of economics, he
finds that the common rule of kindness to neighbors appears almost univer-
sally as the doctrine of charity or aims—giving freely to help others in need.
This principle explains, among other things, the deep—seated distrust of usury
in some religious traditions, which hold that to loan money while collecting
interest is a way of exploiting, not helping, the poor. In keeping with its new
ethic, Calvinism boldly challenged this principle. It prohibited charitable giv-
ing to beggars because not all were truly in need, as were the deserving poor:
the disabled, widows, and orphans. Charity was not meant for those who can
answer God’s calling to work. Those who beg when they can earn clearly vio-
late the law of love by accepting what is not rightly theirs. Conversely, usury
may be seen simply as a payment from earnings generated by labor that could
not have occurred without borrowed funds. Usury, then, does not exploit pov-
erty; it creates opportunity.
As for politics, sexuality, and the arts, Weber observes that religion has most
commonly found itself in a measure of tension, and then compromise, with
each of these endeavors. Whenever prophetic religions have stated a universal
doctrine of salvation or love, they cannot help coming into conflict with the
state, which always puts first the interests of a political entity, whether that is a
city, territory, nation, or empire. Religion can seek to subdue the state to its
interests, as in the early wars of Islam or the exploits of Cromwell’s Protestant
army in England, but most often it must pursue compromises, accepting or
ignoring the independence of the political order. The same holds true for sexu—
ality and the arts. In the great religions with a salvation ethic, both mysticism
(which seeks to lose the self) and asceticism (which seeks to discipline it) are

168 Nine Theories of Religion
in competition with the one human drive most able to distract from the goal of
the former and break the constraints of the latter. In general, therefore, reli-
gions distrust sexuality; women are assigned secondary status, and marriage in
all ethical systems is primarily a legal rather than an erotic or a romantic insti-
tution. Artistic expression should, by contrast, have a natural affinity with reli-
gion through the value it places on imagery and symbolism. But when art
ceases being a craft in service of a religious purpose and asserts aesthetic val-
ues independently, proposing that people can find ultimate meaning through
created beauty, a clash with religion is unavoidable.
”The Economic Ethic of the World Religions”
In its final pages, The Sociology of Religion does not really come to an end; it
simply breaks off midway through a new chapter (the rest of which survives in
notes) that examines the great religions of the world. Those pages can perhaps
best be understood less as a conclusion to The Sociology ofReligion than as the
introduction to Weber’s last and most ambitious enterprise, also left unfinished
at the time of his death. He projected a series of studies that would include The
Protestant Ethic and continue through no less than eight volumes dealing
comparatively and in sequence with the world’s major religions. There is no
space in our discussion to give this project the full attention it deserves, but we
can offer a brief sketch of the parts that Weber did finish, along with some
observations on the general theme it was designed to explore. We will pass
entirely over two important and complex essays he included at the beginning
and in the middle of the sequence. Since the time of their translation, they have
been read widely by English-speaking sociologists of religion; here they can
be left to more advanced inquiries.21
“The Economic Ethic” preposes to explore all of the “five religions, or reli-
giously determined systems of life-regulation which have known how to gather
multitudes of confessors around them.”22 Weber adds Judaism to this group
because of its historical importance to two other religions: Christianity and
Islam. Of the volumes he planned, three—0n Chinese religions,23 Indian reli-
gions,24 and Judaism25—were completed. The two on Asian systems were pre-
pared during the years of World War I, and the essays that made up the volume
on Judaism were completed between 1917 and 1919. Weber’s first aim in these
works was to return in much greater depth to the economic question that he had
first asked, and provisionally answered, in The Protestant Ethic: Why did cap-
italism, the economic system that has transformed the world, arise in Europe
and North America and only there in the two centuries after the Reformation?
The proper strategy for answering this question requires a broad comparative
analysis, starting with civilizations of the Far East.

A Source of Social Action: Max Weber 169
The Religion of China (1916)
From time immemorial, China has been preddminantly an agricultural society
ruled at the top by the emperor, who controlled the river systems crucial
to agriculture and transport, and managed at the bottom by local village
elders. The emperor asserted his authority through an elite class of public
administrators—the literate mandarins schooled in the great Confucian
writings—who resided mainly in the cities. Privileged and cultivated, they
pursued an ethic of refinement and comfortable “adjustment to the world” that
shaped Chinese elite culture for two millennia, but without notable impact on
the attitudes of the masses. In both city and countryside, ordinary life was
governed by ties of family and clan and by religious attachment to age—old
magical rites and ancestral spirits, which the elite made little effort to chal-
lenge or to change. China’s cities never deveIOped features of many cities in the
West: self-government, charters of independence, legal rights, guilds and fra-
ternal societies. They remained patrimonial institutions that deferred to the
emperor and willingly accepted rule by the Confucian elite. The only protest
against this traditionalism came from the Taoists, followers of the teacher
Lao—tzu, who urged a life of self—denial and escape from the world. Lao—tzu
called for retreat into the unspoiled forests, where the spirit could attune itself
to the Tao, the great and mysterious flow in all existing things. Taoists sought
a life of simplicity, but because they prized life so highly and took such keen
interest in techniques they believed could extend it, their doctrines often
blended naturally with popular magic, even reinforcing its grip on the masses.
So although it did enter a protest against the mandarins’ learning and privi—
leged urban lifestyle, Taoism was no more disposed than Confucianism to pro-
mote a universal ethic among the masses; on the contrary, the stress on quiet,
selfless drift in the stream of nature left Taoist teachers as much at ease as
Confucians with a civilization shaped mainly by peasant traditionalism.
This dominant posture of traditionalism and passivity meant that neither the
folk traditions nor the great philosophical systems of China furnished a reli-
gious incentive for people to seek profit in business or trade. Despite certain
early advances in mathematics and technology, China’s cultural blend of tradi-
tionalism and patrimonialism discouraged the kind of rational impartiality (the
refusal to “play favorites” to help friends or family) in business dealings that is
crucial to rational profit-oriented activity. More decisively, the indispensable
element, the spirit of capitalism, failed to appear. The learned mandarin, proud
of his Confucian training, thought mostly about his personal dignity, not about
fulfillment of any divine calling, as Luther had taught. As disciples of Confucius,
the literate and cultivated elite showed no inclination toward the asceticism
that drove Calvinists to see themselves as instruments of God at work in

170 Nine Theories of Religion
the world. If one’s life is seen as already a polished and perfected achievement,
there is little point in striving to gain greater self-control or to prosper in the
marketplace. Confucianism did not seek mastery of the world through a life of
disciplined self-denial; it was content with its ethic of adjustment to the world
as it was and had always been: traditional, stable, and unchanging.
The Religion of india (1916—1917)
In India, successive invasions and conquests had created divisions in the social
order that appeared in the system of caste, which was dominated by two elite
groups. The Brahmins were a caste of priests privileged alone to read the
sacred texts of the Vedas; the Kashatryias, a warrior class, held military and
political power. Beneath these two groups, which claimed their status as an
inherited charisma (or family gift), lesser castes arranged themselves down—
ward on a scale fixed by birth and vocation. At the bottom were the very lowest
of the slaves, literally “out—castes.” Rules against marriage or even association
at meals kept the lines of separation distinct, but the most powerful support of
the system was religious. Brahmin intellectuals, who were the main bearers of
the ideas that shaped Indian civilization, wrote caste divisions into the very
script of the universe. They held that all of life is subject to the cosmic law of
samsara, or rebirth, which governs both nature and society on the principle of
karma, the cumulative weight of one’s spiritual (or unspiritual) deeds. Those
in the Brahmin caste, placed high, deserved their fortune as a reward for spir-
itual achievement in an earlier existence; those placed low equally deserved
theirs as a natural consequence of prior lives too entangled in material attach-
ments and sensual pleasures. This system was intellectually persuasive,
explaining with a kind of cold logic just why social differences that seem
unfair are not so because they are built into the very framework of the world.
But it was also deeply disheartening. To the ordinary person, it promised one
life after another lived on the great “wheel of rebirth.” Human existence was
defined chiefly by a continuous struggle to slip free from the coils of reincar-
nation and by (mostly failed) efforts to overcome the allurements of sexuality,
luxury, and even family.
This great world system, gray at best and grim at worst, colored the entire
development of both religion and society in India. Brahmin leaders, originally
masters of the sacred chant, introduced ascetic practices of yoga and with-
drawal to impose discipline on the body’s urges and to cultivate a form of
spirituality pure enough to give the soul its final release. The same motive of
determined search for release gave rise to India’s two great protest religions:
Buddhism and Jainism. Both accepted in full the system of samsara, but they
broke the grip of caste by offering hope of escape to all who could either

A Source of Social Action: Max Weber 171
manage a Buddhist life of total ascetic discipline and meditation or travel the
Jain path of total respect for life in all its forms. Still, for the ordinary masses,
none of this was realistic. They were not spiritual athletes; they could not hope
to reach the heights of a virtuoso in spiritual performance. Because such
self—denial was unachievable for the great majority of people, they accepted
second best, gaining merit by supporting the communities of monks. While the
Brahmin, Buddhist, and Jain elite practiced spiritual heroics, the great masses
lived as religious stepchildren. On the surface of life, they could interest them-
selves in the “garden of magic” that was filled with popular saviors and super-
stitions, but deep within, at the level of ultimate questions, they were resigned
to a fate that promised little more than seemingly endless discouraging new
births on the ever-turning wheel of reincarnation.
All of this resignation left a visible imprint on economic life. As in China,
capitalist enterprise in India failed to take root, even though the prospects were
quite favorable. There was a system of arithmetic using zero and positional
numbering; there were thriving centers of handicraft and trade, as well as Spe-
cialized laborers with guilds to support them; there were independent mer-
chants; and taxation was not oppressive. But in contrast to Europe, Indian
society remained chiefly rural and traditional, so true capitalist enterprise did
not develop. It did not help that free, self-governing cities, the nurseries of
capitalism in the early modern West, had failed to emerge. The main cause was
caste, which prevented the unification of different guilds and classes into a
single community of citizens, all possessing equal rights under an impartial
legal and moral system that rejected any favoritism based on family or class
ties. Further, the problem of caste was in the end the problem of the Indian
religious system that served to anchor it. The classic teachings of Hinduism held,
and still today hold, that there is in the end no enduring, positive value to be
placed on human activity in the physical world and present life. The messages of
the Brahmin elite and of prophets such as Buddha and Mahavira (the founder of
Jainism) were essentially the same: spiritual peace comes only through with-
drawal from the world and release from its toils, cares, and even joys.
Such teachings differ sharply from those of the Jewish prophets, who offered
a message received directly from God, a divine revelation that disenchanted the
world of its magical spells and spirits. Their oracles demanded obedience to
the moral law of a sovereign Lord rather than ceremonies and sacrifices to
please the spirits of the field or village. India abounded with elite ascetics and
mystics skilled in withdrawal from the world, but again, as in China, there was
no program that called for self-denying obedience to the will of God through
systematic engagement with the world, such as we see in the Puritan merchants
of London or the settlers in Massachusetts Bay. For all their other achieve—
ments, the civilizations of China and India did not produce an equivalent of

172 Nine Theories of Religion
Europe’s Protestant ethic. And without it, neither the true spirit nor the genuine
practice of modern capitalism ever managed to emerge.
Ancient Judaism (1917—1919)
As he turned from Asia to the West, Weber planned his next volumes, which
were to center on the great Western religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Unfortunately, the first, on ancient Judaism, was the only one he lived long
enough (almost) to complete. It is a dense, thoughtful work; we, again, cannot
do it justice. But we can touch upon its central ideas.
As with China and India, Weber begins by offering a close review of the
material circumstances in which Judaism arose: the geography, politics, and
culture of the ancient Near East. Even before the age of kings, the Hebrew
confederation of tribes had united around a shared faith in Yahweh, the per-
sonal Lord of the covenant and Creator of the world. Out of all humanity he
had chosen the Jews as his children by contract. His favor was theirs for the
taking; only their loyalty was expected in return. All subsequent Jewish his-
tory was to be interpreted, by priest and prophet alike, in terms of this sacred
covenant, which was to shape the theologies of both Christianity and Islam
as well.
The contract was shattered in the age of monarchy. The kings brought wealth
to Jerusalem, but along with their success came dynastic marriages to non-
Israelite princesses and the worship of foreign gods of fertility. Resentment
flared among the rural and traditional poor, bringing civil war and eventually
the destruction of the tribes in the North. In time the kingdom was reconsti-
tuted in the South, and under King Josiah, prophets and teaching priests made
the books of the law—the Torah rather than temple sacrifices—the centerpiece
of Jewish life. They called for a new individualized religious faith: obedience
to the precepts of the Torah out of a sense of personal devotion to Yahweh, the
covenant Lord, no longer conceived only as Israel’s God but as the God of all
nations. This obedience consisted of more than just isolated good deeds; it was
to be a complete “ethic of commitment.” The prophets who proclaimed it—
Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah—demanded both purity of faith in Yahweh and
social justice for the poor. Differing from the exemplary prophets of the East,
they made no personal claim for themselves of supreme wisdom or divinity.
But in another sense they asserted something far greater: the message of ethical
monotheism. They proclaimed the sovereign majesty of God and demanded
total obedience to his will. More than almost anything else, that message is
what separates Judaism and its successor religions of the West from the tradi-
tions of the East. Unlike the great Asian systems, Judaism and its disciple faiths
insist that salvation is not won through contemplation that leads the soul out of

A Source of Social Action: Max Weber 173
the everyday physical world; it comes instead through faith and lifelong obedi—
ence that seek to achieve a divine purposeiwithin that world.
Equally important in this connection was prophetic opposition to the ways
of magic, which was widely tolerated among the masses in the Far East. As the
prophets conceived him, Yahweh, the Lord of creation, is utterly beyond
manipulation by rituals and spells of the kind offered to the Canaanite deities
of fortune and fertility. Personal devotion and ethical obedience, not magic and
divination, are the things that please him. In place of mysterious forces and
occult manipulations, the prophets urged ordinary people to a life freed of
magic, a path of action governed solely by personal obedience to the Mosaic
law. This new ethic of commitment was not reserved only to an elite circle of
specialists, as in Hinduism and Buddhism. It placed before all Jews the ideal of
a “total ethical personality,” of an entire individual life molded into habits
of obedience to the Torah’s commands. Through preaching from texts of the
Old Testament, this ideal of an entire life lived in service to God made its way
ultimately into the ethic of modern Protestants as they pursued their sacred
vocations in the world.
As these paragraphs reveal, Weber keenly appreciated the historical signifi-
cance of Judaism to both religion and civilization in the Western world. There
is, however, a troubling element in his discussion. Although he treats Judaism
no differently than he does Christianity or Buddhism, and although he fiercely
opposed the mistreatment of Jews he saw in German universities, some of his
ideas on Judaism have been linked nonetheless to later German anti-Semitism.
The issue arises from his description of later Jews as a “pariah people” of the
ancient Near East. After the exile in Babylon, he claims, Jews gradually became
a “community of outcasts,” partly of their own making. They adopted a form of
self-isolation in Christian Eur0pe (similar to that of the outcastes in India) by
refusing either to intermarry or to associate with members of the wider gentile
community. Inevitably, then, they found themselves disprivileged—the victims
of suspicion, hatred, and exploitation. Burdened further by an “ethic of resent-
ment” against their Oppressors, they embraced a kind of dual morality, apply-
ing a high moral standard in all dealings with fellow Jews and a lower one for
commerce with others. Jewish enterprise thus became “pariah capitalism,” as
illustrated in practices associated with usury. Because the Torah prohibited the
practice, interest-bearin g loans could not be made to other Jews, ybt they could
be offered to gentiles. In part this divided ethic also helps explain why Protes-
tantism, and not Judaism, is the real parent of Western capitalism. Protestants
demanded wholly neutral and rational standards of conduct in commerce—a
principle that was alien to the Jewish pariah ethic.
Some critics have vigorously attacked this “pariah” theory of Jewish iden-
tity, challenging Weber’s evidence and noting how easily such words could

174 Nine Theories of Religion
later be conscripted to support Nazi racism—barely more than a decade after
they were written. Had he lived longer, we might well have had a chance to
read Weber’s responses to such critics and measure his words by the judgments
he himself would have been compelled to render as he witnessed the patriotism
of his generation descend into the fascism of the next. Unfortunately, his early
death in 1920 has left no chance of discovering what his response might have
been. Nor can we know what his wide erudition might have offered in the
remainder of “The Economic Ethic” had it been brought to completion; cer-
tainly it would have made a suitable capstone to a career of extraordinary
scholarly achievement.
Analysis
1. Weber and Durkheim
Weber’s writings are notoriously difficult to summarize because he weaves
such an abundance of historical and sociological detail so seamlessly into his
theoretical discussions. With him the forest does seem hard to see for the trees.
Even so, we can find a path if we work comparatively, placing Weber’s meth-
ods and his achievements over against those of neighboring theorists, espe-
cially his nearest intellectual rivals, Durkheim and Marx. With respect to
Durkheim, we should notice that between him and Weber there is a clear sim-
ilarity of interest combined with a sharp difference in method. As noted,
Durkheim and Weber were not just pioneers in the field of social theory; they
were also responsible for turning the focus of professional sociology in
its earliest years specifically toward the sociology of religion. Durkheim’s
Elementary Forms was pivotally important in placing religion at the center of
social investigation and theory. In the same way, Weber, though primarily
interested in the economic aspects of social life, found himself steadily drawn
toward the central importance of religion to society. By the time of his death,
comparative study of civilizations, anchored in research on world religions,
was the main focus of his labors.
This shared interest in religion did not carry over into agreement on the
methods most suitable to the inquiry. Durkheim’s agenda, as we saw, was to
begin from a single case of religion in its near-original state—among the
Aborigines of Australia. From their tribal practices he broke out the “elemen-
tary” forms of ritual activity—and proceeded to show how all of religion
exhibits them. Weber, by contrast, starts less with a religious community than
a cultural problem: How did a new, revolutionary form of economic behavior
arise to transform Western civilization in the early centuries of the modern era?

A Source of Social Action: Max Weber 175
The search for an answer to this question leads him to a religious change—the
emergence of the “Protestant ethic,” which became the animating spirit of
modern capitalism. Unlike Durkheim, Weber then proceeds (in works like The
Sociology of Religion and “The Economic Ethic of the World Religions”) to
explore the widest possible range of cultures, practices, and beliefs. Also in
contrast to Durkheim (and, for that matter, Tylor and Frazer as well), he does
not privilege primitive religion as containing the seed from which all later
institutions have grown. He thinks that at least as much (and indeed much
more) can be learned from the actual histories of the great world religions as
from the field studies of anthropologists centered on primitive tribes.
There is a further difference over the matter of cultural evolution. As we saw
earlier, Durkheim, because of his central focus on religion in its earliest forms,
allowed for some forms of later deve10pment. He could entertain the notion of
religious institutions changing over time from the simple to the more complex.
Clearly, this was not the View of Weber. When he sets out to explain ideal-types,
he is careful to notice how expressions of those types may appear in one epoch,
fade in the next, and return again thereafter, depending on each new cultural or
historical circumstance. He finds magic, for example, more common in earlier
societies but concedes its enduring appeal among the masses—the peasants and
poor—in any society. He notices too how it can revive in places where once it
had faltered. Magic was probably more widespread in medieval Christian
Europe than it was a thousand years earlier in ancient Judaism after the message
of the prophets had taken effect. Accordingly, there is also for Weber no such
thing as a natural intellectual evolution of the kind Frazer imagines when he
puts magic, religion, and science into historically successive stages. Finally,
and significantly, Weber departs from Durkheim’s functionalist reductionism.
As we have already seen in several connections, he does not believe that reli-
gious beliefs and practices are mere reflections of a controlling and more fun-
damental social reality. Since Weber diverges from Marx on this issue even
more acutely than he does from Durkheim, we can turn to that comparison next.
2. Weber and Marx
When we compare Weber with Marx, there seems at first an obvious similar-
ity. Both are historically oriented social theorists who build arguments from
close analyses of complex social and historical relationships. They draw on
encyclopedic understandings of culture and civilization, and they energetically
search out causes and effects. Marx, however, confines most of his historical
work to Western civilization, where, among other things, he finds decisive
evidence that the fantasies of religion arise from economic exploitation. Weber,

176 Nine Theories of Religion
on the other hand, attends to religious activities worldwide, a strategy that
makes him more cautious than Marx about advancing, for nearly all events,
only one form of explanation: class struggle born of economic oppression. The
complexity and differences in world religious systems suggest to him that
interpreters need to draw on explanatory theorems that are not singular but
multiple and interacting.
It is, further, just this sense of the great complexity in human endeavors that
draws Weber back from reductionist functionalism. As we have seen, Freud,
Durkheim, and Marx readily assume that religious actions and beliefs always
trace to nonreligious causes, whether psychological, social, or socioeconomic.
What sets Weber clearly apart from their approach is the conviction he articu-
lates in the principle of Verstehen. Human ideas, beliefs, and motives deserve
to be counted as real and independent causes of human action. An idea in the
mind of one human agent (or shared by a group of agents) is as much a real
cause of human action as the application of heat to water is the real cause of
steam. Conscious thoughts affect human action at least as much as unconscious
urges or needs. When he unfolds the argument of The Protestant Ethic, Weber
does not, like Marx, look first to economic distress, tracing the theological
doctrine of predestination to class conflict in Calvin’s Geneva. His inquiry
takes him in the very opposite direction, unearthing as the key cause of the
capitalist revolution not some material circumstance but a new form of eco-
nomic behavior that in fact followed from a new religious idea. The self-
constraining ethic of Protestantism was the animating spirit of capitalism. It is
historically significant that in two decades after 1900, as Freud, Durkheim, and
the disciples of Marx were extending their intellectual influence, Weber stead-
fastly pressed on with his approach. For him, meanings matter; the webs of
significance that human beings spin do effectively shape and change the mate-
rial and social structures that underlie them. In taking this view, Weber cer-
tainly was not given to overstatement. He appreciated in full the dense tangle
of causes, events, conditions, ideas, and motives that enter into all of human
action, both individual and social. He makes a special note of this point in an
introduction later added to The Protestant Ethic, where he grants that Calvinist
worldly asceticism was by no means the only cause that accounts for the rise of
modern capitalism. Clearly, a complex array of factors converged at its cre-
ation. He states that he has addressed
the side of the problem which is generally most difficult to grasp: the influence
of certain religious ideas on the development of an economic spirit, or the ethos
of an economic system. In this case we are dealing with the connection of the
spirit of modern economic life with the rational ethics of ascetic Protestantism.
Thus we treat here only one side of the causal chain.26

A Source ofSocial Action: Max Weber 177
That “one side of the causal chain” was the powerful imprint of Protestant
religious ideas on human behavior. Certainly that factor was not the only cause,
but just as certainly it was a cause, and arguably the most important one. This
firm but carefully modulated antireductionist stance, which Weber maintained
as a feature of his approach through all his later research, is a prime reason why
his analyses draw new appreciation (and of course new criticism) to the present
day. Because social endeavor is for him always complex, and explanation is
almost never singular or simple, Weber on principle refused membership in the
club of reductionist theory. He could not join Marx or Freud or Durkheim in
diminishing the role of ideas, intentions, and beliefs while still remaining true
to the evidence that history and society presented to him.
Critique
Normally, it is no compliment to describe a theorist as someone whose work
has been widely and roundly criticized. The case of Max Weber, however, is a
notable exception. As with Marx, the scale of the criticism Weber’s ideas have
received is a sign of their importance and influence. If the real merit of a the-
orist is measured by the commentary he provokes, then Weber’s stature is
secure. As noted earlier, The Protestant Ethic is still starting arguments more
than a century after its publication. Similarly spirited critical discussions cen-
ter on the concepts, distinctions, and connections advanced in Economy and
Society, The Sociology ofReligion, and the separate studies of “The Economic
Ethic of the World Religions.” The controversy over Judaism as a pariah reli-
gion is just one example. Weber’s ideal-type of “bureaucracy” is another. Both
have produced vigorous discussion among social psychologists, as well as
experts on industrial organization and public administration. Economists and
historians of business still debate the definition of capitalism; others have dis-
puted Weber’s ideas on power, on law, and on political institutions, as well as
his commentaries on the arts, eroticism, science, and music. More recently,
intellectual historians have focused on his discussions of “rationalization” in
human societies over the course of history. Some think this is actually the
grand interpretive theme that underlies Weber’s program, linking religion,
economics, and society.27 ‘
With regard to religion, the stormiest debates have swirled, not surprisingly,
around the famous thesis advanced in The Protestant Ethic. Many critics accept
that the concepts of both the Protestant ethic and the distinctive spirit of capi-
talism are illuminating. Some, however, claim that Weber fails to establish the
connection he asserts. Others point to factors more important than religion that
account for the capitalist revolution. Still others contend that the economic

178 Nine Theories of Religion
behavior Weber thinks so new and so distinctively Western can be found to
have existed both long before the arrival of Protestantism and well outside of
Europe. These debates, which turn on sociological and historical details, can
be left for specialists to settle. But there are two other issues to address that
bear more directly on Weber’s general program both as a theorist of human
action and an interpreter of religion.
Consistency
The first is a criticism leveled primarily by disciples of Marx, though it could
just as well have come from the circle of Durkheim or of Freud. It applies well
beyond The Protestant Ethic to the whole spectrum of Weber’s work on reli-
gion, and it pits against Weber a most formidable opponent—himself. The
issue is consistency. Weber, we have noticed, insists that religious ideas must
be accorded an independent, causative place in the process of understanding
human history and society. In discussing Protestantism, for example, he con—
siders the Calvinist concepts of “vocation” and “worldly asceticism” to be
compelling religious ideas that caused people to adopt a distinctively new form
of behavior. But in other discussions (and elsewhere even in that study), Weber’s
practice appears to depart from his precept. The Sociology of Religion offers
an interesting example. When he discusses there the origin of monotheism, he
writes:
[T]he personal, transcendental and ethical god is a Near-Eastern concept. It
corresponds so closely to that of an all—powerful mundane king with his rational
bureaucratic regime that a causal connection can scarcely be denied.28
He adds that the model of the monarch who owned the vital irrigation systems
“was probably a source of the conception of a god who had created the earth and
man out of nothing, and not procreated them, as was believed elsewhere.”29
This explanation of a crucially important religious idea—the sovereign
Creator God—looks almost as if it could have come from Marx. The discus-
sion adduces a purely material economic circumstance—a basic need for water
provided by a mighty and distant monarch—as the fundamental reality and
turns the religious conception into a reflection of political power and geogra—
phy. To be sure, Weber can reply that he finds the desert king to be only a
source, not the or the only source, of the idea of God. But even so, the tenor of
his exposition here certainly suggests what Marx might have said: Religious
ideas arise naturally as reflections of socioeconomic realities. Weber’s correla-
tions of certain class interests or status group concerns with Specific religious
ideas proceed in similar fashion. He finds the Muslim notion of God a concept

A Source ofSocial Action: Max Weber 179
characteristic of the “warrior nobility” of early Arabia, and he thinks the Hindu
doctrine of samsara reflects the need of an intellectual elite to offer a cosmic
rationale for the birth of some to wealth and privilege while others are fated to
poverty and hardship. With this, Marx could readily agree.
This pattern of explanation occurs also in the studies that make up “The
Economic Ethic of the World Religions.” Before he turns attention to the reli-
gious beliefs and teachings of China or India or ancient Judaism, Weber offers
an exhaustive examination of the material, political, and socio-economic con-
texts in which the religions arose. In principle, he articulates an anti-reductionist
position, saying of India, for example, that the course of development in reli-
gious thought proceeds independently of material circumstances and social
influences. But in the actual process of explanation, he is disposed to treat those
ideas differently: as bound to their historical framework and as naturally mir-
roring the Specific social, cultural, and economic settings in which they appear.
Social Science and Religion
Criticism of another kind attaches to Weber’s idea of a social science as applied
to the subject of religion. As we noticed in our discussion of his methods,
Weber (no less than other theorists) is keenly committed to developing accounts
of religious activity that can claim to be scientific. The whole purpose of devis-
ing the concepts he designates as ideal-types is to offer, as in all science, some
kind of generalized conceptual framework that can be applied uniformly
across cultures. The approach is somewhat similar to that of Durkheim, who
draws the elementary forms out of one religious instance and applies them to
all others. For a genuinely historical sociologist like Weber, however, this
strategy is more problematic. Historical precision, after all, is not the easy
friend of scientific generalization. Whatever the religious phenomenon—
event, person, process—he addresses, Weber’s habit is to bring to the issue the
full array of his wide learning, often outlining an intricate network of material
circumstances, political influences, economic conditions, social forces, and
class or status group interests, as well as religious ideas and activities, in the
course of his analyses. All of this labor is instructive, at times even dazzling,
in its effect. But there is a complication: the aim of sociology as a science,
presumably, is to find patterns and categories that can be applied generally to
most, or many similar cases. Yet that is the very thing that Weber’s delicately
complex historical descriptions make it exceedingly difficult for him, or any—
one interested in social scientific theory, to do.
A specific instance can illustrate. In one section of his Religion of India,
Weber explains the beginnings of Buddhism. He describes it as the product of
an urban aristocratic setting, not the pastoral world of the Hindu Brahmins.

180 Nine Theories ofReligz’on
It teaches reincarnation, as does Hinduism, but leaves out any doctrine of the
soul or Brahman-atman (the world soul). It is a salvation system, but only for
cultivated intellectuals. It shows none of the asceticism of the Jains. In almost
every way, “it is the polar opposite of Confucianism and of Islam.”30 It is an
ethic that rejects both active conduct in the world and ascetic exercises. Despite
this fact, its monks gradually acquired permanent residences and estates,
becoming landowners and farm administrators like the Christian monks of the
West. Unlike the Western monks, however, Buddhist leaders had no real
authority, and ordinary monks were not formally attached to any one monas-
tery. These and many other explanatory details are carefully presented as the
discussion proceeds.“ But the end result of this process is a kind of paradox.
On the one hand, we have been given the historian’s dream—a remarkably
rich, detailed, and specific account of Buddhist life and culture in early centu—
ries after Gautama; on the other, we have (one could almost say) the sociolo—
gist’s nightmare——an economic, social, cultural, and religious portrait of early
Buddhism so carefully shaded, precise, and detailed that any attempt to place
it in a category, any effort to bring it under some general sociological pattern or
draw from it an analogy applicable to a religious community of another time or
place, seems nearly futile. Weber’s cabinet of ideal-types does offer a set of
tools to classify and compare, but their value to the aims of social science is
limited. The historian’s task, certainly, is to explain particulars, to trace events
or actions to a convergence of causes and conditions specific to one time, place,
and circumstance. Social science, by Weber’s own account, is not history. Like
natural science, it seeks theoretical constructs that have some kind of general
applicability to most (if not all) reasonably comparable cases. In his actual
practice, however, Weber seems unable to deliver this general applicability.
Despite his best efforts toward the goal of empirical sociology, his inquiries
wear the look of outstanding history rather than successful, generalized social
science. His analyses are useful, instructive, illuminating, and original, but
they are not general, or generally applicable, in the way that scientific sociol-
Ogy presumably would want them to be.
Present—day theorists working in Weber’s lineage do offer responses to these
complaints, but here we must leave them aside, with an invitation to further
debate at another time in another place. Whatever the residual misgivings crit—
ics may harbor, Weber’s contribution to the theory of religion is most impres—
sive. The marks of his achievement are to be found in the great range of his
learning and interests, in the precision of his concepts and subtlety of his anal-
yses, in the firmness of his resistance to reductionist functionalism as repre—
sented by Freud, Durkheim, and Marx, and most emphatically, in his keen
appreciation of the great complexity involved in the task of explaining human
behavior, both religious and otherwise.

A Source of Social Action: Max Weber 181
Notes
1. Clifford Geeitz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in
The Interpretation of Culture: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 5.
2. A brief but detailed factual account of these early years and education is provided
in Dirk Kasler, Max Weber: An Introduction to His Life and Work, tr. Philippa Hurd
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 1—25.
3. Descriptions and discussions of these early studies can be found in Reinhard
Bendix, Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait, 2nd ed., rev. (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1978), pp. 13—48.
4. Her richly anecdotal but also rather formal and protective memoir is Marianne
(Schnitger) Weber, Max Weber: A Biography, tr. Harry Zohn (London: John Wiley &
Sons, 1975).
5. A noteworthy (if also controversial) attempt to provide a “psycho- historical”
account of Weber’s life and thought that pivots on his emotional crisis is Arthur
Mitzman’s The Iron Cage (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970).
6. English translations of these essays can be found in two collections: Edward A. Shils
and Henry A. Finch, Max Weber on the Methodology of the Social Sciences (Glencoe, IL:
Free Press, 1949), and Max Weber, Roscher and Knies: The Logical Problems ofHistorical
Economics, ed. and tr. Guy Oakes (New York: Free Press, 1975). A clear and very instruc-
tive recent study of Weber’s ideas on method is found in Sven Eliaeson, Max Weber’s
Methodologies: Interpretation and Critique (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 2002).
7. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. and
tr. Guenther Roth, Claus Wittich et a1., 2 vols. (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968),
1: 24—25.
8. Fritz Ringer, Max Weber: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2004), p. 100.
9. On this issue, see especially the analysis of W. G. Runciman, A Critique of Max
Weber’s Philosophy ofSocial Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972),
pp. 33—78.
10. On this early sociological research for the Union, see Bendix, Max Weber,
pp. 13—48.
11. This point is part of an important revisionist assessment of Weber’s achievement
by Wolfgang Schluchter, Rationalism, Religion, and Domination: A Weberian Perspec-
tive, tr. Neil Solomon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). He argues that
the center of Weber’s lifelong interests is not to be found in Economy and Society, as
most have thought, but in the unfinished multivolume “Economic Ethic of the World
Religions.”
12. The English translation of this study was first published in 1930 by Harvard
sociologist Talcott Parsons, who worked not with the original articles but with revised
German versions that included an introduction and other materials Weber added later.
This revised edition was published in German with other works by Weber’s wife,
Marianne, after his death. See Talcott Parsons, “Translator’s Preface,” in Max Weber,
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1958), pp. ix—xi.

182 Nine Theories of Religion
13. On the composition and publication of The Sociology of Religion, as well as its
inclusion in Economy and Society, see Sam Whimster, “Translator’s Note on Weber’s
Economic Ethics of the World Religions,” Max Weber Studies 3.1 (2002): 80 and n. 1;
Weber, Economy and Society, “Introduction,” pp. lix—lx, xciv—xcv.
14. Max Weber, The Sociology of Religion, tr. Ephraim Fischoff (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1963), p. 46.
15. Weber, The Sociology of Religion, p. 60.
16. Weber, The Sociology of Religion, pp. 80, 82.
17. Weber, The Sociology of Religion, p. 125.
18. Weber, The Sociology of Religion, p. 120.
19. Weber, The Sociology ofReligion, p. 155.
20. Weber, The Sociology ofReligion, pp. 164-165.
21. They are found in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and tr. H. H. Gerth and
C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946) under the titles “The Social
Psychology of the World Religions,” pp. 267—301, and “Religious Rejections of the World
and Their Directions,” pp. 323-359. There is a good recent analysis of the first of these
discussions in Whimster, “Translator’s Note,” pp. 75—98. The second is in part a more
elaborated discussion of the asceticism-mysticism typology discussed on pp. 165—166.
22. Gerth and Mills, From Max Weber, p. 267.
23. Weber, The Religion of China, tr. Hans Gerth (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press,
1951).
24. Weber, The Religion of India, tr. Hans Gerth and Don Martindale (Glencoe, IL:
The Free Press, 195 8).
25. Weber, Ancient Judaism, tr. Hans Gerth and Don Martindale (Glencoe, IL: The
Free Press, 1952).
26. Weber, The Protestant Ethic, p. 27.
27. On this, again, see Schluchter, Rationalism, Religion, and Domination.
28. Weber, The Sociology of Religion, pp. 56, 57.
29. Weber, The Sociology of Religion, pp. 56, 57.
30. Weber, The Religion oflndia, p. 206.
31. Weber, The Religion of India, pp. 204—30.
Suggestions for Further Reading
Andreski, Stanislav. Max Weber’s Insights and Errors. London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1984. A short, highly substantive analysis filled with penetrating observa-
tions on all aspects of Weber’s thinking.
Barbalet, J. M. Weber; Passion and Profits: ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of
Capitalism in Context. New York : Cambridge University Press, 2008. A recent
reassessment of one of the most widely discussed theorems in economic and
social history. The author links Weber to Adam Smith and others in the previous
century.
Bendix, Reinhard. Max Weber. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.
A perceptive intellectual biography in English, widely read and cited by scholars
in America.

A Source ofSocial Action: Max Weber 183
Collins, Randall. Max Weber: A Skeleton Key. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications,
1986. A very brief introduction to the whole of Weber’s life and scholarly career;
valuable for those making a first encounter with Weber.
Eliaeson, Sven. Max Weber‘s Methodologies. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002. A fairly
recent, thorough, and clear assessment of Weber’s difficult writings on sociologi-
cal method.
Freund, Julien. The Sociology of Max Weber. New York: Pantheon Books, 1968. An
earlier study, but lucidly written; one of the most readable of all introductions to
Weber.
Honigsheim, Paul. 012 Max Weber. Translated by Joan Rytina. New York: The Free
Press, 1968. A fascinating personal memoir by a student of Weber who knew him
personally, rich with insightful anecdotes illuminating Weber’s life and intellec-
tual associations.
Kasler, Dirk. Max Weber: An Introduction to His Life and Work. Translated by Philippa
Hurd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. An English translation of a
thoroughly researched German study; difficult in places, but important.
Kivisto, Peter, and William H. Swatos, Jr. Max Weber: A Bio-Bibliography. New York:
Greenwood Press, 1988. A comprehensive annotated guide to the entire literature
on Max Weber in English; contains nearly 1,000 entries. Now slightly dated, but
still indispensable for non-German readers.
Lehmann, Hartmut, and Guenther Roth, eds. Weber’s Protestant Ethic: Origins,
Evidence, Contexts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Essays by a
group of international experts addressing multiple aspects of the “Weber thesis”
controversy.
Max Weber Studies. Sheffield, England: Academic Press, 2002—. A relatively new jour-
nal offering careful studies, notes, and book reviews on all aspects of Weber’s life
and career.
Mitzman, Arthur. The Iron Cage: An Historical Interpretation ofMax Weber: New York:
Alfred Knopf, 1970. A provocative “psycho-history” that seeks to understand
Weber’s life in terms of the tensions arising from his family relationships, his
marital arrangement, and the effects of his anxiety disorder.
Mommsen, Wolfgang. Max Weber and German Politics: 1890—1920. Translated by
M. S. Steinberg. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. An important revi-
sionist study by a major German historian who centers on Weber’s politics and
German nationalism.
Radkau, Joachim. Max Weber: A Biography. Translated by Patrick Camiller. Malden,
MA: Polity, 2009 [2005]. The publication of this long—awaited biography in 2005
was a major event in German cultural history; now in English, it offers an in-
depth account of Weber in multiple dimensions; new sources allow a rich por-
trayal of the man and his achievement.
Ringer, Fritz. Max Weber: An Intellectual Portrait. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2004. Though now surpassed by Radkau, a still useful, briefer account of
Weber’s life and ideas in English, written by an accomplished historian of uni-
versities and intellectual life in pre—World War I Germany.

184 Nine Theories of Religion
Schluchter, Wolfgang. Rationalism, Religion, and Domination: A Weberian Perspec-
ti ve. Translated by Neil Solomon. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.
A major reinterpretation of Weber’s complete intellectual project. shifting em—
phasis from his work on economy and society to his comparative studies of civi-
lizations and world religions.
Turner, Stephen, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Weber. Cambridge, England:
Cambridge University Press, 2000. More than a dozen current essays on Specific
dimensions of Weber’s work by leading authorities on his life and thought.
Weber, Marianne. Max Weber: A Biography. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York:
John Wiley & Sons, [1926] 1975. A long, rich, informative but also protective
account of Weber’s life and thought, written by his wife and published six years
after his death.
Wrong, Dennis, ed. Max Weber. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970. Short,
highly informative essays on specific Weberian concepts contributed by leading
international authorities and complemented by the editor’s informative, wide-
ranging introduction.

6.
The Verdict of Religious
Experience: William James
Religion is the great interest of my life.
William James, Letter to Henry W. Rankin, 1897′
If among sociologists Weber offers a counterpoint to Durkheim, can we find
something similar in the case of psychology? Is there in the psychology of
religion a voice to dissent or differ from the reductionism of Freud? The answer
to both of these questions is: Yes. But in this instance—and for the first time
in our discussion—we need to travel beyond Europe to locate the theorist who
offers the most instructive case to consider. We need to reach across the Atlantic
to Harvard University, where we find in its lecture halls at the turn of the cen—
tury the energetic, engaging figure of William James. Scientist, essayist, mor-
alist, philosopher, and by official title psychologist, James was seen in both his
time and in the decades after his death in 1910 as one of the leading lights in
American cultural and religious discussion. His career spanned the decades of
the nation’s Gilded Age, capturing notice in the later 18708 and extending
through the first full decade of the twentieth century. Throughout this entire
epoch, he cut a visible profile on the Harvard campus as a thoughtful conver—
sationalist, genial colleague, lively classroom lecturer, and mentor to scores of
students, private inquirers, and personal friends. He did as much as anyone in
its early years to establish psychology as a major field of study in American
universities; his Principles of Psychology, published in 1890, provided a
much-needed introduction to the discipline and definitive summary of its
research as it stood on the edge of the twentieth century. When the American
Psychological Association held its diamond anniversary in 1977, the open-
ing speaker publicly declared William James the father of psychology in
America.2 At the same time, James was not the kind of theorist to be con-
tained by a single discipline, however new and promising. With his Harvard
185

186 Nine Theories of Religion
colleague and philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, he introduced pragmatism,
a perspective on knowledge and truth that to this day can claim to be the most
distinctively American contribution to modern philosophy.3 In the same vein,
we can credit James with a gift of comparable value to the study of religion: his
signature work, published in 1902 as The Varieties of Religious Experience.
This ambitious project, which marshalled the empirical methods of science to
catalogue instances illustrating the subtle power of religion to alter individual
human lives, secured James’s place as a theorist of enduring importance.
Appearing at the dawn of the twentieth century, it has since become a classic
text, addressing present-day concerns with an immediacy that rivals the wide
interest it generated among thoughtful readers when it first came to print. It
will claim the better part of our attention here as well.
Early Life and Learning
William James belonged to one of the most well-known and widely heralded
families in American arts and letters. He was the eldest, but arguably not the
most accomplished, of five children born to Henry James Sr. and Alice Walsh
in the decade of the 18403.4 Their second son, Henry Jr., is considered by
many the finest American novelist of the post—Civil War era; two other sons
were wounded serving in the Union Army during the conflict; the youngest
sibling, their sister Alice, who was in persistent ill heath, produced a diary
that emerged (after her early death in 1892) as one of the late-century’s most
candid and shrewdly perceptive commentaries on morals, customs, and per-
sonalities in the circles of American privilege. Their father, Henry Sr., was
born to wealth, inheriting part of a vast fortune earned by his father (also
named William) from property ventures along the route of the Erie Canal.
Without a need to work, Henry Sr. gave most of his time to two interests—
religion and family. Though not trained formally, he aspired to be a theolo-
gian, and such he became, if of a rather marginal kind, embracing the peculiar
mysticism of the Swedish visionary prophet Emanuel Swedenborg and mix-
ing it in equally peculiar ways with the utopian ideas of the French socialist
Charles Fourier and support of the quixotic communal living experiment at
Brook Farm in Massachusetts. There was nothing odd or marginal, however,
about the social circle in which the James family moved. At their townhouse
near Washington Square in New York City, they entertained a variety of elite
guests, including notables from both the New England and Atlantic intelligent-
sia that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson
Alcott, Horace Greeley, and others of sufficient talent or means. When the

The Verdict ofReligious Experience: William James 187
family traveled to Britain, Henry Sr. made sure the children were taken to
meet Thomas Carlyle, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and John Stuart Mill; similar
meetings occurred with French and German intellectuals placed on the
European continent. These prestigious encounters came about in part because
of their father’s other personal passion—the education of his children, which
was almost as eccentric as his theology. In singular pursuit of this goal, Henry
Sr. not only moved his family to new places in America; he also took up travel
to Europe in search of the most intellectually challenging educational forums
available.
In consequence, throughout much of their childhood and most of their youth,
the five James children were moved from school to school, and from teacher to
tutor or governess, first in New York, then in Europe, and back again in the
United States. In 1855, when William was thirteen, the family traveled to
London, Geneva, Paris, and Boulogne (to name some but not all of the destina-
tions), then again to London, and finally back to America—a three—year odys—
sey in good measure inspired his father’s search for new and better mentors
wherever they could be found. This unusual experiment in pilgrim learning
was a measure of both the family intimacy and the deep sense of intellectual
mission that pervaded the James household, even if it did not always demon-
strate the best in parental judgment. In the end, the results were somewhat
mixed. The travels offered some pleasures that all of the family enjoyed, but in
the longer term and in its main purpose, it did little for the younger sons; only
Alice and the two eldest, most gifted brothers saw clear benefits. William
acquired complete mastery of French and would later do the same with
German. He and Henry Jr. both also developed exceedingly broad, cosmopoli-
tan tastes; they came to relish the best of Europe’s art, literature, and thought;
William read incessantly, choosing the finest in literature, poetry, science, and
philosophy that the Western tradition had to offer. Only a year after the fami-
ly’s return to America, he could be found back in Europe on his own, working
with private tutors in Germany and Switzerland and developing contacts of
lifelong value across the Atlantic. Henry Jr. was more reserved and contempla-
tive; he preferred isolation. Leaving America behind, he chose Europe as his
home, settling into a reclusive life in England, where most all of his fiction was
to be written.
The personalities of the two brothers, who corresponded “continuously in
perceptive, mutually critical, and yet personally affectionate and candid letters
throughout their lives, were quite different in a variety of ways. William was
and remained always outwardly more social and engaging than Henry, though
he was inwardly prone to tensions and misgivings. He was generally active,
ambitious, and energetic, but with recurring episodes of depression that, in the

188 Nine Theories of Religion
language of present-day psychology, suggest a personality uncomfortably near
to bipolar syndrome. These darker moods were aggravated by assorted physi-
cal ailments—some real, others perhaps imagined—that he wrestled with
unevenly for all of his adult life.
The active, optimistic side of this dual personality appears in a letter written
near the end of the European educational experiment, when James was just
s1xteen:
What ought to be everyone’s object in life? To be as much use as possible. Open
a biographical dictionary. Every name it contains has exercised some influence
on humanity, good or evil, and 99 names of out 100 are good. . . . I want to be a
man and to do some good no matter what.5
To a degree, this kind of earnest moralism was not atypical in the circles of
privileged, well-educated young men in America and Britain of the Victorian
era. Often enough the sentiment passed. In James’s case, however, it was quite
consciously carried into later years, with a direct bearing on the perspective he
would adopt in his analyses of both psychology and religion. Initially, however,
the two areas in which William felt that he could “do some good” were the arts
and natural sciences. In Paris he was captivated by the vast canvases of the
painter Eugene Delacroix, and he had shown real skill of his own with sketches
and drawings. So in 1860, when back from Europe, he made a try at art, enter—
ing the studio of the notable American portrait and landscape artist William
Morris Hunt. After some modest early success, he abruptly changed course.
Though he had both talent and interest, he seems to have concluded he had not
enough of either, and so turned to his other passion—science. In 1861 he entered
the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, and three years later was admitted
to the School of Medicine, where from the beginning he made clear that his
goal would be medical science, not practice. While enrolled in the program, he
joined a scientific expedition to Brazil led by Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz,
whose aim was the collection of tr0pica1 fish, wildlife, and foliage samples.
James was utterly fascinated by the exotic beauty of the tropics but found the
circumstances physically harsh; among other ailments, he contracted a minor
form of smallpox that affected his vision. Even so, he was greatly impressed by
Agassiz, whom he regarded as a wonderful team leader and a model of the sci-
entific intellect. On returning, he committed to continuation of his medical
studies at Harvard, where in 1869 he took his M.D., the only graduate academic
degree he ever earned. In the meantime, his father had funded a return to
Germany for rest and recuperation. The darker, depressive side of James’s per-
sonality had begun to manifest itself; both mind and body were in need of
healing.

The Verdict of Religious Experience: William James 189
A Personal Crisis
Over a five-year interval from about 1867 to 1872, both during and after his
medical studies, James wrestled with recurring, serious attacks of mental
depression. As recounted in his letters, he became at moments even suicidal. It
was the onset of what physicians of the day called “neurasthenia,” a mentally
paralyzing state defined by pessimism and a sense of futility, a debilitating
incapacity to act, and the loss of all energy and motivation. In James’s case,
multiple factors probably converged to bring this condition on. He had chosen
medicine as a professional interest, but with no taste for clinical practice, there
was little promise of a career. At age twenty-six, any further dependence on his
father was nearing the point of embarrassment. He was personally alone, with
no prospect of a spouse or plans to marry. More troubling still for someone of
his young age were his health concerns. There was the eye problem acquired
in Brazil; there were digestive ailments, and more acutely, recurring back pain,
from which he hoped to find relief in Germany’s famous thermal baths. But
beyond these issues, there was something more emotionally critical. To friends
he confided his need to resolve a disconcerting philosophical problem, an
intellectual dilemma with an unsettling personal dimension.
Just as he was turning—still with some hesitation—to science for a career,
James felt compelled to address the theory of scientific materialism, which he
encountered directly in a book entitled Force and Matter (1855), published in
German by physiologist-philosopher Ludwig Buchner. Buchner, who lost his
academic post in the controversy he generated, was a leading advocate of mate-
rialism in its starkest form. On this view, all of nature, every element, structure,
and organism—including human organisms—could be explained as a product
of matter and motion; nothing more or other was needed, or even conceivable:
no soul, no mind or spirit, no human feeling, emotion, or free action. All of
nature, even human nature, behaves as an automaton: a field of mindless energy—
and-matter—driven material mechanisms. For Biichner materialism required
this determinism. If human organisms are only matter in motion, then we are
robots. That is the very meaning of “automaton.” The decisions made by our
minds are in fact made by our bodies, by our biology. The soul that we think we
have is not consciousness, but chemistry. It is clear from the language in James’s
letters and diary that he felt keenly the full force of this thesis, which was both
intellectually and personally disconcerting. At the very moment when he was
making an important life decision about his future in science, science itself was
telling him that whatever decision he might make was meaningless—a mere
illusion. Further, science construed in these terms seemed to undermine the
very purpose of any human effort in life and in society, the sphere in which, by
freely taken choice, he had made it is mission “to do some good.” Determinism

190 Nine Theories of Religion
appeared to make action for any cause meaningless. For both these personal
and intellectual reasons, a satisfactory answer had to be found. Without it,
action for a purpose was a meaningless Charade.
Amid bouts of depression and after some distressed searching, James in time
encountered the writings of the philosopher Charles Renouvier, who furnished
the response he was so urgently seeking. A French disciple of the German
Immanuel Kant, Renouvier was a figure little known in America, but a reasoned
defense of the idea of human freedom was central to his thinking, and it Spoke
directly to James’s concerns. In his diary for April 30, 1870, he wrote: “I think
that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier’s 2nd
Essay, and saw no reason why his definition of free will—the sustaining of a
thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts—need be the
definition of an illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”6
These words might not have been persuasive for everyone, but somehow, they
took effect with James. For him, Renouvier’s argument provided the anchorage
needed to weather the determinist storm. He could build his life, and much of
his life’s work, on a resolute commitment to the freedom of the human will.
With the resolution of this intellectual issue, James’s depression began partly
to lift, and other positive developments followed. In 1872 he received his first
academic appointment, being named an Instructor in Physiology at Harvard.
Five years later, he married Alice Gibbens, a girls’ school teacher who lived in
Boston. Over the decades, her even temper and exceptional patience brought
happiness, stability, and children into his personal life. Their thirty—two years
of successful married life ran a course that mirrored the thirty—five years of
almost unbroken success and growing recognition that James enjoyed on the
Harvard faculty. The physical ailments did not disappear, nor did occasional
further bouts with depression, but both became more moderate and manage-
able as the years moved on. In time invitations to prestigious lectureships
arrived, and other accolades followed. At Harvard, James’s march upward in
rank culminated in 1889, when President Eliot awarded a promotion that
brought him—with an MD. as still his only professional credential—the cov-
eted title of Professor of Psychology. There he remained in rank until his resig-
nation (for reasons of health) in 1907, the year that marked a reluctant
professional end to an impressive (and still unfinished), intellectual journey.
Harvard Career: Psychology, Religion, Philosophy
While at Harvard James’s career passed through three phases, each centered
on a different intellectual project. Each in turn brought an achievement of con-
siderable note—a book, a collection of essays, or both. Impressively, the work

The Verdict of Religious Experience: William James 191
was also done in three disparate fields. The first twelve years, 1878 to 1890,
were taken up with the teaching of his Harvard classes, his initial studies in
psychology, and work on The Principles of Psychology, his ambitious intro-
duction to the field that grew to a book of imposing proportions. Published in
1890 and regarded by some as his finest achievement, it ran to more than 1,200
pages.7 During the next phase, 1890 to 1902, his interests in moral philosophy
and religion moved to the foreground. A collection of lectures he delivered
both before and during this interval came to print in 1897 under the title The
Will to Believe, and the capstone to this phase of his endeavors was put into
place in 1902 with the publication of The Varieties of Religious Experience,
his chief endeavor in what he defined as the science of religion. Although his
intellectual legacy as a theorist of religion rests on his achievement in Varieties,
it was not his last noteworthy accomplishment. In the final decade of his life,
James turned more fully toward philosophy, and despite faltering health, he
managed to complete several projects that some contemporary philosophers
have come to admire as his most genuinely original work, defending the merits
of pragmatism as a phiIOSOphical outlook. In addition to Pragmatism (1907),
the book that gave definitive expression to his ideas on truth and value, both A
Pluralistic Universe (1909) and the posthumously published Essays in Radical
Empiricism (1912) have won new appraisals as both provocative and under-
appreciated works. In the pages that follow, The Will to Believe and the Vari-
eties of Religious Experience will naturally claim our main attention, but not
without also attending to the studies in psychology that came earlier and those
in philosophy that came afterward.
The Principles of Psychology
In 1878 James was asked to write a book summarizing current knowledge in
the field of psychology for the “American Science Series” offered by publisher
Henry Holt. He thought he could finish the task in two years; it took all of
twelve, expanding along the way into an early landmark overview of the dis-
cipline. The Principles of Psychology did considerably more than introduce
and summarize. It took readers into each of the major area of the field, offer-
ing substantive discussions and thorough analyses of the issues as they stood
at the time.
As James’s approach to religion relies on his psychology, a closer look at
this first and only major book he published in the field is in several ways
instructive. It begins by defining psychology as the scientific study of human
mental activities. It explains that in the past this kind of inquiry belonged to
theologians and philosophers, but in the modern era psychology has become a

192 Nine Theories of Religion
science: it proceeds by observation and experiment, and by classification and
comparison of data. Examining mental activity requires introspection, an
inward form of Close observation similar to what is done with a microscope in
biology or chemistry, but without instruments and only a trained, attentive
intellect to assist. Psychology explores all things affecting the mind: obviously
the structure and physiology of the brain, where mental life is centered, but
also the various forms of mental activity, including such things as: sensation
and perception; the sense of space and of time; the nature of habit, attention,
and instinct; the roles of imagination and conception, and of memory, will, and
emotion. Most of these discussions do not bear Specifically on James’s ideas
about religion, but in indirect ways they are relevant, and on some matters offer
essential background.
To start with a negative, James explains that there is one quite common and
traditional idea that modern scientific psychology simply cannot accept. It
rejects the notion, long embraced by nearly all of religion and much of philos-
ophy, that human beings are composed of a body and a soul. From the time of
Plato to earlier modern times, theologians and philosophers have routinely
relied on these paired concepts to understand the mental and physical sides of
the human self.8 Ordinary people almost invariably use the same language.
They assume bodies have souls; they think the soul controls the body; they
believe that the two can be separated at death, and (for most Jews, Christians,
and Muslims at least) that they can be rejoined at the end of time. In brief, they
conceive of the body and soul as two substances: one material and mortal, the
other nonmaterial and eternal. But that is not how science sees them. Body and
soul are not separable entities. They are two intimately interwoven aspects of
the same living organism. Every smallest element of activity in what we call
the soul, or mind—every sensation, perception, or thought—mirrors an associ-
ated and simultaneous process in the chemistry of the brain. In human life,
brain and mind are so inseparable that a better (if still not perfect) word to use
for the latter is “consciousness.” We must think of the soul not as a thing, but
as a process: as a tumbling river of feelings, ideas, and images pouring over, in,
and through the physical network of the brain. As James said in a famous
phrase he is now credited with coining, the mind is a “wonderful stream of
consciousness,” an ever-changing flow of ideas, images, and sensations contin-
uously affecting and affected by the physical body through which it passes, as
water over the riverbed moves among its rocks, shifting or slowing or turning,
then sweeping ahead, taking silt and stones along with it. The physical and
mental aSpects of the self are fitted to each other like river and valley.
James believed that thinking of the self in this interwoven manner offers real
advantages to psychologists, whose task is to explore the subtle interplay
between the mental and physical sides of the human person. For him the model

The Verdict of Religious Experience: William James 193
of a physical organism suffused and saturated with consciousness offered to
science exciting new paths of research. At the same time, it is just this model
that had led others, including some of James’s own Harvard colleagues and
mentors, to draw the conclusion that he himself had resisted when confronted
with the works of the German scientist-philosopher Buchner. They were inclined
to endorse physiological materialism, the View that the physical is all that is
real, that there is nothing other than body, and that the idea of “mind” or even
“consciousness” is an illusion. Among some scientists, this materialist perspec—
tive gained further support as the century progressed. The watershed moment,
of course, was Charles Darwin’s publication of the Origin of Species in 1859.
As his version of evolutionary theory took hold, biological materialism found
outspoken new advocates in both England and America. In the 1880s T. H.
Huxley, the man who became famous as “Darwin’s bulldog,” took the position
that physical processes fuel and drive all of human mental life; our thoughts, he
wrote, are like the steam that issues from the smokestack of a locomotive. The
churning body is real; the mind is a mere vaporous appearance totally depen-
dent on the body. Huxley’s slightly less combative but no less outspoken scien-
tific colleague John Tyndall took the same point of View. Moreover, as Huxley
affirmed without flinching, materialism logically requires determinism. The
body’s processes determine the mind’s thoughts. Most people prize what they
like to call the freedom of the will, but there is no such thing.
To many people of religious faith, this doctrine of materialist determinism
was utterly unacceptable. How, they naturally asked, could a person believe in
immortality of the soul if the soul—if “consciousness”—is as completely
interwoven into the body as Huxley and Tyndall suppose? When the body dies,
the soul, it seems, will die also. And more than just immortality is at stake.
Even more than Marxism, scientific materialism reduces religious beliefs to
empty words; in fact, it reduces all beliefs about human motives and actions to
empty words, and distills all decisions into biological processes.
As we would expect from his earlier struggle with materialist determinism,
James shared such concerns. But as a psychologist he also recognized that the
materialist principle is needed for scientific explanation; scientists address
physical reality, and naturally look for material, physical causes to explain the
workings of the brain. That principle cannot just be ignored. At the same time,
it is true that beyond science, the debate over freedom and determinism is
exceedingly complex; the issues are so difficult to decide that the quarrel likely
will never be resolved. And if neither view can persuade, James argues, it is
entirely reasonable outside of the laboratory to endorse freedom. Because it is
crucial to almost every form of human endeavor, we are justified in making
freedom the presiding postulate of our lives. Put in simplest terms, James could
allow materialism for his work as a psychologist, but as a person, he just as

194 Nine Theories of Religion
firmly held to the principle he had seized upon when reading Renouvier: the
first act of free will is to believe in free will . . . even when science seems to
oppose it.
If to others it seems arbitrary–even an outright contradiction—for a scientist
to accept determinism in his profession while assuming freedom elsewhere in
life, James is prepared to explain himself. Choosing and deciding, he reminds
us, are from the very beginning a part of the human physical organism. The
brain is not some passive thing that just responds and never initiates. Even in
its primitive animal forms and earliest human stages, the brain’s consciousness
is defined by its active, choosing properties. When a child is born, sensations
come to it from the outside world as a great “blooming, buzzing, confusion,”
but at once consciousness starts to work; it attends to some things in that
confusion—the face or touch of the mother—and filters others out completely.g
It “makes sense” of the world precisely by centering on some sensations and
disregarding others. Then as we mature, our consciousness continues the pro-
cess. We live by continually selecting from impressions, organizing experi-
ences, and placing some things in focus while moving others aside. As we
become adults, we gradually confront the most complex of these choices, most
notably those that create and shape our human character. When consciousness
reaches the level of rational and moral choices that affect personal conduct, it
is only natural to embrace our freedom and dismiss the thought of determin-
ism. The momentous matters of personal and social morality require that we
accept, as a moral principle of the universe, that “what ought to be can be.” We
know that where evil occurs, it is possible that good could have been done in
place of it.10 Without the critically essential belief in mental freedom, we can—
not make moral decisions, so the mind must assume its truth. And if the
demands that arise from our moral experience take us beyond the materialism
of science, then so be it. “Science,” says James, “must constantly be reminded
that her purposes are not the only purposes, and that the order of uniform
causation which she has use for. . . may be enveloped in a wider order, on
which she has no claims at all.”” In this intriguing manner James blended his
moral convictions with his scientific aspirations. Just as in his personal crisis
as a young man who wanted to “do good in the world,” he had to overcome
determinist thinking, so James argues here—as a principle of moral psychol—
ogy surpassing the claims of science—that only the idea of freedom can make
human moral conduct meaningful and possible. That is a principle that science,
even if it needs materialism and determinism, cannot be allowed to undermine.
Nor is this all that can be said. In different and later discussion, James affirms
a further tie between freedom, morality, and religion. He of course agrees
that religion is not necessarily needed for moral conduct; there are many
non-religious people who behave morally, and may in fact behave better than

The Verdict ofRelz’gious Experience: William James 195
many religious people do. But there are different kinds of moral action. Passive
morals, the conduct of the vast majority of people who obey the law and live
decently, is one thing; active, strenuous moral effort is another. Only a very few
people are capable of heroic morals, of showing exceptional sacrifice and ded-
ication of their lives to others in the manner, as we might say today, of a
St. Francis, 3 Gandhi, or a Martin Luther King. And in that respect, religion
does make a difference. Faith in a divine order can furnish the inspiration for
lives of great sacrifice, and great endeavors of love, in a way that no other
human resource seems able to deliver.12
One final point should be made before leaving The Principles of Psychology
behind. Its discussions presume, and in some places clearly state, that there
should not be a separation between human “knowledge” on the one hand and
“feelings” on the other, as if the part of the human self that is our rational intel-
lect is one thing and the sensing, feeling side of our selves is another. Some
thinkers James encountered in his time (and some very much active today)
claimed that ideas are grasped only by the human intellect; feelings, on the
other hand, are the emotional qualities that accompany knowledge but do not
in themselves convey any conceptual content. For example, sadness is a gen-
eral emotion, and as such it is an undefined feeling, nothing more; I can “feel
sad” about many different things. Only when a concept provides content can I
have a “specific” emotion, as when I feel sad about “my lost dog” or my “bad
investment.” Significantly, James here takes a different view of this matter. For
him, human feelings can actually carry intellectual content; the ideas are, we
might say, bound into, or bound up from the start with, our emotions. Feelings
can provide us with “preconceptual” knowledge in the very moment we expe-
rience them. This principle will be worth recalling, and assessing, when we
turn to James’s discussion of religious experience in Varieties, where, in an
echo of what is said here, he will tell us that such experience “has a noetic
component” (“noetic” being Greek for “knowledge”). Religious experience,
therefore, is not empty; it conveys knowledge without the help of concepts
supplied by the intellect. ‘3
“The Will to Believe”
After finishing Principles James turned his attention increasingly to questions
of moral philosophy and religion. He began lecturing and writing for a wider,
more general audience, choosing articles and occasional papers as his pre-
ferred format. In 1897 he published ten of these essays, collected in book form
under the title of the lead entry, “The Will to Believe,” which had been pre-
pared just a year earlier.

196 Nine Theories ofReligion
“The Will to Believe” was first presented as a lecture to college students,
members of the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown Universities. It soon
made a wider impression, and as it provides an instructive path into James’s
genera] perspective on religion, it is worth some effort on our part to follow
where it leads. Designed as a justification of religious faith, James proposes
“a defence of our right to adopt a believing attitude in religious matters, in spite
of the fact that our merely logical intellect may not have been coerced.”l4 The
argument begins with some context. In any circumstance where we are faced
with the choice to accept or reject a belief, James tells us, three things naturally
affect the decision. The alternatives before us can be described as (1) “living or
dead,” (2) “forced or avoidable,” and (3) “momentous or trivial.” As to the first
of these, if you ask me whether I seriously would worship the nature gods of
ancient Greece or the warrior gods of early Scandinavia, I am likely to chuckle
rather than answer. Ancient mythology is intriguing, but in the modern world,
polytheism is not a “living” option. Secondly, we all recognize that some
choices are forced and others are avoidable. If you ask of a concert I’ve
attended: “Was it good or bad?” I might just answer: “No comment.” I could
offer an answer, but the Choice you’ve given me is avoidable. But if you say:
“Either catch this train or wait a full day for the next,” I cannot avoid a deci-
sion. Either I will catch the train, or I will need to wait a day. If I try to say “N0
comment” and put off an answer, the deferral will be a decision; today’s train
will be missed. Some situations compel us to make a choice; there is no way to
avoid it. Finally, some choices are trivial, others momentous. If you ask me
whether I want Italian biscotti or English crumpets with my tea, that is hardly
a critical matter; either will do. But if I am in urgent need of a heart transplant,
and the donor heart is not the best match, I face a momentous choice. If this
heart is taken, the transplant could fail; if it is passed over, it may be too late for
another. That decision is hardly trivial: life or death hangs in the balance.
To these three initial considerations, says James, we need to add another.
Some thinkers, influenced heavily by modern science, have said there is an
“ethic” of belief. We have a moral obligation not to believe just anything we
want; our beliefs should have rational support. James points to W. K. Clifford,
the noted British mathematician of his time, who said that we should, as a
matter of moral propriety, only believe things “upon sufficient evidence.” If the
evidence is not good enough, we cannot consent; it is morally wrong to do so.
Above all, we should not allow ourselves to be duped into obviously foolish,
misguided beliefs. Religion belongs among those beliefs.
Now in some respects, James observes, Professor Clifford’s advice makes
sense and is easy enough to follow. If there is a technical, scientific question at
hand, and I do not have technical knowledge, I should naturally decline to
answer. A nontechnical person who does not understand electricity should not

The Verdict of Religious Experience: William James 197
try to wire a complicated circuit. He does not have sufficient evidence to make
electrical judgments. J
But suppose we move from electrical circuitry to larger moral and personal
issues. In matters such as these, we do need to ask—do we not?-—-how one is
to judge when and whether Clifford’s standard of “sufficient evidence” has
been met. Both philosophers and scientists disagree intensely on this matter.
And even if we could agree on what evidence is sufficient, another question
needs to be asked: how did Clifford come up with his idea that to hold a mis-
taken belief is, morally, the worst of all options? It seems to come from what
James calls his “passional” nature. Clifford believes from the start, as an article
of his own personal faith, that avoidance of error at all costs is required as our
“duty to mankind”; it is for him a moral precept. We have an ethical obligation
to follow it as the only behavior fitting and proper to human beings.
But if we accept that view, says James, if we accept that our “passional”
nature—anchored in our most basic values and wishes—is to be allowed a
voice in deciding these questions, then we are in the realm of moral judgments
about what is good, not just scientific conclusions about what is true. And if
that is so, then certainly other judgments, other deeply held views about what
accomplishes our duty to mankind, have a right also to be heard.
Religions believe that the best things are eternal things, and that we as
humans all are better off holding to such beliefs. So let us consider them, says
James, by the criteria set out above: (1) Is religious belief a “live” option? Yes.
For thoughtful people in the modern world, the choice of theism or atheism
presents itself as very much a live Option. (2) Is the choice for or against belief
a momentous one? Unquestionably it is momentous. It is not like deciding on
biscotti or crumpets with tea; it bears upon all of life and its meaning. (3) Fur-
ther, and most critically, is belief a choice that is forced or avoidable? It would
certainly seem that it is forced: either you embrace belief or dismiss it. You
cannot easily “wait and see.” So, when Clifford says: “My duty is not to believe
without proof,” he is making a choice from which it follows that he will not
believe. By deferring he is in effect choosing not to believe. Presented with the
religious option, he insists that “to yield to our fear of its being error is better
and wiser than to yield to our hope of that it may be true.”’5 But if so, then this
clearly is not a choice between the clear rationality of science and the “blind
passion” of religion. It is rather a disagreement between one kind of faith, one
moral passion, and another. In that circumstance, and in a matter this momen-
tous, James says that the believer, no less than the skeptic, has a right, equally
grounded, to choose faith. Belief is no more “passional,” and no less rational,
than disbelief.
In the course of his discussion, James readily acknowledges a similarity in
his reasoning to that of Blaise Pascal (1623—1662) the brilliant, devoutly

193 Nine Theories ofReligion
Catholic French mathematician-physicist of an earlier time who formulated the
famous “wager” argument for belief in God. Pascal had ingeniously argued for
faith from the law of probability. Since giving one’s life to God promises the
infinite gain of eternal life at the price of only small sacrifices in this present
life, while disbelieving entails the opposite—eternal loss in return for short-
term self-indulgence—the rational choice always will be to commit to belief in
God. If God does not exist, the wager brings limited loss; if God does exist, it
brings infinite gain. Anyone who calculates rationally would take the wager.
Though not identical to Pascal’s, James’s reasoning bears a certain resem-
blance to it. He does not focus on eternal life, and he does not go so far as to
claim, as Pascal does, that “wagering” on belief is logically superior to choos-
ing disbelief. Instead he argues more indirectly, striving to show that people
who do believe stand on ground equally as firm as that on which disbelievers
like Clifford choose to stand. Believers are not gullible or superstitious; they
are not being duped. By any fair measure of rationality, they are in are a position
quite comparable to that of those who choose not to believe. Holding to religion
out of hope of its truth is no less justified, psychologically and rationally, than
rejecting religion out of fear it is in error.
It is not hard to see why this essay struck a resonant chord with an audience
of educated Christian readers in America. It ingeniously placed the prestige of
science and profession of religious faith on a roughly equal footing, and pre-
dictably enough, it has generated both warm approval and stiff criticism ever
since. For present purposes we do not need to take sides in the Clifford-James
debate itself or discuss the similarities to Pascal, however intriguing to theolo~
gians and logicians such arguments along the lines of game theory or wager
transactions have proved to be. There are two other points that we can better
notice instead.
First, as he moved to the second phase of his career, turning from his nar-
rower professional interest in psychology to wider questions of philosophy and
morality, James expressed a more Openly favorable attitude toward religion. As
a professional psychologist in a university, he had been in frequent conversa-
tion with intelligent atheist colleagues, whom he held in high regard. But as he
turned seriously to the investigation of moral values in society, his doubts
about the superiority they claimed for the nonreligious world view grew
steadily deeper and more insistent. He was not persuaded. Secondly, the reason
for these doubts lay in his steadily deepening commitment to the logic of prag—
matism, his growing personal conviction that we discover the truth of our
beliefs when we assess them by their value to our actions, by examining how
they “pay off’ ’ when we apply them in our lives. In Principles, this is the logic
he applies to justify belief that we have freedom of the will, despite the need of
science to rely on materialist determinism. In the same way, the argument for

The Verdict of Religious Experience: William James 199
religious faith as “The Will to Believe” articulates it is also pragmatic in char—
acter: it is at least as beneficial to mankind, James says, to live by a faith that
we hope to be true as it is to live in fear that it might be false. Further and
finally, if measuring benefit to mankind is a relevant matter, then surely it is
part of the theorist’s duty to make the effort. Let us try, as best we can, to
measure those effects (both personal and social) of religious faith as reported
by those who experience it. What actually happens when people encounter the
divine? In fairness, no person of scientific mind should answer that question
dismissively. We should instead turn to the kind of objective, empirical study
that is worthy of science. We should examine religion scientifically and let the
evidence speak for itself.
The Varieties of Religious Experience
The invitation to pursue just such a scientific inquiry came soon enough. In
1900, three years after publishing The Will to Believe, James was invited to
give the prestigious Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh, Scotland. The Gifford
Trust required a treatment of religion that appealed to natural evidence, not to
supernatural revelation; it stipulated an argument that draws on evidence
acceptable to all interested parties, and not to some special revelation found
only in the Bible or church doctrines. James welcomed this opportunity, for it
enabled him to work just as he wished—scientifically and empirically. Under
the title The Varieties of Religious Experience he proposed a two-part project.
First, he would assemble evidence—testimonies from people of every type or
inclination, great or small, wise or weird, young or old, ordinary or excep—
tional: peOple who had encountered “the divine” (as they saw it) in some pow-
erful, life—affecting form. Second, with this substantial array of evidence in
hand, he would offer a wider philosophical assessment of the beliefs, issues,
and questions raised by those experiences. The project did not quite turn out as
planned, for as he worked, James saw the first of his tasks grow into almost the
entire effort, leaving only the last several lectures to address the work of
assessment. Clearly, he had set himself a daunting assignment.
Defining Religion
After some preliminaries, James begins his inquiry by proposing a definition
of religion that can lead the way. For the purposes of his investigation religion
should be defined as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in
their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to what-
ever they may consider divine.”16 This formula is less than elegant, but the

200 Nine Theories of Religion
main idea is clear. Such a definition intentionally puts much of what we nor-
mally associate with religion to the side. By design, says James, the focus of a
book from a professor of psychology ought not to be on institutions or assem—
blies, not on churches, temples, or mosques, not on ministers or monks, and
not on rituals or ceremonies, pertinent as these things undoubtedly are to the
religious life. Nor should the focus be on creeds, confessions, or theological
doctrines. All of these features—the beliefs, the practices, the organizations——
should be seen as matters that are secondary; they come after, and arise from,
the primary fact, which is to be found in the personal experience of individu-
als. The center of religion appears in those decisive, deeply felt moments when
human beings feel they have directly encountered God (or whatever else they
may think of as the divine). Those experiences are the heart of faith, the center
of all religion. They are not superstition; they do not involve some bargain with
a spirit of the field to make crops grow, or some sacrifice to win favors from
the gods of battle. They are serious, moving encounters with the divine as an
overarching, enveloping power, a primal reality. True religious experience elic-
its a response of solemnity and gravity, along with a feeling of surrender and
overwhelming joy; it spurs an impulse to embrace all things, and allows the
self to feel profoundly affirmed and inwardly renewed. In that connection,
James says that we should attend especially to the reports of those people who
appear to have had experiences of this kind in unusually intense or decidedly
dramatic form. We can learn most about religious experience not from people
who are conventionally religious, people who follow custom or obey routine,
but from those who live at the edges of ordinary life—the mystics, seers,
prophets, and saints: those who have seen visions or heard voices. They are the
people who may even be counted as “‘geniuses’ in the religious line.””
Judging by conventional measures, our first impulse would be to dismiss
such personalities as unbalanced: a collection of the eccentric, unstable, and
slightly strange. But in fact, we need to look carefully at these examples, not
ignore them, for they often disclose in pure, unmixed form what is not easily
noticed in the personalities we call normal. Further, we should not be put off
our task by people who want to dismiss religious beliefs, especially strange or
mystical beliefs, on the basis of human physiology. “Medical materialists” are
quick to attribute religious experience to purely physical causes or psycho-
physical disorders, such as sexual tension, epileptic seizure, or nervous dys-
function. These physical causes can be introduced to explain almost anything
humans claim to experience or believe; we can explain atheism or faith with
these same causes. So they prove nothing negative or otherwise about the
actual content of religious beliefs. If we were to learn that the genius Isaac
Newton suffered from chronic depression or epilepsy, that fact would hardly be
a reason to reject his laws of motion or theory of gravitation. “In the natural

The Verdict of Religious Experience: William James 201
sciences and industrial arts,” James notes, “it never occurs to anyone to try to
refute opinions by showing up their authorg’s neurotic constitution. Opinions
here are invariably tested by logic and experiment, no matter what their author’s
neurological type. It should be no otherwise with religious opinions.”18 We
should therefore dismiss alien causes and judge these religious opinions on
their own terms, where different measures apply: “Immediate luminous-
ness, . . . philosophical reasonableness, and moral helpfulness are the only
available criteria.”’9
The first attribute of all religious experience is an intuition, a certitude that
beyond our conventional experience, beyond the routine events of daily life,
stands another, unseen order of reality. This reality does not immediately stand
out in the Specific events or occasions of ordinary life because it lies in, under,
around, and beyond them. It impinges invisibly 0n visible things, calling us to
look past the dreary round of daily tasks and troubles and seek harmony with
what lies beyond.
Two Kinds of People: Healthy-Minded and Sick Souls
Religious experience of every kind affirms this unseen reality, but there are
certain differences in the way people respond to it. Drawing a distinction that
has since become famous, James says we must recognize two kinds of person-
ality, two differing temperaments. Some are fundamentally “healthy-minded,”
affirming and optimistic; others are more darkly disposed—more inclined to
notice evil, to lean toward pessimism. They are the “sick souls.”
For those born with a “sky-blue” spirit, a positive, welcoming view of life
and its experiences comes naturally and spontaneously. The beloved St. Francis
of Assisi was one of these “healthy-minded” souls. He loved, embraced, and
was made wondrously happy by all he encountered—by brother sun and sister
moon, by all things bright and beautiful, by all things located or living in
the beneficent Creator’s world. Others, perhaps not as naturally healthy as
St. Francis, achieve a similar contentment by conscious effort and practice.
They set a course of purposeful self—surrender and acceptance of life; they
welcome things as they come, and they do so with an embrace that disposes
them to dismiss all bad things as invisible or deceptive, and to attend only to
what is positive. James cites as examples of this more studied optimism the
new religious movements of his day: the system of self—help known as “mind
cure,” or “new thought,” and the program of Mary Baker Eddy and her disci-
ples, known as Christian Science. Nor are these innovative movements alone.
For some this inner peace can be found in the older theologies, in the release
that the teachings of Martin Luther and John Wesley promise to those who
accept God’s grace in their lives. The Spirit they all share is a determination to

202 Nine Theories of Religion
think positively, to look away from evil and place it on the periphery of life,
and to attend only to things that are good. And they are convinced that good is
genuinely achieved in their lives by doing so. By their accounts, some who
think this way experience such things as better health; physical “cures” can
take effect because of their mental optimism. In this they could even be com—
mended as near to the attitude of modern science. They prove their hypothesis
by its effects, finding the experimental evidence of healing in their own lives.
And who are we to dismiss them instantly, without at least considering the
evidence they offer? When we dismiss their claims abruptly, looking in on
them and passing judgment from the outside, are we outsiders not in fact the
ones who behave unscientifically?
The other temperament—what James describes as the “sick soul”—presents
a less appealing portrait on first sight. This is the personality inclined to maxi-
mize, rather than marginalize, the presence of evil in the world. People of this
type find the attitudes of the healthy-minded superficial and shallow. They
insist on an undeniable fact: suffering, sorrow, and death are stamped indelibly
on the world’s architecture as we encounter it. This is a sober truth that the
ancient Greeks, for all their playful mythology, knew very well. They recog-
nized that no one can escape fate; their Epicurean and Stoic philosophers did
not pretend otherwise. Similarly Tolstoy, the great novelist, claimed to see with
acute vision the utter pointlessness of human activities, the triviality of inter-
ests and pleasures that are certain to end—for all people—at their death. An
even more personalized form of this despair can be seen in the English preacher
John Bunyan, author of the famous book Pilgrim ’5 Progress. He described
himself as a man in double despair: “weary of life, and yet afraid to die.” To
these more troubled souls, evil is ingrained in the world. And though most of
us could wish to be in the club of the happier and healthy—minded, it must be
admitted that the wider, more truthful graSp of life belongs to these more pes—
simistic minds. The simple fact of all existence is that while it can offer joy and
wellness, it is also framed irretrievably by defect and danger, by disease, and
ultimately by death. In all lives, these grim elements appear at one time or
another, and they invariably bring dark, despairing moments with them. Corre-
spondingly, the religions that most completely address the human situation are
those that most fully appreciate this reality of evil and center on deliverance
from it. The best known of these religions of salvation are Christianity in the
Western world and Buddhism in the East.
Most people of pessimistic temperament do not give up on life; only a few
become utter nihilists and fatalists. The others become what James calls
Divided Selves. They seek wellness and true inner peace, but they know it will
only come by struggle. This was the case with the early Christian theologian
Augustine of Hippo. Only after great inner struggle did he give up his

The Verdict of Religious Experience: William James 203
self-indulgent life as a young man to find the gift of eternal joy and peace. Only
through an extreme agony did his restless: heart come to rest in God. All pessi-
mistic minds know that somewhere in life there must be a turning, a clear and
true reversal—something that puts life back on firm ground. A profound expe-
rience of life wholly changed is what the personality needs in order to regain a
secure equilibrium.20 Such transitions do not necessarily need to be religious;
they can occur in other ways, as when a person turns toward some new goal or
purpose, even in some cases what may seem a less admirable purpose. People
can turn from a life untouched by the temptations of wealth to one of avaricious
greed, or vice versa; we can fall in or out of love, and if we are religious, we
can also turn away from religion, as was the case with the French philosopher
Theodore Jouffroy, who found relief in renouncing his faith and adopting
atheism.
When such a major turning happens, it is not a kind of minor and momentary
shift of interest, as all human beings pass through when they prefer—for a
time—a new trend in clothing, a novel diet, or a different football team; it is
instead a shift at what James calls “the habitual center” of a person’s self, the
core of one’s being. Some feeling or belief, perhaps once at the margin of a
personality, moves unmistakably, and sometimes suddenly, to the commanding
center. It occurs as something deep and fundamental, reshaping a person’s
entire life from that moment forward. The religious word “conversion” is the
most suitable term we have to describe this kind of experience. Certainly con-
version can occur in different ways. Sometimes it happens in a manner James
calls “volitional.” Gradually over time, yet still in a decisive way, the orienta-
tion of a personality changes. In other instances it takes the form of a sponta—
neous and sudden experience. In either form, the key point in any conversion
appears in the moment of self-surrender, the instant of “letting go.” No matter
how studied and strenuous any prior religious efforts may have been, the clas-
sic cases of conversion involve at some key point a state of exhaustion with all
previous efforts, a sense of being Spent, and often physically weak, just before
the moment of self-surrender and rebirth.2| In certain American and British
Protestant communities, especially the Baptist and Methodist churches, there
has also been an accent on “revivalism”—events specially arranged to promote
a dramatic, emotional, and instantaneous conversion experience. In the arche-
typal revivalist conversion, James writes, “you must first be nailed on the cross
of natural despair and agony, and then in the twinkling of an eye be miracu-
lously released.” He adds that “it always seems, after the surrender of the per—
sonal will, as if an extraneous higher power had flooded in and taken
possession.”22 Along with surrender, the drama of spontaneous conversion is
accompanied by other characteristic features: a sense of “higher control,” a
release from worry and concern, and a deep feeling that all is well. There is

204 Nine Theories of Religion
also a sense of perceiving truths unknown before, of seeing the world itself as
changed in appearance and accepting life as suffused with a secret joy and
inner tranquility.
James suggests also that in these extraordinary cases what we may well be
seeing is an eruption of the “subliminal” consciousness recently proposed
by Freud and Breuer. “If there be higher spiritual agencies that can directly
touch us,” he observes, “the psychological condition of their doing so might
be our possession of a subconscious region which alone could yield access to
them.”23 Even so, the validity of such experiences should in the end be mea-
sured not by where they originated, but by what they have produced. This does
not mean, of course, that those who have had conversion experiences are pre—
sumed to be better people, or can be expected to do more good, than those
who have not. But at least this much can be said: There is broad and vigorous
testimony from those who have had such experiences that they feel they are
better people, emotionally and morally, than they would have been Without
them. Their lives offer exhibits of the Bible’s promise: “By their fruits ye shall
know them.”
Saints and Saintly Lives
If the value of the conversion experience is to be seen in its effects, what do
those effects look like? And how do we assess them? James responds as
follows: We know that conversion leads to “saintliness,” so in addressing these
questions, we can hardly do better than listen to what the saints themselves
have chosen to tell us. Here he puts to full use the remarkable inventory of
personal confessions that has made the narrative of Varieties so rightly famous
and irresistibly fascinating to readers of almost every persuasion. For after all,
who better to tell their story than the converted ones themselves? And how
better to hear them than in their own words as shared in the treasury of their
letters, diaries, sermons, books, and meditations, their musings, poems,
prayers, and songs?
It should not be surprising, in light of these questions, that the descriptions,
accounts, and assessments of “saintliness” that James provides for us take up
no less than five lectures in their entirety and a good measure of the others
as well. There is a rich, remarkable diversity in the deeply personal and emo-
tional statements that he draws upon, though it needs to be noted that they in
most cases come from Christian experience, both Protestant and Catholic.
(Examples from Asian, Jewish, Muslim, and other religions do appear, but they
are rare.) Whatever the source, there is in these stories from the saints a striking
personal candor, an unvarnished and intimate honesty, a sense of singular joy
newly discovered and placed on a wide canvas for full display. Most are

The Verdict of Religious Experience: William James 205
touchingly emotional, tender, and sometimes beautiful; others are stunning in
the level (for their time and place) of self-disclosure; still others suggest per-
sonalities near to the neurotic and behaviors bordering on the bizarre. Yet amid
all the variations in quality and peculiarities of expression, certain shared pat—
terns naturally emerge.
In their inward character, the emotions that claim the central place in the
lives of saints follow naturally from their experience in the conversion moment.
There is a feeling of surrender, of being swept into something wider and
grander than mere personal concerns—a welcome embrace of the greatness of
the divine that dwarfs all things human. Along with the feeling of release from
all constraints and stress, a true joy and elation in “letting go,” there is a desire
to affirm others and join in harmony with them. These inner spiritual qualities
come to visible expression in the distinctive behaviors of the saints. In some
cases the quality of self-surrender expresses itself in asceticism—the visible
practice of self—denial and, in more extreme cases, even self-punishment.
Others among the converted are moved to practice some or all of the classic
religious vows: poverty, chastity, and obedience. The most enthusiastic try to
practice all of the disciplines. The saints strive also for purity in life, strongly
opposing cruelty and sensuality. Above all, there is in the saints a noticeable
“increase in charity.” Their testimonies show decisively that religious experi-
ence moves believers to a renewed sympathy for others, a love even for ene—
mies, and a selfless compassion for the poor and downtrodden. Not that
religious experience makes all who have found it to be alike. In some these
qualities and behaviors are more evident; in others less so. But almost all of the
traits can to some extent be seen in almost all of the saints.
Of course it is not enough just to describe the motives and manners that arise
from religious experience. We need also to appraise the outward effects and
measure as we can the actual good that comes from saintly lives. And here,
James argues, we ought to test saintliness by common sense; we should “use
human standards to help us decide how far the religious life commends itself
as an ideal kind of human activity. If it commends itself, then any theological
beliefs that may iHSpire it, in so far forth will stand accredited. If not, then they
will be discredited, and all without reference to anything but human working
principles.”24 We need of course to allow that individuals differ considerably
from one to the next; just as there are varieties of religious experience, there are
varieties in the individual aims and actions that such experience may lead to.
Judgments need to be broadly drawn, and we can only say what is “on the
whole” good or not good. By no means, for example, can we say that the truly
strange and excessive behaviors of some of the saints actually commend them—
selves to our common sense. Clearly, devotion can on occasion become fanat-
icism, as when Martin Luther saw no reason to protest the torture of the

206 Nine Theories of Religion
Anabaptists he disagreed with. Or it can go to absurd extremes. Sister Mary
Margaret Alacoque became so consumed with her visions of the Sacred Heart
that she was of no use to others in her convent—unable to work in the kitchen,
attend to the sick, or perform any other useful task. Saint Louis of Gonzaga
was so obsessed with his sexual purity that he refused to have a conversation
with a woman, or even look up from the pavement to see one. But on the whole,
and even with the excesses, the record of religious experience is undeniably
positive. If we measure by the impulse toward charity, for example, the saints
have been by all accounts “a genuine creative social force” in the world. They
are people who in countless instances have turned lives filled with despair or
mired in evil into beacons of hope and forces for good. They have moved out
of enslavement to vice or addiction and into exemplary civility and compas-
sion; or they have escaped habits of cruelty, violence, and self—centered malice
to embrace generosity, self-sacrifice, and love of others. As with acts of charity,
so too with asceticism, the spiritual practice of self-denial. When applied in
reasonable measure, asceticism has enabled saints in their multitudes to liber-
ate themselves from the debilitating worship of money and material posses-
sions. It has taught them to value life and the others in their lives, rather than
allow possessions and properties to become obsessions of the kind that disable
compassion and deflate all spiritual aspirations. Asceticism has also provided
welcome release from lives dominated by silly pretensions, envious competi-
tion with rivals, and incessant worries about whether wealth is increasing or
decreasing. By these measures, the beneficial effects of religious experience
are indiSputable and everywhere visible.
Mysticism
No discussion of saintly lives transformed by conversion can be complete
without a consideration of mysticism, which some consider the premier form
of religious experience. It is found across the globe. In almost every one of the
world’s major traditions, we can find a focus on mysticism as the pinnacle of
the religious life. In Christianity, both Protestant and Catholic, mystics have
seen themselves as a select and special few—spiritually favored souls—to
whom God has given the ultimate gift of being drawn into the wonders of His
immediate presence, of being absorbed, through Christ or the Virgin or some
relic or symbol, into the full, unmediated glory of divinity. Those in the elite
Sufi sect of Islam feel the same’ way. In Asian religions like Hinduism and
Buddhism, mystical experience is even more prevalent; the most profound
Hindu sacred texts and the most highly regarded teachers of yoga offer the
mystical experience of “Samadhi”—oneness with Brahman—as the ultimate
goal for all. The most revered of Buddhist monks stress the supreme value of

The Verdict of Religious Experience: William James 207
“dhyana”—meditative contemplation of the highest order—as the ultimate
path of release from the cycle of rebirth. There is a set of shared features that
define these mystical encounters wherever they appear. They are the same
across cultures. Thus, mystics of almost every kind report their breathtakingly
beautiful experiences as “ineffable”—beyond the power of words to describe;
if we suggest to them a description, their most likely response is: “No, not that;
so much more; more than speech can say.” Though words cannot capture it,
mystics are nearly always certain that they have acquired some profound new
knowledge; they instinctively sense they have found truth of a kind that is deep
and hidden, truth of a type that the ordinary rational mind does not grasp. The
mystical moment is, to be sure, a passing thing. The peak phases rarely reach
to even an hour in length, but in those brief intervals, new dimensions of divin-
ity, new waves of wonder, come flooding in. And they come seemingly without
effort, for another feature of mystical experience is its passive character.
Strenuous efforts are sometimes made in preparation for the experience, but
when the mystical moment comes, the feeling is one of being utterly over-
whelmed. The self is nothing; it is helpless; the divine is all and is overpower-
ing; the self is completely engulfed by such experience, joyfully submerged in
transcendent beauty and peace. To be sure, most ordinary pe0ple never reach
these mystical heights; they have neither the gift nor the discipline to get there.
But through more conventional means, through sacrifice, confession, and
especially prayer, they can achieve at least a faint approximation of the mys-
tic’s peace and joy in embracing the divine.
When we turn to the matter of assessing these mystical experiences, James
says that there are limits that apply. In describing the union of the human soul
with God, a mystical poet like St. John of the Cross shares a deep experience
that to him is of surpassing value and undeniable truth. His poetry sings of his
encounter with God. We who have not had his experience have no ground for
denying him the validity of his visions. They are his; they are truth for him. At
the same time, he cannot impose his truth on others. However powerful his
poetry, he cannot require those of us without his mystical gifts to accept his
revelations as valid for all merely on his word. Neither can the Hindu yogi or
the Buddhist sage. The truth is theirs; the value is theirs. We cannot make it
fully ours. But even if not ours, such truth can still be of spiritual use. For the
great majority, those of us who are not mystically inclined, mystics can be tutors.
They provide the world with clues, with hints and suggestions of a reality that
is there for all of us even if we are less able than they to access it. Compared to
everyday rational thinking, the visions of mystics suggest a vastly wider spiri-
tual reality; they serve as “windows through which the mind looks out upon a
more extensive and inclusive world”; they open portals that disclose “the truest
of insights into the meaning of this life.”25

203 Nine Theories ofReligion
The Heart of Religious Experience
The issue of mysticism and truth brings us to the final chapters of Varieties,
where James turns at last to the philosophical questions raised by religious
experience. Mysticism, we can agree, offers truth for the mystic. Religious
experience offers truth for those who have been favored to have it. But even so,
we still need to address the question of truth for everyone. When a scientist
affirms the truth of the law of gravitation, she means that gravity applies to all;
it is not truth just for herself. So we do need to ask whether there is any way
that we can say the same thing for religion. Is there anything about religious
experience that we can say is true for everyone—-for all religions and even all
who are not religious? That is the more difficult question. The confirming of
objective, general truths—truths that all can accept—has in the past been the
business of philosophy to address, using its tools of logic, analysis, and argu-
mentation. But as applied to religion, says James, philosophy has been of little
use. It has led only to endless, futile arguments about such things as the exis-
tence and attributes of God. So by far the better course is to apply (as far as
they can take us) the methods of science: to continue on the path of these very
Gifford Lectures, and draw conclusions from the observation of actual reli-
gious experiences. Better to make judgments only after we have made all of
the effort needed to gather evidence, to classify and compare it, and to frame
proper categories and generalizations.
Clearly, there are things that a truly scientific study of religious experience
can tell us. But also, we need to proceed carefully. Science can make mistakes.
Some who have thought themselves scientific about religion have been con—
fused, and seriously mistaken. They see religion as the opposite of science
because it appeals to the personalities of the gods to explain the world rather
than the uniform, impersonal laws of nature that are the pride of scientific
inquiry. It hardly needs saying that James has theorists like Tylor and Frazer in
mind here, and he is underscoring their mistake. To understand religion scien-
tifically, we must “subordinate the intellectual part” and realize that “it is
founded on feeling”; that is the only place where “we catch real fact in the
making, and directly perceive how events happen.” The heart of religion is not
to be found, as Tylor and Frazer think, in belief in gods or in the prayers and
sacrifices offered to please them. If we think that way, we will of course con-
clude, as they do, that religion is simply a “survival,” a set of ancient supersti-
tions now properly replaced by science. But that is a grave mistake. For what
the pages of Varieties illustrate in abundance is that the heart of religion is to
be found in the realm of human feeling, along with the undeniable change in
moral conduct that it produces. That, if anything, should be clear from all of the
reports that come to us from the saints. That is the center—the enduring

The Verdict of Religious Experience: William James 209
core—of religious experience. What Tylor and Frazer dismiss as the supersti-
tion of primitive religions is a quite marginal and dispensable thing; it is merely
the “theory,” or theology, that primitive peoples place upon their religious
experience to try to account for it. Such theories are changeable and replace-
able, while the experience and actions at the core of such theories are change—
less and abiding. As James puts it,
When we survey the whole field of religion, we find a great variety in the
thoughts that have prevailed there; but the feelings on the one hand and conduct
on the other are almost always the same, for Stoic, Christian, and Buddhist
saints are practically indistinguishable in their lives. The theories which Reli-
gion generates, being thus variable, are secondary; and if you wish to grasp her
essence, you must look to the feelings and conduct as being the more constant
elements. . . . This seems to me the first conclusion which we are entitled to
draw from the phenomena we have passed in review.26
In sum, religious ideas and beliefs invariably change and differ. Religious
feeling—along with the conduct it produces—is different: it is always present
and constant—the same across the borders of cultures and in both the great
religions and the small.
So, if all of this is the case, can we say anything more precise about these
“feelings” at the core of religious experience? What do they consist of? In broad
strokes, James says we can mark out the following. Religious experience finds
the visible world to be part of a larger, more spiritual universe; it sees our unit-
ing with that spiritual realm as the goal of human life; it conveys knowledge of
that realm; and it draws on practices like prayer and meditation to channel that
spiritual energy into the present world; finally, religious experience inspires and
uplifts, even as it offers the believer a profound sense of safety and peace.
Wherever we observe these feelings, these sentiments and emotions, along
with the habits and actions they inspire—there, says James, we can detect the
“more constant elements” that define the essence of religion. In addition, if we
consider the structure of religious experience, we can say more. In its most
universal and compelling form, religious experience almost everywhere con-
sists of a crucial two-part sequence. There is first a personal feeling of uneasi-
ness, a deep sense that something about ourselves as we naturally stand is
discordant, dissonant, broken. Then there is the feeling of rescue: a wonderful,
flooding sense of a solution found, a salvation discovered. In the moment of
conversion we feel a sense of resolution and escape that has been achieved by
somehow “making proper connection with the higher powers.” This transition,
this compelling experience of reversal and recovery, is religion’s pivotal center-
point. In every one of us, says James (shifting as he occasionally does to

210 Nine Theories of Religion
parent-and-child discourse) there is a “wrong part” and a “better part.” The
crucial turn occurs as the individual person connects his or her “real being”
with the “higher” and “better” part. Further, those who pass through a religious
experience discover that “this ‘higher part’ is coterminous and continuous with
a MORE of the same quality, which is operative in the universe” outside of our-
selves.27 James here goes back to more abstract language, but if we attend
closely to it, his meaning becomes clear. In the moment of religious conver-
sion, of renewal, enlightenment, or discovery—whatever we may call it——and
as individual persons move inwardly from distress to relief, from being “lost”
to being “saved,” they are enabled to make this change through contact with the
“more,” which is divinity, however theologians or spiritual leaders may say this
“divine” should be conceived. In other words, through religious experience
human beings repair their broken selves with help they see as coming from
beyond, from the realm of ultimate reality. This pivotal experience, however it
may occur, is the permanent emotional core of religion. After that conversion
moment, or conversion process, the self recovers; a sense of well-being suf-
fuses the mind, and good actions follow. On that most basic transaction, James
argues, there is virtually unanimous agreement among the world’s religions.
Religious Experience, Theologies, and Truth
Of course there is also genuine disagreement among religions, but it should be
now clear to everyone just why this is so. It is in their differing efforts to explain
religious experience that divergent religious cultures, traditions, and theologies
arise. The work of theologians and the wisdom of spiritual teachers has always
been to propose ideas and frame systems of thought about religious experience
that help to convey and explain it within their distinctive cultural communities.
In each instance they connect the core experience of conversion with doctrinal
teachings that are built out and up from it. James assigns to these systems of
thought the word “over-belief”—each religion in its different way constructing
its own system of ideas on the common psychological foundation of the con-
version experience. The Christian theology of creation, fall, and redemption is a
system of over-beliefs. The Hindu system of imprisonment in matter, self~denial,
meditation, and release is a different over—belief. The Muslim framework of
infidel irreligion, submission to Allah, and heavenly reward is another. The
Buddhist sequence of karma, moksha, and nirvana (imprisonment, release,
and the bliss of extinction) is yet another. In each of these systems there is,
obviously, a different set of over-beliefs governed by differing personal tem-
peraments, cultural assumptions, and religious ideas. But these varieties of
religious over-belief do not alter the psychological core, which remains the
same across cultures, behind theologies, and underneath traditions.

The Verdict of Religious Experience: William James 211
To identify this core of religion is a major step, but it is not the last step.
There is still the matter of the general truth-of religion for all. Does the “more”
that James finds at the heart of religious experience enable believers say that
their beliefs are universally true? After all, the core of religious experience may
well be universal, but it could be a universal delusion. That is what Freud has
said: the obsessional neurosis of religion is universal. Further, even a fully
scientific consensus can be mistaken. Before Copernicus nearly all of science
held that the sun circles the Earth. There was consensus, but it was mistaken.
Why not the same for all of the religious experience that has been so thor-
oughly documented in these lectures?
In response to this final question, James offers first a suggestion and then an
argument, the former psychological, the latter both philosophical and personal.
To make the suggestion, he tums—in part at least—to Freud for help. From
their very different perspectives, Freud and James’s sometime associate F. W. H.
Myers, who promoted of psychical research into the supernatural, stood in
agreement on psychology’s most impressive achievement: the discovery of the
subconscious self.28 James had already alluded to this intriguing domain as the
source of religious ecstasy. Could it be, he suggests, that Freud’s unconscious—
what Myers calls “the subliminal self”—is the hidden corridor by which the
divine directly enters the human personality? This speculative notion did not
rest on a very clear or full understanding of Freud, and James does not really
offer it as much more than an intriguing possibility. It nonetheless shows his
willingness to enlist and engage creatively with newer theorems that might be
applied to religious experience.
About the philosophical issue James is more definite. He turns again to the
pragmatic principle that has guided his earlier thinking. As before in the
Principles ofPsychology and “The Will to Believe,” he argues that the final test
of truth is to found the value it offers when we translate belief into action. We
measure the meaning, the truth—character, of an idea or an experience by the
result it delivers when we actually put it to use—whether in the laboratory or
in life. And in those pragmatic terms, we certainly can speak of the truth of
religious experience, can we not? In light of the manifold evidence assembled
in Varieties, evidence which emphatically shows the immense power of reli-
gious experience to alter lives—almost invariably for the better—we are cer-
tainly entitled to speak of the truth of religious experience. Measuring by
pragmatism’s standard of value when applied in action, religious experience
can be judged on its many merits to be true. Experience that has done so much
to heal wounded souls and morally inspire sacrifice of self for others cannot be
other than the experience of truth.
As the Gifford Lectures come to a close, their author candidly—and
commendably—offers his own personal view of religious experience,

212 Nine Theories of Religion
including a statement on his own over-belief, to be placed alongside all the
others. Not surprisingly, James asserts that as a Christian, steeped in the heri—
tage of his cultural tradition, he finds the term “God” to be the best way to
describe the MORE, the divine reality that accompanies religious experience as
he has known it. He announces that faith as his own, but not with the voice of
dogmatic certainty. Instead, he chooses just the words we would expect from
the author of “The Will to Believe.” He describes his faith as “my personal
venture,” a choice attended by risk, but with prOSpect of reward. As he writes
on the final page of Varieties’ final chapter:
I believe the pragmatic way of taking religion to be the deeper way. It gives it
body as well as soul, it makes it claim, as everything real must claim, some
characteristic realm of fact as its very own. What the characteristically divine
facts are . . . , I know not. But the over-belief on which I am ready to make my
personal venture is that they exist. . . . By being faithful in my poor measure to
this over-belief, I seem to keep myself more sane and true.29
Analysis
Intellectually, William James was a man of two profiles. It has been said, with
a trace of both wit and truth, that he pursued psychology as a philosopher, and
philosophy as a psychologist. If so, we can best understand his work as a theo-
rist by looking at him from each side of the porous border he straddled between
those two fields.
Psychology
It is plain to see that as a psychologist, James takes a view of religion that is not
just different from Freud’s, but emphatically opposed to it. The two theorists
start from a measure of common ground, but from there they move in decid-
edly different directions. Both sought to unlock secrets of the human mind;
both turned to psychology after starting with medicine and physiology; and
both readily moved beyond psychology to address wider philosophical issues:
the nature of the mind, the connection between beliefs and emotions, the role
of religion in the personality and society. Despite these shared interests, the
conclusions they reached were polar opposites. James endeavored lifelong to
appreciate and affirm the religious life; Freud summarily dismissed it. James
looks to faith as a source of meaning, as a healer of the afflicted personality,
and as a force for good in the world. Freud finds belief in God a neurotic
delusion—the chief symptom of mental illness that, with the help of

The Verdict of Religious Experience: William James 213
psychotherapy, we must try to cure. James assembles an array of evidence to
show that peOple of all kinds have found in religious experience a lifeline to
mental health, a true and timely rescue for sick souls. For Freud nothing could
be more absurd; nothing could lead us farther from the truth than the conclu-
sion that religion should be favorably associated with mental health.
A part of this sharp divergence obviously lies beyond psychology, in two
very distant personal and cultural worlds. Freud was a European Jew who had
become an atheist early on in life. James, as we have seen, was raised in an
affluent American Protestant home; his father, though unconventional, was
deeply religious and emotionally close to his eldest son, who in return appreci-
ated a parental faith that enriched relationships, anchored morals, and affirmed
democratic values. Beyond these personal motives, it is apparent also that
James and Freud saw the enterprise of psychology from different vantage
points. James saw the field as a far-reaching, formal discipline newly emergent
from a mere province within philosophy. To him it was a broad and promising
form of inquiry equipped with the tools of science and capable of shedding
new light on the mysteries of the brain and mind. His work on The Principles
ofPsychology brought him into acquaintance with the newest paths of research,
from brain physiology to laboratory studies and methods of mental introspec-
tion. Freud’s work by contrast was that of a brilliant innovator working with
small circle of peers to explore a quite unconventional subject; his research
was concentrated primarily on studies of neurotic patients that had led him and
his associates to pioneer the theory and methods of psychoanalysis. When
Freud first advanced his revolutionary ideas in Vienna, James expressed genu-
ine interest. He helped introduce Freud to American discussion. We have
already seen how he found Freud’s general idea of the unconscious to be highly
intriguing. At the same time, he thought of psychoanalysis as only one among
several promising paths of inquiry that made the landscape of modern scien—
tific psychology so inviting. More so than Freud, James’s intellectual travels
took him to multiple points of interest in the discipline.
Philosophy
By the time he began his medical studies, James was well acquainted with the
broad intellectual currents of the Victorian age. He had read widely, not only
in the classics, arts and literature, but among the main texts in Western thought
and the newest research in the sciences.30 He certainly knew that in phiIOSOphy
the leading figures of his day were gathered into two major, and opposing,
schools of thought. The one—already encountered early in his personal life, as
we have seen—was scientific materialism, the perspective of Biichner and
Huxley, bolstered by Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Materialists affirmed the

214 Nine Theories of Religion
primacy of matter over mind. Those in the other camp, in James’s day often
called philOSOphical monism, took as their starting point precisely the reverse:
the primacy of mind over matter. As some may recall from our earlier discus—
sion of Marx, monism can be traced to the German philosopher Hegel, who
in the early decades of the century advocated Absolute idealism. The monists
of James’s day were late-century disciples of Hegel. Like him, they held
that behind the many material appearances and forms of the physical world,
there is a singular and immaterial ultimate reality, a supreme cosmic Mind, to
which they gave the same title that Hegel used: “the Absolute.” Although the
prestige of science was rising rapidly, philosophical monism still claimed the
high ground among academic philosophers almost up to World War 1.31 Its
spokesmen held prestigious positions in both European and Anglo-American
universities. In Britain, F. H. Bradley commanded wide respect, while in
America James’s Harvard colleague and close friend Josiah Royce held pride
of place. Like Hegel, Bradley and Royce held that the Absolute, as supreme
Mind or Idea, discloses itself and its designs in the material world with a kind
of perfect rationality, just as, we might say, our own human minds express
themselves unfailingly in the actions of our bodies, or (to use a different anal-
ogy) just as an architect can be said to bring the concept of a structure to
expression in an actual physical building that perfectly mirrors the design it
was created from. We could almost call these idealists theologians, given how
nearly the concept of the Absolute approximates to the Judeo-Christian con-
cept of the Creator God. But their monism was not monotheism. The Absolute
is supreme mind, but it is not a personality; it does not reveal itself in the Bible
with personal qualities like anger or love; it is absolute rationality—with
neither personality nor emotions. Nonetheless, the Absolute does express itself
in a cosmic order that unfolds in the forms of the material world—exhibiting
a grand coherence that our finite human minds can in their small way concep-
tually grasp.
To materialist philosophers, of course, these monists had managed to get the
whole question of mind and matter both backward and upside down. Matter—
physical reality—is fundamental; what we call mind is a mere product of mat—
ter. To theorize about some great abstraction called the Absolute is to embark
on a fool’s errand. The only path to real understanding of the world leads
through Darwin, materialism, and experimental science, not through Hegel,
idealism, and airy webs of speculation. Materialism claimed not only gifted,
aggressive spokesmen like Huxley, but more than a few other, more quietly
sympathetic adherents, including two of James’s most admired Harvard men-
tors in the sciences—Chauncey Wright and Jeffries Wyman. But monism also
had powerful spokesmen, one of whom, as noted, was J ames’s other colleague
Josiah Royce. In lectures and papers, over coffee or wine, on walks in the

The Verdict ofReligious Experience: William James 215
country, Royce could be seen with his friend strenuously arguing the case for
idealism. James had great respect for Royce; he listened, and listened more, but
in the end was not convinced. He rejected monism just as firmly as, years ear-
lier, he had rejected materialism. And for largely similar reasons.
Both perspectives, he insisted, follow the perilous path of abstraction. They
are framed in the study or the laboratory, places very distant from the realities
of life as it is lived by ordinary human beings coping with everyday concerns.
Materialism entails determinism and undermines freedom of the will. Life in
the real world, however, requires us to assume that we are free agents, who can
act reSponsibly in making moral decisions. From the start, therefore, material-
ism disqualifies itself. As James had concluded early in life, it is a philosophy
no one can actually live by. But then monists are no better off. They spin their
silver web of abstractions to prove that the world as we find it is exactly as it
should be. They explain that it unfolds in keeping with the perfect rationality
scripted by the Absolute. But such a system can only be proposed by thinkers
utterly out of touch with the actualities of human life, which is scarred by hor-
rific episodes of evil. No philosopher, no human being who has experienced
real physical suffering, known the devastation of a flood or famine, or seen the
death of a child can truthfully say such a world is “just as it should be.” Such
things cannot be accepted as needed, logical, and natural, any more than a
building with faulty foundation could be seen as an essential part of an archi-
tect’s plan. Such a calm, icy acceptance of evil as a logical and natural feature
of world and true expression of the perfectly rational Absolute is absurd.
Monism may entertain philosophers at a distance from life’s realities, but like
materialism, it does not make sense of moral thought or action; it cannot speak
to life as we actually experience it.32
It was this dissatisfaction with both monism and materialism that led James
to propose, as a new departure, his philosophy of pragmatism, where the truth
and value of ideas should be judged by their usefulness, by what happens when
we apply them to our actions in the real world. In that world, we know that a
belief is true “if it pays” when we adopt it. To use a simple, real—world carpen—
ter’s analogy: If we define wood as “a natural substance that is solid and
strong,” we determine the truth of that definition when we act upon it to build
a house. It is in our use of wood that we discover the truth that it is solid and
strong. Similarly so in other aspects of life: we assess the truth of beliefs by
their value to us when we make use of them.
James did not develop this core idea fully until the very final phase of his
career, publishing near the end of his of his life the collection of essays enti—
tled: Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907). Nearly
a decade earlier, however, in a well-known address given at the University of
California in Berkeley just two years prior to his Gifford Lectures, he publicly

216 Nine Theories of Religion
introduced pragmatism as the distinctively new philosophical outlook that he
would personally champion. He would turn his back “resolutely and once for
all” on other philosophies, giving the last years of his career to the exposition
and defense of the pragmatist program. He acknowledged his Harvard col—
league C. S. Pierce as its pioneering thinker and, in part, his mentor. From that
lecture it was also evident that he was giving a preview of the central role that
pragmatism—the principle of measuring truth by its effects—would play in the
scientific study of religion that he was about to begin. If we were to propose a
long philosophical 3 subtitle for The Varieties of Religious Experience, we
would not be mistaken to suggest: “Neither Materialism nor Monism, but
Pragmatism as the Key to Understanding Religion.”
Critique
No less than other theorists, William James has acquired his share of critics,
not only in his day but certainly also in the century following. The more note-
worthy of the criticisms vary considerably in scope and character. Some center
on matters of evidence; others focus on assumptions and definitions; still oth-
ers address the logic of certain arguments, both in Varieties and in some of the
shorter discussions James offers in his lectures and essays. In addition, some
criticisms come close to the core of James’s overall approach; others, while not
unimportant, address matters somewhat less central to his program. We can
look briefly at both types.
Marginal Concerns
Unconsidered Evidence
James commits to studying religion scientifically, so it is fair to ask how
scientific he is with his evidence, especially as assembled in The Varieties of
Religious Experience. There he proposes to make a universal argument, appli—
cable to all of human religious experience and anchored by direct evidence—
the personal reports of people who testify to an encounter with the divine. By
quite a significant margin, however, the reports he considers can be seen to
come from Protestant Christians, eSpecially those of evangelical persuasion,
placed in either England or America. These are religious cultures that by tra-
dition are most diSposed to make the moment of “conversion” a central ele—
ment of their religious life. James does also adduce Catholic instances, citing
the cases of St. Theresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, and occasionally oth-
ers. But that still leaves the discussion framed chiefly by Christian voices.

The Verdict of Religious Experience: William James 217
Reports of Asian Buddhist or Hindu experiences, for example, or texts drawn
from Jewish or Middle Eastern Islamic experience are almost nonexistent.
The lack of examples from these more distant cultures does not necessarily
discredit James’s analyses, but it certainly opens the way to questions about
just how widely grounded his claims are and how definitive his conclusions
can be. At the very least, we would like to hear more from these large, ancient,
and important religious cultures outside of the Western world. Conversely,
James gives perhaps too much attention to certain rather marginally religious
movements in Britain and America. He refers, for example, to the short—lived
“mind cure” and new thought movements of his day. James himself was a
founding figure of one such group. Following the British example of F. W. H.
Myers, who was keenly interested in “spiritualism” and belief in the occult,
James promoted the American Society for Psychical Research, which he cites
in his exposition. Among these groups there was a keen interest in religious
experience based on the (quite unproven) premise that better emotional health
will guarantee better physical health or that one could make contact with
deceased loved ones on “the other side.” They were thus open to manipulation
by Charlatans claiming dubious psychic and spiritual powers. One can cer-
tainly ask why such movements receive attention when little notice is taken of,
say, the mysticism of the Hindu Upanishads or the rich Buddhist literature on
meditation and enlightenment. To be sure, in James’s day Asian materials were
just beginning to be translated on a scale sufficient to be of use, but
certainly some Asian writings and not insignificant numbers of Islamic and
Jewish mystical religious texts already in translation might well have been
more closely considered and cited.
Unfinished Arguments
Leaving aside evidential issues and the case of Varieties, we can also notice
questions that have been raised about James’s occasional writings, which often
were initially presented as public lectures for general audiences. This circum—
stance naturally required simplification and compression, which in some
instances came at a cost. Consider the argument we traced in “The Will to
Believe,” certainly one of James’s most well-received and provocative lectures.
There we found him defending belief in God along the lines of Pascal’s wager
argument. Over the three centuries since it was penned, however, Pascal’s
claim that belief in God is worth the risk has elicited a variety of criticisms
from later philosophers and theologians. In the course of his presentation,
James properly acknowledges Pascal, but he then makes no real effort to
engage the subsequent criticisms of the wager theorem, some of which are
quite relevant to his own version of it, or to modify his discussion to take

218 Nine Theories of Religion
account of them. We can perhaps excuse the oversight on the immediate occa—
sion of the public lecture, but less so afterward. There is no sign that James
returned to his discussion to amplify or amend it by addressing at least some
of those criticisms before allowing it to go forward for publication. Instead, he
moved on to other topics and allowed it to be published it as it stood—still
intriguing, still provocative, but certainly less compelling than it might have
been. James in fact later conceded that there were weaknesses he had left
unaddressed.33 Perhaps not surprisingly, his Harvard colleague Santayana
offered the final, somewhat sardonic word on the matter, suggesting that James
himself was less than persuaded by his own arguments. There was “no sense
of security,” he wrote, “no joy, in James’s apology for personal religion. He did
not really believe; he merely believed in the right of believing that you might
be right if you believed.”34
Core Concerns
Difficulties of the kind noticed above are not trivial, but at the same time,
they do not go to the center of things. There are, however, at least two criti-
cisms that come nearer the core of James’s theoretical agenda and thus carry
greater weight. They are definitional in the one instance and conceptual in the
other.
Defining Religious Experience
In Varieties, we may recall, James develops his thesis in a way that we can
restate as follows: at its core, religious experience occurs in individual persons
who pass through a crucial psychological event, from unsettlement to resolu-
tion, from a sense of “something wrong” to that of “something made right.”
With this change comes a new state of mind in which they feel buoyant,
revived, and morally energized, motivated to do good. Amid these welcome
emotions, the self feels in touch with something “MORE”—with the source of
this renewal, perceived as powerful and active in the universe. This pivotal
psychological change is the center of religious experience, which is then, sec-
ondarily, described and explained in the many varieties of theological belief
that are found across the world’s cultures and religions. Those beliefs, obvi—
ously, are particular and specific, not universal; only the experience is
universal.
At first sight, this is an attractive argument to anyone who wants to respect
differences but still think of all humanity as religiously in harmony. But if we
look at the formula very closely, there is a puzzling element to it. The world’s
theological beliefs and belief-systems are exceedingly diverse. The Christian

The Verdict of Religious Experience: William James 219
may define her religious experience as “being saved by the grace of God in
Christ.” The Hindu yogi may describe it as“‘the absorption of the soul (atman),
or self, into Brahman-atman (the Supreme Soul)”; the Buddhist speaks of “the
release (moksha) of enlightenment leading to the bliss of Nirvana.” Some of
these theological ideas do not just differ minimally or modestly from each
other; they differ fundamentally—in ways that sharply diverge or directly con-
flict. In Buddhism, “Nirvana” means “nothingness”; the Buddhist monk longs
for non-existence, for non-being. The Christian concept of “Heaven” is pre-
cisely the opposite; it means not just existing, but existing eternally, with God,
in a perfected state. Buddhist and Christian can perhaps agree that there is a
“more” that is the source of conversion or enlightenment, but they can hardly
be said to agree on what that “more” is, if it is to be anything other than a mere
empty word. If anything, the Buddhist idea of the “more” appears to be just
what the Christian idea is not. So in order to be truly common, in order to be
universal to all, religious experience needs, it would seem, to be entirely empty
of content, devoid of specific definition.
To put this matter a little differently, the fact of religious diversity discloses
something paradoxical about James’s idea of universal religious experience.
He describes it as the profound feeling of escape and resolution uncolored by
competing religious beliefs and belief-systems. But we seem to need those
religious ideas, those divergent sets of beliefs, if we are in any way to define
the experience as religious. The moment we remove those beliefs, the feelings
at the heart of the experience would seem to have no identity of their own. And
if so, how can we call the experience “religious”? Without any theological
concepts to define it, it may well be a feeling of transformation, a sense of
personal wellness newly discovered, but not an identifiably religious transfor-
mation. James understandably centers his attention on religious experience as
the powerful and welcome feeling of renewal—a sense of personal joy, con-
tentment, and surrender alongside a new surge of empowerment. But as soon
as we try to define these feelings as religious, we encounter a problem: we need
the ideas and beliefs in order to do so. After all, a morning walk can yield a
soaring sense of joy; a glass of wine brings contentment; falling in love brings
blissful surrender. None of these things is religious. “Religious” experience
thus seems to need—somewhere, somehow—a religious belief ,or idea to
define it. James, however, does provide any. In fact he seems in this connection
studiously to avoid mentioning concepts or ideas—something that is especially
puzzling in light of what he had said earlier in Principles. There, we may recall,
he insisted that human feelings can, even without help from the intellect, pro-
vide us with “pre-conceptual” knowledge. Similarly, in Varieties, when dis—
cussing mystical experience, he tells us it has “noetic” character; it gives us
knowledge. But here, when separating pure religious experience from the

220 Nine Theories ofReligion
theologies that explain it, there seems to be nothing left in the way of knowl-
edge that would allow us to define it as religious. It seems a feeling that is
empty, like feeling happy without anything to define what we are happy about.
In the end, then, we are left with a puzzle. To the degree that an experience is
religious, it must be quite specifically religious (that is, “theological”) to some,
and cannot be universally religious to all, while to the degree the experience is
universal and valid for all, it must be without ideas and so cannot be specifi-
cally religious to some or any. Putting it more pointedly, James seems to insist
on a kind of experience that cannot be religious if truly universal, and cannot
be universal if truly religious. We seem to be in a definitional quandary—with
little in the way of a path to escape it.
Pragmatism, Belief, and Truth
A final point of criticism pertains chiefly to James as a philosopher, but with
relevance also to his understanding of religion. The key issue is how we
judge the truth of our beliefs, particularly religious beliefs. If pragmatism
is to be our guide, it follows that we will apply to religions the pragmatic
criterion of truth. In James own later words, published after Varieties had
been written: “If the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest
sense of the word, it is true.”35 The register of religious testimonies we find
in Varieties is assembled to illustrate that very principle. The “hypothesis of
God” confers psychological benefit, a wellness of mind, on all of those
souls—healthy or sick—who have affirmed it. And evidence abounds that
such selves are then moved to do good for others. The narrative of Varieties
enables us to see in vivid colors how the truth of religion emerges from the
good things that flow into the souls of the saints and the equally good things
that flow out of the lives they live.
Not surprisingly, both in James’s own day and ours, this pragmatic test of
truth has drawn a great deal of scrutiny from the analytical eyes of philoso-
phers. Does the pragmatic criterion, they ask, really serve the purpose James
assigns to it? Does it in fact lead us from the benefits of religion to the truth of
religion? The earliest and most skeptical questioners in this regard were two
British philosophers, younger contemporaries of James, who at the time were
offering the world of philosophy a new departure of their own in the form of
language analysis.
In several articles published in the leading British journals of philosophy,
G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell subjected James’s pragmatism to a rigorous
analytical critique. What, they asked, does James actually mean when he
claims that we measure truth by its utility, when he says that we discover what
is true by determining that it is good? It can be generally agreed, wrote Moore,

The Verdict of Religious Experience: William James 221
that most of the things we know to be true are useful, and many things known
to be false are not. But that is evident enough. Presumably James wants to say
more than that. If we read his language attentively, he appears to make utility
the sole criterion of truth, so that only useful beliefs should be judged true, and
false beliefs judged useless. But clearly, that principle is a problem if James
means to apply it in all cases. We can certainly think of instances where true
beliefs are not always useful—as when a detective attends too much to certain
things known to be true about a crime and becomes distracted from other things
that would better lead him to the real culprit, rather than the innocent man that
he now has under suspicion. Conversely, we can think of obvious cases where
believing, or leading someone to believe, what is false can be very useful—for
example in war, when deception of an enemy with a lie can save the life of a
friend in hiding.36 Russell adduces another instance, this with a sly and more
pointed application to religion. Using J ames’s own language, he says, “I have
always found that the hypothesis of Santa Claus ‘works satisfactorily in the
widest sense of the word’; therefore ‘Santa Claus exists’ is true, although Santa
Claus does not exist.”37 It would seem that the pragmatic criterion of truth leads
to absurdities.
The Santa Claus example, while amusing enough, is not entirely fair. James
does not in fact say that we can believe just about anything we want if we hap-
pen to think it beneficial. A belief under consideration does need to be compat-
ible with our other true beliefs if we want to accept it also as true. And certainly
there are some true beliefs—about the inability of reindeer to fly, the con-
straints of narrow chimneys on overweight men, and the poor aerodynamics of
sleighs—that are incompatible with belief in Santa Claus. But still, as Russell
might respond, we would then want to ask how those beliefs were established.
On the pragmatist criterion of utility also? Or on factual grounds? If the latter,
then, it appears that we must somewhere allow a separate determination of
facts to intrude on the test of utility after all, and we cannot apply the pragmatic
criterion universally, as James seems to assert. The problem with using utility
as our sole, or even chief, guide to the truth of religious belief, Russell con-
cludes, is that it “omits as unimportant the question whether God really is in
His heaven.”33 James is content to accept belief in God as something that has
good effects, but he fails to see that for people of faith, belief in the good
effects requires that the belief in God be a factually true belief—true, that is, in
a sense other than being simply useful.
These matters of fact and utility are not the only complications of pragma-
tism. Russell further explains that we face with J ames’s pragmatic formula the
very difficult task of deciding what the “good effects” of a belief actually are,
and for whom they would be good effects, before we can go on to determine its
truth. If the effects of the French Revolution are judged to be good, then we can

222 Nine Theories of Religion
say that the beliefs of the men who led it were true; if bad, then they were false.
But the consequences of the French Revolution for our time are exceedingly
mixed and complicated. How do we judge whether even in the most general
terms they are good or bad? And of course our own present views are very
likely to affect our judgments. Leftist historians have thought the Revolution
overall to have been good; many rightists and Catholic historians think it was
disastrous. So no clear answer is possible. At the very least, such circumstances
suggest that judging the truth of a belief by “how it works in action” is itself
highly problematic and, as it would seem, pragmatically unworkable.39 Moore
and Russell are not alone in their misgivings; subsequent analysts have raised
either the same or quite similar questions. Of course, it is true also that more
recently some impressive arguments have been offered in James’s defense.40
Nonetheless, the key issue remains difficult and much disputed. To think of
truth as a matter of utility without somewhere addressing truth as factuality
requires for most contemporary philosophers a substantial leap in logic that
they are not willing to make. And as James makes the pragmatic test central to
his assessments of religious faith, is it no surprise to learn that theorists of reli-
gion express very similar reservations. The path of pragmatism may not be
entirely closed to future theorists, but certainly it is not without certain impos-
ing obstacles to overcome.
Conclusion
Serious as some of these misgivings may be, they have neither altered the
impact nor reduced the importance of William James’s rich investigations into
the nature of religious experience. Like Freud, he unquestionably Opened new
paths to follow in excavating the close ties between psychology and religion. If
it is true that Freud assessed one pole of that relationship and found faith chill—
ing, crippling, and destructive, James clearly laid a strong claim to the other
pole, where he found in religious experience a remarkable power to heal the
wounded personality, inspire vigorous moral action, and assert the cause of
good against evil wherever it was present in the world. In time, both Freud and
James were to find devoted disciples; and in consequence, their Opposing
views are still very much alive, not just as intellectual legacies, but as living
theoretical options for some—a circumstance all the more impressive when
we consider how much the field of psychology has transformed itself in the
century since they both were among the most celebrated of its early patrons
and, in their ambitious explorations of religion, among the most adventurous of
its pioneers.

The Verdict of Religious Experience: William James 223
Notes
1. The Letters of William James, vol. 2: 58, as quoted in Ellen Kappy Suckiel,
Heaven ‘s Champion: William James ’5 Philosophy of Religion (Notre Dame, IN:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), p. 3.
2. Cited in Jacques Barzun, A Stroll with William James (New York: Harper & Row,
1963), p. 298. The opening speaker was experimental psychologist David Krech.
3. There are many introductions to pragmatism as a philosophical method, including
James’ own book Pragmatism, published in 1907, which contains a collection of eight
essays on the subject. He gave a great deal of time and effort to explaining the pragma—
tist program and defending it against misconceptions in the last phase of his career,
from 1902 to 1910.
4. One of the best accounts of William James’s early life and the unique character of
the James family is still the two-volume biography, supplemented with extensive cita-
tions and quotations from the intra-family letters, written by Ralph Barton Perry, who
was one of James’s most accomplished students at Harvard. Though now itself very old,
this book, published in 1935, reflects an intimate knowledge not only of William James
but also the James family and William’s many associates and colleagues. Few modern
biographers can match it in the immediacy of its knowledge of the man, his times, and
those who knew him best.
5. Letter to friend Edward B. Van Winkle, from Boulogne-sur—Mer, March 1, 1858,
quoted in Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, Briefer
Version (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), p. 52.
6. William James, Diary, April 30, 1870, cited in Daniel W. Bjork, William James:
The Center of His Vision (Washington, DC: The American Psychological Association,
1997 [1988]), P. 89.
7. George Santayana, Character & Opinion in the United States (New York: George
Braziller, 1955), p. 41.
8. William James, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (Mineola, NY: Dover
Publications, 1950 [1890]), 1: 344.
9. James, The Principles of Psychology, 1: 488.
10. James, The Principles of Psychology, 2: 573; see also the article “The Dilemma
of Determinism,” in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
(Mineola, NY: Dover Books, 1956), p. 146.
11. James, The Principles of Psychology, 2: 576.
12. William James, “The Moral Philosopher and Moral Life,” in The Will to Believe,
pp. 213—214.
13. An assertive defense of James’s view that feelings or emotions provide such
preconceptual knowledge can be found in Suckiel, Heaven ‘s Champion, pp. 39-75, and
throughout.
14. James, “The Will to Believe,” in The Will to Believe and Other Essays on Popular
Philosophy, pp. 1—2.
15. James, “The Will to Believe,” in The Will to Believe and Other Essays on Popular
Philosophy, p. 27.

224 Nine Theories of Religion
16. William James, The Varieties ofReligious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, The
Modern Library (New York: Random House, 1936 [1902]), pp. 31—32 (Italics removed).
17. Ibid., p. 8.
18. Ibid., p. 19.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., p. 173.
21. Ibid., p. 210.
22. Ibid., p. 224.
23. Ibid., p. 237.
24. Ibid., pp. 324—325.
25. Ibid., p. 420.
26. Ibid., p. 494.
27. Ibid., p. 499 (Italics removed).
28. On James’s support of Myers and the British Society for Psychical Research and
his founding of the American equivalent, see Gerald E. Myers, William James: His Life
and Thought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 10, 374, 472, 613.
29. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 509.
30. For rich portraits of J ames’s unusual early years and education, see the engaging
accounts by Gay Wilson Allen, William James: A Biography (New York: The Viking
Press, 1967), and Linda Simon, Genuine Reality: A Life of William James (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998).
31. A comprehensive recent account of monism in Anglo-American discussion is
W. J. Mander’s British Idealism: A History (London: Oxford University Press, 2011).
32. William James, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking,
Popular Lectures on Philosophy (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1928 [1907]),
pp. 20—32.
33. Myers, William James, pp. 451—461; see also n. 16.
34. George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States, (New York:
George Braziller, 1955 [1920]), p. 46.
35. James, Pragmatism, p. 299.
36. G. E. Moore, “Professor James’ Pragmatism,” Proceedings of the Aristotelean
Society, New Series, Volume 8 (1907—1908), pp. 47-48.
37. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy: And Its Connection with
Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945), p. 818.
38. Ibid.
39. These and other objections were raised by Russell in two early essays: “Pragma-
tism,” published in 1908 in the Edinburgh Review, and “William James’s Conception of
Truth,” also published in 1908 under the title “Transatlantic ‘Truth’” in the Albany
Review. Both were republished in Philosophical Essays (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1996 [1910]), pp. 79—111 and 112—130.
40. For a sophisticated and relatively recent analysis of James’s pragmatic justifica-
tions of belief, which shows that some critics have too easily dismissed the arguments,
see William J. Wainright, “William James, Rationality and Religious Belief,” in his

The Verdict of Religious Experience: William James 225
Reason and the Heart: A Prolegomenon to a Critique of Passional Reasoning (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), pp. 84—107.
Suggestions for Further Reading
Allen, Gay Wilson. William James: A Biography. New York: The Viking Press, 1967.
A brief, well-respected biography focused chiefly on James’s life rather than his
thought.
Barzun, Jacques. A Stroll with William James. New York: Harper & Row Publishers,
1983. An engaging, literate reflection J ames’s life and thought by a man of com-
parable stature in American life, one of the nation’s most accomplished humanist
thinkers.
Bixler, Julius Seelye. Religion in the Philosophy of William James. Boston: Marshall
Jones Company, 1926. The earliest study specifically of James’s ideas on reli-
gion; argues for the unity of his thought as woven from strands of empiricism,
realism, and romanticism and as expressed in his ideas of the will, immortality,
mysticism, and deity.
Bjork, Daniel W. William James: The Center of His Vision. Washington DC: The
American Psychological Association, 1997 [1988]. A more recent study of
James’s intellectual agenda, emphasizing his introspective approach to psychol-
ogy and his disposition to see the world as a scene of constantly moving, chang-
ing relationships; provides a valuable bibliographical essay.
Bordogna, Francesca. William James at the Boundaries: Philosophy, Science, and the
Geography of Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. A recent
study that interprets James as a thinker who felt impelled to cross the boundaries
of traditional disciplines.
Carrette, Jeremy. William James ’s Hidden Religious Imagination: A Universe of Rela-
tions. New York: Routledge, 2013. An innovative, well-researched study reflect-
ing the current state of discussion, as well as the author’s effort to achieve a more
interdisciplinary and integrated understanding of James’s personal and intellec-
tual life.
Cooper, Wesley. The Unity of William James ’s Thought. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt
University Press, 2002. Sees James’s thought as an integrated whole in which
two levels of truth, scientific and metaphysical, are united by his concept of pure
experience.
Cotkin, George. William James: Public Philosopher. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1999. An examination of James’s inquiries in philosophy,
psychology, and religion as affected by American politics and sdciety.
Gale, Richard M. The Divided Self of William James. Cambridge, England: Cambridge
University Press, 1999. A well—received recent consideration of James’s philoso-
phy that finds multiple themes, such as two different empiricisms in creative
tension with each other.
Levinson, Henry Samuel. The Religious Investigations of William James. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1981. A monograph centered specifically on

226 Nine Theories of Religion
J ames’s inquiries into religion; meant for the more advanced reader; provides an
extensive bibliography.
Myers, Gerald E. William James: His Life and Thought. New Haven, CT: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1986. The definitive modern intellectual biography; a major study,
comprehensively conceived and exhaustively researched, but not easily accessi-
ble to the novice.
Perry, Ralph Barton. The Thought and Character of William James: As Revealed in
Unpublished Correspondence and Notes, together with his Published Writings.
Volume 1: Inheritance and Vocation. Volume 2: Philosophy and Psychology.
Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1935. The first comprehensive study of
James’s life and thought; winner of the Pulitzer Prize in biography, Perry was one
of James’s students who became himself a philosopher of considerable note.
Written with support from the James family, Perry makes extensive use of
James’s diary and private correspondence. Its 1,500 pages were reduced to about
a third of that length in a subsequent Briefer Version.
Proudfoot, Wayne, ed. William James and a Science of Religions: Reexperiencing The
Varieties of Religious Experience. Columbia Series in Science and Religion. NY:
Columbia University Press, 2004. A collection of six essays by scholars recog-
nized for their expertise on James, religion, and the scientific study of religion;
includes a contribution from the editor, who has published an important study of
religious experience.
Putnam, Ruth Anna, ed. The Cambridge Companion to William James. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997. Thorough, thoughtful, original essays on
multiple aspects of J ames’s intellectual enterprise contributed by leading figures,
mainly in philosophy, but also from the fields of literature, history, and religion.
Russell, Bertrand. Philosophical Essays. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966. A col-
lection that contains Russell’s two trenchant essays: “Pragmatism” and “William
James‘s Conception of Truth.”
Simon, Linda. Genuine Reality: A Life of William James. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998. A personal, rather than intellectual, biography that draws
on a large cache of letters to capture the several sides of J ames’s personality and
the many relationships he cultivated.
Suckiel, Ellen Kappy. Heaven’s Champion: William James ’s Philosophy of Religion.
Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996. A sustained analysis
and defense of James’s appeal to religious experience as a legitimate source of
“preconceptual” knowledge and a justifiable ground of religious belief.
Taves, Ann. Religious Experience Reconsidered. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2009. A rich interdisciplinary study exploring the concept of religious
experience in the light of recent research in the natural sciences, social sciences,
and study of religion.

7
The Reality of the Sacred:
Mircea Eliade
My duty is to show the grandeur, sometimes naive, sometimes mon-
strous and tragic, of archaic modes of being.
Mircea Eliade, Journal 111: 1970—1978’
For Max Weber explanation is a kind of integration. Human endeavor is
complex; when we explain it, we cannot privilege one explanation (or kind of
explanation) to the exclusion of all others. Religion, no less than economy or
society, is sometimes mover and sometimes mirror of the forces that shape
human behavior. William James thinks similarly for psychology. On occasion
religion may reflect mental disorder, as Freud claims; but for most of human—
ity, it anchors the self and is the agent of healing. But if these things are true,
can we go farther? Can we claim that in truth the best way to explain religion
is to explain it “religiously”?
If Marx can explain religion by offering a purely economic explanation of it,
could we not just as well offer a purely religious explanation—as religious people
themselves presumably do? Perhaps we best account for religion not as some—
thing neurotic, socially determined, or driven by class struggle, but as something
normal, natural, even central to the human condition. That, in essence, is the posi-
tion taken by the next theorist in our sequence, the influential Romanian (and later
American) comparativist and historian of world religions: Mircea Eliade.
A genuinely multicultural scholar who Spoke and wrote in several European
languages, Eliade was born and educated in Romania, studied and taught in
Western Europe, and completed his career in the United States. Although he
had an array of intellectual interests and was also a talented writer of fiction, he
chose to devote his life to the comparative study of religion, a field that, in
keeping with European practice, he preferred to call “history of religions.” As
a young man he studied for a time in India, then carried on further research at
home in Romania and elsewhere in Europe. For a time he held a university
227

228 Nine Theories of Religion
position in France. In the 19503 he moved to the United States, where, as a
professor at the University of Chicago, he played a pivotal role promoting the
study of religion in American universities. From the outset, Eliade developed
his ideas in direct opposition to reductionist theories, which in his view seri-
ously misunderstood the role of religion in human life. He advocated what he
called a “humanistic” approach, and throughout his long career as a scholar he
held steadfastly to the thesis that religion must always be explained “on its own
terms.” His program thus deserves our attention not just on its own merits, but
because it goes beyond both Weber and James, issuing a more explicit and
direct challenge to reductionist accounts.
Background
Mircea Eliade was born in Bucharest on March 9, 1907, the son of an officer in
the Romanian army. As a boy he loved quiet places, science, stories, and writ-
ing. In his autobiography he reports how at the age of eighteen he celebrated
with friends the appearance of his one hundredth published article!2 Already
at this young age, he was hired by a newspaper to write feature stories, opinion
columns, and book reviews. Also among his recollections is a memorable inci—
dent from early childhood. He tells how one day at home, on entering an
unused room of the house, he was startled by sunlight filtering through green
curtains in a way that gave the entire space an unearthly emerald-golden glow.
Dazzled and entranced, he felt as if he had been transported into an utterly
different, transcendent world. Later, in words identical to those he used in his
accounts of religious experience, he chose to describe his memory of this event
as a profound “nostalgia”—a longing for a beautiful space of otherworldly
perfection.3 This theme of otherworldly ideals was to run through his educa-
tion as well. At the University of Bucharest and in Italy, he studied the mystical
Platonist thinkers of the Italian Renaissance. While doing this work, he dis-
covered Hindu thought, with its stress on spiritual union with the Supreme
Soul beyond the world. Soon he was setting off for India to study with the
noted sage and scholar Surendranath Dasgupta. Arriving late in 1928, Eliade
enrolled at the University of Calcutta and worked with Dasgupta in his home.
On a somewhat less spiritual plane, he also began an affair with his mentor’s
daughter. An unpleasant separation from his teacher followed, and he moved
on to train in yoga with a guru in the Himalayas.
Looking back in later years, Eliade declared that this stay in India had a
decisive impact on his life. In particular, he says, he discovered three things:
that life can be changed by what he called “sacramental” experience; that sym—
bols are the key to any truly spiritual life; and, perhaps most important, that

The Reality of the Sacred: Mircea Eliade 229
much could be learned from India’s countryside, where there was a broad and
powerful heritage of folk religion—a deeply felt form of spiritual life that had
been in existence since time beyond memory. Simple peasants saw things
sacred and eternal in the mystery of agriculture; they viewed the world as “an
unbroken cycle of life, death, and rebirth.” In addition, this “archaic religion,”
as he came to call it, was a perspective on life that seemed to be shared across
much of the world. It could be found to stretch from the villages of India to the
rural corners of his own Romania, from Europe and Scandinavia to East Asia,
the Americas, and other locales where primitive peoples tilled the soil as ances-
tors had taught them for generations. In India, he wrote, he first discovered
“cosmic religious feeling.”4
In 1931, after three years away, Eliade retumed to Romania to complete his
military service. He continued to write, and in 1933, at the young age of twenty-six,
he became a national celebrity by publishing a prize-winning novel, Maitreyi
(in English, Bengal Night), based on his romance with Dasgupta’s daughter.
This decade was eventful in other respects as well. His doctoral dissertation,
Yoga: An Essay on the Origins of Indian Mystical Theology (1936), was pub—
lished in French, the first of several works on the subject. On receiving his
degree, Eliade began teaching at Bucharest as an assistant to the influential
philosopher Nae Ionesco, who was also a leading figure in a Romanian nation-
alist organization known as the Legion of the Archangel Michael. Some mem-
bers of this group, whose violent, terrorist wing was known as the Iron Guard,
saw their role in Romania as similar to that of the Nazi party in Germany, and
they showed some sympathy for Hitler. Eliade had other friends as well in this
circle, though for his part he seems to have preferred intellectual life, editing a
journal, writing, and arranging discussions of current issues and movements in
literature, philosophy, and art. About any other activities he was always disin—
clined to speak, describing himself as a largely nonpolitical person.
During the years of World War II, Eliade was assigned by the Romanian
government to a diplomatic post in Lisbon, Portugal. When the fighting ended,
he chose not to return to Romania and took up residence in Paris, where he was
given a chance to teach at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes. There he completed
research on two important books that set the course for most of his later study
and thought. Patterns in Comparative Religion (1949) explored the role of
symbols in religion, while The Myth of the Eternal Return (1949) investigated
the concepts of history and sacred time, as well as the differences between
archaic religion and modern thought. Both books were published in French. As
his work progressed, Eliade drew further inspiration from Carl Jung, the nota-
ble Swiss psychologist and Freud’s former associate, whom he met in 1950 at
Ascona, Switzerland, during a regular gathering of European intellectuals
known as the Eranos Conference. Until Jung’s death in 1960, Eliade visited

230 Nine Theories of Religion
him regularly, finding in this aged scholar not just a supporter of his ideas on
archaic religion but a kind of living exhibit of them as well. Of their discus-
sions, he wrote, “I felt I was listening to a Chinese sage or an East European
peasant, still rooted in Earth Mother yet close to Heaven at the same time.”5
The 19503 brought the last important change in Eliade’s scholarly career.
After lecturing at the University of Chicago, he accepted a professorship in its
Divinity School; in 1962, he became one of its Distinguished Service Profes—
sors. His position at Chicago, where he remained for the rest of his life,
enabled him to serve as mentor to a full generation of talented younger schol-
ars who were inspired by his example, even when, as was common, they pro-
ceeded to disagree with his views. He chose to measure his own impact by
citing a simple statistic. When he came to Chicago, there were three signifi-
cant professorships in the history of religions in the United States; twenty
years later, there were thirty, half of which were occupied by his students. On
the intellectual journey from Romania to India to Chicago, Eliade traced a
career—and life—that saw many opposites converge: East and West, tradition
and modernity, mysticism and rationality, contemplation and criticism. He
continued his research and writing in retirement until his death of a stroke on
April 22, 1986.
Eliade’s Starting Point: Two Axioms
Before considering Eliade’s theory in its particulars, we ought to notice the
foundation on which it stands. Two ideas especially serve as its axioms, or
cornerstones; they are fundamental to everything else. The first, which has
come into view already, is his strong stand on reductionism. Eliade believes
adamantly in the independence, or “autonomy,” of religion, which for him can-
not be explained as the mere by-product of some other reality. “A religious
phenomenon,” he insists,
will only be recognized as such if it is grasped at its own level, that is to say, if
it is studied as something religious. To try to grasp the essence of such a phe-
nomenon by means of physiology, psychology, sociology, economics, linguis-
tics, art, or any other study is false; it misses the one unique and irreducible
element in it—the element of the sacred.6
In the language of the natural sciences, we might rephrase this to say that reli-
gion should not be construed as a “dependent variable,” the thing that always
changes in any test or experiment. If anything, it must be taken as the constant
or the independent variable; other aspects of life—social, psychological,

The Reality of the Sacred: Mircea Eliade 231
economic—must be understood to depend upon it. As an element in human
behavior, religion functions as active agent rather than a passive effect.
The second axiom applies to method. If religion is in fact something inde-
pendent, something that cannot be explained purely through psychology or
sociology, how, then, should we explain it? Eliade answers that we must com-
bine two separate angles of vision. Because students of religion mostly study
the past, their subject in one sense is simply history. Accordingly, like other
historians, they gather evidence, make generalizations, criticize them, and try
to find causes or consequences. In this respect, their discipline certainly is the
history of religions. At the same time, the study of religion cannot be just his-
torical either. We understand religion only when we also apply what Eliade
calls “phenomenology” (from the Greek phenomenon, “an appearance”): the
comparative study of things in the form, or appearance, they present to us. Any
science is partly phenomenology. We know the color red in the spectrum
because its appearance differs from that of blue or violet. By the same measure,
one way we know a religious form—a belief or a ritual—is by comparing it
with others. Eliade thus emphatically endorses the famous words of the philos~
opher Goethe on language, which Max Miiller had already adapted to religion:
“He who knows one knows none.” Without comparison there can be no real
science.
It is true that historians are suspicious of comparisons, especially when they
are used to find similarities. The skeptical mind of the scholar is always inclined
to think that no two things are ever quite the same; every time, every place is
different from the next. Eliade disagrees: he thinks that certain general forms,
certain broad patterns of phenomena, can be taken outside of their original time
and place to be compared with others. Times and places may differ, he would
say, but concepts are often the same. The mathematician Euclid was an ancient
Greek, a man of his time; yet we can study his geometry as if he had taught it
just yesterday. The man may be historical, but his theorems are timeless. The
same applies to the concepts of religion. The worship of Zeus is in one sense
tied to a single time and place in history; it is a practice belonging to ancient
Greek religion. But if we notice that in the Greek stories of the gods Zeus has
a wife, that he lives on Mt. Olympus, and that he is more powerful than other
divine beings, it is not hard to see in him certain typical features of the “sky
god” as he appears in many different times and places around the world. Zeus
may belong only to the Greeks, but the phenomenon of the sky god does not.
Because such gods appear in many cultures, we can learn a great deal by trac-
ing their patterns—by noticing those features they share with one another and
those they do not.
With these axioms in hand, we can turn to the main elements of Eliade’s
program, although here, as with Marx and Freud, we will need help from more

232 Nine Theories of Religion
than one of his books. Eliade tends in all of his writings to explore the same
major ideas and patterns, but in no one of them does he offer a sort of single,
major exhibit of his theory. In addition, as a writer of fiction, he occasionally
prefers the ways of the novelist even in his scholarly works; he offers winding
commentaries rather than succinct arguments. That being so, we can best
explicate his views by keeping to the main themes and exploring each by way
of the one book that explains it best. We will consider in sequence each of the
following:
1. Eliade’s concept of religion. This is most clearly outlined in The Sacred
and the Profane (1957), perhaps the best short introduction to his theory
written for the general reader.
2. His understanding of symbolism and myth. This is best observed in
Patterns in Comparative Religion (1949), the work that sets the agenda for
most of his later works.
3. His explanation of time and history as seen by archaic and modern cul-
tures. This theme is the focus of The Myth of the Eternal Return (1949),
perhaps the most original and challenging of all Eliade’s books.
Eliade’s Concept of Religion: The Sacred and the Profane
The Sacred and the Profane (1957) is a short introductory work which makes
it clear that in seeking to understand religion, the first move we make is prob-
ably the most important one. Eliade explains that the historian must step out of
modern civilization, which, after all, accounts for only a small and recent frac-
tion of human life on Earth, and enter the world of “archaic” humanity. Archaic
people are those who have lived in prehistoric times or who live today in tribal
societies and rural folk cultures, places where work in the world of nature—
hunting, fishing, and farming—forms the daily routine. What we find everywhere
among such peoples is a life lived on two decidedly different planes: that of the
sacred and that of the profane. The profane is the realm of the everyday
business—0f things ordinary, random, and largely unimportant. The sacred is
just the opposite; it is the sphere of the supernatural, of things extraordinary,
memorable, and momentous. While the profane is vanishing and fragile, full
of shadows, the sacred is eternal, full of substance and reality. The profane is
the arena of human affairs, which are changeable and often chaotic; the sacred
is the sphere of order and perfection, the home of the ancestors, heroes, and
gods. Wherever we look among archaic peoples, religion starts from this fun-
damental separation.

The Reality of the Sacred: Mircea Eliade 233
For readers with a good memory, the first impression made by these words
is likely to be one of déja vu: Eliade here seems to be repeating the very thing
we heard from Durkheim. Nor should that come as a surprise. Eliade was edu-
cated in the French intellectual tradition, where, largely because of Durkheim,
this way of defining religion came to be widely accepted. A closer look, how-
ever, will show that in fact there is a difference. As we saw before, when
Durkheim speaks of the sacred and profane, he is always thinking of society
and its needs. The sacred for him is the social (that which matters to the clan);
the profane is the opposite (that which matters only to the individual). For
Durkheim, sacred symbols and rituals seem to speak of the supernatural, but all
of that is just the surface appearance of things. The purpose of symbols is sim-
ply to make people aware of their social duties by symbolizing the clan as their
totem god. When Eliade speaks of the sacred, this clan worship clearly is not
what he has in mind. In his View, the concern of religion is with the supernatu-
ral, plain and simple; it centers on the sacred in and of itself, not on the sacred
merely as a way of depicting the social. Though he uses Durkheim’s language
and agrees that the term covers more than just personal gods, Eliade’s View of
religion is closer to that of Tylor and Frazer, who conceive of it first and fore-
most as belief in a realm of supernatural beings.
Instead of Durkheim, Eliade invites us to think of another scholar as his
guide: the German theologian and historian of religion Rudolf Otto. In 1916
Otto published on this very subject a famous book entitled The Idea of the
Holy (in German, Das Heilige), where he too uses the concept of the sacred
but not as applying to society or social needs. He writes instead about a dis-
tinct and dramatic kind of individual human experience. At one time or
another in their lives, he writes, most people encounter something truly
extraordinary and overwhelming. They feel gripped by a reality that is “wholly
other” than themselves—something mysterious, awesome, powerful, and
beautiful. That is an experience of “the holy,” an encounter with the sacred.
Using Latin terms, Otto calls it the mysterium that is both tremendum etfascinans,
a mysterious something that both frightens and fascinates at the same time.
Another name he gives it is the sense of “the numinous” (from the Latin
numen, a “spirit” or “divine being”). When people have such an encounter, he
says, they invariably feel that they themselves are nothing, no more than “dust
and ashes” as the Bible puts it, while the sacred seems just‘the opposite:
something overpoweringly great, substantial, sublime, and truly real. Otto
believes this awe-inducing sense of the numinous is unique and irreducible. It
is unlike any other encounter with things beautiful or terrible, though they
may vaguely resemble it. It is the profound emotional core of all that we call
religion.

234 Nine Theories of Religion
Eliade’s concept of the sacred bears a strong resemblance to Otto’s. In an
encciunter with the sacred, he says, people feel in touch with something other-
worldly in character; they feel they have brushed against a reality unlike all
others they know, a dimension of existence that is alarmingly powerful,
strangely different, surpassingly real and enduring.
For primitives as for the man of all pre-modern societies, the sacred is equiva-
lent to a power, and in the last analysis, to reality. The sacred is saturated with
being. Sacred power means reality and at the same time enduringness and effi-
cacity. . . . Thus it is easy to understand that religious man deeply desires to be,
to participate in reality, to be saturated with power.7
Readers of a Judeo—Christian or a Muslim background naturally suppose that
Eliade is referring here to an encounter with God, but his idea of the sacred is
much wider than that. It could mean the realm of many gods, of the ancestors
or immortals, or of what some Hindus call “Brahman,” the Supreme Spirit
beyond all personality. However the sacred is conceived, the role of religion is
to promote contact with it, to bring a person “out of his worldly Universe or
historical situation, and project him into a Universe different in quality, an
entirely different world, transcendent and holy.”8 Further, the sense of the
sacred is not an occasional thing, found only among certain people or at cer-
tain times. In the secular societies of modern Western civilization, people dis-
play it in surprising, unconscious ways, such as through dreams, nostalgias,
and works of the imagination. Yet however disguised, suppressed, or obscured,
the intuition of the sacred remains a permanent feature of human thought and
activity. No human being is without it. When eyes are open to notice it, it can
be seen anywhere.
Among archaic peoples, Eliade continues, this idea of the sacred is more
than just common; it is regarded as absolutely crucial to their existence, shap-
ing virtually every aspect of their lives. They refer to it even when they think of
something so basic as the time of day or the place where they live. When the
ancient Greeks thought of their daily routine, they turned naturally to the myth
of Phoebus Apollo, the god who each day drove the chariot of the sun across
the sky. When they rose at dawn, they assumed that the light would be with
them because Phoebus was just then harnessing his horses; they did their work
as he traveled, knowing from him how much of the light had passed and how
much still remained; and when, at the end of the journey, he rested his horses,
they too could sleep and restore their strength for the next day’s dawn. While
to us such mythological tales are merely entertaining, to archaic peoples they
mean a great deal more; they provide the very framework within which they
think, the values they admire, and the models—Eliade sometimes calls them

The Reality of the Sacred: Mircea Eliade 235
“archetypes”—they choose to follow. Such sacred patterns govern all sorts of
archaic activity, from the grand and ceremonial to the ordinary and even trivial.
In some ancient cultures, which had myths similar to the story of Phoebus,
every chariot had to be built on the model of the chariot driven by the god of
the sun. In others, similar rules applied. Among the early peoples in Scandinavia,
for example, boats for fishing and transport could not be made in just any way;
they had to follow a sacred model, that of the ship on which the dead were
placed for their funerals. Such rules existed because archaic peoples insisted
on the precept that the ways of the gods are best; divine models show how life
should be lived.
In The Sacred and the Profane, Eliade draws upon numerous examples from
a wide range of cultures to show just how seriously such traditional peoples
take the business of following the patterns set by the gods. The authority of the
sacred controls all. When they set up their villages, archaic clans do not choose
just any convenient place to build. A village must be founded at a place where
there has been a “hierophany” (from the Greek hieros and phainein, “sacred
appearance”). Once it has been confirmed that this particular place has, in fact,
been visited by the sacred, perhaps in the form of a god or ancestor, the loca-
tion receives a ritual blessing that establishes it as the center point of a “world”
(in Greek a cosmos, “place of order”). Around this center, the community can
then be built in such a way as to show it has a definite divinely ordered struc—
ture; it is a sacred system. Because this constructed society extends outward
from a ceremonial center point, it stands clearly separate from the disorder of
the desert, forest, or open plain that normally surrounds it. Instead of a chaos,
the village, built according to the blueprint given by the gods, is a cosmos; in a
world of danger and disorder, it is a scene of security and design.
In many cultures, this sacred center is marked with a pole, pillar, or some
other vertical object that plunges into the ground and rises up to the sky to join
the three great regions of the universe: Heaven, Earth, and the underworld.
That is because this point, which may also be marked by a tree or even a moun-
tain, is regarded not just as the center of the village but as an axis mundt‘ (Latin,
“centerpost” and “world”); it is the very axle, the central pillar, around which
the whole world is seen to turn. If we remember the stories of the Bible, the tale
of Jacob’s ladder fits into this pattern. The biblical patriarch Jacob, tired from
his travels, chooses to sleep outdoors and lays down a stone as a pillow. During
the night, he dreams of a ladder extending from the place where he sleeps all
the way to Heaven, while angels rise up and come down upon it. When he
wakes, he is afraid, for he has here encountered the sacred. “How dreadful is
this place!” he says, “This is none but the house of God, and this is the gate of
heaven.”9 Significantly, he then sets his nightstone vertical, turning it from pi]-
low to pillar, so that it will mirror the angelic ladder. For Jacob, this special

236 Nine Theories of Religion
place is the axis mundi, the point where one finds the sacred pole that connects
Heaven to Earth, the holy place where the separate worlds of the sacred and the
profane are joined.
In medieval Christianity and early Islam, in ancient Babylon and modern
Java, among the Indians of the American Northwest and the villages of Vedic
India—almost everywhere we want to look—we find this recurring pattern,
says Eliade. Life orients itself around a sacred center, a vertical “symbol of
ascent” that links Heaven to Earth, the sacred to the profane. Around such
sacred poles or atop sacred mountains, great temples have always been built.
And from them also the surrounding world is divided into its different sectors,
usually the four directions of the compass. Just as the universe itself starts from
a center and spreads out to four horizons, so, in Bali and parts of Asia, villages
must be built at a crossroads, so that they can reflect the four main sectors of
the world. In some tribal cultures, the ceremonial house in the village center is
supported by four columns, which represent the four main directions, while the
roof symbolizes the vault of Heaven, and an opening in the center allows
prayers to rise along the sacred pole up to the gods.
In all of these shapes and ceremonies, which naturally vary in minor ways
from one culture to the next, the role of divine patterns, or models, is plainly
evident. Eliade explains that the archaic village, temple, or even house must be
an imago mundi, a mirror image of the entire world as it was first fashioned by
divine action. When such places are built, the process of construction is just as
important as the structures themselves. Things must not only be a reflection of
the sacred; they must come into being in a sacred manner as well. And that is,
again, because human structures and activities must trace out the very process
by which the gods brought the world itself into existence. Archaic peoples thus
place great significance on “cosmogonic” myths—their stories of how the
world first came into being, whether by divine command or by some struggle
in which the gods overcome chaos to defeat an evil monster. Whenever some-
thing new is begun—when a temple is built, a child is born, or new phase of life
is entered—that process must be a repetition of the creation, a reenactment of
the original deeds and struggles by which the gods brought the world into
being. Eliade offers a fascinating instance of this imitation of the gods from
ancient India, where, before building a house, an astronomer shows the masons
exactly where they must lay the first stone: “This spot is supposed to lie above
the snake that supports the world. The master mason sharpens a stake and
drives it into the ground . . . in order to fix the snake’s head.” There the founda-
tion stone is laid, at the point now regarded as the exact center of the world.
The act of piercing the snake is profoundly sacred because it repeats the very
work of the gods Indra and Soma as described in the sacred texts. These gods
were the first to strike the snake, who “symbolizes chaos, the formless, the

The Reality of the Sacred: Mircea Eliade 237
unmanifested.” By destroying it, they brought into existence an orderly world
where once there was only a formless confusion.IO So, when the home is built,
the work must exactly mirror the work of the gods. Elsewhere, Eliade points to
other examples of the same process. In many myths, for instance, the dragon
fills the role played by the snake in India; he is the great ocean monster, the
symbol of watery chaos, who rises from the dark fluid depths and must be
subdued by a hero or a god before an ordered system of nature, as well as a
human civilization, can come into existence.
In Eliade’s view, this intense effort to imitate the gods is part of an even
deeper desire that archaic peoples have. They wish not only to mirror the realm
of the sacred but somehow actually to be in it, to live among the gods. A full
discussion of this issue must be deferred until we come to The Myth of the
Eternal Return; for the moment we can simply note Eliade’s comment that all
archaic peoples have a sense of a “fall,” of a great tragic loss in human history.
By this he does not mean just the fall of humanity into sin as told in the biblical
story of Adam and Eve. Archaic people know a fall in the sense of a profound
separation. They hold that from the first moment human beings become aware
of their situation in the world, they are seized by a feeling of absence, 3 sense
of great distance from the place where they ought to be and truly want to be—
the realm of the sacred. Their most characteristic attitude, in Eliade’s words, is
a deep “nostalgia for Paradise,” a longing to be brought close to the gods, a
desire to return to the realm of the supernatural.
Archaic Religion: Symbol and Myth
It is one thing to sense or seek the realm of the sacred; it is quite another to find
and describe it. Although archaic peoples, like any others, strive to depict it,
the very nature of the sacred, which is something utterly different from the
profane, would seem to make this impossible. How can one describe that
which is “wholly other” than anything in normal experience? The answer,
Eliade explains, lies in indirect expression: the language of the sacred is to be
found in symbols and in myth.
Symbols, we know, are rooted in the principle of likeness, or analogy.
Certain things have a quality, a shape, a character that strikes us as similar to
other things. In the realm of religious experience, certain things are seen to
resemble or suggest the sacred; they give a clue to the supernatural. Myths are
also symbolic, but in a slightly more complicated way; they are symbols put
into a narrative form. A myth is not just one image or sign; it is a sequence of
images put into the shape of a story. It tells a tale of the gods, of the ancestors
or heroes, and their world of the supernatural. That seems clear enough.

238 Nine Theories of Religion
But just what is it that this indirect language actually tells us about the sacred?
It is said to be something real, but what kind of reality is it? What are its qual-
ities, its characteristics? These are questions that Eliade spent most of his
career addressing in his many studies of symbolism and myth. Our plan allows
space to examine only the most important of these works, Patterns in Com-
parative Religion, which was first published in 1949, while Eliade was work-
ing in France.
Patterns is a book designed to explain and explore religious symbols on a
very wide scale. It examines the nature of symbolic thinking, showing what
symbols are, how they work, and why archaic peoples in particular make use
of them. It also shows, with the help of many examples, just how systems of
symbol and myth tend to follow certain recurring patterns throughout the
world. Eliade claims that regardless of the location we choose or epoch in
history we select, certain common symbols, myths, and rituals turn up again
and again.
In observing how symbols work, the first thing to notice is that just about
anything we encounter in the world can serve as a symbol. Most of the things
that make up ordinary life are profane; they are just themselves, nothing more.
But at the right moment anything profane can be transformed into something
more than itself—a marker or sign of that which is sacred. A tool, an animal, a
river, a raging fire, a star or stone, a cave, a blossoming flower, or a human
being—anything can become a sign of the sacred if people so discover or
decide. Once recognized as such, moreover, all symbolic objects acquire a
double character: though in one sense they remain what they always were, they
also become something new, something other than themselves. At the shrine
known as Kaaba Muslims revere a sacred black stone. Though on one level that
object remains to this day just a stone, no faithful follower of Muhammad
would ever recognize it as that. From the instant of hierophany—from the
moment, that is, when Muslims saw it as something touched by the sacred—
this profane object was transformed; it became no longer a mere stone but a
holy object, an imposing package, we might say, that carries the sacred within.
Eliade calls this infusion of the supernatural into natural objects the “dialectic
of the sacred.” Though concrete, limited in shape, and perhaps even movable
from place to place, a sacred stone can—through another of its qualities, its
solidity—convey to the eyes of a believer features of the sacred that are pre-
cisely the opposite of its limitations; it can suggest, as the sacred stone of the
Kaaba does for Muslims, a God who is immovable and beyond change, the
almighty, infinite, and absolute Creator of the world. In common logic, of
course, such a combination of opposites strikes us as irrational. If the profane
is truly opposed to the sacred, how can it become its precise opposite? How can
the natural also be the supernatural? It can do so, says Eliade, because in such

The Reality of the Sacred: Mircea Eliade 239
matters human reason is not in charge of the transaction. Symbol and myth
make their appeal to the imagination, which often thrives on the idea of contra-
diction. They grip the complete person, the emotions, the will, and even sub-
conscious aspects of the personality. And just as in the personality impulses
collide, just as in dreams and fantasies all sorts of illogical things can happen,
so in religious experience opposites like the sacred and profane do converge. In
an intuitive burst of discovery, the religious imagination sees things otherwise
ordinary and profane as more than themselves and turns them into the sacred.
The natural becomes supernatural. ‘
It is interesting to notice that, like Max Mtiller, Eliade finds the main sup-
plier of materials for symbolism and myth to be the world of nature. To the
archaic mind, the physical world is a veritable storehouse of prospective
images, clues, signs, and analogies. All that we see in the world is part of a
grand framework that the gods brought into existence at the beginning of time,
and everywhere in it, the sacred waits to shine through. In all of its beauty and
ferocity, its complexity, mystery, and variety, the natural world is continually
opening windows to disclose the different aspects of the supernatural—what
Eliade calls “the modalities of the sacred.” This, by the way, is what makes
traditional cultures so rich in imaginative figures and symbols and their world
so wonderfully alive with folklore and legend, with creation accounts, flood
stories, and epic tales of heroes, monsters, and gods. As collections of symbols
put in narrative form, all of these can be broadly associated with myth. They
are tales of the sacred, stories that bring the supernatural world of divine life
closer to the natural world of humanity.
Over the centuries, of course, human beings have generated countless new
myths, symbols, and variations of both. No scholar could hope to find them all.
Nor is it necessary to try. Eliade thinks a great deal can be learned just from the
major symbolic patterns and systems, which are the only ones he chooses to
trace out in detail. It will repay our efforts to notice a few of them.
Sky Symbolism: Sky Gods and Others
One of the most common elements of archaic cultures is belief in sky gods,
divinities whose character is suggested by the very nature of the wide heaven
above the Earth. The sky conveys a sense of transcendence, of a span raised
high above us, something infinite, sovereign, and eternal—full of authority
and reality. Fittingly, the sky god is often imagined in just this fashion. The
god Iho among the Maoris is “raised up”; Olorun among the African Yoruba
tribes is “owner of the sky”; the great god Ahura—Mazda in early Iran is the
giver of all laws and enforcer of moral order in the world. Because the heavens
are high, these gods are, in fact, often portrayed as almost too elevated and

240 Nine Theories of Religion
distant, too far away to care about mere human beings. Australian myths tell
the story of the withdrawal of the sky god, while in other primitive societies
as well, the god of the sky seems so far beyond human reach that other reli—
gious conceptions must come in to replace him. Often these new conceptions
are gods of the rain and storm, deities who are more concrete and personal,
more directly involved in human life because they specialize in one task. Here
the early Hindu god Rudra is an example. Virile and violent, surging with life,
he was for the villagers of ancient India the bringer of rain as well as the
source of sexual energy. He and others like him had female partners or entered
sacred marriages; they stood at the center of lavish ceremonies, which often
included bloody sacrifices and orgies. Their imagery is exceedingly powerful
and their influence extremely widespread. In fact, says Eliade, in words that
remind us of Frazer, “this structure made up of the rainy sky, bull, and Great
Goddess was one of the elements that united all the protohistoric religions of
Europe.”11
It is not hard to guess why such a change from sky to storm gods may have
taken place. Eliade explains that the appeal of rain and fertility gods was
closely linked to one of the most important events in all of early civilization—
the discovery of agriculture. Plowing the soil, planting seeds, and harvesting
crops—all of these activities brought a new pattern of life, and with it an
occasion for new hierophanies and symbols of different kinds. In an agrarian
world, the great “fecundators,” the gods of storm and sex, conveyed the
sacred with greater power and more vivid appearance than the distant god of
the sky.
“Son” gods, like Dionysos in Greece and Osiris in Egypt, also made their
appearance in the age of agriculture. Like storm gods, they were dynamic, but
differently 30. Their role was rather to suffer and die. The so-called mystery
religions, which were enormously popular in the ancient Mediterranean
world, centered especially on these deities, which in name were vegetation
gods but figured more prominently as divine saviors. In these gods especially,
Eliade discerns an important psychological aspect of religious symbols. They
not only tell us about the world and the sacred but also show “the continuity
between the structures of human existence and cosmic structures.”12 Their
myths do not just reflect the cycles of life and death in nature; they reenact as
well the personal struggle that takes place in the life of each human individ—
ual: the drama of birth, life, and death as well as the hope of rebirth or
redemption. Eliade tells us that no symbol brings divine life so near to human
as the figure of the savior-god, the divinity who “even shared mankind’s suf-
ferings, died and rose from the dead to redeem them.” Precisely because
of his marked “humanity,” this type of god plays a crucial role in the history
of religion.13

The Reality of the Sacred: Mircea Eliade 241
Sun and Moon
Eliade notes that sun worship, which some earlier theorists (especially Max
Muller) thought the center of all mythology, is in fact very rare.14 Much more
prominent and widespread are myths and symbols associated with the
ever-changing moon. The moon moves through cycles; it grows, becomes full,
then for a time completely disappears. Its phases connect readily to other
events, such as the ebb and flow of the ocean tides, the coming and going of the
rains, and through the latter, to the growth of plants and the fertility of the
Earth. Since it always returns to its beginnings, the moon furnishes the arche-
typal image of ceaseless renewal. Its dominant theme is “one of rhythm carried
out by a succession of contraries, of ‘becoming’ through a succession of oppos-
ing modalities. It is a becoming . . . that cannot take place without drama.”15
Lunar symbolism also shows a remarkable power of expansion; it keeps
reaching out to make new connections. Besides waters and vegetation, the
moon is often linked to death, the last phase of life; to the snake, which regen-
erates itself by shedding its skin; and to woman, whose power to renew life by
giving birth arises from the “lunar” phases of the menstrual cycle. In fact, “the
intuition of the moon as the measure of rhythms, as the source of energy, of
life, and of rebirth, has woven a sort of web between the various levels of the
universe, producing parallels, similarities, and unities among vastly differing
kinds of phenomena.”16 Because of a long linkage that takes the form
moon—rain—fertility—woman—serpent—death—regeneration, a person can tap
into the lunar network at any one of its points. A simple rain ritual, for instance,
or a serpent charm worn on the wrist, can engage this entire system of cosmic
associations, all of which play upon the fundamental theme of opposites that
alternate and converge.
Like the “son” gods, the moon has both a cosmic and a personal dimension.
On the one level, it is treasured “in what it reveals of the sacred, that is, in the
power centred in it, in the inexhaustible life and reality that it manifests.”17 On
the other, it reminds us psychologically of the double nature of our human
condition: rooted in the realm of the profane, the place of shadows and death,
we nonetheless long for the sacred, the sphere of things real and undying. In
earlier ages, amid disease and death, the hopes of archaic peoples for their own
personal renewal and immortality “gained confirmation from the fact of there
being always a new moon.”18 The moon is in one sense a display of dualisms:
light and dark, full and empty, old and new, birth and death, male and female.
Yet by its alternations and changes, it also suggests the overcoming of all dual-
isms. Eliade here points to myths of androgyny, which suggest that the first
human beings, who lived close to the gods, were neither male nor female but a
unity of both sexes. This theme, moreover, is just one in a whole family of

242 Nine Theories of Religion
myths of reintegration. Common throughout the human race, these stories
express a powerful hope for the end of all opposites, the dissolution of all sep-
arations, the return to the original unity of the sacred.
Water and Stones
In addition to the great symbols of the sky and moon, archaic cultures abound
as well in lesser signs and images, which often link up with the more dominant
ones. Water, for example, everywhere expresses the shapeless, unformed
nature of things before they were ordered into a world by the gods. It starts the
process of renewal. Neither the world nor the human self can be reborn until
each has first returned to chaos by plunging into the watery depths, thence to
emerge as a new creation. In ritual initiations and in rites of purification, water
is the agent that cleanses and erases all, taking us back to the unformed, the
primeval, the “clean slate,” where a new beginning can be made.
The symbolism of stones, by contrast, suggests the opposite. Unlike water,
the substance of stones is hard, rugged, and unchanging. To the primitive
person, “rock shows . . . something that transcends the precariousness of his
humanity; an absolute mode of being. Its strength, its motionlessness, its
size . . . indicate the presence of something that fascinates, terrifies, attracts,
and threatens, all at once.”’9 If we put these words into the Latin fascinans
and tremendum, we actually have Rudolf Otto’s very words for the sacred.
A normal stone would hardly attract our notice; a sacred stone generates awe
and fear.
Other Symbols: Earth and Fertility, Vegetation and Agriculture
The symbolisms of life, growth, and fertility have played a large role in the
religion of archaic peoples, both before and after the dawn of agriculture. Of
the many patterns Eliade considers in this category, we can notice just a few.
A very early image is that of the Earth as sacred mother, the source of all
living things. The sacred marriage of the divine sky father and Earth mother is
found in many mythologies, from the South Pacific to Africa, the Mediterranean,
and the Americas. The sky fertilizes the Earth with rain, and the Earth produces
grains and grass. With the coming of agriculture and cultivation of plants and
grains, the earlier symbol of the Earth as mother is often overlaid by that of the
great goddess—again, a more dynamic, emotional divinity who, like the “son”
gods considered above, personally lives out the fate of the crops in her life
cycle of birth, sexual encounter, fertility, and death.
More widespread than that of either the Earth mother or the goddess, how—
ever, is the symbolism of trees. Sacred trees can be found “in the history of

The Reality ofrhe Sacred: Mircea Eliade 243
every religion, in popular tradition the world over, in primitive metaphysics
and mysticism, to say nothing of iconography and popular art.”20 Some, like
the cosmic tree Yggdrasil in Norse mythology, combine the symbolism of the
axis mundi, the world’s centerpost, with a second theme: the tree as the sacred
source of life. As great vertical objects that are alive, trees represent “the very
life of the entire world as it endlessly renews itself.” Further, since trees live a
long time, the life within them is considered inexhaustible; they become a
focus of human hopes for immortality. Frazer, we should remember, found
the soul, the source of life, to be closely associated with both the mistletoe and
tree worship in northern Europe. And in the many ancient myths of a tree of
life, we read of a hero who must face a test, as did Adam and Eve in Eden. By
defeating a dragon or resisting temptation, the great man wins the prize of
immortality. Trees tell us that the sacred is the fount of all life, the one true
reality, and, to those who can pass the test, the giver of immortality.
Eliade reminds us that to appreciate vegetation myths we must recall how
primitive people lived in ongoing fear that at some point the powers of the
natural world would weaken and begin to run out. For the archaic mind, all
things—whether plant, animal, or human—are energized through “the same
closed circuit of the substance of life,” which passes from one level or creature to
another.“ When planted, the grains that die at harvest give their life to the next
year’s crop. When harvested, ground into flour, and baked, they transfer their
life to humanity, for they then become the force of life in the bread that is eaten
at meals. This tight connection shows why in so many legends we read of a
murdered human being who is changed into a tree, or of plants that spring
directly from the blood of a slain god or hero. When the power of life leaves
one living thing, it must move to another; when it runs down, it must be
recharged. Always there is an ebb and flow, a fading and renewal. For archaic
peoples, “the real is not only what is indefinitely the same, but also what
becomes in organic but cyclic forms.”22 In that connection rites of initiation,
purification, and redemption, by their gestures and procedures, recreate the
first of all renewals—the creation of the world itself as it arises out of chaos by
the powerful commands or mighty struggles of the gods.
The Structure and Character of Symbols
From fertility and vegetation Eliade turns next to the symbolisms of space and
of time. The first of these we have already noted above, and the second will
come our way shortly, so we can pass over them here to observe something
else. Although most of the discussion in Patterns is taken up with individual
symbols and myths from around the world, Eliade takes time along the way to
consider two broad features of all symbolic thinking. One is the structural, or

244 Nine Theories of Religion
system-like, character of most symbolism and mythology; the other is the mat-
ter of ranking symbols—placing some above others in value.
Throughout his discussion, Eliade explains that symbols and myths rarely
exist in isolation. It is their nature always to be part of larger symbol systems;
they “connect up” with other images, or other myths, to form a pattern. The
thought world of archaic peoples is thus filled with associations, linkages, and
repetitions that keep extending the sense of the sacred, if possible, to almost
every dimension of life—from the noblest occasions and ceremonies t0 the
simplest daily task. A pair of examples may help to illustrate this process. In a
first appearance of the sacred—an original hierophany—a religious person
finds, let us say, a vision of the one true God in the sun, as did the Egyptian
Pharaoh Akhenaten. (Freud, we may recall, thought Akhenaten was the reli-
gious genius who inSpired Jewish monotheism.) Soon the round solar disk is
declared the symbol of the divine. It is carved into walls, worn as jewelry, and
required on flags at palace ceremonies. These gestures naturally expand the
occasions for thinking about the sun; they “sacralize” places, people, and
events quite beyond the occasion or place of the first sacred encounter. In time,
still more connections may be made. The sun is personified, and the stories of
the sun and its adventures come to expression in myth. Akhenaten or his
followers may claim that because it “defeats” the night, the sun is the lord of
battle; or they may see in each morning’s sunrise a sign of personal renewal
and immortality. Because of its warmth, the sun can be tied to the return of
vegetation each spring; it can be connected with plants, like the sunflower,
or substances, like gold, that resemble its shape or possess its color. With each of
these new connections, the sacred reaches out to capture a new aspect of life.
Another vivid example of this systematic extension is the cycle of lunar
myths and symbols noted above. From its center in the phases of the moon, this
symbolic system continually spreads out its net to convey a sense of the sacred
to many other dimensions of life: the waters and rains, fertility and woman,
serpents and human redemption, even shells and spirals and bolts of lightning.
There may be no formal rule of logic that compels people to connect lunar
phases with spiral shells; yet intuitively and imaginatively, there is a certain
“logic of symbols” that makes the connections. Symbols always lead naturally
to other symbols and to myths in such a way as to create a framework, a world
that is a complete, connected system, rather than a chaotic jumble.
In addition to noticing their systemic character, a second general issue
Eliade alludes to is that of comparing symbols and myths. Are some symbols
perhaps better in character than others? Can we rank myths on a scale of value?
And if so, what standard would we use? In Patterns, he does not address these
questions as directly as one would like, but it is plain that he does in fact feel
some images and myths to be superior to others. The main standard he applies

The Reality of the Sacred: Mircea Eliade 245
seems to be that of their scale or size. The “bigger” the symbol, the more com-
plete and universal it is, the better it conveys the true nature of the sacred. Here
again, a specific example may help. If the people of a primitive village encoun-
ter something supernatural in a nearby tree, that can be called a hierophany; the
tree manifests the sacred. If, in the course of time, however, the council of
elders should rethink this symbolism and decide that this sacred tree is in fact
the cosmic tree, the center of the world, that too is a hierophany, but of a higher
order. It is a better representation of the sacred because it is wider in extent,
grander in scale than the original sacred tree. By means of the elders’ decision,
then, the first sighting of the sacred in the local tree is “revalorized” (as Eliade
likes to say) into a far more impressive image of the sacred than it originally
was. The new symbolism of the world tree surpasses the old symbol of the
simple village hierophany.
Again, one type of hierophany is a theophany (from the Greek theos,
“deity”): the appearance of a god. A theophany can occur in something as sim-
ple as a stone. At the same time, drawing on his own tradition of Romanian
Orthodoxy, Eliade points out that Christianity finds God to be incarnate in the
man Jesus of Nazareth. This human theophany is superior to the stone theoph-
any, not—as missionaries once would have said—because Christianity is true
and other religions false, but because a human person, possessing intelligence
and emotions, is by nature a richer, fuller being than an animal or stone. Thus,
as a symbol, the figure of Christ, the God-man, captures more of the fullness
and reality of the sacred. In addition, Christians make universal claims about
the incarnation; they say that never has there been or will there be a theophany
as final or as world—embracing. Christ is to other theophanies as the great cos—
mic tree is to the village tree—a wider, grander, and consequently better image
of the divine. As the human form of the all-powerful Creator, he better conveys
the full extent of the sacred than, say, the Greek god Pan, who is pictured only
as god of the pastures and forests.
These concepts of replacement and “revalorization” of symbols play an
important role in Eliade’s theory. They show that he is interested in examining
not just the timeless forms of religion but also their historical changes. In his
view, human beings throughout time have been continually at work restating
their perceptions of the sacred in original ways, fashioning new myths, dis-
covering fresh symbols, and rearranging them into wider or different systems.
Accordingly, the mission of the “history” of religions is first to discover sym-
bols, myths, rituals, and their systems, then to trace them through the human
past as they have been changed and interchanged from one age or place to the
next. After that—and just as importantly—the more phenomenological side
enters in. The historian seeks to compare and contrast these materials to deter-
mine their different levels and types of significance as carriers of the sacred.

246 Nine Theories of Religion
And he observes how in different ages and places, symbols, myths, and rituals
are perpetually subject to change. Through history, they are constantly being
created, revised, discarded, and created again. Were he an evolutionary
thinker, we might find Eliade claiming that all these changes are improve-
ments, that each new myth or symbol is progressively better than the last. But
that is not really his view; he believes the natural logic of symbols and myths
pushes them always to become more universal, to shed the particulars of a
single time and place and approximate ever more closely to a universal arche-
type, as when a local goddess acquires more and more of the features of the
archetypal great goddess of fertility. But the reverse happens also; symbols
can decay and degenerate. History presents occasions when cultures move
counter to the logic of the sacred—say, by losing or corrupting a great world
creation myth or by replacing more universal symbols with less universal
ones, as when the smaller storm god replaces the earlier sovereign sky god.
When that happens, certain new dimensions of the sacred may be discovered,
but others are lost. Then again, while that is happening in one culture, in
another the figure of the sky god might reappear. The natural tendency of
symbols and myths is to grow, to spread out their significance in new associ-
ations; but in different times and places there are also variations that “flow
simply from differences in the mythological creativity of the various societies,
or even from a chance of history.”23
Throughout the ages, then, archaic and other peoples have enjoyed a certain
freedom of imagination in selecting sacred symbols and myths. Eliade notes
that there seems scarcely a single natural object that has not at one time or
another become a symbol or figured in a myth. And yet, for all of this creativ-
ity, religious imagery has never been purely random or chaotic. The point of
Patterns is to show just the opposite: that regardless of place, time, or culture,
archaic peoples have shown a remarkable constancy in returning to the same
types of symbol, the same themes in their myths, and the same universalizing
logic in both. The closer we look at the historical specifies of religion, the more
clearly we see its ever-recurring, ever-expanding patterns.
History and Sacred Time
For the scholar inquiring about the symbolism, the historical record is of con-
siderable value. It shows us how people have conceived the sacred in different
places and times. Archaic believers themselves, however, assess their situation
in history to be less than fortunate. For them, the events of ordinary profane
life, the daily rounds of labor and struggle, are things they desperately wish to
escape. They would rather be out of history and in the perfect realm of the

The Reality of the Sacred: Mircea Eliade 247
sacred. Eliade’s term for this desire, as we noted earlier, is the “nostalgia for
Paradise.” It is a concept central to his theory. Though he refers to it in many
places, he explains it best in the third of the three texts we have taken as our
guides: The Myth of the Eternal Return: 0r, Cosmos and History, first pub—
lished along with Patterns in 1949.
Eliade considered this book one of his most significant, and even his critics
have tended to agree. In it, he sets out a strong thesis: the one theme that dom-
inates the thought of all archaic peoples is the drive to abolish history—all of
history—and return to that point beyond time when the world began. The
desire to go back to beginnings, he argues, is the deepest longing, the most
insistent and heartfelt ache in the soul of all archaic peoples. The distinctive
mark of archaic ritual and myth is the wish “to live in the world as it came from
the Creator’s hands, fresh, pure, and strong.”24 That is why myths of creation
play such a central role in so many archaic societies. It is also why so many
rituals are associated with acts of creation. We have not said much about rituals
so far, but Eliade does find them important, especially in association with cre-
ation accounts. Usually they involve a reenactment of what the gods did in illo
tempore (Latin for “in that time”)—at the moment when the world came into
being. Every New Year’s festival, every myth of rebirth or reintegration, every
rite of initiation is a return to beginnings, an opportunity to start the world over
again. When in archaic festivals of the New Year a scapegoat is sent out and
purifications are done to rid the community of demons, diseases, and sins, this
event is not just a rite of transition from one year to the next but “also the abo-
lition of the past year and of past time.” It is an attempt “to restore—if only
momentarily—mythical and primordial time, ‘pure’ time, the time of the
‘instant’ of the Creation.”25 In India, coronations follow patterns set at the
beginning of the world. And in sacrifices as well, “there is an implicit abolition
of profane time, of duration, of ‘history.”’26
Eliade thinks it important to notice the motives that inspire this myth of
return. He explains that archaic peoples, like all others, are deeply affected not
only by the mysteries of suffering and death but also by concerns about living
without any purpose or meaning. They long for significance, permanence,
beauty, and perfection as well as escape from their sorrows. Life’s minor irri-
tations and inconveniences are not the problem; they can be borne by anyone.
But the idea that the human adventure as a whole might be merely a pointless
exercise, an empty spectacle with death as its end—that is a prospect no archaic
people can endure. Eliade calls this experience “the terror of history.” It
explains why people have been drawn so powerfully to myth, especially the
myth of eternal return. Because ordinary life is not significant, because real
meaning cannot be found within history, archaic peoples choose to take their
stand outside of it. In the face of life’s drab, empty routine and daily irritations,

248 Nine Theories of Religion
they seek to overcome all in a defiant gesture of denial; through symbol and
myth, they reach back to the world’s primeval perfection, to a moment when
life starts over from its origin, full of promise and hope. “The primitive, by
conferring a cyclic direction upon time, annuls its irreversibility. Everything
begins over again at its commencement every instant.”27
This “terror of history” has been felt not only by archaic peoples but also by
the great civilizations of the ancient world, where a cyclical view of time was
predominant. In India, for example, the oldest teachings held that human
beings were destined to live without hope in a world that passed through
immense cycles of decay and decline until all was finally destroyed and again
remade. The reaction to this deeply pessimistic outlook eventually took the
form of the classic Eastern version of eternal return—the doctrine of rebirth, 0r
reincarnation. We find it chiefly in the famous Hindu Upanishads, as well as in
the teachings of Gautama the Buddha and Mahavira, the founder of Jainism.
Seeing humanity as hopelessly enslaved by these endless cycles of nature,
these teachers pointed to a path of purely Spiritual release from history’s trivi—
ality and terrors. They announced that the soul, or true self, could free itself
from the body, which is its main tie to history, by struggling patiently through
a long series of rebirths until a purely spiritual escape was ultimately achieved.
In different ways, each offered meaning through the doctrine of moksha, the
soul’s final release from nature and history. Elsewhere, the doctrine of return
appeared in other forms. Among certain Greeks and the followers of the great
prophet Zoroaster in ancient Persia, it was expressed in the belief that human
history consists only of a single cycle, which has come out of eternity and will
one day end forever in fire or some other great catastrophe. Against this back-
drop of finality, Zoroaster’s followers found liberation by way of the last judg-
ment and the reward of Heaven that came to all who had remained faithful to
Ahura-Mazda, the great god of goodness and light. The pattern of these reli-
gions is thus quite clear. Though culturally more advanced than archaic peo-
ples, the great civilizations 0f the Mediterranean and Near East, no less than
those of India and Southeast Asia, faced the very same problem of history and
labored just as strenuously to chart a path of escape.
The Revolt Against Archaic Religion: Judaism and Christianity
Almost everywhere in archaic and civilized ancient cultures, then, the problem
of history was central, and the solution, the escape, was found in some form of
the myth of eternal return. The pattern is so widespread, says Eliade, that only
in one place—among the Hebrews of ancient Palestine—can something dif-
ferent be found. It is in ancient Israel that, apparently for the first time on the
world scene, a new kind of religious outlook emerges. While not entirely rejecting

The Reality of the Sacred: Mircea Eliade 249
the idea of a mythical return to beginnings, Judaism proclaims that the sacred
can be found in history as well as outside Ofl it. With this insight, the whole
equation of archaic religion is altered. In Judaism, and later in Christianity,
which derives from it, the pointless cycles of nature are pushed into the back-
ground, while human events come to center stage, where they take shape along
the line of a meaningful story—a history—with the sacred, in the form of the
God of Israel, a participant in its scenes. In place of endless, purposeless world
cycles, Judaism asserts a meaningful sequence of sacred historical events. This
striking innovation was fashioned chiefly by the great prophets of Israel—
Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and others. When disasters fell on their people, they
presented these troubles not as miseries to be escaped but as punishments to be
endured—in history—because they came from the very hand of God. In their
oracles and speeches, says Eliade, the prophets affirmed the idea
that historical events have a value in themselves, insofar as they are determined
by the will of God. This God of the Jewish people is no longer an Oriental di-
vinity, creator of archetypal gestures, but a personality who ceaselessly inter-
venes in history, who reveals his will through events (invasions, sieges, battles,
and so on). Historical facts thus become “situations” of man in respect to God,
and as such they acquire a religious value that nothing had previously been able
to confer upon them.23
That the encounter of a peOple with this personal God of history is some-
thing quite new can be seen also from the famous biblical story of the patriarch
Abraham, who prepares to kill his son as an offering to God. If Judaism were
an archaic religion, says Eliade, this fearsome act would be an instance of
human sacrifice, a killing of the firstborn to renew the sacred power of life in
the gods. Within Judaism, however, the event has a quite different character:
Abraham’s encounter is a very personal transaction in history with a God who
asks him for his son simply as a sign of his faith. This God does not need
sacrifices to renew his divine powers (and indeed he does spare Isaac, the son),
but what he does require from his people is a heart loyal enough to make that
ultimate sacrifice if asked. Christianity inherits this same perspective. The
sequence of events that make up the life and death of Jesus forms a singular
and historic instance, a decisive moment that, occurring once only, serves as
the basis for a personal relationship of forgiveness and trust between Christian
believers and their God. In celebrating the life, crucifixion, and resurrection of
Christ, the Christian faithful do not engage in a ritual of seasonal rebirth; they
do not act out an eternal return to beginnings. They remember a specific and
final historical event, one that requires from them an equally singular and final
decision of personal faith.

250 Nine Theories of Religion
Of course, this new historical religion did not win an instant victory over the
older, archaic attitudes, which are deeply rooted in human psychology. The
tremendous attraction that fertility religions like the cult of Baal had for ordi-
nary people in ancient Israel is proof of this in the case of Judaism. In Christian
cultures also, archaic seasonal ceremonies of rebirth survive and blend in with
the more purely historical elements. And both traditions have been routinely
susceptible to messianic movements. These passionate groups, which expect a
return of God’s chosen one, a catastrophe at the world’s end, and the coming of
a perfect world, bear again the marks of the archaic mind; they tolerate history,
but only because they believe “that, one day or another, it will cease.”29 In con-
sequence, both sides of the Judeo-Christian tradition have unfolded amid some
considerable tension and compromise. They have found the sacred both within
history and outside of it.
The Revolt Against All Religion: Modern Historicism
The Judeo—Christian turn to historical religion is for Eliade an event of momen-
tous importance. It marks the beginning of a shift away from archaic attitudes,
a first revolt against the myth of eternal return. Yet it is not the only seismic
shift in the world’s religions. A second revolt—of equal or even greater
proportion—has just recently begun to take shape in the very centers of
Western civilization, notably modern Europe and America. Over the past few
centuries, Eliade explains, we have once again seen something quite new in
human history: the wide acceptance of philosophies that deny the existence
and value of the sacred altogether. Advocates of these views claim that it
makes no difference where we locate the sacred, whether in history or beyond
it, for the simple reason that human beings do not need it. The truth, they say,
is that there are no gods, there are no “sacred archetypes” that can show us
how to live or what ultimate purpose to live for. We must learn to live without
the sacred altogether. There is no such thing.
We can put aside for a moment the question of whether this modern, wholly
unsacred view of the world is good or bad. Eliade’s first concern is to show
where it came from. He thinks, interestingly, that the door to this second revo-
lution was in fact opened by the very same shift of ideas that created the first:
the coming of Judeo-Christian historical religion. This seems puzzling at first
sight, but for Eliade the sequence is clear. It comes into focus the moment we
place everything within the original context of archaic religion and the myth of
eternal return. We must remember that to the first archaic peOples, the world of
nature was of pivotal importance. It was able at any instant to come alive with
the sacred. Symbolism clothed it in the supernatural; legend and myth sang of
the gods behind the storm and rain. Clues and hints of the sacred could be

The Reality of the Sacred: Mircea Eliade 251
found in a tree, a stone, or the path of a bird in flight. Nature was the garment
of the divine. This was not to be the case, however, in Judaism and Christianity.
The prophets of Israel and writers of the New Testament pushed nature into the
background and brought history up to the front of the stage. The seasons,
storms, and trees were “desacralized,” for the God of Israel and of Christian
faith chose to reveal himself chiefly in the twists and turns of dramatic human
events: in the Hebrews’ escape from Egypt, in the battle of Jericho, or in the
birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. To be sure, nature still had a part
to play, but only in a supporting role. Israel’s prophets still saw the great wind
that parted the Red Sea as a sign of the sacred, but—in the light of their histor-
ical perspective—they read it quite differently. For them it disclosed the divine
not because it was a wondrous natural event—as archaic peoples would have
said—but because it advanced God’s aims for the pe0ple he had chosen; it
delivered them from the hands of their enemies.
As Eliade sees it, this change of religious sensibility is a significant one, not
only on its own terms, but because of the momentous consequences that follow
from it. For gradually, and almost imperceptibly, this original move from reli-
gions of nature to religions of history laid the groundwork in the present era for
a further shift—from the religions of history to phi1050phies of history and
society that discard religion altogether. Through the long passage of centuries,
and especially in Western civilization, the removal of the divine from nature has
slowly opened the way for entire societies to adopt a style of thought that only
a few isolated individuals ever seriously considered until the coming of the
modern era. That style is secularity: the removal of all reference to the sacred
from human thought and action. Eliade states that in explaining the logic behind
their move entirely away from religion, secular thinkers can argue as follows:
If biblical religions like Judaism and Christianity made one great change in the
world’s religious consciousness, does that not license us to make another if we
should so wish? If the prophets felt they had a right to take the sacred out of
nature and find it only in history, why can we not follow their own example and
dismiss it from nature and history both? There is, in short, nothing indispens-
able about the idea of the sacred. For Eliade, this is the form of reasoning at
work in nearly all of the secular, nonreligious philosophies that have arisen
with such powerful appeal during the past three centuries of the modern era. We
might call them the unwelcome stepchildren of Judaism and Christianity.
Eliade describes these secular creeds as forms of “historicism,” a type of
thought that recognizes only things ordinary and profane while denying any
reference at all to things supernatural and sacred. Historicists hold that if we
want significance, if we want some sense of a larger purpose in life, we obvi-
ously cannot find it in the archaic way—by escaping history through some
doctrine of eternal return. But neither can we find it in the Judeo-Christian

252 Nine Theories ofReligion
way—by claiming that there is in history some great plan or purpose of God.
We can find it only in ourselves.
Examples of this historicist thinking can be found in any number of modern
systems and thinkers, among them several we have already met in our chapters.
Eliade notes the developmentalism of the German philosopher Hegel, the com-
munism of Karl Marx, and the perspectives of twentieth-century fascism and
existentialism. Modern capitalism might be included as well. What all of these
systems share is the fundamental belief that if human beings want meaning and
significance in their lives, they must create it entirely on their own—in the
profane realm of history and without assistance from ideas about the sacred.
This can be done in different ways, of course. Fascists and Marxists believe
that even without gods or the sacred, history is still “going somewhere.” It will
end in the triumph of a nation or race or in the victory of the proletariat. Exis-
tentialists tend to think that history as a whole has no central purpose; it is
“going nowhere,” so only the private lives and choices of individuals matter.
The capitalist entrepreneur may make a similar choice by finding purpose only
in money and other material goods. For such people, only personal freedom or
achievement matters, and they can even argue that they are better off than
archaic peoples, who do not have freedom because their lives must always
conform to patterns provided by the gods.
In the contemporary world, these nonreligious philosophies have been
extremely attractive, winning followers not only in Western civilization but
around the world. Eliade, however, has serious doubts about all of them. Is it
really the case, he asks, that they offer a greater degree of meaning and purpose
than archaic religion or Judeo-Christian faith? Is the modern fascist, who must
obey every command of his leader, really more free than the archaic woman,
performing her household ritual of renewal? Does the life of the communist,
bound absolutely to the cause of the party, really have more significance than
that of the archaic tribesman or medieval monk? Is the existentialist philoso-
pher, whose prized individual freedom could be destroyed in a moment if a
brutal army were to march through his streets, truly more content and fulfilled
than the archaic villager who celebrates the seasonal feast of fertility, hoping
thereby to bring life to his crops each Spring?
The Return of Archaic Religion
Despite his misgivings, Eliade does not carry on an extended argument with
these modern philosophies. He merely voices his doubts as to whether they can
ever be truly satisfying. And he tries, by contrast, to show how in hidden ways
archaic thinking has persisted up to the present day. He notes that creative
artists like T. S. Eliot and James Joyce display in their works a remarkable

The Reality of the Sacred: Mircea Eliade 253
attachment to forms of the myth of eternal return. Athletic events, the great
public spectacles of our time, show similar affinities; they generate intense
emotions and center on a single “concentrated” game time, very much like the
sacred moments of primitive ritual. The dramas of theater, television, and film
play out life in a compressed interval of “sacred” time that is wholly different
from normal hours and days. The images and stories of popular culture resem—
ble archaic myths, creating character archetypes on which ordinary people
pattern their lives: “the political or the military hero, the hapless lover; or the
cynic, the nihilist, the melancholy poet.” These and others play for us the same
roles filled for archaic people by the heroes and gods of myth. Even the modern
habit of reading can be seen as a replacement for the oral traditions remem—
bered and recited by primitive peoples; it mirrors the archaic desire to create
an “escape time,” free from the pressures of daily life.
Finally, and quite apart from its disguised modern versions, Eliade observes
that even in its original form, the archaic nostalgia for paradise has never fully
disappeared. Christianity, we have seen, is committed to finding the sacred
only in history. Yet among the Christian peasants of Romania and other central
European lands, one finds a remarkable blend in which archaic habits of mind
virtually sweep aside the residue of history in the church’s creeds. In this “cos-
mic Christianity,” it is accepted that Jesus of Nazareth was a man in history, but
that fact fades from view once it is taken up into the peasants’ image of Christ
as the great Lord of nature, the eternal divinity who in sacred folklore contin-
ues to visit his people on the Earth, just as the high gods do in the myths of
other archaic cultures. Significantly, the liturgies and ceremonies of this cos—
mic Christianity tend to celebrate not the historical Jesus but the eternal Christ,
the cosmic ruler who renews the powers of nature and returns humanity to the
time of beginnings. To its followers, this archaic faith offers a depth of mean-
ing that the historical perspective inherited from Judaism can never provide.
It is worth noticing that this cosmic Christianity with which Eliade concludes
The Eternal Return bears a marked resemblance to the peasant religion he found
so strongly appealing when he first encountered it in the villages of India as a
young man. He is always careful not to make any open endorsements, but it
would seem that in the end his own strong sympathies lie nearest to this sort of
cosmic folk religion and the satisfactions offered by the archaic frame of mind.
Analysis
Eliade pursues a program of inquiry that dissents, more sharply than those of
either Weber or James, from the functionalist reductionism of Freud, Durkheim,
and Marx. At the same time, his interest in comparisons on a global scale and

254 Nine Theories of Religion
his commitment to explaining religion “on its own terms” recall the intellectu-
alist perspective of the Victorian anthropologists Tylor and Frazer. Three of
the elements in this theoretical agenda call for more specific comment.
1. Critique of Reductionism
From the outset Eliade announces his strong dissent from the reductionist
approaches favored in his day and still attractive in ours. In opposition to
Freud, Durkheim, and Marx, he strongly asserts the independence of religious
ideas and activities. He accepts that psychology, society, economics, and other
forces affect religion, but more even than Weber or James he refuses to see
such influence as largely determinative, still less exclusively so. Religion, he
insists, can be understood only if we try to see it from the standpoint of the
believer. Like Roman law, which we can grasp only through Roman values, or
Egyptian architecture, which we must see through Egyptian eyes, religious
behaviors, ideas, and institutions must be seen in the light of the religious per-
spective, the view of the sacred that inSpires them. In the case of archaic peo—
ples especially, it is not profane life—social, economic, or otherwise—that
controls the sacred; it is the sacred that controls and shapes every aspect of the
profane.
2. Global Comparativism
Another main feature of Eliade’s theory is its broad and ambitious design. He
is of course not the only theorist to try to assemble data from a wide variety
of sources, places, and times, but he is certainly more ambitious in this regard
than most. He takes very seriously his double mission to be both a serious
historian and a precise phenomenologist, and he strives for a genuinely com-
prehensive understanding of religion in all its forms. The research that lies
behind his analyses is far—reaching in extent. The three central texts on which
we have focused here represent just a part of his labors, which include not
only his several books on Indian yoga but studies as well of Australian reli-
gions, European folk traditions, and Asian shamans, or prophet-mystics.
Other works focus on alchemy, initiation rituals, and witchcraft; on dreams,
myths, and the occult; on symbolism in the arts; on methods of studying reli-
gion; and on a variety of related other topics. Even in retirement, Eliade con-
tinued to work on a full-scale History of Religious Ideas, which was almost
complete at his death. These wide-ranging global interests have won Eliade
endorsements, especially among some of his American followers. Skeptical
critics, on the other hand, wonder whether this agenda is rather too global,
and perhaps therefore superficial. In tones that hardly suggest a compliment,

The Reality of the Sacred: Mircea Eliade 255
some see his approach as “Frazerian,” as a retreat to the doubtful aims and
methods of The Golden Bough.30
3. Contemporary Philosophical Engagement
Third and last, as we saw in his comments on what he calls modern “histori-
cist” philosophies, Eliade does not regard himself as a detached scholar, solely
interested in the obscure customs of people from distant ages. Though his pro-
fessional life is taken up with scholarship, ancient texts, and archaic ideas, he
sees himself as very much a man engaged with the ideas and culture of his own
time, a theorist who draws from his knowledge of the past to address important
philosophical issues that confront society in the present. He is quite frank, for
example, in arguing that scholars and intellectuals of the modern era have
greatly underestimated the psychological merits of archaic thinking, which
has sustained human endeavors for so much of the history of civilization.
While, again, some greatly appreciate this “philosophical” side of Eliade, there
are others who say it damages any claim he may have to scientific objectivity.
There is undoubtedly more to be said on this matter, but as it stands, it has
already taken us into the final task of this chapter, which is to turn from Eliade’s
theory itself to the main complaints of his critics.
Critique
Eliade’s theory of religion is warmly welcomed in some quarters and strongly
contested in others. This is hardly surprising, given the bold stance he takes
against reductionist approaches and the broad scope of his interests. As should
be apparent from the discussion we have just concluded, Eliade is not afraid to
tackle large questions and take sides on controversial matters of current interest,
though both of those policies have a way of placing other scholars in a very
skeptical mood right from the start. Among the charges of Eliade’s detractors, it
is helpful to make a distinction between minor complaints and those that are
more serious. Certain misgivings expressed about his work seem quite marginal
or even mistaken. It has been said by some, for example, that evidence from
Chinese religions and Islam is missing from most of his writings, ‘even though
he claims to be a “global” comparativist. Others claim that examples which
might discredit his claims can never be found in his books; that he does not
carefully evaluate the texts and scholars he relies on; and that he applies our
modern concepts to ancient peoples.31 Still others have claimed that his views
are a throwback to Victorian social evolutionism and that his methods are
largely intuitive and speculative rather than scientific.32 In fairness, we should

256 Nine Theories of Religion
first note that some of these criticisms could be made of almost any theory as
broad’as Eliade’s, while others could, in part, be answered or even corrected.
Failing to speak at length about Islamic or Chinese religions, for example,
would not be a serious oversight unless significant evidence from these tradi-
tions could be found to contradict the general conclusions Eliade draws from his
other evidence in some significant respect. After all, no one who seeks to make
general observations can possibly know all of the available evidence. Again, it
does not seem accurate to say Eliade is some sort of old-school social evolution-
ist. He recognizes the fact of change in history, but for him change is by no
means to be equated with irreversible evolutionary progress.
These points aside, questions about Eliade’s approach still can be raised on
several other, more important matters. Specifically, reservations have been raised
about the issues of theology, history, and conceptual precision, or clarity.
1. Theology
A number of observers have claimed that the key problem with Eliade is a
religious one. Hidden within his theory, they say, are certain prior assump-
tions, both religious and philosophical, that undermine its objectivity; there-
fore it cannot be scientific. In recent years, several outspoken critics have
claimed that Eliade is really a Christian theologian—or even missionary—in
disguise. He believes in God and presents all religions in a favorable light, so
that he can then show Christianity to be the true and best form among them.33
As one might guess, this charge is a source of considerable controversy, which
Eliade’s own statements unfortunately do not always help to clarify. Though he
published both a journal and an autobiography and discussed his career in a
wide-ranging published interview, he has always remained elusive about his
personal religious convictions. Another issue is that even if he were to admit to
a Christian motive behind his work, we could not discredit his arguments and
analyses for that reason alone, any more than, earlier on, we could dismiss the
theories of Marx and Freud merely because these were inspired by decidedly
antireligious motives. The question that must be asked is whether such prior
beliefs, on either side of the issue, actually enter the theory in such a way as to
make it invalid for anyone who does not accept them. Once we put the matter
this way, perhaps the best that can be said is this: Although it might be true that
Eliade allows his own religious sympathies to intrude on his science, none of
his critics has so far proved that point to general satisfaction. Interestingly, one
of the most objective and careful observers to write on this issue argues that
Eliade’s theory does in part rely upon what may be called a “normative” reli-
gious point of view, but this stance is closer to that of antihistorical Eastern
religions like Hinduism than it is to Christianity.34 Others argue that Eliade’s

The Reality of the Sacred: Mircea Eliade 257
personal creed is in fact the cosmic religion of the archaic peoples he so much
appreciates, and that because of this he fails to do justice to the non-archaic,
historical perspective of Judaism and Christianity or to the nonreligious mod—
ern perspective when he raises doubts about their value.
2. Historical Method
Another set of critics claims that troubles lie in the path not of theology but of
history. As we noted above, Eliade feels he has succeeded in making the
study of religion both a phenomenological and historical enterprise. He
claims not only to explain the timeless symbolic forms of religion but also to
show how they change with each new historical situation. His historical crit—
ics, however, are not so sure. They point out, often quite persuasively, that in
reality only the timeless forms seem to count for Eliade; their special histor—
ical contexts, each with its small but significant variations of, say, the great
tree, the moon cycle, or the eternal return, seem to count very little in his
interpretations. In framing his generalizations, Eliade draws examples from
very distant places in space and time; he lifts them out of their setting, finds
certain similarities, and on that basis concludes that they form a significant
pattern. Regardless of whether he turns to Vedic India several thousand years
ago, to European peasants of the Middle Ages, or to people living in tribal
communities today, he finds in all of these religions the same basic categories
of thought. Everywhere, it seems, he is able to find the same types of symbol
and the same forms of myth, all expressing the same core of ideas: the reality
of the sacred, a reliance on its archetypes, the escape from history, and the
symbolism of return. The conclusion easily drawn from this argument is that
Eliade’s research program is subject to just the sort of criticism first leveled at
Frazer more than half a century earlier. It may well be that some method of
this kind must be followed by anyone who attempts a truly universal theory
of religion, but that does not necessarily mean Eliade’s is sound. As was the
case with Frazer, each time a careful anthropologist or historian who has
closely studied a certain society shows that one of its symbols or myths can-
not be fitted into Eliade’s grand patterns, another crack appears in the theo-
ry’s foundation. One or a few may not weaken the structure, but the effect of
such cumulative weakening cannot be lightly dismissed. i
3. Conceptual Confusions
Alongside both of these problems, there is finally the matter of certain key
concepts that seem, if not confused, at least somewhat imprecise and unfo-‘
cused. It is troubling that at just those moments when we want him to be very

258 Nine Theories of Religion
clear, Eliade’s discussions can turn out to be rather disappointingly vague and
elusive. Instead of sharp, clear lines, we tend to find a mist. On the question of
symbolism, to give just one example, anthropologist Edmund Leach has
pointed to a significant confusion. Eliade tells us that myths often present the
division between the sacred and the profane and then introduce a third thing
that connects them: a boat, a bridge or ladder, a pole, or “great tree.” What is
important, Eliade explains, is not the content of the symbols but their struc-
ture, the linkage they make between the sacred and profane. Whether the con-
necting object is a boat rather than a bridge does not really matter, since the
important thing is the form, or framework, of the symbols—the relationships
between them—rather than the actual content of the symbols themselves. At
the same time, we are in other places told with equal emphasis that certain
connecting symbols—like the great tree as axis mundi—must be considered
superior to others. But surely that can be true only if the content of the symbol
does, in fact, matter after all. So we have a confusion. Could it be, Leach asks,
that Eliade has from the start decided—perhaps for his own religious
reasons—that certain symbols which he personally prefers must come out of
the analysis as better than others? Could it be that content is more important
than formal relationships after all? Whether or not Leach is correct, the matter
of symbols and their precise significance is too important in Eliade’s theory to
be left in this kind of uncertainty.
A similar point can in a sense even be made about the concept of the sacred
itself. Whenever we try to specify just what the sacred is for archaic peoples,
that task turns out to be quite difficult. Eliade says it can be symbolized by the
image of a center that is hard to reach, but also by a center that is easy to reach.
He says that stones represent the sacred because they are solid and changeless;
yet the moon, with its changing phases—its cycle of birth, death, and
reappearance—is said also to represent it because “the real is not only what is
indefinitely the same, but also what becomes in organic but cyclic forms.”35
Elsewhere we learn that “all divinities tend to become everything to their
believers.”36 In other words, the content, or character, of the sacred as Eliade
conceives it would seem subject to considerable change. But if so, if the con-
cept of the sacred must be this formless and changeable to do its job, how
useful can it really be? How instructive is it to build a theory on the notion of
the sacred if, in the end, there is relatively little that can be specified about it
other than the fact that it is the opposite of the profane?
DeSpite these problems, Eliade deserves a measure of commendation for
being one of the few thinkers to speak assertively against the spirit of his age,
laying a strong claim to the independence of religious behavior over against
the various forms of functionalist reductionism. He can also be commended
for at least attempting an approach that draws its data from almost every world

The Reality of the Sacred: Mircea Eliade 259
religion and tries to account for all the evidence within the framework of a
single comprehensive system. Whether he has: succeeded, or ever could suc-
ceed, with such an ambitious program is of course another matter. Interest-
ingly, among those who think not it is sometimes suggested that a more
promising approach would be simply to abandon Eliade’s hopes of a “global”
theory and refocus the aims of inquiry altogether. They claim that just as much
can be learned not by looking for general patterns but by doing the very oppo-
site: by centering upon the religion of a single place or people and exploring
it in painstaking depth and detail. As we shall see next, that is just the path
taken, and made exemplary, by the renowned English anthropologist E. E.
Evans-Pritchard.
Notes
1. Mircea Eliade, Journal [11: 1970—1978, tr. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 179.
2. Autobiography: Volume 1, 1907—1937, Journey East, Journey West, tr. Mac
Linscott Ricketts (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981), p. 94. In addition to Eliade’s
own autobiography and journals, accounts of his life include Ioan Culianu, Mircea
Eliade (Assisi, Italy: Cittadella Editrice, 1977), and Ivan Strenski, Four Theories of
Myth in Twentieth-Century History: Cassirer; Eliade, Levi-Strauss and Malinowski
(Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987), pp. 70—128. The most extensive account of
Eliade’s early years is Mac Linscott Ricketts, Mircea Eliade: The Romanian Roots,
1907— 1945, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
3. Mircea Eliade, Ordeal by Labyrinth: Conversations with Claude-Henri Roquet
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 6—8.
4. Eliade, Ordeal, pp. 54—56.
5. Eliade, Ordeal, pp. 162—163.
6. Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, tr. Rosemary Sheed (New York:
Meridian Books [1949] 1963), p. xiii.
7. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, tr. Willard
R. Trask (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World [1956 French], 1957), pp. 12—13.
8. Mircea Eliade, Autobiography, Volume II: 1937—1960: Exile ’s Odyssey, tr. Mac
Linscott Rickets (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 188—189.
9. Genesis 28:17.
10. Eliade, Sacred and Profane, pp. 55—56.
11. Eliade, Patterns, p. 91.
12. Mircea Eliade, “Methodological Remarks on the Study of Religious Symbolism,”
in The History of Religions. Essays in Methodology, Mircea Eliade and Joseph
Kitagawa, eds. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), p. 103.
13. Eliade, Patterns, pp. 98—99.
14. Eliade, Patterns, p. 124.
15. Eliade, Patterns, p. 183.
16. Eliade, Patterns, p. 170.

l7. Eliade, Patterns, p. 158.
18. Eliade, Patterns, p. 158.
19. Eliade, Patterns, p. 216.
20. Eliade, Patterns, p. 265.
21. Eliade, Patterns, p. 315.
22. Eliade, Patterns, pp. 314—315.
23. Eliade, Patterns, p. 322.
24. Eliade, Sacred and Profane, p. 92.
25. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return: 0); Cosmos and History
(New York: Harper Torchbooks [1949], 1959), p. 52.
26. Eliade, Eternal Return, p. 35.
27. Eliade, Eternal Return, p. 89.
28. Eliade, Eternal Return, p. 104.
29. Eliade, Eternal Return, p. 11 l.
30. William A. Lessa, review of The Sacred and the Profane, in American
Anthropologist 61 (1959): 1147.
31. For a full accounting of these criticisms and their merits, see John A. Saliba,
“Homo Religiosus” in Mircea Eliade: An Anthropological Evaluation (Leiden: E. J.
Brill, 1978).
32. On the claim that he is an evolutionist, see Dorothy Libby, review of Rites and
Symbols of Initiation, in American Anthropologist 61 (1959): 689. On the other criti-
cisms, see Anthony F. C. Wallace, Religion: An Anthropological View (New York:
Random House, 1966), p. 252; and Annemarie de Waal Malefijt, Religion and Culture:
An Introduction to Anthropology of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1968), p. 193.
33. Among the most vocal of these critics is Canadian scholar Donald Wiebe, who, in
a number of articles and books, repeats the claim that Eliade’s opposition to reduction-
ism is not a scientific principle but a religious prejudice; see, among several of his writ-
ings that make this point, Religion and Truth (The Hague, Netherlands: Mouton
Publishers, 1981).
34. Douglas Allen, Structure and Creativity in Religion: Hermeneutics in Mircea
Eliade’s Phenomenology of Religion and New Directions (The Hague, Netherlands:
Mouton Publishers, 1978), pp. 221—245, especially pp. 221—222.
35. Eliade, Patterns, pp. 314—315.
36. Eliade, Patterns, p. 262.
Suggestions for Further Reading
Allen, Douglas. Structure and Creativity in Religion: Hermeneutics in Mircea Eliade ’s
Phenomenology of Religion and New Directions. The Hague: Mouton Publish—
ers, 1978. A substantive analysis, difficult in places, but written by a scholar with
a wide and deep knowledge of Eliade’s life and works.
Cave, David. Mircea Eliade’s Vision for a New Humanism. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993. A sympathetic, but not uncritical, discussion of the hu—
manist perspective that in the author’s view guides all of Eliade’s thinking about
religion.

The Reality of the Sacred: Mircea Eliade 26]
Dudley, Guilford, III. Religion on Trial: Mircea Eliade and His Critics. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1977. An instructive discussion, with a critique of the
assumptions and major themes in Eliade’s works.
Eliade, Mircea. Autobiography: Volume 1, 1907—193 7: Journey East, Journey
West. Translated by Mac Linscott Ricketts, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981.
Autobiography: Volume 2, 1937—1960: Exile ’s Odyssey. Translated by Mac
Linscott Ricketts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. In these volumes
Eliade himself provides a narrative of his life and thought up through his first
years at the University of Chicago.
Leach, Edmund. “Sermons by a Man on a Ladder.” The New York Review of Books,
October 20, 1966. A sharply critical review of Eliade’s works from the perspec-
tive of professional anthropology.
Olson, Car]. The Theology and Philosophy of Eliade: A Search for the Centre.
New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. A good introduction to the major themes in
Eliade’s work.
Rennie, Bryan, ed. Mircea Eliade: A Critical Reader (Critical Categories in the Study
of Religion). London: Equinox, 2006. Essays that introduce students and non-
specialists to key concepts and themes in Eliade’s work; also considers develop-
ments in his life and criticism of his theories.
Rennie, Bryan, ed. The International Eliade. Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2007. The editor assembles a wide array of scholars from Asia, South
America, Europe, and Scandinavia, whose global appraisals measure Eliade’s
strengths and weaknesses.
Ricketts, Mac Linscott. Mircea Eliade: The Romanian Roots, 1907—1945. 2 vols. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1988. The most extensive account of Eliade’s
earlier years in Romania, Italy, India and other places.
Saliba, John A. “Homo Religiosus ” in Mircea Eliade: An Anthropological Evaluation.
Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978. A modern anthropological assessment that mixes ap-
preciation and criticism.
Strenski. Ivan. Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth—Century History: Cassirer: Eliade,
Levi-Strauss and Malinowski. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1987,
pp. 70-128. Contains a perceptive and provocative exploration of Eliade’s ties to
Romanian culture and its nationalist movement between the wars.
Wedemeyer, Christian, and Wendy Doniger. Hermeneutics, Politics, and the History of
Religions: The Contested Legacies of Joachim Wach and Mircea Eliade. New
York : Oxford University Press, 2010. Papers presented at a conference marking
the death of Wach and birth of Eliade offer the most recent perspectives on their
legacies, along with reappraisals of their achievements.

8
Society’s “Construct of the Heart”:
E. E. Evans-Pritchard
If he could alter the categories of his own generation’s universe so that
primitive peoples would rank in it as fully rational beings, that change
would entail others, among them a higher status for religious
knowledge.
Mary Douglas, E. E. Evans-Pritchard‘
E. E. Evans-Pritchard is one of the great figures in modern anthropology, a
field he claimed as his profession for a period of nearly fifty years, from the
19205 to his death in 1973. Were he to have seen his name alongside the others
in this book, this unassuming Englishman doubtless would have expressed
some surprise, insisting that if theories of religion are the subject, he had pro-
posed no such thing. Certain observers, in fact, might even prefer to describe
him as an “antitheorist” of religion, for in one of his most widely noticed
books, Theories of Primitive Religion (1965), he takes it as his mission to dis-
mantle the ambitious schemes of explanation put forward by the pioneering
figures in anthropology and the study of religion, including several of the the-
orists already discussed in these pages. It may be recalled that on occasion in
earlier chapters we noted some of his perceptive criticisms of their views.
Evans-Pritchard’s role in the enterprise of explaining religion, however, has
been much larger than that of a critic whose main interest is to find the faults
in the work of others. His considerable reputation rests on the very impressive
work he was able to do “in the field”—as anthropologists prefer to say——
preparing studies he carried out as a trained, professional observer of actual
tribal peoples.
Of the theorists we have so far met in this book, almost all have readily offered
an opinion on the nature of primitive, or tribal, religion, yet only one—Eliade
in India—records even so much as a passing contact with people living in cir—
cumstances remotely similar to a real primitive society. This is emphatically
not the case with Evans-Pritchard, who did far more than just meet or speak
263

264 Nine Theories of Religion
with a few “native” peoples. He made it his mission fully to engage with two
different primitive societies, learn their languages, live for a time by their cus-
toms, and carefully study them in action. The significance of his work can
therefore hardly be overestimated. His approach differs from that of earlier
“armchair” anthropologists just as experimental science does from specula—
tion. Further, while he was critical of most theories he had encountered, Evans-
Pritchard was by no means opposed to them in principle. He felt that among
anthropologists, in fact, not enough effort had been put into this enterprise, and
he saw his own work among tribal pCOples of Africa as—if not a way of fram-
ing a full theory of his own—a necessary step in the right direction.
Life and Career
E. E. Evans-Pritchard was born in 1902, the second son of a Church of England
clergyman, Rev. John Evans-Pritchard, and his wife Dorothea.2 The parish his
father served was at Crowborough, Sussex, not too distant from Hampshire,
where Evans-Pritchard took his secondary education at Winchester College,
one of England’s elite public schools. He then entered Exeter College, Oxford
University, continuing his studies for four years and graduating with an M.A.
in modern history. By then his interests had already begun to turn in the direc-
tion of anthropology, so in 1923 he began graduate study at the London School
of Economics. As noted earlier, the study of anthropology in England had
evolved from the older armchair-and-library research practiced by Muller and
Frazer into a discipline that required at least one apprenticeship of study devoted
to a society very different—meaning “primitive” usually—from those of mod-
ern Europe and America. This was precisely the kind of work Evans-Pritchard
was determined to do. In London he was able to study with C. G. Seligman,
who had been the first professional anthropologist to do fieldwork in Africa. At
the same time, Bronislaw Malinowski came to London and became a second
mentor. Malinowski, a noted figure, had spent four years studying the people
of the Trobriand Islands, where he was the first anthropologist to do his
research in a native language and immerse himself fully in the daily life of a
primitive community. He strongly encouraged Evans-Pritchard to do what he
had done, studying the culture of a single people in great depth; Seligman
encouraged him to choose a tribal society in Africa.
Taking the advice of both tutors, Evans—Pritchard traveled to the Sudan
region of East Africa, the area where the Nile and Congo rivers find their
source. Under the joint control of Egypt and Britain at the time, this area was
known as the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Between 1926 and 1931, while

Society’s “Construct of the Heart”: E. E. Evans-Pritchard 265
encountering a number of tribal communities, he settled among a people
known as the Azande in the southern Sudan. In all, he spent almost two years
with them and learned their language thoroughly, all the while writing his doc—
toral dissertation and other articles on their social life. Between 1930 and 1936
he did further fieldwork among the Nuer people of the region. In 1935 he
became Research Lecturer in African Sociology at Oxford, and four years later
he married a South African, Ioma Nicholls, with whom he had a family of three
sons and two daughters. In 1937 he published his first major work, Witchcraft,
Oracles, and Magic among the Azande. Though it made a modest impact at
first, this book acquired great importance in the years after World War II, being
called by at least one authority “the outstanding work of anthropology pub-
lished in this century.”3 It was followed by the first of three volumes he was to
publish on the other tribe he had studied in depth. The Nuer: A Description of
the Modes ofLivelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People appeared
in 1940.
During World War II, Evans-Pritchard served in the British army, leading a
Zande (this is singular; “Azande” is the plural) band of warriors on a campaign
against certain Italian army defenses in East Africa. Later, while serving at a
post in Cyrenaica, Libya, he did further research that led to a study of a Muslim
Sufi religious order known as the Sanusi. It was at this time, in the year 1944,
that he converted to Roman Catholicism. After the war, he returned to England,
where he settled first at Cambridge and then became professor of social anthro-
pology at Oxford, taking the chair occupied by the noted advocate of function—
alist theory, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, on his retirement.
At Oxford Evans-Pritchard rose to even greater prominence as perhaps the
leading figure in British social anthropology. During these years he published,
alongside numerous articles on anthropological subjects, the results of his
work in Libya, The Sanusi of Cyrenaica (1949); the second and third of his
Nuer studies, Kinship and Marriage among the Nuer (1951) and Nuer Religion
(1956); and major books on the methods and history of the field, including
Social Anthropology (1951), Essays in Social Anthropology (1962), and A His-
tory ofAnthropological Thought (1981). The last of these appeared a number
of years after his death. Evans—Pritchard’s worldwide renown in anthropology
was almost matched by his fame in and about Oxford as one of the university’s
most engagingly eccentric characters. Unpretentious, retiring, and often
dressed in clothes that allowed him to be easily mistaken for a handyman, his
close associates marveled at his acid tongue and what one described as his
“awesome, Celtic prowess at drinking.”4 In 1970 Evans-Pritchard retired from
his post, and the following year, against his wishes, he was knighted. He died
two years later, in 1973.

Intellectual Background
Evans—Pritchard’s approach to anthropology—and consequently religion—
took shape against the background of three earlier traditions. The first was
older Victorian anthropology, the second was French sociology, and the third
was the newer British school of fieldwork anthropology. We have already met
the last of these, at least briefly, in the form of his teachers Seligman and
Malinowski, who stressed close study of a foreign society. We can understand
why this type of research was considered important if we look at the two other
traditions as Evans-Pritchard saw them when he began his work.
Older Anthropology
As we noticed earlier in the case of such figures as Tylor, Frazer, and their
associates, the Victorian founders of anthropology imagined a new science of
human affairs. They felt they could study such things as religion and the rise
of human culture as scientists, methodically collecting, comparing, and classi-
fying facts. They thought also that this science could demonstrate social evo-
lution, humanity’s march of progress. And though they were less aware of it
than of the other principles, they preferred an approach that was intellectualist
and individualistic.
Looking back on this enterprise, Evans-Pritchard, like others in the early
years of the twentieth century, gave it a quite mixed review. The ideal of
science he found the easiest to accept, and even improve upon, chiefly by
using the Victorians’ research, gathering more facts, and refining the meth-
ods for studying them. The evolutionary conclusions, however, were another
matter. He recognized that certain technical improvements in history were
obvious: a better plough, a faster loom, a stronger wheel. Cultural progress as
a whole, however, was a much larger, more elusive issue. And though it may
have seemed self-evident to Tylor and Frazer, Evans-Pritchard insisted that
such a theory contradicted the very scientific principles upon which it suppos-
edly was based. Darwin, after all, had provided evidence to prove the physical
evolution of animal Species; unfortunately, evidence was precisely what the
older anthropologists did not have for their broad theories of cultural progress,
including their views on the origin and development of religion. Most the-
orizing about the first humans—what their marriage customs were, what
their religion was, and so forth—consisted mainly of speculation about an
era from which there were no historical records, nor could there ever be.
The ideas were interesting, but there was no way they could be proved or,
for that matter, even disproved. So any theory of social evolution was prob-
lematic from the start.

Society’s “Construct of the Heart”: E. E. Evans-Pritchard 267
With regard to the other feature of older anthropology, its individualist intel-
lectualism, the appraisal was more mixed; Insofar as Tylor and Frazer explained
primitive belief as the ideas of isolated ancient thinkers, they had clearly failed
to see that humans always live in society, which conditions and colors their
thought in a fundamental way. Insofar as they explained religion intellectually,
their emphasis was rather one-sided; however, they were partly correct. All
human beings, even uneducated ones, do approach life to some extent in intel—
lectual terms; they want to explain their experience; so they frame concepts,
connect them to others, and relate them to the activities of daily life.
French Sociology
Evans-Pritchard felt strongly that the proper corrective to the individualism of
Tylor and Frazer could be found in the field of sociology as it had recently
developed in France. As noted earlier, the French tradition of interpreting
human affairs in social terms went back to the period before the Revolution
and could be seen in the works of the Baron de Montesquieu, especially his
Spirit of the Laws (1748). This approach had been further developed by figures
like Henri de Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte in the early nineteenth century
and further refined at its close by Durkheim and his disciples. Evans—Pritchard
expressed real admiration for Durkheim, whom he called “the central figure”
in the deveIOpment of social anthropology, not just because of his own work
but because of the way in which he formed a circle of talented associates and
students to work with him.5 He was the leader of the French school, which had
shown definitively that human social life, which included religion, could never
be understood merely as what individuals think and do, though in associations
and numbers; there was more to the formation of social groups than merely
private thoughts and emotions in assembled form. Durkheim’s disciples
demonstrated that the framework of life is fixed for every person by society
even before birth and remains in place through the generations. Accordingly,
in their view, it was society that created much of the individual. A child born
in France will speak the French language, feel obliged to obey French laws,
and observe French customs. So too in thought: a French child will understand
the world with French ideas. Everyone knew these things more or less, but
until Durkheim not everyone knew their full importance.
The colleague and sometimes critic of Durkheim who sought to explain the
influence of these social factors on how people think, both religiously other-
wise, was Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857—1939), a philosopher who was very much
aware of social considerations and took a Special interest in the thought of
primitive peoples. When they were translated into English in the 19203, two of
his books, How Natives Think (1926) and Primitive Mentality (1923), drew

268 Nine Theories of Religion
considerable attention in Britain. Evans-Pritchard thought these works, like
Durkheim’s, were extremely important for anthropology. Unlike Tylor and
Frazer, whom we have seen referring to early peoples as rational but also as
ignorant, superstitious, and childish, Lévy-Bruhl sought to show how primitive
thought is not weaker or more immature than ours but simply different from it.
It is a reflection of an entirely different social system, which places value on a
type of thinking best described as “prelogical.” Primitive people live in a world
of “mystical participations” that do not follow our rules of logical connection
or our law against contradiction. Because they obey these different rules of
thought, primitive people can quite literally think of themselves as one thing
and something else at the same time. When, in the report of a European
explorer, a South American native declared, “I am a red parakeet,” those words
were meant literally, yet the native was not demonstrating that he was deranged
or even weak in reasoning power; he was demonstrating a different kind of
thought, a type that is irrational to us because it accepts as normal the “mystical
participation” of one thing in another.
Evans-Pritchard thought the work of Lévy—Bruhl to be brilliant, even though,
on the key point of the primitive prelogical mind, it would need correction. Not
only had it shown that the ideas and attitudes of nonliterate peoples must be
understood within the context of their culture—the whole sea of values, habits,
and assumptions in which they swim—but it also marked a most important
change in the attitude of modern thinkers toward primitive people. In Lévy-
Bruhl’s perspective, early peoples were not mentally deficient, subhuman, 0r
childish; they were equally but differently mature, human, and intelligent
beings. To Evans-Pritchard, this was a perspective every anthropologist should
take with him into the field.
British Empirical Anthropology
Evans-Pritchard was not the only one in the Britain of his day to appreciate
French sociology. Its importance had already been recognized by
A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, whose ideas dominated anthropological discussion at
the time. From Durkheim and his colleagues, Radcliffe-Brown had borrowed
and then further developed the functional theory of society as a complete,
interconnected, working organism: no part of it could be understood without
the whole. Explaining primitive religion without addressing primitive class
divisions or economic needs was like explaining the human heart without ever
referring to the blood or lungs. Evans-Pritchard, along with almost every other
aspiring younger anthropologist of the time, heartily endorsed this view, as
well as the important practical conclusion that followed from it. To do his
work, the anthropologist could no longer stay in a library or read the reports of

Society ’5 “Construct 0f the Heart”: E. E. Evans-Pritchard 269
missionaries about this strange notion or that odd habit. He must go out into
the field and make a complete study of a single culture, observing not just its
religion, but its law and economics, its class divisions, family structure, and
kinship connections—all of these aspects as they come together in a unitary,
organic whole. This conclusion, endorsed and implemented by all of his most
important teachers, is what led Evans-Pritchard in 1926 to the interior of the
Sudan—and to his first major anthropological study.
Witchcraft, Grades, and Magic among the Azande
In this chapter as in the others, our plan of action requires that we focus our
attention on the main books in which Evans-Pritchard developed his key ideas
on religion. These are chiefly Nuer Religion (1956) and, to a lesser degree, his
critical study Theories of Primitive Religion (1965). Before doing so, however,
we must take note of his extremely important earlier work on the Azande peo-
ple, in part because of its great significance for anthropological research as a
whole but also because it provides the key link between the initial assumptions
we have just noted and Evans-Pritchard’s views on religion as they were devel—
oped in his later years.
As its title indicates, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande
(1937) deals with a topic that anthropologists since Tylor and Frazer had taken
to be closely related to religion: namely, magic. For Evans—Pritchard, magic is
the belief that certain aspects of life can be controlled by mystical forces or
supernatural powers. Since most educated members of modern Western
societies—and Evans-Pritchard includes himself in this group—think the
belief in such forces is wholly mistaken, the natural question is: Why then do
the Azande believe in them? Evans—Pritchard found it unacceptable, as we have
seen, to say with Tylor and Frazer that they are partly irrational and childish.
And outside of the realm of magic, there was abundant evidence to support
him. On their own terms, he wrote, the Azande are logical, analytical, and
inquiring. In social and practical affairs, they are clever and perceptive. They
are skilled craftsmen; they are poetically imaginative, and in matters of sur-
vival and daily living extremely resourceful. On the whole “they are unusually
intelligent, sophisticated, and pro gressive.”6 Still, a surprisingly significant part
of life among the Azande is given over to oracles, magic, and other ritual
performances. They refer to mystical ideas and ritual practices on a daily
basis; they Speak freely about them and without fear, even though addressing
practical matters still takes up most of their daily conversation.
The precise nature of Zande witchcraft seems strange to a Westerner, but it
is not difficult to describe. The term “witchcraft” actually refers to a physical

270 Nine Theories of Religion
substance that some pe0ple have in their bodies, unknown to themselves. It is
inherited and can be discovered in their bodies after death. Evans—Pritchard
states his own belief that this substance, which the Azande can find post mor-
tem as a dark mass in the small intestine, is nothing more than undigested food.
Yet the Azande believe that while this substance looks to be merely physical
and natural, it operates in a mystical fashion to bring misfortune, and espe-
cially sickness, on other peOple. It is a mistake, Evans-Pritchard cautions, to
suppose the Azande are so obsessed with witchcraft that they spend most of
their time making and responding to accusations that they have it in their bod-
ies; they do not. But references to it are made in every aspect of their life,
especially in connection with almost any unfortunate turn of events that cannot
be directly explained by ordinary mistakes or misjudgments.
Evans-Pritchard observes that if a blight hits one of the crops, if animals are
not found in the hunt, if a wife and husband quarrel, if a commoner is turned
away by his prince, there are always mutterings of witchcraft, though very little
is done about it. Nonetheless, when a truly serious misfortune makes an
appearance—say, the presence of a wasting disease that seems to be taking the
life of an individual—there is no doubt in the Zande mind that such occur-
rences must be due to witchcraft. The person whose witchcraft caused them
must be found—and confronted.
In such cases the Azande regularly consult what they call the poison oracle.
In this—again, to us quite strange—procedure, a man forces poison into the
throat of a chicken while at that very moment asking a question that can be
answered with a yes or no. The death or survival of the chicken then determines
the answer. For example, concerning the sick friend: “If x has caused his ill-
ness, poison oracle, kill the fowl.”7 If the bird dies of the poison, the person
whose witchcraft has caused the illness has been found. There then follows a
procedure of accusation, a ritual of “blowing water,” in which the accused
agrees to “cool” his witchcraft, which is devouring the soul of the sick person,
and all is considered to be at an end—unless of course the victim of the witch-
craft dies after all. In that case, vengeance must be taken. Evans—Pritchard
points out that at one time in the Zande past, this act might have involved the
murder of the accused witch. Now, however, it is usually a matter of offering
compensation to the family or, even better, of discovering, again through ora—
cles, that another person in the community, now deceased, was in fact the witch
and has thus already suffered a fitting punishment for his witchcraft. Ven-
geance, moreover, cannot be claimed until the verdict of one’s private oracle
has been confirmed by the secret poison oracle of the local prince, for Zande
society is an aristocracy in which the ruling class makes all final decisions. If
the logic of these oracles, deaths, and acts of vengeance were analyzed pub-
licly, Evans-Pritchard notes, it would reduce itself to an absurdity, because

Society ’5 “Construct offhe Heart”: E. E. Evans-Pritchard 271
every new death would have to be attributed to yet another act of witchcraft in
an endless circle. The Azande—significantly—choose not to address this prob-
lem in any abstract or theoretical manner.
Alongside witchcraft and the poison oracle, there is an array of associated
magical practices. There are minor oracles that function like the poison oracle
but are less accurate and need its confirmation in important matters. There are
all sorts of medicines that witch doctors can apply as good magic to ward off
the effects of witchcraft. And there is sorcery, which is done in secret and
regarded as a crime if discovered. In addition, Evans-Pritchard notes that the
class of the nobility is largely exempt from the entire business of witchcraft.
Commoners do not accuse the ruling class; conversely, the poison oracle of the
prince, which gives the final determination on all serious witchcraft charges
brought by commoners, is the anchor of the society’s entire legal system; it is
both constitution and supreme court.
The painstaking detail with which Evans—Pritchard describes these magical
practices is one reason for the extraordinary praise Witchcraft came to receive
from experts in the field. It is a classic piece of what anthropologists call scien-
tific ethnography. The details have great theoretical importance, for through
them Evans-Pritchard is able to show how, from the Zande perspective, the
seeming absurdities of witchcraft and magic form not only a coherent and
rational system, but one that plays a central role in social life. It offers a plau-
sible account of all personal misfortunes. It also works alongside what we
would call explanation through natural causes, for the Azande also believe in
these and appeal to them often as well. In certain cases, witchcraft helps to
explain why the natural causes act as they do. It does not explain why fire
burns, but it does explain why, on this particular unfortunate occasion, fire,
which never bothered me before, now has burned my hand. The Azande, there-
fore, see no competition between science on the one hand and their system of
magic, oracles, witchcraft, and religion on the other. Significantly, the notion
of a struggle between these two forms of knowledge—which is so central to
views of Tylor, Frazer, Freud, Lévy-Bruhl, and so many other theorists of the
primitive mind—seems totally foreign to their experience. Magic and religion
are not replaced by science; they simply operate alongside and with it.
In addition to its task of explaining misfortune, witchcraft works along with
magic to achieve other useful social purposes. It not only serves as the founda-
tion of legal affairs but also governs Zande morals and softens the rough edges
of social life. The chances of violence, for example, are reduced because there
is a routine procedure for determining the identity of those who are believed to
have caused misfortune and an expectation that, in the appropriate way, they
will be punished. Again, since witches are thought to be naturally disagreeable,
uncooperative, unhappy people, there is a strong incentive not to behave in that

272 Nine Theories of Religion
way lest other people suspect you are a witch and bring your name before their
oracle after the next bad event. As Evans-Pritchard puts it in concise form: “The
concept of witchcraft . . . provides them [the Azande] with a natural philosophy
by which the relations between men and unfortunate events are explained and
a ready and stereotyped means of reacting to such events. Witchcraft beliefs
also embrace a system of values which regulate human conduct.”8
All of this also puts Evans-Pritchard in the position to make a clear state-
ment about how the Azande reason as compared with thinking in a modern
scientific culture, and here it is worth quoting him at length. Although the
Azande clearly do not see the theoretical weakness in their system of witch-
craft belief,
their blindness is not due to stupidity, for they display great ingenuity in explain-
ing away the failures and inequalities of the poison oracle and experimental
keenness in testing it. It is due rather to the fact that their intellectual ingenuity
and experimental keenness are conditioned by patterns of ritual behaviour and
mystical belief. Within the limits set by these patterns they show great intelli-
gence, but it cannot operate beyond these limits. Or, to put it in another way;
they reason excellently in the idiom of their beliefs, but they cannot reason out-
side, or against, their beliefs because they have no other idiom in which to ex-
press their thoughts?
Having said this, Evans-Pritchard then turns the argument around. He states
that if we look closely at Zande witchcraft in the context of the society in
which it functions, we find it a system of thought that shows certain quite strik—
ing similarities to our own nonmagical system. Certain beliefs—like the idea
that there is such a thing as witchcraft—are fundamental and beyond dispute.
Once these are accepted, other inferences, connections, and ideas follow from
them quite logically and consistently. Moreover, the fundamental ideas are
always affirmed in a way that allows for certain adjustments and protections of
them if they do happen to be contradicted by the facts.
Toward the end of Witchcraft, Evans-Pritchard provides a long list of consid-
erations that affect Zande thinking and of the defenses they readily adopt to
“save the system” when needed. When a poison or type of magic does not
work, they declare that it may have been inappropriately used or that it was
applied against mystical powers whose action is beyond the natural realm and
so cannot be contradicted by events within nature. If a medicine fails, the
Azande set against it the apparent successes of others. They may also claim
that magic seldom produces a result by itself but acts only in combination with
other actions. Moreover, their medicines are never actually tested and some are
always used, so there is no way to tell what would happen if they were not.
These are only a few examples of the way in which the fundamental

Society’s “Construct of the Heart”: E. E. Evans-Pritchard 273
assumptions of the Zande world view are very well protected against facts that
might disprove them; indeed, they form a system of belief impossible to shake.
From our perspective the Azande may be wrong, but from theirs it is clear that
they think quite rationally within the limits their culture chooses to allow. Their
small beliefs rest very logically on certain large ones, and these important basic
principles are extremely well guarded. The attachment to the major beliefs is
so fundamental to their life that the Azande cannot imagine them to be in error.
Without them, their entire social order would be inconceivable, and no one
could endure that.
As students of contemporary culture have come to realize, what Evans-
Pritchard shows to be true for the Azande holds consequences for the assess-
ment of belief and doubt in our own social circumstance. The case of the
Azande suggests that in any culture, certain fundamental beliefs must at all
costs be preserved; they are too precious and crucial to lose.
Nuer Religion
In 1930 Evans-Pritchard began a series of visits to the land of the Nuer, a peo-
ple living just to the north of the Azande but very different in their character,
culture, and traditions. He at once set upon the difficult work of learning their
language and began questioning his hosts, a task that proved more difficult
than with the Azande, who had volunteered information freely. Over a period
of about six years, to 1936, he put together the equivalent of a year in the Nuer
camps, questioning, observing, and writing. This research led in time to three
impressive books—and numbers of articles—published between 1940 and
1956. The first of the books, entitled The Nuer, focused on economic and polit-
ical life. Among other notable features of Nuer community life, it explores the
central place of cattle in the tribal economy and examines the role they play
also in people’s personal affections. It offers as well a fascinating discussion of
the way the Nuer have constructed their ideas of time and space in relation to
their way of life. In 1951 The Nuer was followed by a more specifically social
study of the community’s patterns of kinship and marriage. The trilogy was
then brought to completion in 1956 with Nuer Religion, the book that calls for
our attention here.
The Concept of “Kwoth”
Evans-Pritchard begins Nuer Religion at the very center of its subject. On a
first look, he notes, one would almost say that the Nuer are a people without
religion; they seem to have no formal dogma, no developed liturgy or

274 Nine Theories of Religion
sacraments, no organized worship, not even a system of mythology. But those
appearances are misleading. The Nuer have all of these things, but they appear
in the culture in such an informal, almost hidden way that the casual observer
can easily miss them.
Nuer religion centers chiefly on the concept of kworh, or spirit (in the plural,
kuth). Foremost in their thought is God, the being they know as Kwoth nhial,
the “spirit of (or, in) the sky.” He is the creator of all things, invisible and pres—
ent everywhere, the sustainer—and taker—of life, the upholder of cuong, or
what is morally upright, good, and true. A being with qualities of human per-
sonality, Kwoth nhial is preeminently a God who loves unselfishly the human
beings he has created.‘0 Nuer are keenly aware of God’s control of their lives,
often uttering quiet prayers to the effect “God is present.” And though proud in
their attitudes to other people, they regard themselves as nothing before him.
They are dumb and small, mere ants in his sight.
The Nuer have a strong sense of God’s complete control over the great nat-
ural events that happen in the world. Floods, storms, drought, and famine—all
of these are in his hands and must be accepted as they come. If, as happens not
infrequently, someone is killed by lightning in a thunderstorm, they do not
mourn or hold a normal rite of burial; they accept that God has just taken back
what is his own. At the same time, the lesser, if still significant, misfortunes
that arise in the course of daily social life are another matter. Unlike the Azande,
the Nuer do not see them as caused by witchcraft, which must be discovered
through oracles so the witch can be pointed out; they feel strongly that such
things are their own fault: reversals caused by their own wrongdoing. And they
believe that life cannot go on, nor can their community prosper, until matters
have been made right before God—until the pollution of their wrongs has been
purged. To this idea we will return shortly.
Spirits of the Above
In addition to God, the spirit of the sky, the world of the Nuer embraces other,
lesser spirits. They fall into two main groups: the “spirits of the above” (spirits
who live primarily in the air) and “Spirits of the below” (those associated
strictly with Earth).
Spirits of the above include deng, the son of God; mani, the spirit who leads
in war; wiu, the god of the clan assembled; and buk, a female spirit, called the
mother of deng, who is associated especially with rivers and streams. Though
their primary dwelling is the air, these spirits can seize and enter the bodies of
human beings. When this happens in a temporary way, the sign of it in the
person possessed is sickness. But there is also a more lasting kind of

Society’s “Construct offhe Heart”: E. E. Evans-Pritchard 275
possession experienced by those who are recognized as prophets. Such persons
are actually described as permanent possessors, or owners, of a spirit. Histori-
cally, the main role of these figures was to serve as inspired leaders in battle,
especially during cattle raids upon the neighboring Dinka tribe. But in the
modern era, Evans-Pritchard notes, that duty is seldom carried out. In no case
does the spirit of the sky, Kwoth nhial, ever stoop to possess a human being; he
is far, far above anything like that.
If we ask what is the relation of these secondary kuth, or spirits, to God, we
meet one of the most complex and subtle elements in the whole of Nuer theol-
ogy. Characteristically, Evans—Pritchard makes a very close comparative anal—
ysis of Nuer speech patterns in order to determine exactly how, and in just what
contexts, they use the terms Kwoth nhial (God) and kuth nhial (spirits of the
air). The usage patterns show that in certain contexts the Nuer clearly think of
the air spirits as beings with their own identity, separate and distinguishable
from each other. Just as clearly, they fall between God and humanity; they are
lesser spirits, beings whom the people often regard more with annoyance than
fear. At the same time, being kuth, they are in other respects thought of as
inseparable from Kwot/1 nhial, the supreme God. In other words,
they are many but also one. God is manifested in, and in a sense is, each of them.
I received the impression that in sacrificing or in singing hymns to an air~spirit
Nuer do not think that they are communicating with the spirit and not with God.
They are, if I have understood the matter correctly, addressing God in a partic-
ular spiritual figure or manifestation. . . . They do not see a contradiction here,
and there is no reason why they should see one. God is not a particular air-spirit
but the spirit is a figure of God. . . . Nuer pass without difficulty or hesitation
from a more general and comprehensive way of conceiving of God or Spirit to a
more particular and limited way . . . and back again.‘I
Among other things, this short sample of Evans-Pritchard’s analysis shows
why his work has been so much admired. He was an anthropologist who
worked with analytical precision, respect, and self-awareness. Not content to
find out in a general way what the Nuer think, he can be seen here, as in
many other places, striving to catch each connection, sort out confusions,
and make clear each shade of difference or emphasis. In the process, he was
also able to win from many Western scholars a respect for Nuer thought that
had rarely been given to primitive peoples in the past. Instead of a culture
marked by savagery and superstition, he presents a pe0ple whose material
life may be very simple but whose theology is abstract and s0phisticated,
a creed suggestive of both Jewish monotheism and medieval Christian
mysticism. ‘2

276 Nine Theories of Religion
Among the spirits of the air, those called colwic are a special class; they are
the spirits created directly from the souls of human beings struck down by
lightning. When lightning strikes a hut and kills its occupants, the Nuer regard
this awesome event as a direct act of God, who has chosen to take back these
souls for his own purposes. The bodies of such people, as we noted, are not
buried in the normal way, for they have been instantly transformed into spirits.
In their air-spiritual form, however, they often keep their connection to their
original human families, serving as their patrons and protectors.
Spirits of the Below
As family guardians, the colwic spirits provide the Nuer with a link between
one form of their gods and one part of their social structure: the family, or
lineage. We find further connections of this sort the moment we turn to the
other main class of divinities: the “spirits of the below,” whose natural ties are
to the Earth rather than the sky. These spirits are held in much lower regard
than those of the air; in fact, they seem hardly even to qualify as kwoth,
though that is what they are called. It is of interest to notice that after all the
attention lavished on the controversial practice of totemism by earlier theo—
rists of religion, this is where it finally appears in Nuer religion—much farther
down the scale of importance than Frazer, Durkheim, or Freud could have
imagined. The Nuer do recognize totem spirits, which they associate with
animal species, such as the crocodile, lion, lizard, snake, and egret, and even
plants, gourds, rivers, and streams. Consistent with totemic customs else-
where, members of a specific tribe or clan are said to give “reSpect” to their
totem animal. They do not eat it; they acknowledge it when seen; and they
bury it if they should happen to find it dead in the wild. The totem animal,
however, is not the same as the totem spirit. The Nuer clearly think of these
two as separate, though they are, of course, closely related. They take the
totem animal to be a physical symbol of the totem spirit, which is a manifes—
tation of Kwoth. The totem animal is always less important than the totem
spirit. But totem spirits, in turn, are always less important than spirits of the
air; unlike the air spirits, they must remain connected to their physical sym-
bol, the totem animal.
Nuer theology holds finally that there are mystical objects, persons, and
powers on a still lower level than spirits of the air—so low, in fact, that they
take us to the margins of tribal life. There are diviners, and there are healers of
a sort. The concern of these figures is with minor ailments and anxieties, like
fortunetellers in our own society. In the same class are the people who control
fetishes and nature sprites. These are mystically charged objects or beings
under the control of an individual person. In general, however, the Nuer have a

Society’s “Construct 0f the Heart”: E. E. Evans-Pritchard 277
dislike or at least a healthy low-grade fear of these things. There is a general
suspicion that they are alien entities, which; have entered Nuer life through
tribes they dislike, especially the Dinka.
Religion and Refraction in the Social Order
Totemic and colwic spirits both exhibit what Evans-Pritchard calls the “social
refraction” of religion. As white light is split by a prism into different colors, so
the Nuer seem to think of Spirit, or God, as in these cases “refracted” into
different bands, or levels, of divine power that apply in a particular way to
different clans or social groups. In these cases, though the Nuer feel they are
still worshipping God, they worship him as figured, or symbolized, in associ-
ation with one lineage, clan, or social group in particular. Spirits of the air
sometimes also assume this role when they possess a prophet who becomes a
public spokesman for a clan, or when they are called upon in a special way by
a certain lineage. So too with fetishes and nature sprites, which often are
owned and even inherited by families. Interestingly, Evans-Pritchard notes that
the lower we travel down the scale of Nuer spirits, the nearer we come to ritu—
alized ceremonies of the kind normally associated with religion in the West.
God, the Spirit of the sky, is worshipped through simple prayer and sacrifice,
while such things as hymns, possessions, and divination become more com-
mon as we descend through the spirits of the air and down to the spirits of the
below.
This hierarchy of spirits shows itself in other ways as well. There is a polit—
ical dimension, with God conceived as ruler and spirits of the air as aristocracy;
below them come the totem spirits, which fill a middle rank, in essence spiri-
tual but on display in animals and plants; and last, fetishes fall into the undesir-
able position of outcast or foreign objects, however mystical their powers. In
similar fashion, the Nuer trace a persistent contrast between the light and dark-
ness, the first belonging always to the spirits of the air, the second always
associated with those of the below. Even age comes to figure in the contrast.
God is the eldest of the spirits; spirits of the air are his children; totemic spirits
are the children of his daughters; and so on.
It is only natural to think of Durkheim when we follow these connections
between layers of divinity and levels of society. In some respects, Nuer spirits
obviously mirror social groups and attachments. But to Evans-Pritchard, this is
hardly the complete picture. “An interpretation in terms of social structure,” he
writes, “merely shows us how the idea of Spirit takes various forms corre-
sponding to departments of social life. It does not enable us to understand any
better the intrinsic nature of the idea itself.”13 In language that recalls Eliade’s
strong opposition to reductionism, we are told that the value of a sociological

278 Nine Theories ofReligion
model “is limited, for it does not help us to understand the specifically religious
facts any better.” Evans-Pritchard then adds,
Were I writing about Nuer social structure this is the feature of the religion that
it would be most necessary to stress. But in a study of religion, if we wish to
seize the essential nature of what we are inquiring into, we have to try to exam-
ine the matter from the inside also, to see it as Nuer see it.’4
Symbolism
After discussing spirit in its multiple forms, Evans-Pritchard turns to an
important—and now famous—discussion of Nuer symbolism. He points out
that this is the subject on which the primitive mind has been most commonly
misunderstood. He begins with a very careful analysis of language, particu-
larly what the Nuer mean when they say one thing “is” another. When a bird,
for example, perches on top of a hut, they are known to say, “It is kwoth,” or
spirit. Or they may say that a crocodile is spirit, meaning that it has the signifi-
cance of spirit for people who call the crocodile their totem and give reverence
to the crocodile totem spirit. Again, they sometimes say that an ox is a cucum-
ber, but only in situations where an ox must be sacrificed and none can be
found or spared, so custom allows for a cucumber to be substituted—to be
placed, that is, in the role of the ox. To all appearances the cucumber is still a
fruit, and no one would pretend to deny it. Conceptually, however, it is in this
situation given a new role, that of a (substitute) ox in sacrifice.
Again, in words remarkably like the phrase “I am a red parakeet,” which so
interested Lévy-Bruhl, the Nuer will say, “A twin is a bird.” Lévy—Bruhl
believed that such contradictory phrases show the prelogical, primitive mind at
work. But do they? Evans-Pritchard shows what this phrase really means in
Nuer culture. Birds, as the only creatures that fly in the air, are regarded as
particularly close to Spirit, which as we have seen is also associated with the air
in the cases of both the spirits of the air and God, the “spiIit of the sky.” On the
other hand, the birth of twins, because it is a quite unusual event, is in its way
also a sign that spirit is present in a special form. Twins are given special treat—
ment in Nuer culture, being thought of on some occasions as one personality
even though they are two separate physical individuals. Twins do not receive
the same sort of funeral as ordinary people, for they are said to be “people of
the air” rather than, like all others, “pe0ple of the below.” Both twins and birds,
in other words, are in an unusual way gaat Kwoth, “children of God,” and it is
in that respect that they are identical.
Against the full background of Nuer theology, then, it is clearly true, and not
a contradiction, to say that twins are birds. But if so, then there is also no need

Society’s “Construct 0fthe Heart”: E. E. Evans-Pritchard 279
to claim, as Le’vy-Bruhl did, that people like the Nuer have a prelogical men-
tality; their thought, in their terms and in ours, is logical enough.
Evans-Pritchard tells us further that Levy-Bruhl was not the only one to fall
into this kind of error. Earlier investigators like Muller and Tylor tended to
make the same mistake when they claimed that primitive people believed the
sun or moon was a divinity. Being uninformed about the larger context in
which primitive or ancient peoples make such statements, they fail to make
allowance for metaphors, figures of speech, and multiple meanings of words.
When some primitives name the sun a divinity or Spirit, they may mean no
more than that such an object suggests or symbolizes divinity to them, or that it
simply shares one of the qualities of divinity——its grandeur or brightness or
beauty. In Evans-Pritchard’s View, most anthropological writers have been
sorely deficient in appreciating the richly poetic habits of speech adopted by
primitive peoples. In their imaginative way of describing the world, analogies,
figures, symbols, and metaphors are the rule of language, not the exception.
Ghosts and the Soul
The Nuer believe that there are three parts to the human being: the flesh, the
life (or breath), and the soul (or intellect). At death, the first of these goes into
the ground and decays; the second goes back to God, who gave it; and the third
lingers for a time near the realm of the living until it eventually disappears.
The Nuer are not happy if it stays for long. They have a true horror of death, in
part because all of their attention is centered on this life, which they wish to
have and enjoy in abundance. Says Evans-Pritchard, “They neither pretend to
know, nor, I think, do they care, what happens to them after death. There is an
almost total lack of what in Western religions falls into the category of escha—
tology.”15 The Nuer prefer not even to talk about death. Their main concern at
funerals is to make sure that the souls of the dead are given their full status as
ghosts, so that they can be separated completely from the affairs of those who
remain on Earth. The only way a ghost can trouble the living is through cien,
or vengeance, which may come if a person were wronged while alive and then
died before a reconciliation could occur. When this situation arises, it is neces-
sary to make a sacrifice to God and a gift of reparation to the ghost. Since only
wrongs done in life can lead to cien, the living can at least rest assured that
only the recently dead will ever try to bother them. The dead, and their ghosts,
are rather quickly forgotten in Nuer life.
For the Nuer, “soul” is something that only humans possess, and Evans-
Pritchard notes that this fact bears directly on Tylor’s famous animistic theory
of religion. Tylor, as we saw earlier, thought that early peoples developed their
idea of spirits and demons out of the idea of the human soul, which they got

280 Nine Theories ofReligion
from dreams and visions. This primitive concept of a soul led naturally to that
of a spirit and thence to gods. If we look closely, however, that is not the case
with the Nuer, who find these two to be very different and even opposed things.
Soul is a part of all human beings, and it is created; spirit exists outside of
human life, and when it enters a person, it always does so as an invasion from
the outside. Even in the case of the colwic spirits, those persons taken by light-
ning, the Nuer are careful to say that their souls must be replaced by spirit at
the moment they are taken. The one is so different from the other that any idea
of derivation seems impossible. And in that Evans-Pritchard finds a lesson. We
should notice, he warns, how Tylor’s theory, which seems perfectly reasonable
and natural when it is pieced together out of scattered fragments of mythology
and folklore, looks very different when brought up against the concrete
evidence of an actual system of primitive religious thought.
Sin and Sacrifice
The idea of sin—including the suffering that is associated with it—is central
to understanding the human side of Nuer religion. The Nuer conceive of
wrongdoing in two basic forms, both of which are defined by the concept of
thek, or “respect.” Among the Nuer as in other tribal cultures, various things
are prohibited out of respect for others. A man, for example, ought not to be
Seen naked by other women in his wife’s family; a new wife avoids her hus—
band’s parents; engaged or newly married couples ought never to eat in each
other’s presence, and so on. When these rules are broken, even unintentionally
(as they most often are), the acts are considered faults, and they bring a mea-
sure of shame upon those responsible for them. In other cases, however,
breaches of thek are more serious; they may involve such things as adultery or
incest, and they are known as nueer, acts regarded as “death.” These are usu—
ally intended actions, and they are not just shameful but sinful. Their conse-
quence is sickness, which in Nuer thought will lead to death unless there is an
appropriate sacrifice to God, who is the guardian of the entire moral order.
Though it has its human effects, all sin ultimately is sin against God, and its
main consequence is to bring God, by way of his punishments, into the affairs
of the community. This is a dangerous situation, for, ideally, the Nuer want
God to rule but at a safe distance, looking after his world and his creatures with
pleasure and not needing to enter it with punishments. The only way the dan-
ger of such divine involvement can be cleared is through sacrifice. The cere-
mony of sacrifice is almost the only element of Nuer religion that might qualify
as a full-scale religious sacrament, though even here the most important
instances are largely personal affairs—transactions between one or a few
persons and God.

Society ’3 “Construct offhe Heart”: E. E. Evans-Pritchard 281
Sacrifice in Nuer life is of two kinds: personal and collective. The second of
these—group sacrifice—seems to be the less clearly religious and perhaps less
important. It occurs in connection with rites of passage, especially weddings
and funerals, and its purpose is to make sacred an otherwise secular event. “It
sacralizes the social event and the new relationships brought about by it. It
solemnizes the change of status or relationship, giving it religious validation.
On such occasions sacrifice has generally a conspicuously festal and eucharis-
tic character?” The level of attention given to sacrifice on these occasions, and
the emotions on exhibit, vary greatly from one person to the next; some are
indifferent and almost bored, others are serious, while still others may be happy
and jovial. Their attitudes do not offer much support, Evans-Pritchard claims,
for the views of theorists who find the essence of religion in some unique feel—
ing of awe, ecstasy, or fear. Many kinds of emotion seem acceptable.
Unlike the group rites, personal sacrifices are more seriously religious, occa-
sioned by a sin or crime. They properly require the death of an ox—the most
precious possession any Nuer can claim. The ceremony, which can be held at
any location, is conducted by an older male, preferably the head of a family,
and occurs in four stages. There is a presentation of the designated victim to
God; a consecration, in which ashes are rubbed on the back of the animal; an
invocation, in which the celebrant “states the intention of the sacrifice and mat-
ters relevant to it”; and finally the immolation, in which the ox is killed, usually
with a quick single spear thrust from the side into the heart.
The roles of the ox and of the spear in this ritual are quite important, for the
Nuer identify themselves closely with both. For the Nuer man, the spear in his
right hand communicates power, virility, authority, and goodness. It is “a pro-
jection of the self and stands for the self”; by extension, it also serves to repre-
sent the clan or lineage group, which in fact is called by its Spear name.’7 The
spear represents the clan in its unity and strength—the clan as prepared for war.
The ox, on the other hand, represents a more strictly personal attachment. From
the moment of initiation, when each Nuer boy is given his own ox, it is an
animal he becomes extremely close to, an animal he identifies with, almost as
a second self. And that identification is particularly important when, later in
manhood, the occasion arises for personal sacrifice, for then the ox may have
to be killed. In the rite of sacrifice, the rubbing of ashes on the back of the ox
seems to fix the identification of the man with the beast. It is done always with
the right hand, the spear hand, symbolizing the whole self, which is thus united
to the animal in the last moments before it is slain. In the gesture of sacrifice to
God, a man may be said to be enacting, through the victim, his own personal
death.
It is not sufficient, in Evans-Pritchard’s View, just to describe the procedure
of Nuer sacrifice for his readers. Turning once again to a close analysis of

282 Nine Theories of Religion
language, he probes and explores to discover its meaning. He observes that
anthropology has in general proposed two main views of primitive sacrifice:
the gift theory and the communion theory. The latter was put forward in con-
nection with totemism by Robertson Smith, who by now has become a familiar
name in our discussions. Smith believed that by killing the animal and eating
it, people engaged in an act of social communion, or solidarity—a sacred shar-
ing of food and friendship with each other and with God. There were no “bar-
gains” or trade-offs involved. The gift theory, on the other hand, proposes just
that: an exchange, or trade, in which something is given to God, who gives his
favor in return. Nuer ceremonies, Evans—Pritchard tells us, clearly belong in
some sort of “gift” category. Their central purpose is to give something very
precious to God, even though God, of course, does not get anything he does not
already have. The important thing is that a human being, reSponsible and at
fault, undergoes a loss, a denial of the self, that connects deeply with a personal
sense of guilt for wrong and expresses the desire for evil to be expiated and
expelled. It is not a case of God being angry and needing to be pleased; it is a
case of the human need to make a transfer of that which is evil in oneself to the
ox as a representative, “so that in its death that part may be eliminated and flow
away with the blood.”13 Dramatic as the ceremony may be, the key thing is not
the ritual but the inward intention. In this serious and necessary transaction, the
person who sacrifices—and the community about him—finds a release from
the dangerous visit of spirit to human affairs. With the atonement complete,
God can at last “turn away” and be finished with the entire matter. The family,
clan, or tribe can again feel out of danger.
Evans—Pritchard closes his discussion with a short account of prophets and
priests, none of whom is central to Nuer religion in the way that they are for
religions like Judaism and Christianity. The most important is the leopard—skin
priest, who performs his role mainly in connection with a murder or some other
circumstance in which a human life is taken. His task is to provide sanctuary
for the killer, to begin a process of reconciliation with the victim’s family, and
to arrange compensation for the act, so as to prevent any one such terrible event
from spiraling into a destructive blood feud. He is thus a valuable figure, but
more for social than religious reasons. Other figures include the cattle man, or
cattle priest, and the prophet. In the past these figures, who claim to possess (or
be possessed by) certain spirits of the air, acquired political significance among
the Nuer clans and therefore were suppressed by colonial authorities. They are
not rivals of the priests, but the keen interest of some in material things, and the
unusual behavior of most, have caused the Nuer people as a whole to view
them with mixed feelings.
As with Witchcraft and the other Nuer books, one cannot read Nuer Religion
without coming to appreciate the careful and thorough work of its author. Only

Society’s ”Construct of the Heart”: E. E. Evans-Pritchard 283
the most patient study in the field could yield the precise, sympathetic, and
systematic account of primitive beliefs‘ and rituals that appears in its pages.
From its narrative two things clearly emerge: (1) a picture full of correctives
for nearly every one of those theorists who has framed a personal concept of
“primitive religion” without ever having come into contact with the real thing
and (2) the portrait of a complex, well-ordered religious system, one that seems
almost surprisingly Western and even “modern” in character.
Theories of Primitive Religion
Early in the 19603, Evans-Pritchard was invited to give a short series of lec-
tures at the University College of Wales. He took the occasion as an opportu-
nity to revisit several issues first raised in the conclusion of Nuer Religion and
build them into a general discussion addressed to theories of primitive religion.
In 1965 the lectures were published as Theories of Primitive Religion, one of
Evans—Pritchard’s shortest but most engaging books—a work whose pages
glisten with clear analyses and penetrating criticisms, often adorned with his
stinging wit. In addition, by way of its judgments on others, the analyses in this
book indirectly profile his own fully ripened views on the matter of explaining
religion. Though we have space here to look at this work only briefly, we can
at least trace the general line of its discussion.
Theories of Primitive Religion opens with a word of caution and some can—
did comments about earlier approaches to the subject. Most of the interpreta-
tions it considers were developed when little was known and much was
misunderstood about the actual facts of primitive religion. Few people who
addressed the issue had even seen a primitive culture, let alone studied one. But
not for a moment did that stop them from writing on the subject, with all the
confusion and distortion one would naturally expect in the process. Evans—
Pritchard notes that nearly all of these theorists start with the premise that most
of religion, like most of magic, is something quite strange to modern people,
who think scientifically, but quite normal to primitive p60ple, who have no
difficulty accepting absurd and incredible ideas. They see primitives as “quite
irrational” people, “living in a mysterious world of doubts and fears, in terror
of the supernatural and ceaselessly occupied in coping with it.”l9 The challenge
they thus find themselves facing is to give a reasoned and plausible explanation
of why early peOples held these beliefs, and why, despite the progress of sci-
ence, so many other pe0ple still do. The explanations they propose, which
include those considered or mentioned in our own earlier chapters, are of two
main types: psychological and sociological. Those taking the path of psycho-
logical explanation include Mtiller, Tylor, Frazer, Freud, and others. Numbered

284 Nine Theories of Religion
among the sociological theorists are Marx and Durkheim, naturally, as well as
Durkheim’s disciples, Lévy-Bruhl, and a sequence of others.
In framing their psychological accounts of religion, Evans-Pritchard con-
tends, these interpreters have almost without exception resorted mainly to clever
guesswork. Each has simply asked himself how he, an educated Westerner,
might have come to hold a religious or magical belief if he were walking in the
footsteps of some primitive person who one day put a hand to his chin to reflect
upon the world around him. Muller, a sentimental and romantic gentleman,
says he would have been dazzled and intrigued by nature’s great displays of
power; accordingly, he finds the origin of religion in nature worship. Tylor, a
flinty rationalist, thinks he would have been puzzled by the human figures he
sees in dreams; so he produces the animistic theory. Frazer, both a rationalist
and evolutionist, thinks he would have started with magic, then changed to
religion, and finally adopted science. Being intellectuals, they all offer psycho-
logical explanations we can call intellectualist. They think that primitive peo-
ple, like themselves, wanted to explain everything and so settled upon religious
beliefs as a way of showing how the world works.
Other psychological interpreters, alert to the fact that while not all people are
thinkers, all do have feelings, have put forward a type of theory best called
emotionalist. Freud, for example, imagines that early people were gripped by
anxieties and fears that could be eased only by concluding there was a divine
Father above them. The English scholar Marett and the anthropologists Lowie
and Malinowski suppose that primitives felt a certain profound awe and won-
der about life and took this as a sign of some awesome Being or Power who
had created it. Regardless of the specifics, however, one common feature is
apparent in every one of these theories: they are pure speculation. Evans-
Pritchard calls them examples of the “If-I-were-a-horse” mistake. Because
these interpreters do not really know how a primitive person thinks, they imag-
ine he or she would think as they do. Some make matters even worse by sup—
posing that they can actually reconstruct the thoughts not just of today’s
primitives but of the very people who thousands of years ago first created reli-
gion, even though these ancient believers have left us not a single written word
about anything in their lives, let alone their thoughts about a god or gods!
Needless to say, the unsparing verdict Evans—Pritchard renders on such psycho-
logical theories is that they are for the most part worthless.
Sociological thinkers, Evans-Pritchard continues, have done a somewhat
better job, but not by much. The more interesting are the theories that follow
paths traced by Robertson Smith, the French scholar Fustel de Coulanges, and
of course Emile Durkheim. These theorists have noticed, quite correctly, that
however primitive people think, they do not do it on their own, any more than
civilized people do. They are part of a culture, a society, that shapes their

Society ’3 “Construct of the Heart”: E. E. Evans-Pritchard 285
language, values, and ideas. Yet even with this insight at their disposal, socio-
logical theorists have been no less inclined to guesswork than their psycholog-
ical rivals. Because none of them actually knows a real primitive society, each
chooses to create one in his imagination out of the scraps of evidence about
totemism, sacrifice, or some other custom that happens to float in conveniently
from Australia or other remote parts of the globe. As a result, even the most
brilliant of the sociological theorists, Durkheim, constructs a theory that, how—
ever fascinating, begins to totter the moment new evidence comes along to
show that totemism is something very different, and much more diverse in
kind, than he thinks it is. For all their promise, then, sociological theories come
in the end to something only slightly better than psychological ones; they still
tend toward the fallacy that begins, “If I were a horse.”
In contrast with these efforts, Evans-Pritchard finds it refreshing to note the
achievement, limited as it is, of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. He, too, scarcely left the
comfort of his study, and he was mistaken to think that the primitive mind is
prelogical while the modern mind is not. But he was a penetrating thinker,
who, almost alone among modern theorists, recognized the crucial principle
that we cannot understand the culture or religion of primitives until we concede
that their whole world may be a very different one from ours, and that this
world cannot be properly explained until we have worked very hard and very
long to understand how it functions from the inside.
With so many failures and only Lévy-Bruhl to admire, one is inclined at this
point to ask whether even attempting to explain religion is any longer worth the
effort. Interestingly, and despite the record, Evans-Pritchard very much thinks
it is. He believes, in fact, that more explanation, not less, should be offered, so
long, of course, as theorists are ready to learn from the mistakes of their prede-
cessors. There is, after all, at least a grain or more of truth in these earlier the-
ories. There can be no question that religion involves the intellect, that it
engages the emotions, and that it is closely associated with social organization.
But it cannot be explained by any one of these factors alone. It must be
explained comprehensively, in terms of its relations with all other factors and
activities in a given society. In addition, though the guesswork of the past has
compelled current anthropology to turn toward careful, specialized studies of
specific cultures like the Azande and the Nuer, interpreters do need to move
beyond specialized work. At some point, theorists need to “take into consider-
ation all religions and not just primitive religions.”20 In this connection, Evans-
Pritchard notes, one promising general path of inquiry has already been charted
by the Italian social theorist Vilfredo Pareto, the French philosopher Henri
Bergson, and the German sociologist Max Weber, all of whose writings seem
to converge on a common theme. Instead of regarding religion and magic as
forms of primitive thought, while science is assumed to be modern, they

286 Nine Theories of Religion
suggest that these two types of thinking are perhaps best seen as complemen—
tary configurations—forms of understanding that are clearly different but
equally necessary in all human cultures, primitive and modern alike. N0 soci-
ety can survive without something like science and something like religion; all
cultures will always need both science’s constructs of the mind and religion’s
“constructs of the heart.”21
Evans-Pritchard does not completely commit himself to this last View, but he
does suggest that it should be pursued as a hypothesis—to be confirmed or
disproved through further work in the comparative study of religion, which has
been sadly lacking to date. Moreover, such study should center not on theolog—
ical writings, which carry the ideas of elites and leaders, but on encounters with
ordinary peOple, on religious faith as it is actually lived and practiced. That is
a difficult enterprise, he notes in conclusion, and the scholar without any per-
sonal religious commitment is unlikely to succeed in it. For the study of reli-
gion is not entirely like other disciplines. Scholars who reject all religion will
inevitably be looking for an explanation that reduces it, for some theory—
biological, social, or psychological—that will explain it away. The believer, on
the other hand, is a person much more likely to see religion—including other
people’s religions—from the inside and to try to explain it on terms that are
its own.
Analysis
One way to measure Evans—Pritchard as a theorist of religion is to place his
work next to that of Eliade, who is almost his exact contemporary. Both men
began their work in the decades between the two world wars, at a time when
functionalist interpretations were dominant and when, in European culture as
a whole, reductionist Freudians and the followers of Marx were regarded as
the leading lights of the age. Both came to reject this reductionist perspective
and anchor their work in a more sympathetic approach to the religion of
primitive (in Eliade’s word, “archaic”) peoples. Both also repudiate the idea of
social evolution. It misreads human cultural activities, and besides, it never
fails to put primitives at the bottom and beginning of history while Western
culture is placed at the end and at the top. Finally, both men—it is not irrele-
vant to add—exhibit a natural sympathy for religion that arises in some mea-
sure out of their personal heritage or commitment: Eliade presumably to
Romanian “cosmic” Christianity, Evans—Pritchard to Catholic Christianity
after his conversion in 1944.
Agreed as they are against certain attitudes of the age, Eliade and Evans-
Pritchard nonetheless choose to carry out their programs of opposition in quite

Society ’5 “Construct of the Heart”: E. E. Evans-Pritchard 287
different ways. Starting from a resolute rejection of all reductionism, Eliade
sets out to draw a global portrait of “the religious mind” in all, or at least most,
places and times. He is also a man of the library, who thinks religion can still
best be understood through its recorded history and mythology. Evans-
Pritchard’s stance is quite decidedly different. He too comes to reject function—
alism, at least in its more extreme reductionist form, and the whole thrust of his
research is to show that there really is no need for it. After all, if primitive
magical and religious systems are in their terms just as rational as ours, we
certainly do not need a reductionist theory to explain why people believe irra-
tional things. At the same time, he is not nearly so emphatic about all of this as
Eliade, especially in the case of sociologically functional approaches to reli-
gion, which played a strong role in his training and earlier work. He opposes
any sociological determinism, to be sure, but, as we have seen, he also has the
keenest appreciation for the merits of the French school—for Durkheim and
especially Le’vy—Bruhl. In addition, he has no wish to make claims about “the
archaic mind” on some sort of worldwide, all-embracing scale. In his view, a
theory of that sort comes near another instance of “If-I-were-a-horse” specula-
tion. Not that there is anything necessarily wrong with the ideal of a broad,
general theory embracing all of religion; at the close of Nuer Religion, Evans—
Pritchard describes his own work as a step toward “building up a classification
of African philosophies” that will make for the even wider comparisons needed
to construct a theory of religion as a whole.22 But to be done right, such things
take time, patience, and a great deal more research. They simply cannot be
done as readily as theorists like Eliade, and those of the past century, have
supposed. Nor can they be done in the same way. Regardless of whether it is a
world religion or primitive cult one studies, Evans-Pritchard insists that in the
future the real work must be done outside of libraries and theological texts. A
valid theory will have to explain religion as it is lived by ordinary people, not
as it is taught by priests and theologians. That is where the real source of its
power and remarkable resilience will ultimately be found.
If we draw a comparison with economics, we can see that Evans-Pritchard’s
great achievement lies on the plane not of macro- but micro-theory of religion.
In his detailed account of Nuer belief and practice, he is able to show, just as he
did for Zande magic, how religion “makes sense” for a specific people, in a
specific kind of tribal society, at a specific point in time. He shows how this
religion is intellectually coherent, how it “fits together” within itself. And he
shows that it is culturally connected; it fits into the patterns of Nuer life in ways
that answer both personal and social needs. When we compare Evans-
Pritchard’s own very solid, small-scale achievement in Nuer Religion with the
grand theoretical balloons he floats by us from the past, puncturing them as he
writes, it is not hard to see which kind of work, in his eyes, carries the greater

288 Nine Theories of Religion
weight. On the issue of how best to construct theories that reflect a true “sci-
ence” of religion, his work represents an unmistakable turning point. No sub-
sequent interpreter can afford to ignore his achievement.
Critique
As Freud’s theory of religion depends in part on the strength of his psychology,
so the value of Evans-Pritchard’s theory rests in part on the nature and quality
of his anthropology. As we have noted above, the judgment of most anthropol-
ogists on the value of his fieldwork and his interpretation of cultures is impres—
sively favorable. Some regard him as the greatest ethnographer ever to have
worked in the field. Though there have been criticisms, the more persuasive of
them do not pertain to the religious dimensions of his work.23 So we can per-
haps pass over them here and note for our purpose the following points, which
bear more specifically on his approach to religion.
1. Assessments of Other Theories
There are places where Evans—Pritchard shows considerably less patience
with the theories of his fellow scholars than he does with the thought of the
Azande and the Nuer. In discussing Nuer sacrifice, for example, he criticizes
as “inept” those thinkers—like Rudolf Otto—who find the origin of religion
in a distinctive emotion of awe or solemn wonder. The crowds at Nuer collec-
tive ceremonies show all kinds of emotions: attention, indifference, solem—
nity, amusement, whatever. Having said this, however, Evans-Pritchard in the
very same context also points out that these collective sacrifices occur on
occasions that are barely religious at all; they are largely social events, where
one would expect a great variety of emotions, including, of course, at least a
few serious moments. When, on the other hand, he discusses personal
sacrifices, which by his own account are more purely religious occasions, the
emotional state of the participants seems to be quite different. They are
expected to show a grave and serious disposition—not unlike the emotions
Otto calls religious. They exhibit a demeanor of solemnity and awe, a sense—
one might almost say—of the numinous. This is not to say that Nuer religion
offers a confirmation of theories like Otto’s; it is meant only to suggest that
when dealing with other theorists, Evans-Pritchard shows an occasional rush
to judgment. The same tends to be true when he demolishes other theories
with his favorite hammer: the “If—I-were-a-horse” fallacy. In a sense, the
method of “If—I-were-so-and-so” is the only one we have when we wish to

Society’s “Construct offhe Heart”: E. E. Evans-Pritchard 289
understand the motives and actions of other people, just as the detective does
when trying to rethink the actions of a person who has committed a crime.
The real problem with this kind of argument, which Evans-Pritchard does not
strive as hard as he might to detect, is not that it is used (we really have no
other) but how it is used, especially when theorists merely guess about how
tribal peoples think instead of carefully reconstructing their thought on a
solid foundation of evidence.
2. The ”Primitive” Mind
Evans-Pritchard’s great achievement has been to give theorists of both religion
and human society a greater appreciation of what we can call “the normality”
of the primitive mind. In the light of his work, we can say that the world of
non-Western, tribal thought seems to make sense; it no longer strikes us as
absurd or childish, as it once seemed to Tylor, Frazer, and others. But even so,
we can legitimately ask whether Evans-Pritchard has solved as much of the
problem of the primitive mind as he seemed to think. In the case of the Azande,
for example, it is curious that after analyzing a particular item of witchcraft, he
writes the following: “Azande have little theory about their oracles and do not
feel the need for doctrines.”24L Elsewhere he observes that the idea of testing
general beliefs against actual experience is simply foreign to Azande practice.
On reading this, the question that naturally comes to the mind of the reader is:
Why? Why do the Azande have little theory? Why do they fail to test their
beliefs? Evans-Pritchard’s answer to this question is clear but not entirely per-
suasive. He says magic is something too fundamental and too important in
Zande life ever to be questioned—as are some of the inconsistent and seem-
ingly illogical notions that many people hold in our civilized cultures as well.
In short, they and we are the same, neither of us being in the sum of things
either fully rational or wholly irrational. But here there is a further question to
be asked: We and they do not seem to be exactly the same, do we? For our
world, unlike theirs, is quite clearly a divided one. Some people in our
civilization—scientists, philosoPhers, mathematicians, even some theologians—
do stress theoretical understanding of the world, while others of us do not.
Zande culture, on the contrary, seems curiously undivided. In it, we seem
unable to find anyone who wants to defend theoretical knowledge-and testing,
or anyone who believes in critical, logical, and experimental thought. In that
sense, their society is different, and we would very much like to know why.
Evans-Pritchard does not really pursue this question, even though it is clearly
important to the defense of his View that our culture and theirs stand on intel-
lectually equal footings.

3. The Need for Theory
The last complaint we might bring against Evans-Pritchard is in some ways the
most obvious and important—and yet the one to which he would most readily
plead guilty. He does not really have a full theory of religion, or even of prim—
itive religion, but only a theory of a religion—that of the Nuer—along with a
few suggestions as to how thoughtful scholars might begin to work so as one
day actually to arrive at something more general. Far better, he tells us, to
do the small-scale foundational work that in the future will yield a solid
general theory than to rush into the groundless speculations that were the
trademark of theories past. This is a point no one can dispute. Yet Evans-
Pritchard himself concedes that this is not an entirely satisfactory way to leave
things. In the concluding pages of Theories of Primitive Religion he writes:
During [the] last century . . . general statements were indeed attempted . . . in
the form of evolutionary and psychological and sociological hypotheses, but
since these attempts at general formulations seem to have been abandoned by
anthropologists, our subject has suffered from loss of common aim and method.25
We could almost wonder, in light of these comments, whether Evans-
Pritchard’s weakness is just the opposite of his predecessors”. Could the study
of religion have been done an even greater service if someone as well grounded
as he in the evidence were perhaps more willing to generalize—even if only on
the order of suggestion and hypothesis? Could he not himself have possibly
contributed something to this much-needed “common aim and method”? At
the least, a book from his hand with a title such as “Notes Toward the Construc—
tion of a General Theory of Religion” certainly would not have gone unread.
Even without such an effort, however, Evans-Pritchard’s influence on
thought about religion, especially in anthropological circles during the middle
and later decades of the past century, has been unparalleled is scope and con—
sequence.We shall see an instructive parallel to it in the next and last of our
theorists, Clifford Geertz, the contemporary American advocate of interpretive
anthropology.
Notes
1. Mary Douglas, Edward Evan Evans—Pritchard, Modern Masters Series
(New York: Viking Press, 1980), p. 93.
2. There is no complete biography of Evans-Pritchard. T. O. Beidelman offers a brief
account in “Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard, 1902—1973: An Appreciation,” Anthropos 69
(1974): 553—567. There is also a measure of biographical information in a critical study,

Society’s “Construct of the Heart”: E. E. Evans-Pritchard 291
noted above, by anthropologist Mary Douglas, who has been strongly influenced by
Evans-Pritchard; see her Edward Evans-Pritchard, pp. 1—22 et passim.
3. John Middleton, “E. E. Evans-Pritchard,” The Macmillan Encyclopedia of
Religion (New York: Macmillan & Co., 1987), 8: 198.
4. Beidelman, “Appreciation,” p. 556.
5. See his comments in Social Anthropology and Other Essays (Glencoe, IL: The
Free Press, [1951] 1962), pp. 51—53; also in Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford,
England: Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. 53-69, where he is, however, also severely
critical.
6. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic among the Azande (Oxford,
England: Clarendon Press, 1937), p. 13.
7. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic, pp. 299—312.
8. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic, p. 63.
9. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic, p. 338.
10. Douglas, Evans-Pritchard, pp. 91—113, points out that Evans-Pritchard prepared
himself for writing on Nuer religion by reading extensively in the Western theological
literature he found in his father’s parsonage study. She adds that the description of
Kwoth nhial as a god of selfless love seems to draw upon Agape and Eros (1936), a
classic study of the concepts of love in Western religious thought by the Lutheran theo-
logian Anders N ygren; Evans-Pritchard acknowledged this book and its influence in
other works.
11. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press), pp. 51—52.
12. To those familiar with the mystical theology of the early and medieval Eastern
church, the Nuer hierarchy of spirits reflecting God, but not identical to him, resembles
the modalistic language used by the theologian Sabellius to explain the Trinity. Their
beliefs about the kuth nhial also bear a likeness to the mystical doctrine of the heavenly
angelic hierarchy as presented in the widely read early medieval treatises of Pseudo-
Dionysius the Areopagite.
13. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion, p. 121.
14. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion, pp. 121—122.
15. Evans—Pritchard, Nuer Religion, p. 154.
16. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion, p. 199.
17. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion, p. 239.
18. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion, p. 281.
19. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, p. 10.
20. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, p. 113.
21. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, p. 115.
22. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion, p. 314.
23. For a discussion of some of these criticisms, see Adam Kuper, Anthropology and
Anthropologists: The Modern British School (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983),
pp. 88—98.
24. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic, p. 314.
25. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, p. 114.

Suggestions for Further Reading
Beidelman, T. O. A Bibliography of the Writings of E. E. Evans-Pritchard, pp. 1—4.
London: Tavistock Publications, 1974. Provides a brief biographical note on
Evans—Pritchard’s career. There is no comprehensive biography.
Beidelman, T. 0. “Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard, 1902—1973: An Appreciation.” Anthro-
pos 69 (1974): 553—567. An account of Evans-Pritchard’s achievements and im-
portance in his chosen field of anthropology.
Douglas, Mary. Edward Evans-Pritchard. Modern Masters Series. New York: Viking
Press, 1980. A short but informative analysis, combining biographical informa—
tion with critical assessment, by a well-known anthropologist strongly influenced
by Evans-Pritchard’s research.
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. “Fragment of an Autobiography.” New Blackfriars, January
1973, pp. 35—37. The author’s own brief account of his life, addressing among
other things his mid-life religious conversion.
Geertz, Clifford. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford, CA: Stanford
‘ University Press, 1988. Observations on Evans-Pritchard’s works and his per-
sonal style alongside essays on other leading figures in anthropology.
Karp, Ivan, and Kent Maynard. “Reading The Nuer.” Current Anthropology 24, no. 4
(August—October 1983): 481—503. A wide-ranging discussion of the impact of
Evans—Pritchard’s research among the Nuer in Africa; comments on the article
and on Evans-Pritchard by other anthropologists are included.
Kuper, Adam. Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School. London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983. Examines Evans—Pritchard’s important role in
the British tradition of fieldwork anthropology.
Lienhardt, Geoffrey. “Evans Pritchard: A Personal View.” Man, n.s. 9. no. 2 (June
1974): 299—304. Comments on Evans-Pritchard’s career by a distinguished
fellow anthropologist who did similar fieldwork with a different African tribe.
Siegel, James T. Naming the Witch. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. An
examination of witchcraft in East Java, Indonesia, by an ethnographer whose
long acquaintance with the practice leads him to re-engage and reconsider
Evans-Pritchard’s work among the Azande, as well as Lévi-Strauss’s work in
South America. He shows how modernization and witchcraft can coexist.
Wilson, Bryan R., ed. Rationality. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, [1970] 1984.
Essays by distinguished philosophers debating the questions of rational thought
and action addressed in Evans—Pritchard’s study of the Azande.
Winch, Peter. “Understanding a Primitive Society.” In Rationality, edited by Bryan R.
Wilson, pp. 78—111. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, [1970] 1984. A cele-
brated and controversial essay that begins from Evans—Pritchard’s analysis of
magic and witchcraft and challenges it by claiming that he did not take his sym-
pathy for Azande ideas and customs far enough.

9
Religion as Cultural System:
Clifford Geertz
Cultural analysis is not “an experimental science in search of a law but
an interpretive one in search of meaning.”
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures’
The last theorist in our sequence is American cultural anthropologist Clifford
Geertz. If Evans-Pritchard was until his death the leading figure in British
anthropology, many would say that Geertz held a similar place among anthro-
pologists in America. For more than three decades from the early 19703 to his
death in 2006, he was arguably among the most influential social scientists
actively working. And like Evans-Pritchard, Geertz took a keen interest in
religion, even though it is only one of many issues in cultural analysis that
drew his close attention. The themes addressed in the numerous essays and
noteworthy books published over the course of his career fall across the entire
spectrum of human social life: from agriculture, economics, and ecology to
kinship patterns, social history, and the politics of developing nations; from
art, aesthetics, and literary theory to philosophy, science, and technology. The
phrase “Renaissance man” is seldom used in the contemporary world of spe-
cialized learning, but it is not too far from accurate in describing Geertz’s
remarkably wide circle of interests and investigations. His chief concern was
to press for a serious rethinking of fundamentals in the practice of anthropol-
ogy and other social sciences—a rethinking that bears directly on the enter—
prise of understanding religion. With keen insight and a kind of baroque
eloquence, he argued that human cultural activities are quite unusual and dis—
tinctive things, and that we will therefore get little benefit if we try to “explain”
them in the way scientists explain the nonhuman aspects of the natural world.
Whether we like it or not, human beings are different from atoms and insects.
They live within complicated systems of meaning, which anthropologists call
“cultures.” So if we wish to understand these cultural activities, one of the
most important of which certainly is religion, we must adopt a method that
293

294 Nine Theories ofReligion
suits them. And that method is “interpretation.” In matters human, we are
clearly better off if we abandon the “explanation of behaviors” approach that a
natural scientist might apply to a colony of bees or species of fish and turn
instead to the “interpretation of cultures.” Not surprisingly, that phrase forms
the title of Geertz’s most famous book.
Although Geertz recommended this new approach for all of anthropology
and social science, he himself led the way in applying it specifically to the
study of religion, which he helped to revitalize in the process. Indeed, with
perhaps the sole exception of Mircea Eliade, there is probably no American
scholar who has done more than Geertz to show how valuable a well-crafted
study of religion can be to an understanding of almost all other aspects of
human life and thought. It is perhaps needless to add that this interpretive
stance, which strives to see all religions through the eyes and ideas of the peo—
ple who practice them, marks a further step on the path already entered by
Weber, James, Eliade, and Evans-Pritchard. It marks a course that leads away
from functionalism and reductionism and toward an accounting of religion’s
distinctively human dimension: the ideas, attitudes, and purposes that create it.
Life and Career
Clifford Geertz was born in San Francisco, California, in 1926.2 After com-
pleting secondary school, then military service in World War II, he attended
Antioch College in Ohio, where in 1950 he received his BA. degree in philos-
ophy. From Antioch he went on to study anthropology at Harvard University.
By this time, of course, fieldwork had become the cornerstone of anthropolog-
ical training both in Britain and the United States, so while still a graduate
student, Geertz chose to take his plunge. During his second year at Harvard,
he and his wife Hildred traveled to the island of Java in Indonesia and remained
there for two years, studying the complex multiracial, multireligious society of
a single town. After returning to Harvard, he took his doctorate in 1956 from
Harvard’s Department of Social Relations with a specialization in anthropol-
ogy. He and his wife then set out on a second term of fieldwork in Southeast
Asia, this time on the island of Bali. Like Java, Bali was a part of the new
Indonesian Republic, which had been established late in the 19403, shortly
after World War II and the end of Dutch colonial rule. Unlike Java, where
Islam was the dominant faith, Bali possessed its own religion, a colorful and
fascinating network of beliefs and rituals derived mostly from Hinduism. In
both Bali and Java, Geertz’s first mission as an anthropologist was to do
ethnographywto prepare detailed and systematic descriptions of these
non-Western societies, noticing eSpecially how the different aspects of life

Religion as Cultural System: Clifford Geertz 295
blended into a cultural whole. In the same way that Evans-Pritchard’s work
among the Nuer and Azande formed a basis for his theoretical writing, this work
in Java and Bali provided the foundation for most of Geertz’s later essays and
analyses. In terms of religion especially, his close contact with these Indonesian
communities served as both source and stimulus for many of his most original
ideas. It led him early on to the view that if, as functionalists claim, a religion is
always shaped by society, it is no less true that a society is shaped by its religion.
In 1958, after completing his fieldwork in Bali, Geertz briefly joined the
faculty of the University of California at Berkeley; he then moved to the University
of Chicago for ten years, from 1960 to 1970. In 1960 he published The Religion of
Java, an extensive account of the beliefs, symbols, rituals, and customs found in
the town where he had conducted his first term of fieldwork. This study
exhibited an attention to detail rivaling that of Evans-Pritchard, but it also
attempted to be more wide-ranging—and needed to be, for the society Geertz
had chosen was considerably more complicated by the collision of cultures
than were the largely isolated African communities of the Azande and the Nuer
in the interior of the Sudan. In Java’s culture, Islam, Hinduism, and native ani-
mist traditions all claimed a place in the social system. Alongside his work on
Javan religion, he pursued research on other aspects of society in the region.
Agricultural lnvolution (1963) examined the ecology and economics of Indonesia
and assessed its troubles and prospects in the postcolonial era. Peddlers and
Princes, published in the same year, compared the economic life of a town in
Java with another in Bali. And The Social History of an Indonesian Town
(1965) told the story of the community in which Geertz had done most of his
fieldwork—Modjokuto in Java—tracing the close interplay among economics,
politics, and social life during the passage from colonial rule to independence.
We may recall that Evans-Pritchard’s one venture outside of tribal Africa
occurred during his stay in Libya, when he studied the Muslim community of
the Sanusi. Interestingly, after his work in Indonesia, Geertz made a similar
move to expand his base of field research by doing further work in the Islamic
culture of Morocco in North Africa. Beginning in the 19603, he made five field
trips to this area, enabling him to observe a second Muslim religious commu-
nity in a part of the world decidedly different from Southeast Asia. As a result,
he was able, in Islam Observed (1968), to make a comparative study of a single
major religion—Islam—as it had taken shape in two very different cultural
settings. Later we can look more closely at this book.
In 1970 Geertz became the only anthropologist ever named a Professor at
the famous Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he
continued his research until his retirement. This singular honor, which brought
him to the institution where Einstein once worked, did not come in recognition
of his ethnographic research, which could have been done—if not quite as

296 Nine Theories ofReligion
well—by a number of other professionals in the field. It occurred because in
the decade of the 19603, while doing his ethnography, Geertz caught the atten-
tion of thoughtful people in many fields with a series of striking critical essays
that addressed some of the most important theoretical issues in modern anthro-
pology. In these probing, analytical discussions he set out his reservations
about most earlier social science, claiming that many of its aims and methods
were seriously misguided. In the course of these studies he was able to make a
forcible argument for his newer style of “interpretive” anthropology. In America
especially, Geertz’s theoretical writings have been read with interest not only
by other anthropologists but by scholars across all fields in the academy and by
more than a few thoughtful general readers as well. Though some have left
their mark individually, most of these critical essays have made their main
impression in gathered form, chiefly in the collection entitled The Interpreta-
tion of Cultures (1973), a work that was widely acclaimed, and in Local Knowl-
edge (1983), a later assemblage that earned similar approvals. A proper
appreciation of Geertz’s approach to religion requires that we pay attention to
both sides of his work: the ethnographic and the theoretical.
Background: American Anthropology and Social Theory
To understand Geertz’s perSpective, we should notice first that he acquired his
professional training neither in Durkheim’s Paris nor Evans—Pritchard’s Oxford
but at Harvard University in the United States. His ideas on culture and reli-
gion were thus developed under two main influences: a strong and independent
American tradition of anthropology and a perspective on social science he
encountered at Harvard under the prominent theorist Talcott Parsons.
Since about the turn of the twentieth century, a truly professional style of
research in anthropology had been established in the United States under the
leadership of the German immigrant scholar Franz Boas (185 8—1942) and his
younger contemporaries Alfred Louis Kroeber (1876—1960) and Robert Lowie
(1883—1957). At the time when Tylor and Frazer in England were still promot-
ing grand theories built on the comparative method, these pioneering figures
had already seen its error and abandoned its ways. Ahead of their time and, like
Evans-Pritchard, sharing the view of Bronislaw Malinowski (1884—1942) on
the value of field research, they insisted that any general theory must be rooted
in rigorous “particular” ethnography, the kind of study that centers on one
community and may take years or decades to complete. In America, these men
had natural access to the many tribal cultures of native American peoples, and
they used it to good advantage, learning tribal languages and doing fieldwork
in their communities. Boas made a lifelong study of the peoples along the

Religion as Cultural System: Clrflord Geertz 297
Canadian Pacific coast; Kroeber and Lowie worked among the tribes of the
American plains. .
In addition to fieldwork, Boas, Kroeber, and Lowie stressed “culture” as the
key unit of anthropological study. They insisted that in their field studies they
were investigating not just a society—as some European scholars preferred to
think—but a wider system of ideas, customs, attitudes, symbols, and institutions,
of which society was only one part. “Society,” these Americans tended to think,
was a term weighted too heavily toward the purely material and structural com-
ponents of human communities, while the appropriate term for their more com-
prehensive concept, which searched for hidden attitudes and emotions that lay
behind and within the social order, was “culture.” To some degree, the difference
was verbal. For the most part Europeans seem to have meant by “society” and
“social anthropology” something rather close to what American anthropologists
meant by “culture” and “cultural anthropology.”
In her widely read Patterns of Culture (1934), Ruth Benedict, a talented
student of Kroeber and Boas, explained that culture was the key to understand-
ing even individual human personality traits. When in her fieldwork she noticed
a difference of temperament between the gentle, restrained Pueblo Indians and
more combative tribes like the Pima and Kwakiutl, she traced it to the funda—
mental character of Pueblo culture, which stressed harmony, while the others
did not. Such a view departed significantly from that of theorists in the school
of Durkheim, who had considerably less interest in the psychology of individ—
uals because it was not something concrete and objective in the way social
facts like families and clans are. Benedict found individual psychology import—
ant, for it showed that a culture was a pattern, a kind of “group personality” that
each of its members held in the mind.
While still a student, Geertz seems to have absorbed ideas from Boas,
Kroeber, and Benedict quite naturally into his own anthropological perspective.
Though he chose Indonesia rather than any of the native American communities
as his locale, he immediately enlisted in two substantial terms of fieldwork, as
we have seen. In addition, he fully endorsed the American commitment to par-
ticular studies; they were much to be preferred over the bad science of general
theories built on poorly gathered evidence. Anthropology, Geertz heartily agreed,
must be ethnography before it can be anything else. Its focus must fall on specific
places and peoples, so that general conclusions come, if at all, Only from these
closely studied single instances. Further, and finally, he embraced the American
view that the objects of anthropologists’ inquiries are “cultures,” not “societies.”
He recognized that the door to other peoples’ lives could not be unlocked only
by examining such social units as the family, kinship patterns, clan structures, or
legal systems; it was necessary to search beyond these for the entire intercon-
nected pattern of ideas, motives, and activities that we call a culture.

298 Nine Theories of Religion
With regard to this last point, we should notice that Geertz did have some
reservations about the newer stress on culture and showed rather more sympa-
thy for the sociological approach of the French school than did others. For if,
as Benedict claimed, culture was nothing more than a kind of group attitude, a
communal “personality” passed on in the minds of individual persons, then
there was really nothing very objective about it for the social scientist to study.
In the American view, one tended to argue that individual behavior is an expres-
sion of culture, while defining culture merely as the way in which individuals
have learned to behave.3 Such circular statements might be true, but they were
not very enlightening. If the concept of culture was to be usable in scientific
research, the French were right in saying that it had to refer to something
objective, not just to elusive psychological states like the Pueblo “feeling of
harmony” or another tribe’s attitude of aggression. In addressing this difficulty,
Geertz found help in the work of Talcott Parsons, his Harvard teacher and at the
time one of the leading sociologists in America.
American Social Theory: Parsons and Weber
It is hard to know how direct his influence was, but Talcott Parsons seems to
have affected Geertz in two ways. First, Parsons himself had come under the
influence not of Durkheim primarily, as many others had, but of Max Weber,
whom we have now had a chance to consider at some length. In the decade of the
19303, well before many Americans (including many professional sociologists)
had even read Weber, Parsons had translated some of Weber’s works, most nota-
bly The Protestant Ethic, and had explored certain key themes of his agenda.
So in the circle of Parsons’ students and readers, at least, there was familiarity
with concepts like “worldly asceticism” and its connection with capitalism, with
sociology construed as the study of rational human action, and especially with
the method of Versrehen, which was of key importance in distinguishing
Weber’s stress on the meaning systems that shape the actions of individuals
from Durkheim’s focus on the determinative role of social structure.
In addition to serving as a channel for the ideas of Weber, Parsons provided
Geertz with something else: a way of resolving the problem of culture as it had
been left by anthropologists like Ruth Benedict. In The Structure of Social
Action (1934), his most important book, Parsons built upon Weber and devel-
oped the view that all human groups function on three levels of organization:
(1) individual personalities, which are shaped and governed by (2) a social
system, which is, in its turn, shaped and controlled by (3) a separate “cultural
system.” The last of these, which is a complex network of values, symbols, and
beliefs, interacts with both the individual and the society, but for purposes of

Religion as Cultural System: Clifi’ord Geertz 299
analysis it can be separated from them. To many, this thesis was a breakthrough.
If Benedict’s idea of culture as a group personality was too vague and subjec-
tive to be of much scientific use, Parsons’ concept was not. A “cultural system”
was an objective thing, a collection of symbols—objects, gestures, words,
events, all with meanings attached to them—that exists outside the minds of
individual people yet works inwardly to shape attitudes and guide actions. As
we shall see soon, Geertz clearly shared this idea of a culture as an objective
system of symbols, so much so that some observers prefer to call his approach
not interpretive but “symbolic” anthropology.4
Interpretive Social Science: Principles and Precepts
Weber, Parsons, and the tradition of American anthropology all provide com-
ponents of Geertz’s perspective. To see how he assembles them into a complete
program of interpretive anthropology, we can now turn to his own writings,
especially the theoretical essays and other works published mostly in the two
formative decades of his career, the 1960s and 19703. Since we obviously can-
not cover all of these in our discussion and since some are theoretical and
others ethnographic, it will be best if we work in stages. We begin by looking
at two of Geertz’s best—known theoretical essays: the first explains his interpre—
tive anthropology in general terms, and the second directs it specifically to
religion. With these in hand, we then turn to some samples of the way in which
Geertz applies his perspective to actual religions.
Culture and Interpretation: The Method of ”Thick Description”
In 1973 Geertz published his award—winning collection of essays entitled The
Interpretation of Cultures. Most of these pieces had first appeared in various
scholarly journals during the previous decade. But as an introduction to the
others, Geertz provided a new essay that has since become the classic state—
ment of his point of view. He entitled it “Thick Description: Toward an Inter—
pretive Theory of Culture.” In it, he points out first that although the term
“culture” has tended to mean many different things to previous anthropolo—
gists, the key feature of the word is the idea of “meaning” or “significance.”
Man, he says, referring explicitly to the perspective of Max Weber, is “an ani-
mal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun.” If therefore we
wish to do what anthropologists are paid to do, namely, explain the cultures of
other human beings, we have no choice but to use a method that is described
by the English philosopher Gilbert Ryle as “thick description.” We must
describe not only what happens but also what peOple intend by what happens.

b
300 Nine Theories of Religion
Ryle gives the example of two boys: one experiences a muscular twitch at the
eye while the other winks at a friend. In a purely physical, or “thin,” descrip-
tion, both of these movements can be identically described. But the minute we
take into account the element of meaning, the significance of the physical
motion, no two actions could be more different: the one means nothing, the
other means a great deal. “Thick” description, which includes the meaning of
the motion, shows the wink to be decidedly different from the twitch. It must
be clearly understood, says Geertz, that ethnography, and so all of anthropol-
ogy, is always a matter of thick description. Its aim is never just to describe the
mere structure of a tribe or clan or the bare elements of a ritual. Its task is to
discern meanings, to discover intentions, to detect the significance people
attribute to their rituals, institutions, and beliefs.
It is important to notice that when we speak of “meanings,” most people
think of something quite private—an idea in an individual person’s head. But a
moment’s further thought makes it clear that there is nothing necessarily pri-
vate at all about meaning. I cannot wink privately at you unless there is some-
thing public—a context of meanings—shared by both of us that enables you to
take from the wink the same meaning I give to it. We should therefore under-
stand that the culture of any society is just this shared context of meanings. Or,
to use Geertz’s own words, “culture consists of socially established structures
of meaning in terms of which people do such things as signal conspiracies and
join them or perceive insults and answer them.”5 A culture is not something
physical, but it is there—objectively there—nonetheless. And it is the one thing
that, more than any other, anthropologists must try to reconstruct when they
study a community or people of any place or time.
By the same token, we should notice that a culture is not just about meanings,
as if it were a purely self—contained system of symbols, like mathematics. Behav-
ior, or action, must also be observed “because it is through the flow of behavior—
or, more precisely, social action—that cultural forms find articulation.”6 This may
mean that on some occasions the description of a culture will not always be
completely consistent. People sometimes behave in ways that clash with the
system of meaning prescribed by their own culture; or, perhaps more accurately,
cultural systems sometimes present multiple and conflicting patterns within
which people choose diverse courses of action. It also means that anthropologists
can never do more than reconstruct what their subjects think and do by writing
down their own best interpretation of it. Cultural analysis is, for the interpretive
anthropologist as for every other careful theorist, always a matter of “guessing at
meanings, assessing the guesses, and drawing explanatory conclusions.”7
None of this difficult work can be done well unless it is done microscopi-
cally, so to speak. Interpretive anthropology attends to “ethnographic minia-
tures,” small-scale subjects like clans, tribes, or villages, whose cultural

Religion as Cultural System: Clifi‘ord Geertz 301
systems can be mapped out in all the minute detail characteristic of each. For
Geertz, this means too that any attempt to make broad, general statements
about all of humanity must be viewed with the strongest suspicion. In the past,
he notes, anthropologists have tended to say things like “Middletown, which I
have studied, is the United States in miniature.” The answer to that is: In some
respects it may be; in others it most probably is not. So such general statements
are just as likely to mislead as to inform. Again, it is sometimes said that a
certain society is a “test case” through which we can prove something about all
others. Here we can cite (though Geertz does not) Durkheim’s “crucial experi-
ment” with Australian totemism. But we need to ask: What kind of test case
can we really make when almost none of the important conditions can be con-
trolled? We can never compare two human cultures as we can—with a
control—two laboratory cultures, placing them in identical dishes and adding
a chemical to one and not to the other. The findings of any one such cultural test
case, says Geertz, are “as inherently inconclusive as any others.”8
In light of all this, anyone interested in explaining human activities must
understand that the day when scholars set as their goal some “general theory of
cultural interpretation” is now past—and most likely gone forever. For the
unavoidable fact is that analysis of culture is not “an experimental science in
search of a law but an interpretive one in search of meaning.”9 Does this mean
that the interpretation of cultures can never give us wisdom that is of any gen-
eral value? Well, not quite. But what we can learn from it, says Geertz, is
probably more like the diagnosis a doctor makes in determining a type of ill-
ness from certain symptoms. Anthropology is never fully predictive, never able
to offer the certainty that is available in fields like physics or chemistry, which
center only on physical processes that follow the laws of motion or the rules of
molecular reactions. The anthropologist cannot forecast with certainty what
will happen in a culture, any more than a doctor can definitely predict that a
child will catch or resist a virus. But like a diagnosis, a theory should in some
measure try to anticipate what will happen elsewhere or be in some way appli-
cable to other cases. In interpreting one culture, a theory ought in some way to
be capable of being “tried out” on another, and then be either kept for further
use or discarded. In that connection, anthropologists do have a variety of gen-
eral ideas at their disposal—abstract concepts expressed in words like “struc—
ture,” “identity,” “ritual,” “revolution, world View,” “integration,” and so on.
These allow a theorist to stretch a single example into an idea that might apply
in several or many cases. They may not seem like much, but in fact such con-
cepts are extremely valuable, and in any case, they form the only kind of gen-
eral observation a good theorist would ever want to make. Anything more
ambitious might be interesting, but it is also likely to mark the return of the old
mistakes: bad science pretending to be anthropology.
,5 ‘L

302 Nine Theories of Religion
Cultural Interpretation and Religion
If interpretive anthropology is a matter of seeking out the system of meanings
and values through which people live their lives, then it stands to reason that
in any culture religion will command serious anthropological attention. That
Geertz firmly believes this is evident in the first study that came out of his
fieldwork—and for that matter the first of his career—The Religion of Java
(1960). This book is an ethnography in the best tradition of American anthro—
pology; it is a particular study of a specific people whom Geertz came to
know in depth through his immersion in their language and culture. It explores
in detail the complex interweaving of Muslim, Hindu, and native animistic
(the Javan name is abangan) religious traditions. And it looks at religion as a
cultural fact in its own right, not as a mere expression of social needs or eco-
nomic tensions (though these are certainly noticed). Through its symbols,
ideas, rituals, and customs, Geertz finds the influence of religion to be present
in every crevice and corner of Javan life. His study is so microscopically
detailed, so closely tied to the particulars of Javan culture, and so careful to
avoid generalizations that he might well have used it as the very model for the
kind of “thick description” anthropology we have just seen him recommend.
For that very reason, however, the book does not try to tell us very much of a
theoretical nature about the aims of an interpretive approach to religion.
Typically for him, Geertz chooses to do that instead with an essay, “Religion
as a Cultural System,” first published in 1966 and later included in The Inter-
pretation of Cultures. Though almost as celebrated as “Thick Description”
and just as widely noted or commented upon, this is not the easiest essay to
understand or to summarize. But it is important, so we need at least to trace
its outline.
Geertz begins by telling us, as his title indicates, that he is interested in “the
cultural dimension” of religion. Here he also helps by providing a fairly clear
and complete idea of what he means by a culture. It is “a pattern of meanings,”
or ideas, carried in symbols, by which people pass along their knowledge of
life and express their attitudes toward it. As there are within a culture many
different attitudes and many different forms of knowledge to pass on, so there
are also different “cultural systems” to carry them. Art can be a cultural system,
as can “common sense,” a political ideology, an ethnic heritage, and the like.
What does it mean to say religion is a cultural system? Geertz offers an
answer to this question in a single, heavily packed sentence. Religion is:
(1) a system of symbols which acts to (2) establish powerful, pervasive, and
long-lasting moods and motivations in men by (3) formulating conceptions of a
general order of existence and (4) clothing these conceptions with such an aura
of factuality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.‘0

Religion as Cultural System: Clifford Geertz 303
This is not a description anyone is likely to find brief and clear, but it is not
quite as forbidding as it first may seem. In-‘the rest of his essay, Geertz actually
does us the service of breaking down his account (which serves as both a defi-
nition and theory) by explaining in detail each of its elements. We can start
with the first. By “a system of symbols” Geertz means just about anything that
carries and conveys to people an idea: an object like a Buddhist prayer wheel,
an event like the crucifixion, a ritual like a bar mitzvah, or a simple wordless
action, like a gesture of compassion or humility. A Torah scroll, for example,
conveys to Jews the idea, among others, of God’s revelation. The image of a
saint in a hospital room may convey the idea of divine concern for the sick. As
we have seen before, the important thing about these ideas and symbols is that
they are not purely private matters. They are public—things that exist outside
ourselves in the same way that, say, a computer program exists outside of a
computer as well as within it. As program codes can be examined and read
objectively apart from the physical machines they are installed in, so religious
symbols, though they enter the minds of private individuals, can be grasped
apart from the individual brains that think them.
When it is said, secondly, that these symbols “establish powerful, pervasive,
and long—lasting moods and motivations,” we can abbreviate this by saying that
religion makes people feel things and also want to do things. Motivations have
goals, and they are guided by an enduring set of values—what people think is
good and right. The Buddhist monk feels a strong negative motivation, an aver-
sion, when presented with a generous midwestem American steak dinner. For
him, it is wrong both to eat meat and to eat in such quantity, because attachments
to food weigh him down in his struggle for a better rebirth and ultimate escape
from life in the natural world. His motivation here is a matter of morals, of choos-
ing for himself the good over the evil. Jews wishing to see Jerusalem and Muslims
hoping to visit Mecca will also arrange things so as to reach their goal, which is to
attain the morally good experience of being in the spaces sacred to their traditions.
Moods are more temporary than motivations, also less defined and less clearly
directed. When Hindu pilgrims arrive at Benares 0r Christians at Bethlehem, they
may well experience, even unexpectedly, a feeling of joy, an inner peace that
inspires for a time and then gives way naturally, at a later time, to a different mood.
The power of these moods comes from their source; they are not occasioned
by trivial or minor things. They arise because religion occupies itself with
something truly important; it formulates “conceptions of a general order of
existence.” By this Geertz simply means that religion offers ultimate explana-
tions of the world. Its main interest is not to tell us about stocks and bonds,
sports and games, fashions in clothing, or forms of entertainment. Its intent is
to provide an ultimate meaning, a great ordering purpose to the world. Every-
one knows when the disorder, the chaos of the world makes itself felt. It does

304 Nine Theories of Religion
so when people face things that, intellectually, they just cannot comprehend;
when, emotionally, they face sufferings they cannot bear; or when, morally,
they encounter evil they cannot accept. At these moments they see that what is
collides with what ought to be.
On the one side, then, stand conceptions of the world, and on the other a set of
moods and motivations guided by moral ideals; taken together, these two lie at the
core of religion. Geertz abbreviates the two elements by referring simply to
“world view” and “ethos”—to conceptual ideas and behavioral inclinations. He
then adds that religion “(4) clothes these conceptions with such an aura of factu-
ality that (5) the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.” In simpler
terms, this means that religion marks out a sphere of life that has a special status.
What separates it from other cultural systems is that its symbols claim to put us in
touch with what is “really real”—with things that matter to people more than
anything else. And it is in rituals that people are seized by the sense of this com-
pelling reality. In rituals, the “moods and motivations” of religious believers coin-
cide with their world view in ways that powerfully reinforce each other. My world
view tells me I must feel this way, and my feelings tell me, in turn, that my world
view must be right; there can be no mistake about it. In ritual, there occurs “a
symbolic fusion of ethos and world view”; what pe0ple want to do and feel they
should do—their ethos—joins with their picture of the way the world actually is.
Geertz explains that a vivid example of this fusion, this blending of ethos
and world view, can be found in one of Indonesia’s most remarkable ceremo-
nies. On certain occasions the people of Bali stage a colorful performance of a
great battle between two characters from their mythology: the fearsome witch
Rangda and the comical monster Barong. As these two struggle, the audience
itself gradually comes into the great Spectacle, with some members taking the
parts of supporting characters and others swooning into states of trance. As the
performance proceeds, it becomes clear that for the Balinese this drama is “not
merely a Spectacle to be watched but a ritual to be enacted.”” At its height, the
great drama of the performance, the intense emotion, and the crowd involve-
ment bring the whole scene almost into chaos. The struggle always ends with-
out a clear winner, but that is irrelevant. What is important is the way this
theatrical event evokes from the Balinese the attitudes and emotions—a mix-
ture of playfulness, exhibitionism, and fear—that are emblematic of their cul-
ture. In and through the turbulent, emotion-filled process of observing and
joining this ritual, they experience a deep confirmation of their view of the
world as an always uncertain struggle between the evil and the good. Further,
these religious moods and motivations, fitted to the world View, carry over
from the ceremony into the rest of society, giving all of Balinese life the fea-
tures that set it apart from the lives led in other cultures.

Religion as Cultural System: Clifi‘ord Geertz 305
From all of this, we should be able to see again how unwise it is, in religion
no less than any other sphere of culture, to leap toward quick general conclu-
sions. Balinese religion is so distinctive, so specifically its own sort of thing,
that there is hardly anything about it that we could turn into a general rule for
all religions—other than the fact that all traditions somehow manage to com-
bine, like the Balinese, both a world view and an ethos. Accordingly, as Geertz
explains in his conclusion, any useful study of religion will always require a
two-stage operation. One must first analyze the set of meanings found in the
religious symbols themselves—a difficult task in itself. Then comes the even
more difficult but equally important second stage: since the symbols are tightly
connected to both the structures of the society and the psychology of its indi-
vidual members, those connections must be traced along a continuous circuit
of signals given, received, and returned. If we think of wires strung in a trian-
gular configuration among three poles, one standing for symbol, another for
society, and a third for individual psychology, we have a fitting image of the
steady flow of influences and effects that pass among and through all three of
these centers in any religious system.
Interpreting Religion: A Balinese Example
If this is what Geertz’s approach to religion looks like on its theoretical side,
what shape does it take when applied to actual cases? Although his writings on
Bali, Java, and Morocco give us more than enough examples to choose from,
we have Space here to consider just two: one, a short essay on religion in mod-
ern Bali, and the other, as noted, Gecrtz’s comparative study of Muslim culture
in Indonesia and Morocco, published as Islam Observed (1968).
The article “ ‘Internal Conversion’ in Contemporary Bali” (1964) begins
with an idea pr0posed (not surprisingly) by Max Weber. In one of his interest-
ing comparative discussions (which we could only mention in our earlier chap-
ter), Weber distinguishes between traditional and rationalized religions. We
have already noticed the importance he attributes to the broad process of ratio-
nalization that has propelled the advances of Western civilization. Traditional
religion, which is characteristic of primitive peoples, tends to gravitate toward
magic and polytheism. The natural inclination in these “enchanted” cultures is
to see divinity everywhere. There is a spirit in every rock and a ghost in every
tree, while ritual, often with a magical purpose, frames almost every aspect of
life. Primitive peoples find themselves so immersed in dealings with this spirit
or that demon that they scarcely realize they even have such a thing as a reli—
gion; such things are just what they always do.

306 Nine Theories of Religion
Rationalized religion, by contrast, is what we find at the core of the great
world religions. Though traditional elements are invariably included, Judaism
and Christianity, as well as Confucianism and the Brahmin and Buddhist sages
of India, all center attention on just one or a very few universal spiritual princi-
ples: the one God of the prophets, the Way of Nature, Brahman, the Supreme
Spirit, or Nirvana (absolute nothingness). By a logic of one kind or another,
rationalized religions execute a process of “abstraction,” lifting their ultimate
being or cosmic principle above the little things of life. The effect of this “inter-
nal conversion” process is to leave ordinary life “disenchanted”—left bare of
its helpful or spiteful little gods and the little ceremonies that connect people to
them. Instead of these numerous everyday ceremonies and spells, rationalized
religion offers everyone a single path to the divine, such as through mystical
experience, which the sages of India taught, or through Judaism’s demand of
obedience to the moral law. And in distinction from traditional cults, the fol-
lowers of these rationalized religions are fully aware of what they are doing;
they know quite self—consciously that they “have a religion.” They know, and
are taught to know, that they are giving personal assent to an ordered system of
teaching that embraces all of the world and life.12
Rationalized and traditional religions also differ in one other important
respect: the way in which they deal with the great problems of life. Traditional
religions, as Evans-Pritchard explained in the case of Zande witchcraft, address
these great questions—what life means, why there is pain, why there is evil—
in very particular, specific ways. They do not ask, “Why do people suffer?”
They ask, “Why is my father sick?” And they look for very particular answers
as well: “Father is sick because his enemy has used witchcraft.” Rationalized
religions, however, always raise such questions to a cosmic scale; they include
the whole world. In the case of suffering, they point not to a single witch but to
Satan, who brought sin into the world, or to the dark, cool side of the Tao; they
appeal, in short, to great realities that affect everyone.
Rationalized religions typically have appeared in periods of social upheaval,
at those critical cultural moments when the local practices of magic and the
traditional religions of field and village appear insufficient to meet the cultural
and emotional demands placed on them. Christianity, for example, arose amid
the great social turmoil caused in the ancient Mediterranean world by the rise
and spread of Greco-Roman civilization. Confucianism appeared amid the
chaos of China’s destructive ancient civil wars.
Granting the value of this broad conceptual framework, says Geertz, we can
apply it to modern-day Bali. Anyone who approaches its culture with Weber’s
contrasts in mind will at once notice several interesting things. Though in name
it is Hindu, the religion of Bali is not the mysticism of India’s intellectuals but
the everyday polytheism and mythology of its villagers; that is to say, it fits

Religion as Cultural System: Clifi‘ord Geertz 307
Weber’s category of a traditional religion. There is in it almost no rationalized
theology, whereas rituals and a sense of nearby divinity can be found every—
where. There are thousands of temples in the landscape, and a person can
belong to dozens of them at the same time. Often people have no idea which
gods are worshipped in them, but for each one they insist that an appropriate
ritual be performed exactly according to a set plan. The ceremonies, moreover,
are also tightly woven into the social structure. Local priests who belong to the
Brahmin caste find their high social rank reinforced by their special spiritual
status; each “owns” a group of lower—caste followers who associate him with
divinity, while he calls them his “clients.” In addition, one of the main enter-
prises of the various princes, kings, and lords on the island is to hold large—
scale religious festivals, spectacles that require time-consuming labor,
sometimes employing hundreds of peasants and other laborers. The ceremo—
nies remind all people of their proper place on the social scale; the highborn
host the celebrations, while the lowborn do the work. Finally, in the true manner
of magical religions, the cult of death and witches, which we saw above in the
dramatic combat of Rangda and Barong, penetrates to every aspect of Balinese
life. Although over the years they have encountered both Christianity and
Islam, the Balinese have never seriously considered conversion to either of
these outside faiths. So their traditional religion has been able to survive the
centuries largely untouched by the entry of any rationalized world religion.
As Geertz viewed it in 1964, however, Bali was an island confronted with
dramatic social changes, many brought on by the coming of independence to
all of Indonesia in 1949. Modern education, political consciousness, and
improved communication had opened the channels of contact with the outside
world. The growth of cities and of population had added to the pressure, so that
what happened in ancient societies like the Roman empire when social turmoil
brought the disenchantment 0f the world and the end of magical religion seems
to have anticipated what was happening in modern Bali. If one were to look
closely, in fact, it would seem that the people of modern Bali were at that very
moment engaged in Weber’s process of internal conversion, transforming their
traditional ways of worship into something that, gradually, was beginning to
assume the features of a rationalized world religion. Geertz states that in the
course of his fieldwork, he was particularly struck one evening when, at a
funeral, an intense philosophical discussion of the meaning and purpose of
religion broke out among certain young men of the town. Almost unknown in
traditional cultures, such discussions are the hallmark of rationalized religion;
yet here just such a vigorous exchange was taking place on the street in Bali.
Almost as unheard of in a traditional situation is the development of scriptures,
doctrines, religious literacy, and an organized priesthood. But there were signs
that each of these things was now coming into Balinese culture. Interestingly,

308 Nine Theories of Religion
too, the nobles and princes, perhaps seeing their old privileges threatened by
the coming of democratic government, had actually put themselves behind this
initiative, hoping they could keep their status by being in the forefront of a new,
more defined and self-conscious Balinese religion. The new movement, says
Geertz, had only recently acquired the most visible badge of any rationalized
faith: an organization. In opposition to the Indonesian government’s
Muslim-dominated Ministry of Religion, Bali had recently chosen to establish
its own, locally supported, purely Balinese ministry, which had assumed the
task of certifying Brahmana priests and creating an authorized class of
professional clergy.
In essence, Geertz explains, all of those processes and changes that Weber
discovers behind the growth of the great rationalized religions of the world
could be found in evidence on the island of Bali in the postwar era. Bali in 1964
seemed to stand where Rome did in the time of Jesus and China did in the days
of Confucius. That being so, the question that comes naturally to mind is: Can
any more general conclusions be drawn from Bali’s experience? Is there a the-
ory to connect ancient Rome with modern Bali, and perhaps other places as
well? Geertz does not propose one. What will happen in the future, he concedes,
is something no one can predict. Nonetheless, if there is no theory, there is
clearly much insight to be gained from general paradigms, and Ideal-types such
as Weber’s, along with the promise that the case of Bali may help us further to
apply and refine them. In conclusion Geertz observes, “By looking closely at
what happens on this peculiar little island over the next several decades, we may
gain insights into the dynamics of religious change of a specificity and an
immediacy that history, having already happened, can never give us.”’3
Islam Observed
Our second example of Geertz’s interpretive approach in action takes us into a
larger subject, his comparison of two kinds of Islam. At the outset of Islam
Observed (1968), he proposes, ambitiously enough, to lay out a “general frame—
work for the comparative analysis of religion” and apply it to one faith, Islam,
as it exists in the two quite different countries that his fieldwork enabled him
to know best: Indonesia and Morocco.14 In addition to being Muslim, he notes,
both of these cultures have in modern times passed through great social
change. At one time traditional societies of rice farmers in the one case and
herdsmen in the other, both became colonies of Western powers (the Dutch
and the French) and have only recently won independence (Indonesia in 1949,
Morocco in 1956). Religion, needless to say, has often been at the center of the
social transformations that have come over both of these nations.

Religion as Cultural System: Clifford Geertz 309
The Classical Styles of lslam
Morocco took shape as a Muslim nation during four important centuries from
about 1050 to 1450 AD, when the society was dominated by aggressive tribes-
men from the desert and strong-minded merchants in the towns. The two main
figures in this culture were the warrior, or strongman, and the mystic, the
Muslim holy man, who sometimes came together in the ideal form of the
warrior-saint. Idris II, who built the city of Fez in the ninth century and was
the first Moroccan king, cut such a figure; he was a fierce fighter and reformer
who claimed direct descent from the Prophet Muhammad. Later in time, holy
men so devout that they were known as “marabouts”—from the Arabic word
murabit, “lashed” or “shackled” to God—attracted bands of followers who
split the land into militant sects, each fiercely loyal to its sacred leader. In
Indonesia, by contrast, Islam arrived later and took a different form. Long a
prosperous farming culture whose abundant rice fields supported peasant,
prince, and merchant alike, Indonesia had little use for the boldness and nerve
that were key to survival in Morocco. The virtue prized above all was quiet
diligence in the fields, a personality trait supported for centuries by Hindu-
Buddhist ideals, which stressed meditation, inwardness, and personal compo-
sure. Not until the 13005 did Islam begin to reach the Indonesian islands, and
then it came quietly through trading contacts and in a tolerant Indian form that
allowed it to blend with the Hindu, Buddhist, and animist beliefs already in
place. Indonesian Islam accordingly developed flexible features; it was “adap-
tive, absorbent, pragmatic, and gradualistic”——very different from the “uncom-
promising rigorism” and “aggressive fundamentalism” of Morocco.15 While
the one evolved into something gradualist, liberal, and accommodating, the
other took a shape that was perfectionist, puritanical, and uncompromising.
These characteristic religious attitudes, rigorous in the one case, relaxed in
the other, Geertz calls “the classical styles” of Islam in each nation. Both are
“mystical,” because they find religious truth through immediate contact with
God, but there are significant differences, which Geertz explains through the
stories of two legendary religious leaders. In Indonesia’s sacred legends, Sunan
Kalidjaga is the hero said to have brought Islam to the island of Java. He was
born into the court of a ruling family during the age of the great Hindu—Buddhist
“theater states”—that is, at a time when the ruling classes, as members of the
highest caste, were seen as the Spiritual elite of the country. In the royal and
princely courts, elaborate religious ceremonies were held to demonstrate the
political power and religious authority of the kings. As a young man, however,
Kalidjaga cared little for religion until one day he met a Muslim mystic whose
precious cane and jewels he tried to steal. The holy man only laughed at his
foolish desire for material things and suddenly transformed a nearby banyan

310 Nine Theories ofReligion
into a tree of gold, hung with jewels. Kalidjaga was so astounded by this mira-
cle and the man’s indifference to wealth that he asked to become a Muslim as
well, then proved his Islamic self-discipline by remaining in one place, in a
state of obedient meditation, for an interval that stretched to several decades!
He thus became a Muslim without ever seeing the Koran or visiting a mosque.
Significantly, however, after embracing Islam, Kalidjaga did not abandon the
theater-state culture of his childhood. Instead, he helped to establish a new
royal city at Mataram, and there used his high personal position and the cere-
monies of the king’s court to promote Islam, just as they once served the pur-
poses of the older Hindu-Buddhist religion.
The legend of Kalidjaga is of course more than the tale of a man. It is the
story of all Islam as it came to Indonesia, merged with the older religions, and
adapted itself to the culture of the theater states. Such syncretism, or blending,
of religions was very typical of Indonesia, but it did not last. It began to break
down in the modern era, as Islam came to be the dominant faith of the mer—
chants, whose power grew stronger, and as the Dutch, who arrived at the same
time to colonize the islands, pushed the ruling class out of power. Under pres—
sure from the European conquerors, the delicate mixed religion of these earlier
days broke up into the three separate traditions—Hindu-Buddhist, Muslim,
and native animist—that we find in Java today.
In a fashion similar to the case of Kalidjaga in Java, the features of Islam in
Morocco can best be seen in the life of the Muslim holy man known as Sidi
Lahsen Lyusi, one of the last of the marabouts, who lived in the 16003. Like the
others, Lyusi too saw himself as “tied to God.” A wandering prophet, scholar,
and pilgrim, he was a man of intense morality and great learning, a mighty
figure who in Moroccan stories is revered as the saint who faced down a sultan.
It happened that while a guest of none less than the Sultan Mulay Ismail,
founder of the great Alawite dynasty, Lyusi one day began to insult his host by
breaking all of the serving dishes in the palace. The purpose of this ungrateful
display was in fact a noble one: a protest against the backbreaking labor the
sultan imposed on his slaves. For this, the sultan expelled Lyusi from the palace
and attempted later to kill him. But when he charged the holy man’s tent, his
horse miraculously began to sink into the ground. At once the sultan admitted
his wrongs, acknowledged Lyusi’s demand to be recognized as a holy man and
a sherif, a descendant of the Prophet, and allowed him to go his way.
The quality that Lyusi triumphantly demonstrated in this confrontation was
baraka: a kind of spiritual charisma. His supernatural power to stop the sul-
tan’s horse was a sure sign that he possessed this divine blessing. Further,
Islam’s other way of proving one’s authority is to be accepted as a sherif. Even
though Lyusi performed a miracle, he required that the sultan recognize in him
this second proof of his holiness as well. We thus find centered in this one holy

Religion as Cultural System: Clzfiora’ Geertz 311
man the great question that faced all of Islam in Morocco: How is the spokes—
man for God to be known? Does baraka come simply through a holy man’s
personal charisma and miraculous powers? Or must one be a descendant of the
Prophet Muhammad? Or are both required? In the tension between these two
principles, Geertz explains, we can see one of the key issues that animated
Moroccan Islamic culture throughout its history. Over time, the ruling families
of the country established descent from the Prophet as the dominant principle,
but the appeal of baraka—as expressed in the charismatic qualities of holiness,
moral intensity, and wonder-working power—never disappeared. It remained
very much alive in various cults of the saints and—significantly for later
history——in popular opinion. The people tended to hold that the sultan should
possess both qualities: personal religious charisma and descent from the
Prophet’s line. As a result, both heredity and Spirituality had to be in evidence
to speak or act with divine authority.
In both Indonesia and Morocco, then, the classical styles of Islam are “mys-
tical”; they try to bring people into the immediate presence of God. But the
stories of the Muslim saints show how different in form even mystical Islam
can be. The passive “illuminationist” mysticism of Kalidjaga stands in sharp
contrast to the aggressive “maraboutist” piety of Lyusi. To borrow from
Geertz’s own definition, the religions of Indonesia and Morocco, though both
Islamic, show decidedly different “moods and motivations.” On the Indonesian
side, there is “inwardness, imperturbability, patience, poise, sensibility, aes-
theticism, elitism, and an almost obsessive self-effacement . . . ; on the Moroccan
side, activism, fervor, impetuosity, nerve, toughness, moralism, populism, and
an almost obsessive self-assertion.”l6
The Scripturalist Revolt
Whatever these differences, Islamic Indonesia and Morocco have in recent
times both had to cope with two major challenges: colonial rule and the com-
ing of modernization. In both lands the high point of colonial domination fell
roughly in the century between 1820 and 1920. And in both, this experience
made people distinctly more aware that they were Muslim while their Christian
masters were not. Islam became identified with protest, nationalism, and the
hope of independence. In the process, however, the faith itself began to
change. The classical styles—Indonesian illuminationism and Moroccan
maraboutism—found themselves under challenge from a powerful new move-
ment that claimed to be very old. This was “scripturalist” Islam.
In the case of Indonesia, this scripturalist revolt took shape in the 18005, at
the high point of Dutch control and at a time when national sentiment turned
strongly against colonial powers. Inspired by new opportunities for pilgrimage

312 Nine Theories ofReligt’on
to Mecca, Indonesians began to discover in Arabia a different, more rigorous
and militant Islam, which soon came to be taught in newly founded schools. In
these santri (Javanese for “religious student”) institutions, the older and more
flexible illuminationist Islam was pushed aside to make room for the “purer,”
original tradition, which centered on the example of the Prophet, the first
caliphs, and above all the literal truth of every word in the Koran. Mosque and
marketplace, moreover, were always natural allies; so in the growing number
of trading centers throughout Indonesia, this new, scripture-based Islam rap-
idly spread, all the while contributing its strength to a growing nationalism and
the cause of resistance to colonial rule. Interestingly, says Geertz, at almost the
very same moment, scripturalism also made its appearance in Morocco. Known
as the cause of the Salafi, or “righteous ancestors,” and led by fierce, passionate
nationalists such as Allal Al-Fassi, this new movement had by 1900 come into
open conflict with the older style of maraboutist—or “holy man”—Islam. As
in Indonesia, these new scripturalists opposed both French foreign rule and the
earlier classical Muslim style.
Scripturalist Islam in both Indonesia and Morocco thus provides a back-
ground to the struggle for national independence that engaged both countries
throughout the middle years of the twentieth century. This struggle can be fol-
lowed in the careers of the two national leaders at the time, Sultan Muhammad V
in Morocco and President Sukarno in Indonesia. Muhammad V rode to power
on the strength of the nationalism inspired by the scripturalist revolution in his
country. Personally devout as he was, Muhammad V found himself nonetheless
uneasy with the fundamentalism of the scripturalists. He preferred the older-
style maraboutist Islam, which recognized the sultan as the chief holy man of
the country. When, in the course of the 1950s, the French took a number of
unpopular measures, Muhammad V refused to be their puppet and resisted. He
was deposed and exiled, but two years later managed to return in triumph as
head of the new, independent Moroccan state. In Muslim eyes, his defiance and
devotion were clear proof of divine favor; he had shown the same baraka as
Lyusi, and he measured up fully to the prized maraboutist ideal of the warrior-saint.
Nonetheless, says Geertz, it is hard to see his success in uniting the old religious
ideals with the new postcolonial age as anything more than a holding action
against the running tide of scripturalist fervor.
Sukarno’s story in Indonesia is a less happy one, since it ends with his over-
throw by the military in 1965. Yet in the long struggle that he led from the
19203 to the year of independence in 1949 and then as president of the new
nation, we can see a similar mix of religious and political concerns. Sensitive
to the religious diversity of his people and resisting both communism on the
left and the Muslim scripturalists on the right, he tried to unify all parties with
his famous Pantjasila (Five—Point) Creed: nationalism, humanitarianism,

Religion as Cultural System: Clifi‘ord Geertz 313
democracy, social justice, monotheism. When this eventually failed, he made a
last effort at unity that seemed to turn the clock back to the time of the hero
Kalidjaga. He tried to revive in modern form the ancient “theater state,” build-
ing the world’s largest mosque, a colossal sports stadium, and a national mon—
ument. He also instituted a number of grand state ceremonies.
In the last analysis, both Sukarno and Muhammad V knew well the power of
religion in their societies; both sought to harness it constructively to the
national cause. Significantly, both decided that an Islam of the classic rather
than scripturalist style offered the best hope of success. Just as significantly,
neither was completely successful. Although Muhammad V achieved more
than Sukarno, Geertz claims that in neither case could the older forms of faith
survive unchanged in the modern circumstance.
Conclusion: World View and Ethos
What, then, is the significance of the parallel Islamic histories that can be
traced in Indonesia and Morocco? That question can be answered by recalling
the central point of “Religion as a Cultural System”: religion consists of a world
view and an ethos that combine to reinforce each other. A set of beliefs people
have about what is real, what gods exist, and so forth (their world view) sup-
ports a set of moral values and emotions (their ethos), which guides them as
they live and thereby confirms the beliefs. In both of these cultures up to at least
the year 1800, world View and ethos supported each other, meeting people’s
religious needs in a natural way. In Morocco, Islamic belief gave support to the
ethos of maraboutism, which “projects a style of life celebrating moral pas—
sion,” and this ethos, in turn, reinforced the Muslim creed.” In Indonesia, the
same balance held; the world view of blended Islam and Hinduism supported
the gentle, meditative mysticism of figures like Kalidjaga, while the ideal of
conduct and emotion he provided gave support to the world view. During the
last century, however, and in both lands, the arrival of nationalism and the pro-
tests of scripturalism have brought serious challenges. Doubts of the world view
and changes in ethos have appeared in ways that leave people uncertain about
each and dimly aware that the one is often at odds with the other.
With regard to world view, the root problem is a clash of ideas. In both lands,
secular attitudes have entered the scene with the spread of science in industry,
the universities, and professional classes. At the opposite extreme, the deter-
mined “ideologization” of religion in the hands of the scripturalists, who either
isolate the Koran from all other knowledge or claim that all knowledge is
somehow already in the Koran, has had the same unsettling effect. Collisions
between these two seemingly incompatible faith perspectives have fostered
deep, troubling doubts where once there was only quiet assurance.

314 Nine Theories of Religion
The effect of modern developments on the ethos component of religion in
both countries has also been significant. To prevent misunderstanding, Geertz
notes that a distinction must first be made between the force a religion may
have and the scope of its influence in any given culture. Moroccan Muslims
regard the encounter with God as an extremely intense, all-consuming experi-
ence; yet for them, most of ordinary life in the market or village square is dis-
cernibly unreligious. Conversely, in Indonesia, few religious experiences are as
intense, as full of force, as those that are prized in Morocco, but the range of
religiosity is far wider: there is scarcely a single aspect of life that is not in
some way tinged with a sense of the supernatural. Still, despite these differ-
ences, it is clear that in both countries a significant erosion of ethos is under
way. In small, subtle ways, the religious moods and motivations in both cul-
tures have begun to weaken. People may still be “religious-minded,” wishing
to keep their sacred symbols, but they are less immediately religious. They are
moved less by the direct presence of their gods than by the more indirect feel-
ing that they would somehow like their gods to be present. Increasingly , theirs
is becoming a religion one step removed from a direct encounter with the Reality
it claims to worship.
Islam Observed offers a particularly good illustration of Geertz’s approach
to religion primarily because of what it does not do. It does not offer a crisp
logical argument in defense of a definite thesis about religion, Islamic or other-
wise. It is instead a kind of exploration, a journey into cultural systems led by
a guide who is keenly interested in comparing landscapes and less concerned
with reaching a specific destination. Along the way, three things come into
focus. The first is the particularity of each culture under scrutiny. While
Morocco and Indonesia are both Islamic nations, a central theme of Geertz’s
discussion is the marked difference in the character and texture of the two
forms of Islam they present.
Second, there is the characteristic stress on meaning, the “thick description”
of a religion in terms of what is significant to those who live it. The Islam of
Morocco and Indonesia is governed by the same formal theology in both
places, but within that common system, the ideas that are emphasized and the
attitudes and emotions that are prized differ in marked degree. In Morocco, the
stress on the holy man, on moral passion, and on intensity of experience creates
a pattern of meaning and values manifestly different from the more passive,
tolerant, gently diffused sense of the supernatural found in Indonesia. Thus,
although both nations are Muslim and both encounter the identical challenges
of nationalism and scripturalism, each responds in its own way, and with vary-
ing degrees of success in the outcome. Morocco’s Muhammad V succeeded in
preserving a style of classical Islam in the new age of nationalism; Indonesia’s
Sukarno did not.

Religion as Cultural System: Clifirord Geertz 315
Third and finally, despite all of the attention to specifics and differences,
Geertz does venture to suggest at least the prospect of more general conclu-
sions. He notices, for example, that whatever their differences, neither Morocco
nor Indonesia seems able permanently to reverse the tide of doubt created by
the rise of secularism and scripturalism. For him, this is the kind of similarity
that may serve, like the categories of Max Weber, as at least the beginning of a
theorem that can be “tried out” elsewhere to discern if it will apply more widely
to religions in other places and times.
Analysis
We can best measure Geertz’s achievement as an interpreter of religion by
noticing two things: (1) where he stands among the theorists we have consid-
ered in this book and (2) what he represents as a leading recent spokesman for
interpretive anthropology.
1. Geertz and Other Theorists
Geertz’s program is best seen as an effort to blend the sociological theory of
Weber with the fieldwork of Evans-Pritchard. He clearly shares their misgiv-
ings, and those of Eliade, about functionalist reductionism—rejecting it not
only as an explanation of religion but as a misleading account of any cultural
system. Contrary to Marx, Durkheim, and Freud, Geertz insists that a general
reduction of all religion to the product of hidden neurosis, social need, or eco-
nomic conflict can claim no more credibility than any other grand theory—
which is to say, very little. To explain a religion without trying to grasp the
system of meanings it conveys is not unlike trying to explain a computer with-
out mentioning a program, or writing a book without using sentences. It cannot
be done.
While Geertz may share their suspicions of reductionism, he harbors doubts
of another kind that set him apart from Evans-Pritchard and Eliade. We noticed,
for example, that Evans-Pritchard cherishes the thought of one day framing a
general science of religion whose theories can be built up from the small,
specific studies that ethnographers in the present and in the future still need to
complete. Geertz thinks that time spent in pursuit of such a dream is wasted,
for what it imagines will simply never happen. Eliade’s program is, of course,
quite different from Evans-Pritchard’s, but he too is inspired by the hope of
finding something universal: the human response to the sacred as expressed in
certain enduring images and symbols shared by religious people of all times
and places. Geertz, in sharp contrast, is a declared and passionate particularist;

316 Nine Theories ofReligion
to him, a theory of the “universal forms” of religion is as much a mirage as any
“general science” of it. The reason for this lies in the very nature of anthropol-
ogy as he understands it.
2. The Interpretive Anthropologist
In assessing Geertz the anthropologist, we need to recall again the two sides of
his intellectual career. He was from the beginning both an ethnographer and a
theorist: on one side, a careful student of quite specific cultures in Indonesia
and Morocco; on the other, an innovative thinker, intrigued by the broad issue
of how to understand human behavior. His ethnography, though not of first
interest to us here, is widely praised and admired. Ordinary readers and most
professional scholars applaud the sensitivity, insight, analytical skill, and intri—
cate style of his essays on Balinese religion and field studies like The Religion
of Java, as well as the other works. They feature the trademarks of his craft:
original observations, inventive comparisons, important ideas, and connec-
tions drawn from seemingly insignificant details.
Ethnography of such high quality is interesting in its own right, but in
Geertz’s case it also supports—in an indirect way—the central point of his
interpretive theory. Most scholars of any kind—not just theorists of religion,
anthropologists, and social scientists—make an effort to know one or a few
things in great depth, so that from this foundation they can build to broader
claims. Freud’s psychoanalysis started with a few individual patients and led in
time to a full general theory of the human personality. From the specific case
of Australian totemism, Durkheim produced an account of religion in all soci-
eties. In Geertz’s case, however, this relationship between the specific and the
general is different. Except in certain limited ways, he does not, like Durkheim
or Freud, move from the specifics of religion in Bali or Morocco to general
pronouncements on religion in all or even most other places. On the contrary,
he as much as states that his ethnography—and that of others as well—cannot
and should not be made into a general theory. The point of his method is to
stress the opposite: particularity. In the interpretive approach, no two instances
of humanly created meaning should be fitted to one rule. We might almost say
that the better the ethnography, the worse its chance of becoming science, at
least in the usual sense of that term. Geertz produces his finely etched accounts
of Bali’s rituals and Java’s feasts much as a skilled painter does a portrait—to
show us that the features and temperament of this duchess or that queen are
truly individual; there is not, and will never be, another like her. After reading
The Religion of Java or Islam Observed, we find ourselves saying that we now
know a great deal about Indonesian and Moroccan religion. But Geertz does
not strive to offer some more general theorem that ties them together. What he

Religion as Cultural System: Clifford Geertz 317
offers instead are cautious suggestions, the hint at a possible connection here,
a fruitful comparison there. Beyond that we cannot go. In his opinion such
distinctive cultural expressions cannot be tied together, at least not the way
experimental scientists place under a single rule the facts of cell division or
planetary motion. In human affairs, as he puts it in the title of his second essay
collection, all knowledge is “local knowledge.” That phrase is well chosen. It
can stand as an apt motto for the only kind of interpretive anthropology he
thought it possible to pursue.
Critique
Clifford Geertz’s stature in American social science may not be beyond criti-
cism, but it is imposing enough. Critics are well outnumbered by admirers.
Questions have occasionally been raised about his literary style—sometimes
so adorned with metaphors, allusions, and artful sentence structure as to
obscure what would otherwise be clear and distinct. But that is a relatively
minor matter. On a more substantive level, there are two issues that call for
some attention: one centers on some of Geertz’s rather puzzling claims about
anthropology as a science; the other, on the apparent clash between his princi-
ples and practice as applied to the enterprise of interpretation.
1. Anthropology as Science
In promoting his program of interpretive anthropology, Geertz insists that he
has no intention of abandoning the belief that his discipline is a science. Yet,
as a number of anthropological critics have noticed, that appears to be what in
fact he is doing. For example, in “Thick Description,” the very same essay that
states his commitment to science, he just as forthrightly declares that his form
of cultural analysis is “not an experimental science in search of a law, but an
interpretive one in search of meaning.”’8 This is, to say the least, a puzzling
statement. Paul Shankman, one of Geertz’s sternest professional critics, finds
it to be mere gamesmanship with words.19 Shankman and others contend that
if interpretive anthropology is only looking for “meanings,” whatever those
are, and not striving to develop scientific theories to explain what it finds, then
Geertz’s ideas may be interesting, but they certainly are not what we know as
science.20 Theoretical laws, after all, are what science is all about. So, say what
he may, Geertz the interpreter of meanings is not practicing science; he is
abandoning it, at least as a useful method in anthropology.
It should be clear from what we have seen of Geertz’s position that these
critics are partly right. Geertz is proclaiming the end of science in anthropology

318 Nine Theories ofReligiOn
if by “science” we mean the making of ironclad predictive laws about human
behavior in the way physicists speak of the law of gravity or biologists describe
the laws of cell division. But he holds also that this is not the only form a sci—
ence can take. For “science,” from the Latin term scientia, can just mean a
systematically acquired body of knowledge. Consider a comparable field of
study like history. There is a sense in which historians are scientists. In evalu-
ating a document, they work quite rationally to determine such things as the
specific dates before and after which it could not have been written. In con-
structing the story of a battle or a parliament, they proceed quite critically,
weighing the importance of different events and decisions. In explaining the
rise of a nation or the fall of a king, they are always proposing theories, testing
them with evidence, and then discarding or revising them as the case requires.
All of these procedures are things we call scientific; they are rational, critical,
and evidential. And as far as anthropology goes, those are precisely the things
that good ethnographers do on every day of their field research. In that respect,
anthropologists plainly work as scientists, even though their conclusions will
always be stated in the probabilities that apply in human affairs, not under the
binding laws applied to natural events.
Understanding that there can be two kinds of science, then, clears up some
of the confusion. But even so, anthropologists who cherish the efforts of social
science to approximate the natural sciences as their model of study still have
their misgivings. They note that a further problem of the interpretive approach
is its disabling effect on our motivation to explain. Another critic of the inter-
pretive approach, Richard Franke, observes that in one of his articles Geertz
reports how tens of thousands of Balinese peasants were massacred after the
fall of President Sukarno in 1965. In seeking to account for this atrocity, Geertz
refers it to a deep contradiction in the Balinese sensibility, a combination of a
love for high art and a darker love of extreme cruelty. But in the process, says
Franke, he never really tries to find out
who was killing whom, who benefited from the massacre. . . . Instead of asking
about the possible roles of . . . foreign business elements, the United States CIA,
wealthy Indonesian military officers and their business allies . . . [and others],
Geertz offers the “goal [of] understanding how it is that every people gets the
politics it imagines?“
Other scholars have shown that there was in fact nothing uniquely Balinese
at all about the sensibility that led to this slaughter. The killing arose from a
power struggle between the communists and the military—a struggle quite typ-
ical of what occurred elsewhere in Asia. At times Geertz showed himself
attuned to the risks entailed by an inclination to overlnterpret meanings rather

Religion as Cultural System: Clifiord Geertz 319
than explain facts. But in the view of the critics, the stronger tendency of his
thought was quietly to forget the cautions that arose in his own better mornents.22
2. interpreting Religion
In the case of matters more specifically religious, we must keep in mind
Geertz’s central idea: that religion is always both a world view and an ethos. It
consists of ideas and beliefs about the world and an inclination to feel and
behave in accord with those ideas. Its peculiar chemistry comes from the sup-
port that each of these two elements gives to the other. Although Geertz
throughout his discussions reminds us often of this point, it is not very clear, at
least on the face of it, why such a statement should be regarded as particularly
new, or freshly illuminating. It seems a truism: how could religion be anything
but a set of beliefs and behaviors that relate to each other? It is hard to imagine
a religion that announces to its followers, “God exists” as part of its world View
but then recommends that they live as if there were no God, or makes no rec—
ommendation on a pattern of life. Similarly, an ancient Chinese sage who said,
“The Tao holds the secret of life,” but then recommended that people live as if
no such thing as the Tao existed seems just as impossible to conceive. Geertz’s
well-phrased formulas at times appear to cloak the obvious.
In this same connection it is interesting to observe that when Geertz actually
does seek to interpret religious behavior, only one of the two elements he
thinks central to it ever gets detailed and thorough scrutiny. He tends to say a
great deal about ethos—about conduct, values, attitudes, aesthetics, tempera-
ment, and emotions—but very little about world View. One critic perceptively
noted this fact in the discussion of the dramatic Balinese spectacle of Rangda
and Barong. Geertz writes eloquently of the Balinese ethos, the combined
emotions of horror and hilarity that are on display, the moods of dark fear and
playful comedy that ebb and flow through the performance.23 But the narrative
passes almost entirely over the native myths upon which the story is based.
When it is said, for example, that the audience fears the witch Rangda, what is
it precisely that they are afraid of? Her ugliness? Her threat to children, whom
she is known to eat? Death in general, which she symbolizes? Or something
horrible to occur after death? Is it perhaps just one of these things or several?
Or could it be all? From Geertz’s account, we just do not kndw. The “world
view” side of the religious equation, which in his theory of interpretation is just
as important as “ethos,” is, in his practice of it, often curiously neglected.
In Islam Observed, the same tends to happen. While tracing closely the rela-
tionship between social context and religious life in both Indonesia and
Morocco, Geertz writes at length about differences in ethos: the divergent val-
ues, moods, and temperaments that mark the contrast between the activist

320 Nine Theories ofReligion
self-assertion of the Moroccans and the inward self—effacement of Indonesia.
But in all of this we are told little about the Islamic world View: the belief in
Allah, the five pillars of Muslim practice, the doctrines of fate and the last
judgment, and so on. That omission leaves behind it a substantial trail of ques-
tions: Without any reference to world view, how do we know that the “temper-
aments” are even religious? Political revolutionaries are often self-assertive,
while addicts of certain drugs can be quite inward and self-effacing. We would
also like to know if the different social contexts that have had such a strong
impact on ethos have made any similar impression on world view. Are there
some things Moroccan Muslims believe that Indonesians do not? Or are the
basic Islamic beliefs about God and the world still the same? If they are the
same, then is there not a problem to address? If world view and ethos reflect
and “reinforce” each other, and if the Moroccan ethos differs sharply from the
Indonesian one, why are the world views not different as well?
All of these questions point to a rather curious feature of Geertz’s interpre-
tive approach, particularly in the case of religion. Though in theory he contin-
ually asserts that the hallmark of his method is its address to “meanings,” the
way it attends to the social symbols that carry ideas, he is at times rather sur-
prisingly uninterested in these ideas. In practice, he seems much more excited
about actions and feelings—feelings unattached to the beliefs that would seem
to be necessary to inspire and shape them.24 What is particularly puzzling about
this stress on emotion and ethos—especially if we recall Geertz’s American
anthropological background—is that in some ways it brings his view of culture
back to the subjective notion of a “group personality” found in the theory of
Ruth Benedict—a theory that, under the influence of his teacher Parsons, he
would seem to have rejected. Even in his much praised ethnographic writings,
for all their attention to detail, there seems a noticeable hesitance on Geertz’s
part to track down the inner relationships between the specific beliefs in Islamic
or Balinese theology. A comparison here with Evans-Pritchard’s meticulous
reconstruction of Nuer theology is instructive. If we truly wish to look at a
religion in terms of its meanings and want to avoid the vagueness of concepts
like the “group personality,” then an attention to particular beliefs, a tracking of
their minute connections and shades of difference, would seem to be a central
part of the anthropologist’s mission. Yet in his theoretical essay, Geertz gives it
passing notice at best.
None of these questions is likely to tarnish the sheen on any of the numerous
personal tributes paid to Geertz by his colleagues both in modern anthropology
and in the wider circle of the social sciences, as well as by sundry admirers and
observers from other fields of study. His success in establishing the “interpre-
tive turn” in anthropological research, and in pointing that path out to students
of religion as well, has left his reputation quite secure. The doubts do suggest,

Religion as Cultural System: Clifi‘ord Geertz 321
however, that other and future theorists who see promise in his approach would
be quite mistaken to suppose that there ‘is no need still to assess, revise, and
improve it.
Notes
1. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture,”
in Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books,
1973), p. 5.
2. To date the only full-length monograph on Geertz’s life and thought is Fred Inglis,
Clifford Geertz: Culture, Custom and Ethics (Maldon: MA: Blackwell Publishers,
2000). Particulars of his career can also be found in Adam and Jessica Kuper, eds., The
Social Science Encyclopedia (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), under “Geertz,
Clifford.”
3. This was a criticism made by Talcott Parsons, which Geertz cites with approval in
an essay entitled “After the Revolution: The Fate of Nationalism in the New States,” in
Interpretation, pp. 249—250.
4. See, for example, Sherry Ortner, “Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History 26 (January 1984): 126—166, especially
128—132.
5. Geertz, “Thick Description,” p. 12.
6. Geertz, “Thick Description,” p. 17.
7. Geertz, “Thick Description,” p. 20.
8. Geertz, “Thick Description,” p. 23.
9. Geertz, “Thick Description,” p. 5.
10. “Religion as a Cultural System,” in Interpretation, p. 90.
11. “Religion as a Cultural System,” p. 116.
12. Geertz’s summary of Weber’s theory appears in “‘Internal Conversion’ in
Contemporary Bali,” in Interpretation of Cultures, pp. 171—175; the full article covers
pp. 170—189.
13. “‘Internal Conversion,”’ p. 189.
14. Geertz, Islam Observed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), p. v.
15. Geertz, Islam Observed, p. 16.
16. Geertz, Islam Observed, p. 54.
17. Geertz, Islam Observed, p. 98.
18. Geertz, “Thick Description,” p. 5.
19. See Paul Shankman, “Gourmet Anthropology: The Interpretive Menu,” Reviews
in Anthropology 12 (Summer 1985): 241—248, and for a more extended critique, “The
Thick and the Thin: On the Interpretive Theoretical Perspective of Clifford Geertz,”
CurrentAnthropology 25 (June 1984): 261—279.
20. Others who argue that Geertz’s approach represents an unwise departure from
scientific ideals include Richard Newbold Adams, “An Interpretation of Geertz,”
Reviews in Anthropology 1, no. 4 (November 1974): 582—588; William Roseberry,
“Balinese Cockfights and the Seduction of Anthropology,” Social Research 49

322 Nine Theories of Religion
(Winter 1982): 1013—1028; and Robert A. Sega], “Interpreting and Explaining Reli-
gion: Geertz and Durkheim,” and “Clifford Geertz and Peter Berger on Religion: Their
Differing and Changing Views,” in Segal, Explaining and Interpreting Religion: Essays
on the Issue (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), pp. 77—101, 103—122.
21. Richard W. Franke, “More on Geertz’s Interpretive Anthropology,” Current
Anthropology 25 (1984): 692—693.
22. See Paul Rabinow, “Humanism as Nihilism: The Bracketing of Truth and
Seriousness in American Cultural Anthropology,” in Social Science as Moral Inquiry, ed.
Norma Haan et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). p. 73.
23. Henry Munson, Jr., “Geertz on Religion: The Theory and the Practice,” Religion
16 (January 1986): 19—25. An early collection of essays is Soundings: An Interdisci-
plinary Journal 71 no. 1 (Spring 1988), where the entire number centers on Geertz.
Newer essay collections are Richard A. Schweder and Bryon Good, eds. Clifford Geertz
by his Colleagues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) and Jeffrey Alexander,
Philip Smith, and Matthew Norton, Clifford Geertz: Cultural Investigation in the Social
Sciences (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
24. Munson, “Geertz on Religion,” p. 24.
Suggestions for Further Reading
Alexander, Jeffrey C., Philip Smith, and Matthew Norton, eds. Interpreting Clifford
Geertz: Cultural Investigation in the Social Sciences. New York: Palgrave Mac-
millan, 2011. The most recent collection of articles reassessing Geertz’s ideas
and methods.
Asad, Talal. “Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz.” Man,
us. 18, no. 2 (June 1983): 237—259. An unconventional discussion of Geertz,
which is obscure in places, but focuses critically on his assumptions about the
nature of religion and religious symbolism.
“Geertz, Religion, and Cultural System.” Special issue of Soundings: An Interdisciplin-
ary Journal 71, no. 1 (Spring 1988). An early set of essays by seven authors from
different fields addressing Geertz’s research, methods, and theories as well as his
views on religion and other topics.
Inglis, Fred. Clifi‘ord Geertz: Culture, Custom and Ethics. Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishers, 2000. At present the only single-authored effort to appraise Geertz’s
intellectual achievement over the full course of his career.
Kuper, Adam, and Jessica Kuper, eds. The Social Science Encyclopedia. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985. Under “Geertz, Clifford.” A brief account of
Geertz’s professional career and achievement.
Munson, Henry, Jr. “Geertz on Religion: The Theory and the Practice.” Religion 16
(January 1986): 19—25. A thoughtful analysis, with persuasive criticisms of
Geertz’s actual practice as different from the principles of his interpretive
approach.

Religion as Cultural System: Clifford Geertz 323
Peacock, James L. “The Third Stream: Weber, Parsons, Geertz.” Journal of the
Anthropological Society of Oxford 7 (1981): 122—129. Traces the intellectual
roots of Geertz’s interpretive anthropology through his Harvard mentor to Max
Weber’s ideas and methods.
Rabinow, Paul, and William Sullivan. Interpretive Social Science: A Second Look.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Essays by various scholars as-
sessing the movement in anthropology for which Geertz is the foremost
spokesman.
Rice, Kenneth A. Geertz and Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980.
A first step in the direction of a full-scale study of Geertz and his program,
though it relies heavily on summaries of Geertz’s works and extended
quotations.
Rosebeny, William. “Balinese Cockfights and the Seduction of Anthropology.” Social
Research 49 (Winter 1982): 1013—1028. An analysis of Geertz against the back-
ground of the opposing approach to anthropology taken by the school of “cul-
tural materialism.”
Sega], Robert A. “Interpreting and Explaining Religion: Geertz and Durkheim,” and
“Clifford Geertz and Peter Berger on Religion: Their Differing and Changing
Views.” In Robert A. Segal, Explaining and Interpreting Religion: Essays on the
Issue, pp. 77—122. New York: Peter Lang, 1992. Terse, analytical, and critical
essays on Geertz that shed light on his View of religion through comparisons of
his approach with those of other leading social theorists.
Shankman, Paul. “Gourmet Anthropology: The Interpretive Menu,’ Reviews in
Anthropology 12 (Summer 1985): 241—248. A stringent critique of Geertz by a
younger professional in the field.
Shankman, Paul. “The Thick and the Thin: On the Interpretive Theoretical Perspective
of Clifford Geertz.” Current Anthropology 25 (June 1984): 261—279. Another
aggressive critique of Geertz’s interpretive approach, with responses from other
anthropologists.
Shweder, Richard A., and Byron Good, eds. Clifiord Geertz by his Colleagues.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Assessments and appreciations of
Geertz from leading figures in anthropology and the social sciences; published in
the year prior to his death.
9

10
Conclusion
It may be helpful to look back on the previous pages of this book as a kind of
panel discussion. The invitees are an impressive group, needless to say. Each
has had a fair opportunity to speak, and the sequence of the presentations is
not unimportant. Some are best understood after we have heard others: we
need a grasp of armchair anthropology to see the point of field anthrOpology;
we need to see the questions left behind by Tylor and Frazer to appreciate cer—
tain answers pr0posed by Freud and by Durkheim; and only when we consider
the nature of the reductionist functionalism urged by Freud, Durkheim, and
Marx can we follow the reasoning that led Weber, James, Eliade, and others to
dissent from it. Sequence, however, is not the same as succession. It would be
a mistake to conclude from the review of theories just completed that those at
the end of the sequence have solved all the problems discovered among those
that preceded them. If so, we could easily conclude that Clifford Geertz has
“won the debate” merely because he is placed in the final chapter. It is true he
was the theorist most recently active, but that does not mean his ideas are the
only ones still standing. Theoretical constructs have a certain timeless quality,
like the theorems of geometry. Their value lies in calling certain key questions
continuously to mind for reflection and reconsideration. That being so, we can
make best use of this final chapter in two ways: first, by looking beyond the
classic formulations to the newer interpretive efforts undertaken by theorists in
more recent decades; and second, by taking a final measure of our nine theo-
rists, and implicitly all theories, with a set of general questions that enable us
to compare their strategies and briefly appraise their prospects.
Recent Theoretical Interests
Currently, the modern research university is the home of most Efforts to frame
explanations or interpretations of religion. These endeavors are carried out
mainly by academic specialists pursuing programs of research that are highly
diverse and individualized. Even so, their work can be seen to cluster around
certain shared general patterns—or paradigms—of explanation. Through
much of the past century the paradigms of widest general influence have been
those of Freud and Marx. Durkheim also has claimed a significant set of
325

326 Nine Theories of Religion
disciples, chiefly among professional sociologists. Despite limited access to
his work earlier on, Max Weber has also drawn a small, select following, while
through the 19608 and after, discussion in America came increasingly to be
influenced by the disciples of Mircea Eliade. Throughout most of the century,
however, no theory of religion could hope to be taken seriously if it did not
engage the aggressive reductionist explanations advanced by Marx and Freud
and refined by their disciples. Not until the 19808 and 19903 did that circum-
stance begin to change. In quite different, unrelated ways the achievements of
both Freud and Marx came under severe challenge—the former from critics
who questioned both the ideas and methods of psychoanalysis and the latter
from the stunning popular revolts in East Europe and Russia against the
oppressive regimes of Marxist socialism.I
Today, it is fair to say that no single theory exercises an influence comparable
to that of these leading paradigms just over half a century ago. There are instead
various competing patterns of interpretation that build upon the classic theories
examined here, even as they refine and apply them in novel ways. We can per-
haps best describe these new initiatives as centers of theoretical interest—as pro-
grams that give to certain kinds of explanation a kind of first conceptual priority,
inquiries that for differing reasons privilege certain types of explanation over
others. Among these, we can distinguish a number of leading patterns, or domi-
nant agendas: (l) humanistic, (2) psychological, (3) sociological, (4) politico—
economic, and (5) anthropological. In each case, the adjective defines the kind of
guiding axiom that directs the inquiries of those who work within its loose frame-
work. In each case also, “industry” may be a better word than “inquiry” to
describe these enterprises as they currently proceed. A century ago, scholars who
attempted to theorize about religion formed a tiny guild of learned, solitary
craftsmen; Chips from a German Workshop was actually the title Max Muller
gave to a collection of his essays. Today, in the academics of the English-speaking
world alone, the scholar working from one of these orientations is likely to think
of herself as part of a technical team at a multisite production facility, conversing
with dozens or scores of others in different locations, each with a complementary
specialty or competing method that promises the best design and assembly. What
follows is an effort to penetrate some of that complexity by offering a brief out-
line of these main approaches, attended by some examples that illustrate how the
classic theories have left their imprint on current work.
Humanist Orientations
Humanist theory assumes that religious activity is first and foremost human
activity governed primarily by ideas, intentions, and emotions, as in other
human endeavors. We explain political behavior in terms of the political ideas

Conclusion 327
‘that citizens naturally frame and act upon if they have an interest in politics.
We explain artistic behavior in terms of creative ideas and expressive actions
that move artists to paint, novelists to write, and musicians or actors to per-
form. In the same way, we explain religious behavior by appeal to religious
beliefs, intentions, and aspirations. This kind of explanation, which comes
nearest to the way we explain our activities in everyday life, is anchored in
theoretical axioms articulated most clearly by Weber and Eliade, also by
Evans-Pritchard and Geertz. Its focus falls mainly on the conscious religious
motives that account for obviously religious behavior such as worship and
devotion, ritual and belief. Eliade, we may recall, insists that it is not just reli-
gion that should be explained religiously. For him, religious beliefs and atti—
tudes stand at the center of general human experience, so they can offer a key
to understanding activities of other kinds as well. An instructive recent instance
of humanist explanation can be found in the work of David Carrasco, a disciple
of Eliade who has written extensively on the native religions of Central and
South America before Columbus. His Religions of Mesoamerica: Cosmovi-
sions and Ceremonial Centers (1990) demonstrates how the vision of the
sacred, embodied in religious ideas, myths, and rituals, shaped almost every
aspect of life in ancient Aztec and Mayan civilizations. If we take another
instance and compare the work of Carrasco with that of Wendy Doniger, who
has written extensively on the myths, rituals, and religions of India, we can see
the same axiom applied to an Eastern culture, though with a difference as well.
Doniger commits to a humanist approach; she appeals to religious motives,
ideas, and values embedded in Hindu religion and mythology, but she is less
disposed to privilege them as predominant. In works such as The Origins of
Evil in Hindu Mythology (1976) and The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology
in Myth (1998), she works more evidently in the vein of Weber than Eliade,
using what she calls a “toolbox” approach (“whatever tool seems to work”) to
discover a web of causation in which religious ideas and motives mutually
interact with historical, social, psychological, artistic, political, and other fac-
tors. That pattern of investigation, which freely adduces an eclectic mix of
ideas, values, conditions, and causes to explain either religion or religion’s
impact on other Spheres of life, is today so widely practiced as to be almost the
“default setting” of most explanatory endeavors in this field. Most interpreters
who do not self-consciously choose other orientations move toward this kind
of mixed paradigm, in which the explanation may even start with an appeal to
primarily religious factors but readily blends them with others as the actual
case may require. Examples of scholars who work in broadly humanistic fash-
ion, assigning primary or significant credit to religious ideas, values, and prac—
tices in their explanations, can be found across the whole spectrum of
present-day interpreters. Most authors of articles and books on religion

328 Nine Theories of Religion
encountered in the academy or the marketplace do not attend greatly to the
matter of theoretical presuppositions. But that does not mean they do not have
them; they hold, mostly unawares, to axioms not unlike Doniger’s toolbox or
even Carrasco’s all-encompassing sacred with varying personal emphases.
Psychological Orientations
Theorists who give priority to issues of human psychology and personality
have long been divided about the legacy of Freud. His path-breaking impor-
tance is readily acknowledged, but in the last two decades especially, most
social scientific psychologists have moved quite decisively away from the
methods of psychoanalysis toward “hard science” models of data collection,
correlation, and analysis. For this kind of research, Freudian theory is regarded
as fundamentally unusable.
Elsewhere, judgments on Freud are quite mixed. Practicing psychoanalysts
naturally remain closer to his founding principles, and some, certainly, con-
tinue to share Freud’s dim view of religion as a tissue of illusion rooted in the
dysfunctional personality. But there have been important countertrends as well.
At the very start of the psychoanalytic movement, Freud’s Swiss colleague
Carl Jung took a decidedly more positive view of religion. Further, and as we
have seen at length in the chapter on William James, the guiding thesis of
The Varieties of Religious Experience is the power of religion to restore
and energize the broken self. In the mid-twentieth century Gordon Allport’s
The Individual and His Religion (1951) and Abraham Maslow’s Religions,
Values, and Peak-Experiences (1964) also sought to make constructive reap-
praisals. Allport saw no need to presume there was some singular form of reli-
gious experience, whether that might be Freud’s neurosis or J ames’s conversion
moment. He found that individuals draw on a variety of emotions and senti-
ments in framing a religious perspective on life. Aligning with James, he
argued that such experiences foster maturity if embraced “intrinsically,”
through a willing inward assent, rather than being forced upon the personality
from outside. Maslow concurred. He found that across the human race, reli-
gious sentiments have arisen naturally within individuals as they respond to
peak experiences of a mystical type; to the extent that those experiences are the
same, so are the goals of all religions they inspire, regardless of the Specific
doctrines that arise to define them. Maslow’s perspective here resembles that of
James. Religion in this naturally and universally human form cannot be dis-
missed as pathological; it should be seen as normal.
Since at least the 19803, the association of religion with mental health (rather
than mental illness) has emerged as a promising new focus of psychological
inquiry. Most of this effort has been centered on data-centered programs of

Conclusion 329
research with human subjects that have managed to acquire substantial funding
from both private foundations and government agencies. In general, religion
has emerged from these investigations as beneficial in nature, fostering both
mental and physical wellness. It should be noted that over time a significant
change in method has occurred. Psychologists of William James’s generation
pursued “intr05pection” as their main avenue of inquiry, while later psychol-
ogy has turned the focus to “behavioral” analyses, most recently supplemented
by the technology of brain imaging. One example can perhaps best serve as
representative of both the turn away from Freudian distaste for religion and the
turn toward behavioral studies, which today are largely in the hands of younger
research psychologists. Forgiveness: Theory, Research and Practice (2000),
edited by Michael McCullough, Kenneth I. Pargament, and Carl E. Thoresen,
gathers a number of the more recent studies centered on the intriguing theme
of religion as an agent of human reconciliation, a resource for the repair of
broken relationships. These theorists can almost be said to have stood Freudian
reductionism on its head. For them religion is not a malady that psychoanalysis
alone can cure; it is a therapy that psychoanalysis cannot provide.
Sociological Orientations
Theorists working with a sociological orientation have in the main looked to
Durkheim (or even Marx) rather than Weber as the main guide for their labors.
This is not surprising if we recall the distinctive features of their work.
Durkheim sought quite self-consciously to create a school of inquiry commit-
ted to the axiom of sociological interpretation; in The Elementary Forms he
even offered a kind of template for future inquiries. By way of the Verstehen
method and the appeal to ideal-types, Weber too searched for some kind of
general theory that could be applied, in a manner resembling that of natural
science, to all future work. But as we have seen, his feeling for cultural com-
plexity, his vast command of evidence, and his keen appreciation of what is
unique to each historical instance have made it difficult for others to draw on
his work as a model for their own. Accordingly, though some theorists of
humanist orientation have found ideas and themes from Weber that they can
use, committed social scientists for the most part have not.
Durkheim’s legacy can be observed in Milton Yinger’s Scientific Study of
Religion (1970), a major summation of the state of social science published
two thirds of the way through the past century. Like Durkheim, Yinger defines
religion functionally, arguing among other things that it serves to control pri-
vate passions for the good of the whole. Yinger also strongly endorses
Durkheim’s claim that however it may change over time, religion is too well
integrated into the patterns of social life ever to predict, as Freud and Marx do,

330 Nine Theories of Religion
that it will someday disappear. It is as eternal as society. Paradoxically, both a
recent and a more current theorist, each working in the tradition of Durkheim,
choose to disagree. Bryan Wilson’s Religion in Sociological Perspective (1982)
and Steven Bruce’s God Is Dead: Secularisation in the West (2002) present
modern secularization as a process destined to usher in the eventual disappear—
ance of religion. They draw largely on Durkheim’s distinction between the
“mechanical solidarity” of unified primitive tribes and the “organic solidarity”
of segmented, specialized modern societies. In any society, they contend, as
modernization proceeds, the space left for religion grows steadily smaller. In
the Western Middle Ages, the arm of the Christian Church reached into every
sphere of social activity, from morality to art, economics, politics, literature,
and science. In the modern era, that reach has gradually contracted: control of
knowledge has been conceded to science, political power and social welfare
have been given over to the state, the arts have their freedom, and so on.
Religion today is at most simply one piece in a complex social package.
This “secularization” thesis is not new. It had been anticipated in Peter Berger’s
Sacred Canopy (1967), a work that blends some of Durkheim’s emphases with
others from Weber. For Berger, people living in a social community frame
ideas and project them outward; those ideas then become objectified as truth
outside of the self and society, only to be internalized again as programs of
future action and belief. Modernization, however, tends to break up these con-
nections, and so religion as an external belief system begins to lose its strength.
The same theme was quite differently explored in The Invisible Religion
(1967), a work by Berger’s sometime associate Thomas Luckmann, who dis-
agreed with the secularization thesis and insisted on the power of religion to
adapt and survive. Changing course, Berger later offered his own critique of the
secularization thesis in The Desecularizarion of the World (1999). The ongoing
vitality of these discussions, which are cited here as illustrative rather than
definitive, suggests just how durable Durkheim’s legacy has been, even apart
from its impact on anthropological theorists, whom we have yet to consider.
Politico-Economic Orientations
Recent and current theorists whose explanations appeal primarily to socio-
economic conditions work in the long shadow of Karl Marx, regardless of
whether they endorse all or only part of his economic theorem: that religion is
an illusion born of injustice. Until the political collapse of socialism in 1989, it
could be said that communism had brought to Western civilization the greatest
revolution in thought and society since Christianity overturned the classic
pagan cultures of Greece and Rome. For many, Marx and Engels had unmasked
the great fraud of religious belief—that it comforts the rich while deluding the

Conclusion 331
poor. The truth of the Marxist idea was underscored by the political success of
the communist movement it inspired. Through much of the twentieth century,
it was reasonable to conclude that communism was indeed “on the march.” It
had captured Russia and China, two of the world’s major nations; it was spread-
ing in Asia and to Cuba in Latin America; even in Europe and the United
States, strong socialist movements and left-leaning political parties supported
the goals of communism, if not its violent methods. Marxist theory thus made
a strong claim upon the assent of intellectuals, artists, journalists, academics,
and politicians in nearly all of the Western nations. Within the Soviet and
socialist states, however, it was a different matter; disillusionment arrived
quickly under the rule of Stalin and became chronic thereafter. But outside the
Eastern bloc, this was not the case. Neither the reports of purges nor the tales
of famine and murderous atrocities that filtered out of the socialist states could
shake the faith of true Marxist believers. In recent decades, consequently, the
major spokesmen for the Marxist cause have been placed not in the old
communist bloc, but in the universities of Europe, America, and the Third
World. They are found not mainly among professional economists, as we first
might think, but in humanistic fields such as history, literature, philosophy,
religion, and the political or social sciences, as well as thematic fields centered
on ethnic, environmental, or gender studies. In general, these scholars and
critics offer variant forms of a common argument built on the premise of
global injustice.
“Postcolonial theory” is one of the terms often used to denote this program
of critical suspicion focused on the affluent, imperialistic cultures of the mod-
ern West, but it circulates under many labels in university classrooms and
offices. Terms such as “cultural criticism, critical theory,” “postmodernism,”
“anti-hegemonism,” “transgressive discourse,
’9 fl
1, Hsubversive discourse,” “alter-
ity,” and “subaltem studies” suggest just some of the initiatives associated, in
varying ways of course, with this general posture of cultural critique. Marxist
theory of this sort counts among its modern apostles and evangelists many of the
most influential critics, scholars, and public intellectuals of twentieth-century
Europe and America. The most influential, though not the most profound, of all
these figures may well have been the Algerian French writer Frantz Fanon, whose
animated protest work, The Wretched of the Earth (l961)—now a half century
old—furnished these movements with both their bible and early catechism.
Postcolonial and related theorists write on a far-reaching spectrum of sub-
jects, and the literature as a whole is enormous. The best we can do here is notice,
somewhat at random, a few of the recent efforts to advance the thesis as it bears
particularly on the sociopolitical interpretation of religion. In Orientalism
and Religion in Postcolonial Theory: India and “the Mystic East” (1999),
Richard King argues that the category of “mysticism” employed so

332 Nine Theories ofReligion
prominently in comparisons of Asian with Western religions is a distortion
imposed on Indian religion by European scholars subtly determined to assert
the superiority of the West. In Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Rea-
sons of Power in Christianity and Islam (1993), Talal Asad makes a similar
point about religion itself as an abstract concept provincial to the Western
world but imposed on the Muslim East. His argument underscores a theme
earlier articulated by Edward Said in Orientalism (1978), one of the most polit-
ically provocative works of scholarship written in the past four decades. The
works of Michel Foucault, perhaps the most celebrated of France’s radical the-
orists, have had an even wider impact. He was not exactly a postcolonial theo-
rist, but his aggressive efforts to expose the mechanisms by which those who
hold power in society manipulate institutions, language, culture, religion, and
even science to maintain their control have had a similar effect. In works such
as Madness and Civilization: A History ofInsanity in the Age of Reason (1961)
and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), he Claims to
unearth within the society of the West the same social diSparities, anchored in
power and privilege, that postcolonial theory discerns between the West and all
others.
Foucault’s comments on knowledge as a means of oppression have found a
parallel in the subsequent work of Gayatri Spivak. In such studies as In Other
Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (1988) and A Critique of Post-Colonial
Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999), she adds both an
Asian and a feminist turn to the conventional critique of the West, bringing
women as well as the poor and outcast into the growing army of those offering
resistance to power. Feminist theory is certainly not the same as postcolonial
theory, but Spivak’s work illustrates how feminist literature also explores
themes of protest. Decades earlier, in Beyond God the Father (1973), theolo—
gian Mary Daly was among the first in a line of feminist scholars to file
a strident complaint against patriarchal domination by male authority figures
in Christianity. More recently, Marsha Aileen Hewitt’s Critical Theory of
Religion: A Feminist Analysis (1995) moves beyond Western culture, making
the same point across the spectrum of world religions. Again, these works
have been chosen merely to illustrate patterns; the complete literature on these
themes runs to scores and even hundreds of volumes reflecting a wide array of
academic fields and professional vocations.
There is, finally, one case that can be cited here to illustrate that not all of
politico-economic theory falls within the sprawling network of Marxist post-
colonial criticism. That is the paradigm known as rational choice theory, which
has emerged from behavioral analyses that originate among professional econ-
omists. It is rooted in the critical work of Marx’s principal adversaries in the
Vienna school of free-market economics. These market theorists hold that

Conclusion 333
economic behavior consists of rational choices made by individual people in
their own self-interest. They argue the same point in regard to religion. In The
Future ofReligion (1985) Rodney Stark and Philip Bainbridge contend that the
decision to believe in a God or an afterlife can be explained in terms of cost—
benefit calculations that human beings make every day in all aspects of their
lives. A religious commitment is made on the ground that it offers rewards—
including ultimate rewards—that are worth making other sacrifices to acquire.
There are in this approach certain evident affinities to the views of Frazer and
Tylor, who see religion as centered on the practical need to survive; there are
similarities also to Max Weber’s stress on explanation through Verstehen, the
“understanding” of individual motives behind human action, and even to
James’s argument in “The Will to Believe.” James would not have been sur-
prised to learn that rational choice explanations hold appeal also for profes-
sionals in clinical psychology, where intervention theory stresses personal
choice as a mechanism to overcome addictions on the principle of psychologi—
cal self—interest. Rational choice theorists regard religion as more a matter of
psychological than political or economic interest.
Anthropological Orientations
From their beginnings in the Victorian era, anthropological research and the-
ory have trained attention chiefly on the customs and cultures of “primitive”
peoples. Since these communities are invariably steeped in religion, religion
has naturally come to the center of the discussions. The approaches differ,
however, in accord with the two kinds of anthropology we have encountered
in these chapters: older Victorian and newer field-study investigation. As we
saw earlier, the Victorian founders of the discipline—Tylor, Frazer, and their
associates—came under stiff criticism in the early decades of the twentieth
century. Their armchair methods, faith in cultural evolution, and narrow
intellectualism were so strongly repudiated that their main legacy seemed to
be that of bad examples. This may all be true, but a distinction needs to be
made. In and of itself, the Victorians’ intellectualism—their idea that primi-
tive religion, like magic, arises as an effort to better understand how the world
works—can lay claim to some validity. Tylor and Frazer were mistaken in
supposing their point could be proved through armchair research and a naive
idea of progress, of human evolution out of savagery into civilization. But if
separated from those errors, it regains some credibility. That is the argument
advanced and developed in a series of highly original essays by African
field-working anthropologist Robin Horton. In articles stretching over a quar-
ter century and published in several collections, including Patterns of Thought
in Africa and the West (1993), Horton has sought to demonstrate the value of

334 Nine Theories of Religion
what he calls a “neo-Tylorian” theory: namely, that among the peoples of
Africa he has encountered, religion is indeed primarily an intellectual proj—
ect, an effort to explain the world that places gods or spirits in much the same
role that abstract conceptions such as atoms, molecules, and physical laws
play in Western science. Horton’s striking and original essays suggest that on
the matter of intellectualism, at least, the last words on Tylor and Frazer have
not yet been spoken.
This special case does not alter the fact that the general course of anthropol-
ogy has moved in a direction different from Horton, who forms a lone but
nonetheless noteworthy as a voice of dissent. Without doubt, most practice of
modern anthropology has been molded by two dominant influences. The first
is the principle of disciplined fieldwork, both as framed by pioneers such as
Bronislaw Malinowski and as brought to excellence by E. E. Evans-Pritchard
and others. The second, more theoretical influence has been the principle of
primarily sociological explanation as set out by Durkheim in The Elementary
Forms and other works. The central argument of Durkheim, as noted, is that
religious ideas and rituals are mirror images of an underlying reality that is
social. Social structures and constraints govern all that individuals think and
do; they frame the beliefs and values, the practices, ceremonies, and even the
categories of thought that determine human behavior.
In Structure and Function in Primitive Society (1952), published at the mid-
point of the twentieth century, English anthropologist A. R. Radcliffe-Brown
applied Durkheim’s theorems to reach an understanding of a primitive culture
as he had seen it in the Andaman Islands. His theoretical matrix, known as
structural-functionalism, sought to demonstrate how the fixed components of a
society contribute to its orderly function. In Purity and Danger (1966) Mary
Douglas underscored the central importance of order in primitive societies by
examining their elaborate systems of classification. Foods, animals, objects,
other people, aspects of the human body itself—all are placed in a grid that
specifies what is pure and what pollutes, what is permitted and what is taboo.
People cannot conduct a social life without putting things into places, without
imposing order on the naturally disordered flow of life as it comes along in
daily experience. Religion sanctions the social grids that provide both spaces
and boundaries, answering to the need for order. Edmund Leach’s celebrated
essays “Magical Hair” (1958) and “The Logic of Sacrifice” (1985) and his
Culture and Communication (1976) are works in a similar vein; they explain
how classifications serve the purpose of conveying important information in a
society. The length of hair often serves as a sign of a person’s social or reli-
gious status, and the ritual of sacrifice serves to mediate between different
cultural categories as people move from one role to another. In The Forest of
Symbols (1967) and The Drums of Afi‘liction (1968), Victor Turner takes a

Conclusion 335
similarly structural approach, showing how rituals resolve conflicts that
threaten the stability of the community framework.
While these British anthropologists pursued their work chiefly along the
rails laid down by Durkheim and Radcliffe—Brown, Belgian theorist Claude
Levi—Strauss, living in Brazil and conducting his fieldwork in its interior,
developed a highly original approach to issues of social order, which he set out
in provocative studies such as The Savage Mind (1966) and The Raw and the
Cooked (1969). Brilliant but often forbiddingly obscure, he applied structural
linguistics to the myths and practices of tribal people, contending that rela-
tionships among words, ideas, and objects, rather than their individual mean-
ings or identities, are the truly important things about them. In the religious
language that we find in tribal mythologies, the key feature often is not the
content or characters in the stories; it is the relationships between objects or
terms or characters that matter; they reflect more universal categories of
human thought. Though Levi-Strauss spoke of himself as merely an “incon-
stant disciple” of Durkheim, his approach won an identity of its own as French
structuralisrn.
Field studies anchored in structuralist sociology have thus marked one main
path of inquiry. A new turn took shape, however, in the 19908, as that decade
became host to one of the most important reorientations in social science since
the time of either Durkheim or Malinowski. Over the course of that interval,
books and symposia, journal articles, research initiatives, and even popular
magazine pieces began to trace a rising tide of interest in evolutionary biology
and cognitive science. This arresting new development has by no means been
confined to anthropology or religion. Across both the human and natural sci-
ences, advances in genetic research—-—including a now-complete map of the
human genome—and the explanatory power of Darwin’s evolutionary para-
digm have converged to offer the prospect of new possibilities in explanation.
A certain intellectual excitement attending this shift to biogenetic theory
has been understandable, but it is not an entirely sudden occurrence. An early
spokesman for this path of inquiry was the Harvard sociobiologist E. O.
Wilson. His 0n Human Nature (1978) was among the first works to argue the
controversial thesis that not only human physical features, but also mental
activities and behavioral patterns are traceable to Darwinian natural selection;
significantly, his book included a discussion of religion in that context. At the
beginning of the 19905, in Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cognition and
Culture (1990), American scholars E. Thomas Lawson and Robert N. McCauley
followed with an argument for a more concerted effort to incorporate the find-
ings of cognitive science into theories of religion. Momentum has grown
steadily since then, as anthropologists have begun to pursue the possibilities.
One of the earlier advocates was Stewart Guthrie. His Faces in the Clouds: A New

336 Nine Theories of Religion
Theory of Religion (1993) asserted that religion arises from the human ten-
dency toward “systematic anthropomorphism,” an urge to personify processes
and events that is shared with animal ancestors and rooted, at least partly, in
evolved brain functions associated with survival and self-protection. More
recently, Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of
Religious Thought (2001) has drawn on evolutionary biology to argue that
religious belief is a kind of conceptual afterthought that arises in the brain from
structures that evolved naturally into consciousness for general survival needs.
Ilkke Pysaiennen, in How Religion Works (2001), travels a similar argumentative
path, while David Sloan Wilson in Darwin’s Cathedral (2002) frames the case
in terms closer to sociobiological theory, holding human communities to be a
key adaptive organism, as in the case of animal herds or colonies of ants.
The common pattern of argument in these works is evident: genetically
based mental structures and di3positions, distilled by the age-old evolution-
ary process of filtration into the present physical composition of the human
brain, hold the explanatory key to human action and belief. Clearly, theories
of this kind mark an important shift in emphasis away from social toward
natural science—especially along the paths of genetics and neuroscience.
Philosophers and neurobiologists have already charted some of this terrain
in vigorous journal debates over the mind—brain relationship. Theories
addressing the phenomenon of religion presumably fit into that discussion,
and genetic research, as it develops even greater sophistication, is certain to
play an important part. In fact, it has already begun to do so. One later entry
into the discussion was The God Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our
Genes (2004) by geneticist Dean Hamer, who has suggested that the ten-
dency toward religious belief and behavior may be traceable to a variant
coding of DNA on a specific gene. Whether theorems of this kind will stand
up to close scrutiny over time is unclear; the cases they develop are at present
as much speculative and inferential as they are experimental. Nonetheless,
they deserve serious investigation, for the implications are important, even if
not yet entirely clear. Should we be able to construct it, a theory holding that
genes determine all or most of human behavior would go a considerable way
toward displacing, or at least reshaping, several of the theories on offer in
this book. At the farther limit, it offers the prospect of a new determinist
biological reductionism. Of course, a theory of that sort would embrace far
more than the realm of religion; it would purport to account as well for all
other forms of human thought and action. On the other side of that ledger, if
religion truly is coded into our genes, then the pr0phecies of secularization
theorists about the death of God or the end of faith will appear to have been
either decidedly premature or fundamentally mistaken about the nature of
the human species.

Conclusion 337
A Final Exercise: Comparing and Appraising Theories
If nothing else, this cursory review of recent interpretive strategies suggests that
the classic theories we have considered in these chapters are more than mere
curiosities on display in a museum of discarded ideas. Within and behind almost
every current theoretical orientation, it is possible to discern, whether in the
shadows or the foreground, the insistent questions that were raised more than a
century ago and have persisted under varying forms to the present day. No doubt
it would be convenient if in our conclusion we could issue summary judgments
of “right” or “wrong” on each of our theories, as a jury might decide a case in
court. It would simplify things greatly if we could accept one, reject the others,
and end the matter with that. In matters of explanation and interpretation, how-
ever, that is almost never the case. Categorical judgments come at too big a price.
Further, as all who seek explanations know, the value of a theory goes well
beyond the simple fact of its being true or false. “Wrong” explanations that
discover a new way of seeing a problem or break open a new path of inquiry
are arguably just as important as “right” ones that do little more than restate
what everyone already claims to know. In addition (and as should now be
plain), the matters taken up by most theorists of religion are just too compli-
cated to yield a direct up—or-down vote of confidence on any theory in its total
profile. It is far more likely that certain parts of an interpretive program will be
rejected and pieces of its argument questioned while other aspects are endorsed,
amended, or usefully merged with other views. In general, the principal thesis
of almost every theorist considered here (with the sole exception perhaps of
Evans—Pritchard) is just too broad in scope to be either accepted or rejected in
its complete form.
Clearly, questions of several kinds need to be asked if we wish to grasp the
grammar of theories and read their syntax correctly. On that principle, here is
a final set of five questions that can be asked of all our theorists, allowing us to
sort agreements from differences as we go: (1) How does the theory define the
subject? What concept of religion does it start from? (2) What type of theory is
it? Since explanations can be of different kinds, what kind of account does the
theorist offer, and why? (3) What is its range? How much of human religious
behavior does it claim to explain? All of it? Or just some? And in that light,
does it actually do what it claims? (4) What evidence does it appeal to? Does
it try to probe deeply into a few facts, ideas, and customs, or does it spread
itself widely to embrace many? Is the range of the evidence wide enough to
support the range of the theory? (5) What is the relationship between a theo-
rist ’s personal belief (or disbelief) and the explanation that is proposed? As we
put these questions to the classic theories, the bearing of the answers on con-
temporary theory should readily become clear.

338 Nine Theories of Religion
Theories and Definitions
It is said often that religion is so individual, so elusive and diverse, that it defies
definition; it can mean almost anything to just about anyone. That is not the
view of the theorists considered here. Although they disagree sharply on
explaining religion, they differ much less than one might suppose on the mat-
ter of defining it. If we look closely—and in a few cases read between the
lines—it is apparent that they all come close to the view that religion consists
of belief and behavior associated in some way with a supernatural realm of
divine or spiritual beings. This is a point worth demonstrating.
Tylor and Frazer both choose to define religion in quite straightforward
supernaturalist terms, as does Eliade with his concept of the sacred, which is
the realm of the gods, ancestors, and miracle-working heroes. Tylor puts it
perhaps most simply when in his well-known minimum definition he refers to
“belief in spiritual beings.”2 Durkheim, on the other hand, seems at first glance
to take a quite different view, for he explicitly rejects the concept of the super-
natural. He defines religion instead as that which concerns the sacred; he then
further identifies the sacred with what is social.3 For him, society is worshipped
as divine. Nonetheless, his view is actually closer to the others than he admits,
for the whole argument of The Elementary Forms depends on the premise that
in the eyes of those who subscribe to it, a religion normally consists of beliefs
(in his language, “representations”) and behaviors associated with a realm of
reality that, even if the believers themselves do not see it so, we with our mod-
ern concept of nature clearlywould call supernatural. When Durkheim turns to
his primitive Australians, he does not discuss their trading habits or techniques
of husbandry; he starts with beliefs and ceremonies that refer to the supernatu-
ral, the rites pertaining to the gods, and the stories of the ancestral spirits. He
of course differs from a theorist like Eliade in claiming that although the
inquiry starts with such rites and beliefs, that is not where it ends. His aim is to
show that once the issue has been explored, the Australians’ worship of the
totem god will turn out to be their concern for the clan. But he cannot get to this
conclusion without at least beginning his inquiry at almost the same place it
starts for Tylor, Frazer, and Eliade—with the notion of the supernatural.
The views of Freud and Marx on this issue need less explication. Both are
quite content with a conventional definition: they see religion as belief in gods,
especially the monotheistic Father God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, even
though, like Durkheim, they insist that this is only religion on its surface.
Underneath the appearances lies humanity’s obsessional neurosis or the pain of
injustice that requires the opium of belief.
Weber, James, Evans-Pritchard, and Geertz can be seen to follow convention
as well, though each has certain problems with the term “supernatural.”

Conclusion 339
Evans-Pritchard prefers the term “mystical” because unlike the cultures of the
modern West, the tribal societies he explores have no clear concept of an oppo-
sition between a natural world and a supernatural one.4 Nonetheless, he makes
it clear that the overriding concern of both Nuer religion and Azande witchcraft
is always to arrange a proper relationship with this mystical realm that lies
behind and beyond ordinary life. Before they can be at peace with themselves
or at home in society, the Nuer feel deeply that they must have a clear con-
science before the gods, while the Azande always must locate the source of the
witchcraft that is causing their troubles.
As we might expect given their common lineage, the positions of Weber and
Geertz are similar. Weber’s definition is expansive; it embraces systems of
belief in the supernatural that include both magical and salvation interests,
without excluding even a non-salvationist ethical system such as Confucianism.
As for Geertz, it is true that the word “supernatural” does not appear in his
well—known definition of religion as a cultural system, where he speaks in
abstract terms of “a system of symbols” that conveys “conceptions of a general
order of existence.”5 And his main interest, admittedly, is in the ethos, the
“moods and motivations” of religious people, rather than in the supernatural
beings they fear or love. But when we turn to the actual accounts he provides
in his ethnographies of Java, Bali, and Morocco, it is clear that the key feature
of religion as practiced lies in the emotional and social responses people make
to their world views: that is, to the supernatural beings they believe in, whether
that be the God, angels, and Satan of Islam or the spirits, deities, and demons
of Javan and Balinese traditional cults.
Thus, while the theorists we have examined may disagree on any number of
things, the definition of religion is in general not really one of them. Though
some say it less directly than others, all find religion centered, initially at least,
on beliefs and practices associated with spiritual or supernatural beings. Even
in the cases of Durkheim, Evans-Pritchard, and Geertz (each of whom does
have reservations), the differences turn out to be mainly a matter of terminol-
ogy and emphasis, not substance. On the matter of defining religion, all nine of
our theorists can be said to start, broadly speaking, from common ground.
Types of Theory
Needless to say, the moment these theorists turn from definition to explana-
tion, consensus rather quickly disappears, as we have had ample occasion to
notice. By their nature, of course, explanations come in different forms, which
in themselves can create confusion. The same fact, event, or behavior can often
be explained in multiple ways, some of which can be readily mistaken for

340 Nine Theories ofReligion
others. In Theories of Primitive Religion, Evans-Pritchard observes that when
in the later 18003 the first spokesmen for the science of religion presented their
work as a search for “origins,” they were often less than clear on the meaning
of that term.6 Assuming we can ever find it, the historical or prehistorical
origin of religion is one thing; its psychological or social origin is another. The
first would be found in certain specific events belonging to the earlier (or ear-
liest) ages of civilization, while the others are rooted in conditions presumably
characteristic of human life in all times and places. The one is a past occur-
rence; the others refer to a timeless condition or aspect of all human
existence.
The search for religious origins in the first sense of the word was carried on
especially by Max Miiller, Tylor and Frazer, Freud, and even (to a certain
degree) Durkheim. It is typically connected with the doctrine of human social
evolution and holds that religion is the result of a long process that began with
events lodged deep in the human past, like Freud’s “murder of the first father.”
In tandem with the growth of civilization as a whole, it then slowly developed
through stages of ever-increasing complexity until it arrived at beliefs and
practices of the kind we know today. Such evolutionary theories naturally take
a keen interest in primitive peoples because they are thought to display reli-
gion, as well as civilization, in its earliest, simplest, and purest form. In the
words of the well—worn evolutionist analogy, they Show us the acorn out of
which the oak of religion has grown. In addition, the primitive form is regarded
almost always as inferior to what is modern. “Crude,” “childish,” “barbaric,”
and “savage” are favorite words of theorists like Tylor and Frazer.
As we have had several occasions to notice, this once-fashionable doctrine
of social evolution eventually came to be rejected on all sides. Its chief prob-
lem was that it claimed knowledge of things that no modern inquirer could
ever hope to know. The “earliest forms” of human religion and social life are
subjects we can only guess about—and not with much skill.7 With the failure
of this historical evolutionism, theory in the twentieth century has turned
chiefly to the other sense of the term “origins.” Religion, it is held, is ulti-
mately traceable to the enduring psychological needs or social circumstances
that we find in every age and place of human existence. But that is not all.
Within this second category one must further distinguish purely functional and
even reductionist explanations such as we find in Freud, Durkheim, and Marx
from the antireductionist positions of Weber, James, Eliade, Evans-Pritchard,
and (in his unique way) Geertz. The motive of the reductionist approach is
apparent. Since in the modern scientific world, religion cannot be considered
either a rational form of belief or a normal type of behavior, reductionist
accounts must appeal to something subconscious or irrational to explain why
it persists.

Conclusion 341
The opponents of reductionism insist that such theories rest on a serious
misunderstanding. Weber contends that regardless of whether the theorist
believes in them, systems of meaning are indispensable; it is in the very nature
of human beings to create conceptual frameworks for their actions. James
argues similarly but prefers to make religious experience primary and beliefs
secondary. Eliade and Evans-Pritchard concur, arguing that when seen in its
own terms, there is nothing irrational or abnormal about religion; thus there is
no point in seeking to explain it away through appeals to the subconscious, the
social, or the economic-material. Evans—Pritchard shows that even when they
seem absurd to outsiders, the religious beliefs (even of tribal peoples) form
coherent, orderly systems; they are neither barbaric nor crude—just different
from the systems that undergird modern nonreligious societies. Eliade takes
this argument farther, claiming that the archaic mode of thought characteristic
of religion is actually more meaningful, and thus more “normal,” than modern
secular attitudes because it responds more fully to the deep human craving for
cosmic order and significance in a world of disorder, evil, and suffering. The
same is true for Geertz: from the perspective of interpretive anthropology,
which appreciates the particular self—defining character of every culture, he
contends that religious societies stand on a footing of coherence and normality
comparable to that of our own semi-religious scientific cultural order.
All things considered, this antireductionist stance can be said to have gradu-
ally gained strength throughout the twentieth century, aided of course by the
rather sudden and steep decline in the stature of both Freud and Marx. We can
even note as a further contribution to this shift Robin Horton’s revival of Tylor’s
intellectualist theory.8 Clifford Geertz, incidentally, comes near to the same
conclusion. Though he thinks that religion is more than a purely intellectual
exercise and that it fills a variety of emotional and social needs, he reports that
more than anything else, the people he met in Indonesia appealed to their gods
simply to explain events they otherwise could not understand.9 Needless to say,
the debate between reductionist and antireductionist theory, between the irra-
tionalists and the intellectualists, continues into the present.
Range of Theories
As we have noticed along the way, all of our theorists address themselves in
some measure to the question of religion in general—religion taken “in the
round”—but they do so in quite different ways. Like their predecessor Max
Miiller, Tylor and Frazer feel they can explain the entire history of religion as
it first appeared and then deve10ped through the long span of the human cen-
turies. This strikes us today as an exceedingly unrealistic goal, though for their
part, they felt the principle of social evolution provided all the guidance

34?. Nine Theories of Religion
needed. For Tylor, the spirit worship of primitive peoples, the polytheism of
the Greeks and Romans, and the monotheism of the “higher” religions could
all be explained as steps on the staircase of civilization; they mark the ascent
of humanity to ever more rational forms of thought—the most rational of
which, in his view, was the choice to discard religion altogether. Frazer, who
includes magic as a preliminary stage, embraces essentially the same grand
global sequence.
Nor are Tylor and Frazer alone. From their different perspectives, the three
major reductionists—Freud, Durkheim, and Marx—show the same sort of
general ambition. When they explain religion, they mean to explain all of reli—
gion. They choose one religious system as a sort of paradigm case, the supreme
instance of an endeavor that appears in numerous other “lesser,” or later forms.
For Freud and Marx, the paradigm is the Judeo-Christian belief in God as
Father, an idea that reveals the escapist role of religion worldwide. For
Durkheim it is Australian totemism, which puts on display “the elementary
forms” from which all others can be derived. Weber, James, and Eliade are just
as ambitious but decline to rely on a single paradigm instance. Each considers
the entire spectrum of world religions, though their emphases differ. They keep
the evolutionism and comparative method of Victorian anthropology off their
agenda, but as it happens, the scale of their inquiries is no less wide-ranging
than the worldwide armchair travels of Tylor and Frazer. Weber is confident
that he can make well- grounded but sweeping comparisons between Asian and
Western religions, between asceticism and mysticism on a global scale, and
among the types of economic ethic that guide entire civilizations. James leans
heavily on Protestant accounts of conversion experiences but clearly sees the
personal transition from anxiety to release as the emotional core of religion in
all cultures and traditions. Eliade draws his evidence from every age and every
locale of human civilization. In his search for the universal patterns of symbol-
ism and myth, he moves freely from Hindu yoga and the shamanism of Asia to
the aboriginal culture of Australia and the “cosmic Christianity” of European
peasants; he draws as well on the texts and rites of many other times, places,
and peoples, whether ancient or modern, Eastern or Western, simple or sophis-
ticated. His aims too are genuinely global.
In contrast with these others, Evans—Pritchard and Geertz have serious mis-
givings about any theory that aspires to universal claims about “all” of religion.
From their standpoint, any theory with global ambitions comes uncomfortably
close to the ways of Tylor and Frazer. We cannot visit other cultures and soci-
eties as if we were tourists, stopping briefly to gather up a myth here, a symbol
there, and move casually on. Nor can we, like Freud, Durkheim, and Marx,
center on one tradition and assume what is said about that case will apply by
extension to others. For Evans-Pritchard and Geertz, the focus of the

Conclusion 343
religionist, like that of the anthropologist, must fall on particular cases for the
simple reason that myths, beliefs, rituals, and values are always embedded
things, laced tightly to other strands in the social fabric of all communities.
Theories and Evidence
An explanation is one thing; the way we try to prove it is another. If we look at
all nine theories in light of their approach to evidence, certain clear differences
are not hard to notice. Because they believe that a truly global theory of reli-
gion requires an equally global array of evidence, Tylor, Frazer, Weber, and
Eliade all set out with great determination to collect the widest possible array
of information. The strength of this approach lies in its honest attempt to make
a complete fit between theory and evidence. It assumes that if claims about all
of religion are to be made, then evidence from all (or as close as we can come
to all) religions ought to be adduced. Nevertheless, its disadvantages are obvi-
ous. It is a program virtually impossible to pursue without conceding that our
grasp of some texts or traditions will be better than others, that there will be
barriers of language and limits to translation, and that there will be gaps to fill
by inference rather than evidence. In addition, global inquiries almost by defi-
nition must make at least some of their arguments by drawing facts, customs,
or ideas out of the natural context of the cultures that generate them. When that
happens, the risks of distortion and misunderstanding are real.
These difficulties with evidence are rather neatly escaped by Freud and Marx
even though the claims they make about religion are in their way as universal as
any made by the other globalists. Freud and Marx feel no need to search the
world for data because they feel they have found something better—the funda-
mental mechanism in human beings that everywhere generates religion, regard-
less of the specific form it takes in one culture or the next. For Freud, there is
no need to search the world when the source of all rites and-beliefs can be traced
directly to the oedipal tensions and neuroses that are characteristic of every
human personality. If we have in hand the principle that generates all religions,
we have no need for all the many labors of anthropology and comparative reli-
gion, other than to supply us with instructive supporting details. Similarly for
Marx, it makes little difference whether we examine the tribal religions of New
Guinea or the Christianity of EurOpe; beneath the particulars, he is certain he
will find everywhere the same fundamental dynamic of class warfare—the
struggle that generates the hope of a better world beyond for the poor while
offering divine sanction for laWs that protect the persons and property of the rich.
The challenge for both of these theories, of course, is that they must demon-
strate how all religions arise from wish fulfillment or the class struggle; they
cannot just assume it. Since religions differ tremendously in both form and

344 Nine Theories ofReligion
substance around the world, both Freud and Marx need to show us just how it
is that, say, Chinese folk religion or Australian totemism is generated by the
same psychological and social dynamic that has produced Judeo-Christian
monotheism. This is not impossible to achieve. The Hindu doctrines of caste
and reincarnation, for example, would seem to invite Marxist analysis. But
neither Freud nor Marx sees any compelling need to canvas multiple cases;
both are content to apply their theories chiefly to Judeo-Christian monotheism
and let the verdict in that case stand also for all others. Still, such a strategy is
not a substitute for consideration of other relevant cases. The sharp focus of
both Freud and Marx on one Western monotheistic religion constrains their
accounts unless some effort is made to widen the scope of the evidence they are
willing to consider. Universal claims cannot easily rest on mainly provincial
arguments; the range of the evidence needs to be generally congruent with the
range of the theory it is adduced to support.
The remaining four theorists——Durkheim, James, Evans-Pritchard, and
Geertz—think that the matter of theory and evidence can be settled only by
some form of compromise. They find the comprehensive approach of Tylor and
Frazer and of Weber and Eliade too expansive, while the exclusively Western
focus of Freud and Marx is too narrow. The truth, they say, must be found
somewhere in between. In this connection Durkheim’s solution, though differ-
ently developed, still somewhat resembles that of Freud and Marx. He too
thinks he has found the mechanism that generates all of religion—not in the
psyche or the class struggle but in the needs of society. He also thinks he can
illustrate this mechanism through an account of a single primitive religious
tradition that serves as his test case—in his own words, the “one well-made
experiment” that is “valid universally.”10 The religion he chooses, however, is
not Judeo-Christian monotheism but primitive Australian totemism, for it bet—
ter shows the “elementary forms” of all religions. As Durkheim’s critics have
been quick to point out, however, Australian clan cults cannot offer a better
foundation for a general theory than any other religion taken in isolation.
Although he does try to be more genuinely scientific about his procedure than
either Freud or Marx, Durkheim faces the same problem: the very specific
nature of the (Australian) evidence is insufficient to support the universal
claims of the theory. In contrast, William James proceeds by another plan. He
finds the core of religion—the psychological experience of release and resolu-
tion—-to be prospectively universal and not tied to the diverse theologies of
different cultures that seek to explain it. At the same time, most of the varieties
of religious experience that he cites in support of the theory offer Protestant
Christian testimonies. Consequently, without a wider range of evidence from
non-Protestant and non~Christian sources, it is difficult to tell how globally
applicable that core psychological experience of release really is.

Conclusion 345
The methods of Durkheim and James enable us to see why theorists such as
Evans-Pritchard and Geertz have moved so decidedly away from any general
claims about the nature of religion. The problem is in the evidence, which in
their view must be patiently studied in individual cases before any kind of more
general statement can even begin to be made. In that connection, Evans-
Pritchard does express a kind of deferred hepe that at some future moment
scholars, building on studies done in the present, may be able to frame well-
founded general interpretations. In the conclusion of Nuer Religion, he
describes his own careful work in the Sudan as little more than a first step on
the way to comparative studies that in the future will examine African systems
as a whole.11 From there, presumably, he would encourage interpreters to go on
to even wider theories that embrace other continents and cultures, though all of
that would no doubt occur well into the future.
Geertz, by contrast, is more skeptical. The position he takes brings him very
near to announcing the end of all general theories. He thinks the fault of earlier
theorists lies not (as Evans-Pritchard claims) in the method or manner of reach-
ing their goal but in the goal itself. Given the deep and sharp particularity of
societies around the world, the whole idea of a general theory of something so
culture-bound as religion must be called into question. What we can deve10p,
as the title of his most important book states, is the interpretation of cultures
(plural); what we cannot create is some generic theory of culture (singular).
And what is true of culture is equally true of religion. We cannot reach some
comprehensive theory of world-wide religion “as a whole”. The range of our
evidence will always be insufficient to support the range of such a theory.
Among more recent theorists the cautions of Evans—Pritchard and Geertz
have been largely taken to heart. Current interpreters wonder aloud whether
generalizations of the kind normally sought by social science still hold the
promise they were once thought to offer.12
Theories and Personal Belief
None of the theorists we have met in this book should be considered a purely
detached scholar, writing on a subject of no immediate interest to himself or
his times; each is a human being who in addition to his theory can be presumed
to hold personal convictions about religion as well. The relationship between
those personal convictions and the explanations proposed is in some instances
obvious, as with Marx, but in others it is a more subtle and complicated matter,
which we cannot explore in any complete way here. Still, some final comments
on this issue may turn out to be useful.
First, to recall a point made early in this book, there is a sense in which all
of the theories we have considered here offer at least a possible challenge to

346 Nine Theories ofReligion
religious belief because they choose from the start not to consider supernatural
explanations of religious endeavors. The devout Christian explains her faith as
a gift of God; the Muslim explains the power of the Prophet through direct
inspiration from Allah. By contrast, the theorist of religion appeals only to
what can be described as “natural causes” or “nonprivileged accounts.” This
difference of approach need not necessarily create a conflict. Max Muller, a
devoutly religious man, saw no reason why natural and supernatural explana—
tions of religion should ever need to come in conflict; the two could converge
without colliding.” But that was not the view of Tylor and Frazer, who set the
terms for much of the theoretical sequence that we have followed here. Both
were antireligious rationalists who took considerable pleasure in announcing
that supernatural explanations of religion lose their purpose once we discover
that belief in gods and spirits arises from a natural but mistaken way of explain—
ing the operations of the world. That Muhammad claimed to receive revela—
tions from Allah, they would say, is a fact no one need doubt; that he actually
was so inspired is a claim no rational person can accept. Religion for Tylor and
Frazer is thus a form of thought that arises from ignorance of the (true) natural
causes of things. Now that civilization has evolved, and the ways of science are
known to all, such crude explanations no longer apply.
The decidedly antireligious uses that Tylor and Frazer found for the compar~
ative study of religion opened the way to the even more aggressive attacks of
the three pivotal reductionists we have considered—Freud, Marx, and
Durkheim. Like Tylor and Frazer, they too personally reject religion and dis-
miss it as a relic left behind from earlier ages of ignorance. Going a step far-
ther, however, they proceed to explain how it has survived by tracing its origin
to irrational or subconscious causes. Since religion cannot possibly be a nor-
mal and rational thing, such functional and reductive accounts of its survival
are the only ones available. Atheism in this connection seems naturally to
entail reductionism.l4
Even so, not all reductionisms are the same. Both Freud and Marx think
religion is not only false but (by their standards of morality and normalcy)
also a pathology. It is something unhealthy and dysfunctional, a kind of dis—
ease that people must try to be cured of. Durkheim, however, proceeds differ-
ently. Though just as much an atheist as Freud or Marx, religion from his
perspective is not something abnormal or dysfunctional, for societies cannot
function without it. In fact, if we imagine a society without religion, we can
presume that some equivalent system of rituals and beliefs would appear in its
place. Thus, even though Durkheim’s approach is clearly reductionist, his
affirmative attitude toward religion in terms of its constructive social function
should be distinguished from the scorn of Freud and contempt of Marx.
Durkheim’s appraisal emerges as more neutral and disinterested, and in that

Conclusion 347
respect, it bears a measure of resemblance to the antireductionism of Weber,
James, Eliade, and the others. _
It is not hard to see why James, Eliade, and Evans-Pritchard, all of whom
exhibit some sympathy for religious belief, would take a stand in opposition to
reductionism. Reductionist explanations, even in the less militantly antireli-
gious form developed by Durkheim, tend to be so sharply opposed to the nor-
mal stance of faith that it is hard to see how believers could abide them without
discomfort. Almost invariably, religious people see reductionism as an alien
form of explanation. Yet if believers oppose reductionism, at least of the strict
sort, it does not follow that only believers oppose it, even though current theo-
rists of religion sometimes make the mistake of thinking this must be so.’5
On this point, both Weber and Geertz provide instructive examples. Weber
describes himself as “religiously unmusical.” Geertz describes his stance as
agnostic; he has no personal religious commitments. Yet in their explanatory
work, both oppose reductionist theories as pointedly as do Eliade and James.
Weber and Geertz obviously do not do so because reductionists present any
challenge to their personal beliefs, but simply because in their view such
accounts do not adequately explain the phenomenon of religion. From their
perspective the appeal to a single circumstance or process that explains all
forms of belief—whether it be Freud’s neurosis or Marx’s class struggle—
simply cannot do justice to the extraordinary diversity of forms in religious life
or to its true nature as we actually encounter it in the world. A circumstance
such as class struggle may explain some aspects of some religions, but it can-
not explain fully all of what occurs in any of them.
Behind the scenes, then, it is apparent that personal commitments often and
at the very least play a certain motivating role in the development of theories of
religion. To those who, like Freud and Marx, have written from a personal
stance of antipathy toward religion, aggressive reductionism seems only natu-
ral and right. To those who, like Eliade, have been moved by sympathy for the
religious perspective, it naturally appears deeply misguided and mistaken.
Theorists, Theories, and Their Influence: Past and Present
New chapters on the role of belief and non-belief in these discussions no doubt
remain to be written. But the central question going forward is not likely to be
what theorists think personally about religion; it is most likely to center on
what they think profesSionally about theory. Here the debate finds itself taking
shape as a new version of the old German Methodenstreit that formed a back-
ground to the work of Max Weber. We can recall also that when in 1870 Max
Muller mounted the podium to lecture his British audience, what he

348 Nine Theories of Religion
specifically proposed was a new “science” of religion. The methods of natural
science—observation, classification, and generalization to create laws of
development and behavior—could be adapted to the study of religion, a human
and social endeavor. Over the next century and a half, social scientific
theory—anthropology, psychology, sociology, and economics—took up the
challenge, working strenuously to form general theories of religion. That ulti-
mately was the goal not only of reductionists like Freud, Durkheim, and Marx,
but also of non—reductionists like Weber, James, and Eliade, though their meth-
ods tended toward either humanist inquiry or some mix of the humanistic and
the social scientific.
Along the way, however, the rise of field anthropology put the status of gen-
eral theory itself into some question. The work of Evans—Pritchard has been
doubly significant in this regard. Not only did his studies of the Azande and
Nuer demonstrate just how rich explanations of religion can be when they are
rooted in close, detailed analysis of a single society; he went on also to offer a
searching critique of the most celebrated generalist theories. A similar outcome
emerged from the work of Clifford Geertz, whose equally careful ethnographic
studies of religion in Bali and Java underscored the question raised by Evans-
Pritchard’s work: What happens when the first mission of a science—to acquire
precise, accurate, and specific information—is pursued so thoroughly that its
second task—framing broad and generalized theories with testable hypotheses
and predictive power—becomes almost impossible to accomplish? Without a
path through that dilemma, the prospects for a usable and general social scien-
tific theory of religion do not look especially promising.
The emphasis of field anthropology on particular and local features of reli-
gion does not of course mean that no statements of any more general sort can
be made. Efforts to make connections and frame comparisons that show simi—
larities or highlight differences will always remain useful, but those are, to be
candid, methods and techniques more nearly associated with humanistic
inquiry than the distinctive principles of social science. And they suggest what
some observers long predicted: that future inquiry may well trend toward the
particularist and historical methods of the humanities because that is turning
out to be the path most suited to the subject. It is interesting to note in this
regard an incident from the late 18005, when anthropology first captured the
imagination of the Victorians. Asked about this intriguing new science, the great
legal historian F. W. Maitland is said to have remarked: “It will become history,
or it will become nothing at all.” For Maitland history was emblematic of
humanistic, not scientific, inquiry, and he may well have proved an accurate
prOphet. At the very least, we need to ask: Could he have been right that the
sheer difficulty in framing general social scientific theories that can apply to
human institutions and behaviors leads us back mainly, though perhaps not
exclusively, to the ways and means of humanistic interpretation? Possibly so.

Conclusion 349
Or then again, possibly not. If the original ideal of social science is proving
in part out of reach for theorists of religion, could the intriguing new turn to
natural science noted above presumably offer an alternative? That is a possibil—
ity that Maitland never quite imagined. But his contemporary Charles Darwin
well might have. For the newer appeals to evolutionary biology and cognitive
science bring interpreters of religion into the realm that is indisputably
Darwin’s legacy. The research initiatives in this field of study are still very new,
gaining a firm foothold mostly in the last two decades. Still, they raise possi—
bilities that deserve examination and open paths that may well be both instruc—
tive and provocative. Should those now working in genetics, neuroscience, and
evolutionary biology find some success, should they manage to trace aspects of
religious behavior to physical causes, to the brain, and the biochemistry of its
processes, that clearly would mark a significant turn—a shift not just to a new
explanation, but to a new kind of explanation. Certainly at a minimum, theories
offering such a “biology of belief,” anchored in the evolutionary heritage of the
human species, would slice through both the current humanistic and social
scientific alternatives while making a strong case for the material and physio-
logical origins of religion. At present, any such theory is a quite distant pros—
pect, to be sure, but if more progress were to be made along the lines now in
place, then at the very least, this book would likely need a new and different
final chapter.
Notes
1. For an account of Marxism’s decline, see Lesek Kolakowski, Main Currents of
Marxism: The Breakdown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).
2. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy,
Religion, language, Art, and Custom, 2 vols., 4th ed., rev. (London: John Murray, [1871]
1903), 1: 424.
3. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life: A Study in Religious Sociology, tr.
Joseph Ward Swain (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1915), pp. 24—29, 47.
4. See Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1937), pp. 80—83; for his definition of “mystical notions,” see p. 12.
5. Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures
(New York: Basic Books, 1973), p. 90.
6. E. E. Evans—Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford; Clarendon Press,
1965), pp. 101—102.
7. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, p. 101.
8. Horton has outlined his views in a number of well-known articles; see “The Kalahari
World View: An Outline and Interpretation,” Africa 32 (1962): 210—240; “Ritual Man in
Africa,” Africa 34 (1964): 85—104; and “Neo-Tylorianism: Sound Sense or Sinister
Prejudice?” Man, us. 3 (1968): 625—634. His later work is Patterns of Thought in
Africa and the West: Selected Theoretical Papers in Magic, Religion, and Science
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

350 Nine Theories of Religion
9. See “Religion as a Cultural System,” in Interpretation of Cultures, p. 101, where
he writes, “Certainly, I was struck in my own work, much more than I had at all ex-
pected to be, by the degree to which my more animistically inclined informants behaved
like true Tyloreans. They seemed to be constantly using their beliefs to ‘explain’ phe-
nomena: or, more accurately, to convince themselves that the phenomena were explain-
able within the accepted scheme of things.”
10. Durkheim, Elementary Forms, p. 415.
11. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1956), p. 314.
12. For comment on some of these issues, see the essays of Robert Segal in Explain-
ing and Interpreting Religion: Essays on the Issue, Toronto Studies in Religion, vol. 16
(New York: Peter Lang, 1992); see also the exchange between Robert Sega] and Donald
Wiebe in their essay “Axioms and Dogmas in the Study of Religion,” Journal of the
American Academy of Religion 57 (Fall 1989): 591—605, and my response in “Axioms
without Dogmas: The Case for a Humanistic Account of Religion,” Journal of the
American Academy of Religion 59, no. 4 (Winter 1991): 703—709. See also my
“Explaining, Endorsing, and Reducing Religion: Some Clarifications,” in Religion and
Reductionism, eds. Thomas Idinopoulos and Edward Yonan (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1994):
183—197, along with the other essays in this volume.
13. See in this book the Introduction, pp. 5—6; chap. 1, p. 23.
14. On this, see Robert A. Sega], “In Defense of Reductionism,” Journal of the
American Academy of Religion 51, no. 1 (March 1983): 97—124.
15. See my “Reductionism and Belief,” Journal of Religion 66, no. 1 (January 1986):
18—36.
Suggestions for Further Reading
Allport, Gordon. The Individual and His Religion. New York: Macmillan C0,, 1951.
Asad, Talal. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity
and Islam. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
Berger, Peter. The Desecularization of the World. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans
Publishing Co., 1999.
Berger, Peter. The Sacred Canopy. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967.
Boyer, Pascal. Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought.
New York: Basic Books, 2001.
Bruce, Steven. God is Dead: Secularisation in the West. Oxford, England: Blackwell
Publishers, 2002.
Carrasco, David. Religions of Mesoamerica: Cosmovisions and Ceremonial Centers.
San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990.
Daly, Mary. Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women ’s Liberation.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1973.
Doniger, Wendy. The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth. New York:
Columbia University Press, 1998.
Doniger, Wendy. The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1976.

Conclusion 351
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966.
Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press, [1961] 1963.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, tr. Alan Sheridan.
New York: Pantheon Books, [1975] 1978.
Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason.
English tr. New York: Pantheon Books, [1961] 1965.
Guthrie, Stewart. Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993.
Hamer, Dean. The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired into Our Genes. New York:
Doubleday, 2004. ‘
Hewitt, Marsha Aileen. Critical Theory of Religion: A Feminist Analysis. Minneapolis,
MN: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1995.
Horton, Robin. Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993.
King, Richard. Orientalism and Religion in Postcolonial Theory: India and “the Mystic
East.” London: Routledge, 1999.
Lawson, E. Thomas, and Robert N. McCauley. Rethinking Religion: Connecting Cogni-
rion and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Leach, Edmund. Culture and Communication: The Logic by which Symbols are Con-
nected. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976.
Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Raw and the Cooked: Mythologiques, Volume I. New York:
Harper & Row Publishers, [1964] 1969.
Levi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1962]
1966.
Luckmann, Thomas. The Invisible Religion: The Problem ofReligion in Modern Society.
New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1967.
Maslow, Abraham. Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences. Harmondsworth, Middle-
sex, England: Penguin Books, 1964.
McCullough, Michael E., Kenneth I. Pargament, and Carl E. Thoresen, eds. Forgive-
ness: Theory, Research and Practice. New York: Guilford Press, 2000.
Pysaiennen, Ilkke. How Religion Works: Toward a New Cognitive Science: Cognition
and Culture. Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill Academic Publishers, 2001.
Radcliffe—Brown, A. R. Structure and Function in Primitive Society. New York: Free
Press, 1952.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
Spivak, Gayatri. A Critique of Post- Colonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing
Present. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Spivak, Gayatri. In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. London: Routledge,
1988.
Stark, Rodney, and Philip Bainbridge. The Future of Religion: Secularization, Revival,
and Cult Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985.
Turner, Victor. The Drums ofAffliction. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1968.
Turner, Victor. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1967.

352 Nine Theories of Religion
Wilson, Bryan. Religion in Sociological Perspective. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1982.
Wilson, David Sloan. Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of
Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Wilson, E. 0. 0n Human Nature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978.
Yinger, J. Milton. The Scientific Study of Religion. New York: Macmillan Publishing
Company, 1970.

INDEX
Abraham, 3, 249
Abraham, Karl, 51
Absolute, the
Feuerbach on, 127—28
Hegel on, 120—21
monism and, 214,215
Actions, Weber on. 148—49
Active moral action, 195
Adam and Eve, 237, 243
Adler, Alfred, 51
Adonis, 36
Affectual actions, 148
Africa, 35, 239, 264-65, 333—34. See also
Azande people, Evans-Pritchard on;
Nuer religion, Evans-Pritchard on
Afterlife
in Nuer religion, Evans-Pritchard on, 279
Tylor on, 24
Agape and Eros (Nygren), 291n10
Agassiz, Louis, 188
Aggression, Freud on, 55, 59
Agrarian cults, 36—38
Agricultural [nvolution (Geertz), 295
Agriculture
and archaic religion, in Eliade, 229, 240, 242
and class struggle, in Marx, 119
Ahura-Mazda, 239
Akhenaten, Pharoah of Egypt, 67—68, 244
Alacoque, Mary Margaret, 206
Alawite dynasty, 310
Alcott, Bronson, 186
Al-Fassi, Allal, 312
Alienation
Feuerbach on, 127—28
Hegel on, 120—21
Marx on, 121—22, 123—24, 128, 134
Allport, Gordon, 328
Ambivalence, Freud on, 50, 61
American Psychological Association, 185
“American Science Series,” 191
American Society for Psychical Research, 217
Amon, 2
Amos, 68, 172, 249
Anabaptists, 205—6
Anahuac: 0r Mexico and the Mexicans, Ancient
and Modern (Tylor), 16
Analogy, Freud’s use of, 73—75
Anal phase of development, 56
Ancient City, The (Coulanges), 85
Androgyny myths, 241
Animal sacrifice
Frazer on, 37—38
Freud on, 62—63
intichiuma ceremony, 37, 99—100
Animism
Frazer on, 28
in Indonesia, 309
influence of, 44
in Java, 302, 310
Tylor on, 8. 15, 22—27, 93, 105—6
Anna O. (Freud patient), 51
Anomic suicide, 89—90
Anthropologists, on Freud‘s method, 74
Anthropology
American, 296—98, 302, 320
British empirical, 268—69
development of field, 264, 285, 294, 325, 334
Durkheim’s influence on, 103, 104, 267
Evans-Pritchard and, 264, 265, 266—67, 269,
283—86, 288 ‘
Frazer and, 28-30, 41, 43, 46—47n31, 266—67
future of discipline, 348—49
Geertz and, 293, 294, 296—305, 316—17,
320—21
and general theory of religion, 348
interpretive, 294, 296, 299—305, 316—17,
317—18, 320-21, 341
modern theory, 333—36
353

354 Index
Anthropology (Continued)
Miiller on, 42
sacrifice, theories of, 282
science and, 317—18
and science of religion, 7
social, 265, 267, 297
symbolic, 299
Tylor and, 15—16, 17,41, 43, 266—67
Antioch College, 294
Antisemitism, Weber and, 173—74, 177
Antithesis, Hegelian, 120—21
Anxiety, in Protestants, 155—56
Aphrodite/Astarte, 36
Apollo, 2, 18, 26
Appian Way, 30
Archaeology, and science of religion, 7, 16
Archaic religions, Eliade on
divine archetypes in, 234—37
escape from time as goal in, 232, 246—43
as global phenomenon, 229
modern persistence of, 252—53
modern underestimation of, 255, 341
and otherworldly perfection, longing for, 228,
237, 241—42, 246—48, 253
sacred vs. profane in, 229, 232—37, 254, 258
symbolism of, 228, 232, 237—46
changes over time, 245-46
critique of, 257, 258
and infusion of supernatural into natural
objects, 238—39, 244, 250—51
patterns in, 238, 239-43, 246
ranking of, 244—45, 253
symbol systems, 244
Archetypes, Eliade on, 234—37
Archimedes, 106
Archivefor Social Sciences and Social Policy
(Archivfllr Sozialwissenschaflen and
Sozialpolitik), 146, 147, 153
Art and literature
as cultural system, 302
Freud on, 54
Marx on, 125, 126, 135
Weber on, 168
Aryans, 18
Asad, Talal, 332
Asceticism
functions of within religions, 99
inner-worldly, Weber on, 156—57, 165—66,
167—68, 178,298
James on, 205
Asian religions, Weber on, 160—61, 164, 166,
168. See also Chinese religions;
Indian religions
Aten, 67
Athletic events, Eliade on, 253
Atonement rituals, 101—2, 274, 280—84
Attis, 36, 37
Auden, W. H., 70
Augustine of Hippo, Saint, 155, 202—3
Australian aborigines, 37, 62, 93—95, 98, 102,
107, 174, 240, 254, 301, 338, 342, 344
Authority, types of, in Weber, 150
Axis mundl, Eliade on, 235—36, 258
Azande people, Evans—Pritchard on, 265,
269—73, 295, 306—8
class structure, 270—71
regulation of conduct, 271—72
supernatural in, 339
witchcraft and magic, 269-73, 287, 289
Aztec civilization, 327
Baal, cult of, 250
Babylonians, 25, 236
Bainbridge, Philip, 333
Balder, 38—39
Bali
Eliade on, 236
Geertz on, 294—95, 304—5, 305—8, 316, 313,
319, 339
Baptists, 203
Baraka, 310—11, 312
Barbaric stage, Tylor on, 25—26
Barong, 304, 319
Base of society, Marx on, 124—26, 131, 134
Baumgarten, Hermann, 145
Behavioral analysis, as psychological
method, 329
Belief, truth of, pragmatic criteria for, 198—99
Beltane ceremony, 38
Benedict, Ruth, 297, 298—99, 320
Benedict, Saint, 166
Bengal Nights (Maitreyi; Eliade), 229
Berger, Peter, 330
Bergson, Henri, 285—86
Beyond God the Father (Daly), 332
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud), 52, 58
Bible, 4,5, 17, 23, 28, 29, 37, 59, 156, 164,233,
235—36, 237, 243
Biogenetic theory, 335—36, 349
Bismark, Otto von, 144
Boas, Franz, 296—97
Bodhisattva, 163, 167
Bohm-Bawerk, Eugen, 137—38
Book of Job, 164
Bourgeoisie, Marx on
control of masses by, 119—20, 126
rise to power of, 125—26
Boyer, Pascal, 336
Bradley, F. H., 214
Brahman, 206, 306
Brahman—atman, 219
Brahmins, 170, 171,307
Breuer, Josef, 50—51, 53, 204
Brook Farm, 186

Bruce, Steven, 330
Biichner, Ludwig, 189, 193, 213—14
Buddha, 160—61, 171, 180, 248
Buddhism
Geertz on, 303
in Indonesia, 309
James on, 206—7, 210, 217, 219
in Java, 309—10
Marx and, 134
as religion, 11,91, 163,306
Weber on, 165, 167, 170—71, 179—80
Buk, 274
Bunyan, John, 202
Bureaucracy, Weber on, 150, 177
Calvin, John, 4, 154-55
Calvinism, 154—55, 166. 167, 176, 178
Cannibalism, ritual, 62, 63
Capital, overproduction of, in Marx, 123—24
Capital (Marx), 117, 122—24, 137, 138, 139n2
Capitalism
and class conflict, Marx on, 119—20,
122—24, 138
competition in, 123
Weber on, 153—58, 168—74, 175, 176, 177—78
Caribbean peoples, 22
Carlyle, Thomas, 187
Carrasco, David, 327, 328
Caste system of India, 170—71, 344
Castration complex, 57
Cathedral architecture, 156
Catholicism
Durkheim on, 89—90
and emotional aspects of religion, 6, 155
and labor, 154
and wealth, 153, 156
Weber on, 165, 167
Cattle man/priest, in Nuer culture, 282
Cause vs. function, in Durkheim, 89
Celtic peOples, 33, 43
Chaos vs. cosmos in archaic religion, Eliade on,
235, 237
Charcot, Jean-Martin, 51
Charismatic authority
in Islam, 310—11
routinization of, 150, 161
Weber on, 150, 159—60, 161, 162, 170
Charity
James on, 205, 206
Weber on, 167
Chateaubriand, Vicomte de, 6
China
communismin, 113, 131, 331
cultural development in, 25
Chinese religions. See also Confucianism;
Taoism
early Christian encounters with, 4, 5
Index 355
Eliade and, 255
Weber on, 160-61, 162, 168, 169—70, 171—72
.’ Chips from a German Workshop (Muller), 326
Choice, James on types of, 196, 197
Christianity
cosmic, 253, 286, 342
Deist views on, 6
Eliade on, 248-50, 250—52, 253, 286, 342
evolution as challenge to, l, 17
Freud on, 58, 63—64, 68—69, 73
Geertz on, 303, 306
historicism and, 250—52
Judaism and, 172
Marx on, 127, 130, 134
monotheism of, 3, 25
mysticism in, 206
19th-century debate on, 17—18
on other religions, 1—2, 3—4
over-beliefs, James on, 210
as rationalized religion, 306
Tylor on, 16, 24, 26
as urban religion, 163
Weber on, 151, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166,
167, 168
Christian Science, 201
Christy, Henry, 16
Chrysippus, 2—3
Churches, and sacred ground, Durkheim on, 99
Cicero, 2, 145
Circular arguments, 74-75, 106
Civilization
basis of in totemism, 97
Durkheim on, 85—86
Freud on, 64
Civilization and Its Discontent: (Freud), 58
Clans. See also Totemism
in China, 169
Durkheim on, 93—95
Freud on, 61
Smith on, 25, 29
Tylor on, 25
Classical civilization, and private
property, 118—19
Classification systems in primitive societies, 334
Class struggle
Durkheim on, 90
Marx on, 116, 118—20, 122—24, 125—26,
134—35
Clifford, W. K., 196—97, 198
Collective conscience, 87
Collective memory, in Freud, 73—74
Collective unconscious, Jung on, 70
Colonialism
and Islamic scripturalist revolt, 311—13
Marxist perspective on, 133
postcolonial theory, 331—32
Colwic, 276, 280

356 Index
Commercial manufacturing, Marx on, 119
Communal aspects of religion
Frazer’s ignoring of, 42, 44
Tylor’s ignoring of, 42, 44
Communion (sacrament), Freud on, 63, 73
Communion theory of sacrifice, 282
Communism (Marxism)
Durkheim on, 90
founding of, 116—17
and human rights, 137
in Indonesia, 312. 318
Marx on, 113—14, 118, 119—20
and meaning of life, 252
primitive, 118
program of action, 119—20
religion-friendly forms of, 130—31
resemblance to religion, 113
rise and collapse of, 113—14, 330—31
universities as outpost of, 331—32
views on Luddites, 152
Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels),
116, 118
Community
religion as means to, in Durkheim,
91—102, 103
religious, Weber on, 161, 162
Comparative method
Durkheim on, 88—89, 104
Eliade and, 227, 231, 245—46, 253—54,
254—55, 258-59
Frazer and, 28—29, 41, 296, 342
Freud and, 67, 73, 76
Geertz and, 296
Mtiller and, 7, 18, 231
science and, 88
Tylor and, 19,41, 88, 296, 342
Weber and, 168, 174, 175—76
Comte, Auguste, 84, 88, 104, 267
Confucianism, 4, 160—61, 162, 163, 169—70, 180,
306, 308
Conscience. in ancient societies, 87
Consciousness, James on, 192—93, 194
Constantine (Roman general), 151
Context, and interpretation of evidence, 88—89
Conversion experience, James on, 203—4, 205,
209—10, 216, 218—19, 222, 328
Copernicus, Nicolaus, 211
Cosmic Christianity, Eliade on, 253, 286, 342
Cosmic order concept, Weber on origin
of, 160
Cosmogenic myth, Eliade on, 236
Cosmos vs. chaos in archaic religion, Eliade on,
235, 237
Cost-benefit analysis, in religious choice, 198,
217—18, 333
Coulanges, Numa Denys Fustel de, 85, 284
Creation myths, Eliade on, 247
Critical Theory of Religion (Hewitt), 332
Critique of Post- Colonial Reason.
A (Spivak), 332
Crusades, 3
Cults, minor, Weber on, 163
Cultural systems
Geertz on, 302—5
Parsons on, 298—99
Culture
Geertz on, 293—94, 299, 300. 302
laws of, Tylor on, 19—20
vs. society, in anthropology, 297
understanding of religious practices and, 268
Culture and Communication (Leach), 334
Cyprus, 36
Daly, Mary, 332
Daphne, 18
Darwin, Charles, 1, 17, 60, 61, 74, 193, 213, 214,
266, 335
Darwin’s Cathedral (Wilson), 336
Dasgupta, Surendranath, 228, 229
Das Heilige (Otto), 233—34
Das Kapital (Marx). See Capital (Marx)
Death. See also Murder
in Nuer religion, Evans-Pritchard
on, 279—80
and origin of religion, 23—24, 64—65.
70, 163
Death and rebirth myth and ritual
Eliade on, 240, 241, 247, 248, 250
Frazer on, 36—37
in Indian religions, 24, 170—71, 179—80, 229.
248, 344
Death instinct (thanatos), Freud on, 55, 58
Definition of religion, lO—l 1, 338—39
Durkheim, 91, 106—7, 338, 339
Eliade, 338
Evans-Pritchard, 338—89
Frazer, 338
Freud, 338
functional, 1 1 (See also Functionalism)
Geertz, 338
James, 199—200, 218
Marx, 338
rational vs. traditional, Weber on, 305—7
Tylor, 22, 338
Weber, 338, 339
Deism, 5—6
Delacroix, Eugene, 188
Delusion, Freud on, 65, 212—13
Deng, 274
Descent of Man, The (Darwin), 17
Desecularization of the World, The
(Berger), 330
Determinism
Evans-Pritchard on, 287

genetic research and, 336
James’s reSponse to, 189—90, 193—94
Development. See Human development
Dhyana, 206—7
Dialectic, Hegelian, 120—21, 132
Dialectic of the sacred, Eliade on, 238—39
Diana, 30-31
Dictatorship of the proletariat, 120
Diderot, Denis, 5
Diffusion of cultural ideas, 19
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 145, 148
Dinka tribe, 275, 277
Di Nobili, Roberto, 4
Dionysus, 37, 240
Discipline and Punish (Foucault), 332
Disenchantment, cultural, Weber on, 150
Divided Selves, James on, 202
Diviners, in N uer religion, 276—77
Division of labor, Marx on, 118
Division ofLabor, The (Durkheim), 83, 86
Doniger, Wendy, 327
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 54
Douglas, Mary, 263, 291n10, 334
Dragons, in mythology, 237
Dreams
Freud on, 52—54
Tylor on, 23
Dreyfus, Louise, 83
Drives, basic human, Freud on, 54—56,
58, 62—64
Drums ofAffliction, The (Turner), 334—35
Dualism. urge to overcome, Eliade on, 241—42
Durkheim, Emile, 9, 11, 12
analysis of theories, 102—5
and anthropology, 103, 104, 267
assumptions made by, 106—7
Benedict compared with, 297
cause vs. function in, 89
comparative view of, 325
critique of, 105—9
Eliade compared with, 233, 253, 254
Evans-Pritchard compared with, 277
Evans-Pritchard on, 267, 284, 285, 287
evidence, approach to, 106—7, 344—45
Frazer compared with, 84, 88, 91, 93, 94, 99,
100—101, 104, 105
Freud compared with, 72, 81, 82, 91, 93, 99,
103, 105, 106, 108-9
functionalism of, 105, 108—9
Geertz compared with, 315
influence of, 81, 82, 103, 267, 268, 325—26,
329, 330, 334, 335
influences on, 84—85
life and career of, 82-84
Marx compared with, 114, 132, 138
method of, 86—90, 93, 103—4, 174, 301
on normal vs. pathological behavior, 89
Index 357
personal beliefs of, 82—83, 346—47
on primitive religions, 91—102
1 reductionism of, 108—9
on religion
interest in, 82
origin of, 91, 95—99, 102, 340
ritual, 98—102, 104—5
on sacred vs. profane, 11, 91—92, 93—95,
97—98, 98—99, 102, 106—7, 233
social functions of, 87, 91—92, 93—102,
103, 104—5, 108
on society
as basis of morality and religion, 87,
91—92, 93-102, 103, 104—5, 108,
267, 334
central importance of, 81482, 86—87
modern, nature of, 85—86
and sociology, 81, 82, 86—90, 88—90, 174
on suicide, 89—90
on totemism
and development of religion, 97-98, 102
as fundamental form of religion,
94—95, 102
ritual, function of, 98—102
social functions of, 93—102
totem as symbol of clan, 95—96, 100
Tylor compared with, 84, 88, 91, 93, 94, 101,
103, 104, 105
Weber compared with, 143—44, 158, 166,
174—75, 176, 180, 185
works by, 83, 90
Earth, as god, Eliade on, 242
Ecole des hautes Etudes, 229
Ecole Normale Supérieure, 83, 85
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
(Marx), 116
“Economic Ethic of the World Religions, The”
(Weber), 153, 168—74, 177, 179
Economics
and religion, Weber on, 167
as social science, 148
Economy and Society (Weber), 148, 150, 153,
159, 177
Ecstatic states, Weber on, 159
Eddy, Mary Baker, 201
Education, public, Durkheim on, 90
Edward Evans-Pritchara’ (Douglas), 263
Ego, 55, 56 ;
Ego and the 1d, The (Freud), 52
Egoistic suicide, 89—90
Ego psychologists, 71
Egypt, ancient, 2, 33, 37, 240
Einstein, Albert, 8, 295
Elementary Forms ofrhe Religious Life, The
(Durkheim), 81, 83—84, 91—102, 102-3,
104, 106, 107, 174, 329,334, 338

358
Eliade, Mircea, 9, ll, 12
analysis of theories, 253—55
comparative view of, 325
contemporary philosophical engagement
of, 255
critique of theories, 255—59
Durkheim compared with, 233, 253, 254
Evans-Pritchard compared with, 277—78,
286—87
evidence, approach to, 343
Frazer compared with, 233, 240, 243,
254—55, 257
Freud compared with, 253, 254
Geertz compared with, 294, 315—16
on historicism, 250—52
influence of, 9, 230, 326, 327
influences on, 229—30, 233-34
James compared with, 228, 253, 254
life and career of, 227-30, 263
Marx compared with, 253, 254
method of, 228, 231, 254—55, 255—56,
257, 258—59
patterns in, 238
personal beliefs of, 255—56
on religion (See also Archaic religions,
Eliade on)
archetypes in, 234—37
autonomy of as subject, 230—31
basic axioms, 230—32
myth, 232, 236, 237, 239, 240, 241, 244,
246, 247, 250
sacramental experiences, 228
sacred and profane in, 11, 229, 232-37,
254, 258
on symbolism, 228,232, 237—46
changes over time, 245—46
critique of, 257, 258
and infusion of supernatural into natural
objects, 238—39, 244, 250—51
patterns in, 238, 239—43, 246
ranking of, 244—45, 258
symbol systems, 244
on time and history, 232
Tylor compared with, 233, 254
Weber compared with, 228, 253, 254
works by, 229, 232, 254
Eliot, T. 8., 252—53
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 186
Emotionalist theories of religion’s origin, 284
Emotions of religion
as basis of faith, James on, 208—9
Catholicism and, 6, 155
Deists and, 6
noetic content of, James on, 195, 219
Romantic View of, 6
Empirical anthropology, British, 268—69
Encyclopedia Britannica, 28—29
Index
Engels, Friedrich, 113, 116—17, 130—31, 330—31
English Civil War, 125—26, 133, 167
Enlightenment, 5
Epicurians, 202
Equality, as Protestant value, 154
Eranos Conference, 229
Eros, Freud on, 55
Essays in Radical Empiricism (James), 191
Essays in Social Anthropology
(Evans-Pritchard), 265
Essence of Christianity, The (Feuerbach),
71, 127
Ethical prophet, 161
Ethic of commitment, in Judaism, 172
Ethnography
Durkheim and, 107
Evans-Pritchard and, 27], 288, 296, 348
Geertz and, 294—95, 296, 297, 300—1, 302,
316, 348
Tylor and, 17
Ethnology
Frazer and, 41
Tylor and, 17—18, 19, 27, 41
Ethos, Geertz on, 304—5, 313—15, 319—20, 339
Euclid, 152, 231
Euhemerus, 2
Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan, 9, 10, 13. See
also Azande people, Evans—Pritchard
on; Nuer religion, Evans-Pritchard on
analysis of theories, 286—88
and anthropology, 264, 265, 266—67, 269,
283—86, 288
critique of theories, 288—B9
on cultural and intellectual evolution,
266, 286
on Durkheim, 267, 284,285, 287
Durkheim compared with, 277
Eliade compared with, 277—78, 286—87
evidence, approach to, 344, 345
Frazer compared with, 269, 289
Geertz compared with, 295, 315, 320
and general theory, need for, 285, 287, 290
influence of, 9, 263, 265, 275, 290, 327
influences on, 291n10
on intellect of primitive people, 268, 269,
271, 272—73, 275, 278, 279, 283,
285-86, 289, 341
intellectual background of theories, 266—69
life and career of, 263—65
method of, 268—69, 277—78, 281-82, 282—83,
285, 287—88, 296, 334
on origin of religion, 44, 284, 340
personal beliefs of, 286
on theories of primitive religion,
283—86, 288—89
Tylor compared with, 269, 289
works by, 263, 265, 269, 273

Evans—Pritchard, Ioma Nicholls, 265
Evans-Pritchard, John, 264
Evidence, approaches to, 343—45
Evil, as problem
James on, 202—3
in rationalized vs. traditional religions, 306
Weber on, 164—65
Evolution. See also Darwin, Charles
as challenge to Christianity, 1, [7
Darwin on, 1, 74
Freud’s understanding of, 73—74
Evolution, intellectual/cultural
Comte on, 84
critique of, 42—44, 340
Durkheim and, 103—4
Evans-Pritchard on, 266, 286
Frazer on, 40—41, 42, 104, 333, 341—42
Freud on, 60, 66
Muller on, 341
and search for origin of religion, 340
Tyler on, 19—20, 20—21, 25—26, 42,
333, 341—42
Weber and, 175
Evolutionary biology, and theory of religion,
335—36, 349
Exemplary prOphets, Weber on, 160—61
Existentialism, Eliade on, 252
Exogamy, 29
Faces in the Clouds (Guthrie), 335—36
Faith
cost—benefit analysis in, 198, 217—18, 333
and evidence, as issue, 197
rationality of, James on, 195—99, 217-18
Fall, the, in archaic religions, 237
Fanaticism, James on, 205—6
Fanon, Frantz, 331
Fascism, Eliade on, 252
Feminist theory, 332
Fertility gods, Eliade on, 240, 241, 246
Fetishes, 24
in Nuer religion, 276—77
Feuerbach, Ludwig, 71, 127—28, 129—30, 134
Fire festivals, 38, 39, 43
Folklore
Freud on, 54
study of, 16, 38
Force and Matter (Biichner), 139
Force vs. scope of religion, Geertz on, 314
Forest of Symbols, The (Turner), 334—35
Forgiveness: Theory, Research and, Practice
(McCullough et al., eds.), 329
Foucault, Michel, 332
Foundations of Christianity (Kautsky), 130-31
Fourier, Charles, 186
Francis, Saint, 165, 195
Francis of Assisi, Saint, 201
Index 359
Franke, Richard, 318
Franklin, Benjamin, 5, 156
Fra’zer, James George, 9, 12, 28—41. See also
Golden Bough, The (Frazer)
analysis of theories, 41—42
and anthropology, 28—30, 41, 43,
46-47n31, 266—67
background of, 28
comparative view of, 325, 333
critique of theories, 42—44, 46—47n31, 333
Durkheim compared with, 84, 88, 91, 93, 94,
99, 100—101, 104, 105
Eliade compared with, 233, 240, 243,
254—55, 257
Evans-Pritchard compared with, 269, 289
Evans-Pritchard on, 266—67, 283
evidence, approach to, 343
Freud compared with, 59, 60, 61, 63, 71
influence of, 8—9, 15, 42, 44
intellectualist approach of, 42, 61, 71
James compared with, 208—9
life and career of, 264
Marx compared with, 132
method of, 28—29, 41—42, 88, 296, 333, 342
on origin of religion, 33—34, 41—42, 284, 340
personal beliefs of, 28, 346
on religion vs. science, 15
research by, 40, 46n2l
Smith’s influence on, 28—29
on totemism, 29, 36n21, 37, 94
Tylor’s influence on, 15, 27, 28
Weber compared with, 159, 175
Free will, James on, 190, 193—94, 215
French Revolution, 85, 125, 133, 137,
149, 221—22
Freud, Martha Bernays, 50
Freud, Sigmund, 9, 10, 12
analysis of theories, 70—72
comparative view of, 325
controversy surrounding, 49, 51, 58, 64
critique of theories, 72-76
Durkheim compared with, 72, 81, 82, 91, 93,
99, 103, 105, 106, 108—9
Eliade compared with, 253, 254
Evans—Pritchard on, 283
evidence, approach to, 343—44
Frazer compared with, 59, 60, 61, 63, 71
Geertz compared with, 315
on human personality
tension inherent in, 54—55, 61—64
tensions between society and, 55—56,
59, 64
inconsistencies in, 67, 72
influence of, 9, 51, 70—71, 325, 326, 328, 341
and James, influence on, 204, 213, 222
James compared with, 185, 211, 212—13, 222
life and career of, 49—52, 58—59, 76, 213

360
Freud, Sigmund (Continued)
Marx compared with, 126, 132—33, 138
methods, critique of, 74-76
on murder of primal father, 62, 69—70, 73,
74, 340
on Oedipus Complex, 57—58, 62—63, 66, 73
personal beliefs of, 59, 346, 347
psychoanalytic method, 51, 53—54
reductionism of, 72, 108
on religion, 59—70
critique of, 72—75
Jewish monotheism, 67—70
as neurosis, 59—60, 66, 69—70,
71—72, 74—75
as obsolete, 64—67, 329—30
origin of, 60—64, 71—72, 103, 340
personal attachment to leader in, 58
projectionist theory and, 71—72
psychological need met by, 64—67,
70, 71—72
on repression, 51, 53—54, 55, 60, 66, 69
Tylor compared with, 52, 59, 60, 61, 66, 71
Weber compared with, 158, 176, 180
works by, 51, 52, 54
Freudian revolution, 51
Freudian slips, 54
Functionalism, 12
critique of, 108, 143
of Durkheim, 72, 105, 108—9, 143, 340
Eliade’s rejection of, 253, 254
Evans-Pritchard‘s rejection of, 287
of Freud, 72, 143, 340
Geertz’s rejection of, 294, 315
of Marx, 72, 132—33, 143, 340
Weber’s rejection of, 175, 176—77, 180
Function vs. cause, in Durkheim, 89
Future ofan Illusion, The (Freud), 49, 52,
64-67, 75
Future ofReligion, The (Stark and
Bainbridge), 333
Gandhi, Mahatma, 195
Gautama Buddha. See Buddha
Geertz, Clifford, 9, l3
analysis of theories, 315—17
and anthropology, 293, 294, 296—305,
316—17, 320—21
critique of theories, 317—21
Durkheim compared with, 315
Eliade compared with, 294, 315—16
Evans~Pritchard compared with, 295,
315, 320
evidence, approach to, 344, 345
Freud compared with, 315
influence of, 293, 296, 302, 317, 320, 327
influences on, 296—99
on internal conversion, 306—8
Index
on Islam, 295,303,305, 308—11316,
319—20, 339
life and work, 293—96
Marx compared with, 315
On meaning, 293, 299—300, 301,302, 305,
314, 315, 317, 320
method of, 293—94, 297, 299—301, 302, 305.
314, 316—17, 317—19, 320, 321—22n20
personal beliefs of, 347
on religion
as cultural system, 302—5
force vs. scope of, 314
purpose and functions of, 303—4
world-view and ethos in, 304—5. 313—15,
319—20, 339
and social theory, 298—99
works by, 295, 296
Geertz, Hildred, 294
Genealogies ofReligion (Asad), 332
General theory of religion
ancient theories, 2—3
Durkheim and, 88, 103, 316, 329, 342
Eliade and, 342
Evans-Pritchard on, 285, 287, 290, 315,
342—43, 345, 348
Frazer and, 41
Freud and, 316, 342
Geertz on, 301,304, 314, 315, 316—17,
342—43, 345, 348
James and, 342
Marx and, 342
Miiller on, 6—7
19th-century ambitions for, 6—8
possibility of, 8, 348—49
recent theorists on, 345
Tylor and, 41
Weber and, 149, 179—80, 329, 342
Genetics-based theories of religion,
335—36, 349
Geniuses of religion, James on, 200
Genius of Christianity, The (Chateaubriand), 6
Gennep, Arnold van, 107
Ghosts, in Nuer religion, Evans—Pritchard on,
279—80
Gifford Lectures, 199, 211—12
Gift theory of sacrifice, 282
Gillen, F. J., 37, 93, 107
God(s). See also Monotheism; Origin of religion
in Christianity, 3
Eliade on, 239—42, 244, 246, 249
Feuerbach on, 71, 127—28
Frazer on, 36—38
Freud on, 64—65, 67, 69—70
Hegel on, 120, 127
historicism on, 250—52
James on, 220
in Judaism, 3

Marx on, 121, 126
in Nuer religion, 274, 280-84
origin of
Durkheim on, 95—98, 101
Frazer on, 34—35
Tylor on, 21—26
religions without, 91
ritual death of, 39
savior, 163, 240
in totemism, 95-96
vegetation, 36—38, 240
wager argument for belief in, 198, 217—18
Weber on, 178—79
God Gene, The (Hamer), 336
God Is Dead (Bruce), 330
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1, 145, 231
Golden bough, in King of the Wood legend,
30—31, 39
Golden Bough. The (Frazer), 15, 30—4]
broad sc0pe of, 40, 41, 89
critique of, 43
influence of, 8—9, 28
on kings, divinity of, 35—36
on magic as precursor of religion, 32—35, 43
on magic in early religion, 35—40
on origin of religion, 34—35
publication history, 30, 113
on ritual sacrifice of king, 31, 36, 37, 39—40
on vegetation gods, 36—38
Good works, Weber on, 165
Government
Hegel on, 121
Marx on, 124—26
Greece, ancient
art and literature of, 57
Frazer‘s interest in, 28, 29—30
mythology of, 22
philosophy of, 2—3, 202
religion of, 2, 18, 25, 134, 231, 234—35,
240, 248
studies on, 85
Greeley, Horace, 186
Group Psychology and the Analysis of Ego
(Freud), 58
Grtinbaum, Adolf, 75—76
Guthrie, Stewart, 335—36
Hals, Franz, 126
Hamer, Dean, 336
Harnack, Adolf von, 2
Harvard University, 185—86, 188, 190—91, 193,
214, 216, 223n4, 294, 296
Healers, in Nuer religion, 276—77
Health, optimism and, 202
Healthy-minded (optimistic) persons, James
on, 201—2
Heaven, Eliade on, 248
Index 361
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich von
developmentalism of, 252
5 Feuerbach’s critique of, 127—28
idealism of, 115, 120, 214
and Marx, influence on, 115—16, 120—21, 134
monism of, 214
Heidelberg University, 145
Herodotus, 2, 145
Hewitt, Marsha Aileen, 332
Hierophany, Eliade on, 235, 238, 244, 245
Hinduism
Balinese religion and, 294, 306—7
early Western encounters with, 4
Eliade on, 228—29, 248, 342
gods in, 240
in Indonesia, 309, 313
James on, 206, 210, 217, 219
in Java, 309—10
Javan culture and, 295, 302
Marx and, 134
Muller on, 1, 7
as rationalized religion. 306
Weber on, 164, 179—80
Hippolytus, 30
Historicism, Eliade on, 250—52
History
as class struggle, in Marx, 116, 118—20
dialectic of, in Marx and Hegel, 120—21, 132
end of, in Marx, 120
escape from, as goal in archaic religions, 232,
246—48
meaning of, in Judeo-Christian thought,
248—50
of religion, Eliade and, 227, 231, 245
terror of, Eliade on, 247—48
History (discipline)
methods of vs. sociology, 180
as science, 318
History ofAmhropoiogical Thought, A (Evans-
Pritchard), 265
History of Religious Ideas (Eliade), 254
Holt, Henry, 191
Holy Family: Or a Critique ofall Critiques,
The (Marx), 116
Homer, 25, 145
Horton, Robin, 333—34, 341
Horus, 2
Hosea, 172
How Natives Think (Lévy-Bruhl), 267—68
How Religion Works (Pysaiennen), 336
Human action, explanation of, and Verstehen,
147—49, 152, 176, 298, 329, 333
Human development, historical. See also
Evolution, intellectual/cultural
Freud on, 57, 73—74
individual development as model for, 73—74
Marx on, 118—20

362
Human development, individual, Freud on,
56—58, 73—74
Humanist theory, 228, 326—28, 348—49
Human rights, Marxism and, 137
Human sacrifice
Frazer on, 31, 33, 38
of king, 31, 36, 37, 39—40
in Native American culture, 33
ritualized, in Celtic culture, 38, 39
Tylor on, 24—25
Hunt, William Morris, 188
Huxley, T. H., 193, 213—14
Id, Freud on, 55, 56
Idealism
Feuerbach on, 127
of Hegel, 115, 120, 127, 214
Ideal-types, in Weber, 155, 157—58, 158—59,
160, 161, 162, 164—65, 175, 177, 179,
180, 308
theory of, 149—51
Idea of the Holy, The (Otto), 233—34
Ideology, Marx on, 126, 134
ldiographic explanations, 148
Idris 11, King of Morocco, 309
Iho, 239
Illusion, religion as
in Freud, 65—67
in Marx, 126, 130
Immediate luminousness, James on, 201
Immortality
origin of concept, Durkheim on, 97—98
symbols of, Eliade on, 243
Imperialism, Marxist perspective on, 133
Implied Spider, The (Doniger), 327
Incest taboo. 58, 61—62, 64
India
Christian encounters with, 4
cultural deveIOpment in, 25
language, Miiller on, 18
Indian religions. See also Buddhism; Hinduism
Doniger on, 327
Eliade on, 236—37, 240, 247, 248
Frazer on, 33
salvation religions, 163
Weber on, 160, 163, 168, 170—72
Individual
and culture
in Benedict, 297—98, 320
in Geertz, 305
in Parsons. 298—99
in Durkheim, as always socially determined,
86—87, 103, 267
Individual and His Religion, The (Allport), 328
Individualism
centrality of before Durkheim, 81
critique of, 44
Index
in Frazer, 42, 44, 266
French sociology and, 267—68
Marx on, 125
in modern society, 87
in Tylor, 42, 44, 266
in Weber, 148—49
Indonesia, Geertz on religion in, 308, 309—10,
311—13, 313—15, 319—20, 341. See also
Bali; Java
Indra, 236
Industrial capitalism, and class conflict, Marx
on, 119—20, 122—24
Industrial Revolution, 85, 152
Infantile sexuality, Freud on, 56—58
Initiation rites, 98, 243, 247
Inner-worldly asceticism, 156—57, 165—66,
167—68, 178, 298
In Other Worlds (Spivak), 332
Instinct, religion as, 92—93
Institute for Advanced Study, 295
Institutional grace, 167
Instrumentally-rational actions, 148
Intellectualist approach to religion, 12, 42, 61,
71, 105, 266,267, 284, 333, 334, 341
Intellectuals, Weber on religion of, 163—64
Internal conversion, Geertz on, 306—8
“‘Internal Conversion’ in Contemporary Bali”
(Geertz), 305—8
Interpretation of Cultures, The (Geertz), 293,
296, 299, 302
Interpretation of Dreams, The (Freud),
51, 52—54
Interpretive sociology, 147
Interpretive theories of religion, 12
Intichiuma ceremony, 37, 99—100
Introduction to the Science of Religion
(Muller), 1
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis
(Freud), 52
Introspection, as psychological method, 329
Invisible Religion, The (Luckmann), 330
Ionesco, Nae, 229
Iran, 239
Ireland, ancient, 35
Iron Guard, 229
Isaac, 3, 249
Isaiah, 3, 68, 172, 249
Islam
classical styles of, 309—11
Crusades and, 3
Eliade and, 236, 238, 255
Evans-Pritchard on, 265, 295
Geertz on, 295, 303, 305, 308—15, 316,
319—20, 339
James on, 206, 210, 217
in Java, 295, 302, 309—10
Judaism and, 172

Index 363
scripturalist revolt, 311—13, 314, 315
and secularization, 313, 314, 315
Weber on, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168,
178—79, 180
Islamic nationalism, 311—13
Islam Observed (Geertz), 295, 305, 308—13, 314,
316, 319—20
Ismail, Mulay, 310
Jacob. 3, 235—36
Jaffe, Edgar, 146
Jainism, 170—71, 180, 248
James, Alice (sister), 186, 187
James, Alice Gibbens (wife), 190
James, Henry Jr., 186, 187
James, Henry Sr., 186—87
James, William
analysis oftheories, 212—16
on choice, types of, 196, 197
comparative view of, 325, 333
critique of theories, 216—22
depression, bouts of, 187—88, 189, 190
Eliade compared with, 228, 253, 254
evidence, approach to, 344—45
Frazer compared with, 208—9
on free will, 190, 193—94
Freud compared with, 185, 211, 212-13, 222
Freud’s influence on, 204, 213, 222
health of, 188, 189, 190, 191
on healthy-minded vs. sick souls, 201—3
influence of, 186, 222
influences on, 190
on Islam, 206, 210, 217
life and career of, 185—91, 213, 223n4
on materialism, 189—90, 192—94, 213—14
moralism of, 188
personal beliefs of, 198, 211—12, 213
philosophy of, 213—16
and pragmatism, 186, 198—99, 204, 205—6,
207, 208—10, 211—12, 215—16,
220—22, 223n3
critique of, 220—22, 224—25n40
psychological theory of, 191—95, 212—13, 227
on religion
definition of, 199—200, 218
and moral action, 194—95
rationality of faith, 195—99, 217—18
religious experience, focus on, 199—200
on religious experience
Christianity as primary focus of, 204,
216—17,218—20
conversion experience, 203—4, 205,
209—10, 216, 218—19, 222, 328
criteria for evaluating, 200—1, 204, 205—6,
207, 208—10, 211—12, 220—22
as feelings-based, 208-9
mysticism, 206—7
over-beliefs, 210—11, 212, 219—20
saints and mystics, 200, 204—6
universal core experience of, 209—10
Tylor compared with, 208
works by, 185, 186, 191, 195, 215—16
James, William (grandfather), 186
Japan
divinity of emperor, 36
and suicide mores, 89
Java
Eliade on, 236
Geertz on, 294, 295, 302, 309—10, 316, 339
Jefferson, Thomas, 5
Jeremiah, 172,249
Jesus Christ
in Christian theology, 3
Eliade on, 245, 249, 251, 253
Frazer on, 36
Freud on, 58, 63, 69—70
19th-century debate on, 17
Weber on, 150, 156, 161, 167
John of the Cross, Saint, 207, 216
Jones, Ernest, 51
Josiah, King, 172
Joyce,James, 252—53
Judaism
basic tenets of, 3, 11, 171, 172—74
Eliade on, 248—50, 250—52
Freud on, 67—70, 73, 74, 244
historicism and, 250—52
James on, 217
monotheism of, 3, 25
pariah theory of, 173—74, 177
prophets of, 161, 171
Purim festival, 36
as rationalized religion, 306
and scapegoat ritual, 37—38
Smith on, 29
Weber on, 163, 164, 165, 166, 168, 172—74
Jung, Carl, 9, 10, 51, 70, 229—30, 328
Kaaba, 238
Kalidjaga, Sunan, 309—10, 311, 313
Kant, Immanuel, 5,6, 190
Karma, 210
Kashatryias, 170
Kautsky, Karl, 130—31
Kennedy, John F., 101—2
King
divinity of, 35—36
ritual sacrifice of, 31, 36, 37, 39-40
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 195
King, Richard, 331-32
King of the Wood legend, 30—31, 38—39
Kinship and Marriage among the Nuer
(Evans-Pritchard), 265
Kinship groups, 29. See also Clans

364 Index
Koran, 312, 313
Krishna, 163′
Kroeber, Alfred Louis, 296—97
Kwakiutl Indians, 297
Kwoth (spiritual beings), in Nuer religion,
Evans-Pritchard on, 273—77
Kwoth nhial, 274, 275, 291n10
Labor
Marx on, 121—24, 128, 137—38
Protestant views on, 154
Labor theory of value, in Marx, 122—23, 137—38
Lamarck, Jean Baptiste, 73—74
Lang, Andrew, 43
Language, Tylor on development of, 21
L’Année sociologique (periodical), 83
Lao-tzu, 160—61, 169
Lastjudgment, Eliade on, 248
Latency phase of development, 57, 69
Lawrence Scientific School, Harvard, 188
Laws of development, 7
Lawson, E. Thomas, 335
Layity, Weber on, 162
Leach, Edmund, 334
Leaders, religious, Weber on, 159—61
Legal authority, Weber on, 150
Legion of the Archangel Michael, 229
Leonardo da Vinci, 54
Lessing, Gotthold, 5
Levi—Strauss, Claude, 335
Lévy—Bruhl, Lucien, 10, 267—68, 279, 285, 287
Liberation theology, 131
Libido, 55, 58
Libya, 265, 295
Linguistics, Muller’s use of, 7, 18, 22, 25
Local Knowledge (Geertz), 296
“Logic of Sacrifice, The” (Leach), 334
Loki, 22
London School of Economics, 264
Louis of Gonzaga, Saint, 206
Lowie, Robert. 284, 296—97
Luckmann, Thomas, 330
Luddites, 152
Luther, Martin, 4, 154, 155, 201, 205—6
Lyusi, Sidi Lahsen, 310—11, 312
Madness and Civilization (Foucault), 332
Magic
in Bali, 307
contagious (contact), 32, 33, 37
Durkheim on, 92
in early religion, 35—40
Evans-Pritchard on, 269, 287
Frazer on, 15, 32—36, 35—36, 36—38, 43, 44,
100—101, 284
Geertz on, 307
imitative, 32, 33, 35—36, 37—38, 61, 105
as precursor to religion, 32—35, 40, 43
and social power, 33
sympathetic, 32—34
Tylor on, 21
Weber on, 159, 161, 162, 169, 173, 175
“Magical Hair” (Leach), 334
Magicians, social power of, 33
Magic theory of religion, 15
Mahavira, 171, 248
Maitland, F. W., 348—49
Maitreyi (Bengal Nights; Eliade), 229
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 104, 264, 266, 234,
296, 334
Marta, 95
Mani, 274
Manitou, 95
Mannhardt, Wilhelm, 38
Maoris, 239
Mao Tse-tung, 113
Marabouts, 309, 312, 313
Marett, R. R., 284
Marx, Heinrich, 115
Marx, Jenny, 115, 117
Marx, Karl, 9, 12
on alienation, 121—22, 123—24, 128, 134
analysis of theories, 131—33
comparative view of, 325
concept on history in, 120—21, 132
contradictions in, 135—37
critique of theories, 133—38
Durkheim compared with, 114, 132, 138
on economics as determining factor, 116,
121—22, 124, 133, 134—35
economic theory, 122—24, 137—33
Eliade compared with, 253, 254
and Engels, 116
Evans-Pritchard on, 284
evidence, approach to, 343—44
Feuerbach’s influence on, 71, 127—28,
129—30, 134
Frazer compared with, 132
Freud compared with, 126, 132—33, 138
Geertz compared with, 315
Hegel’s influence on, 115—16, 120—21, 134
on history as class struggle, 116, 118—20,
122-24, 125-26, 134-35
influence of, 9, 113—14, 131—32, 138,325,
326, 329, 330-31, 341
life and work, 115—17
materialism of, 115—16, 118, 121, 128, 138
method of, 134—35
personal beliefs of, 127, 346, 347
political action, emphasis on, 130, 131
political activism of, 117
reductionism of, 108, 132—33, 138, 143, 340,
342, 346
on religion

Index 365
control of proletariat by, 125, 126—30, 133,
227, 330—31
critique of, 134—36
fragmented presentation of, 114
origin of, 128—29
Tylor compared with, 132
and Weber, influence on, 152
Weber compared with, 135, 158, 162, 175—77,
178—79, 180
works by, 116, 117
Marxism. See Communism (Marxism)
Maslow, Abraham, 328
Masochism, Freud on, 58
Materialism, 213—14
and determinism, 193—94
James’s response to, 189—90, 192—94, 213—14
ofMarx, 115—16,118, 121,128,138
medical, 200~201
Mathematics
and projection of systems onto world, 75
Tylor on development of, 21
Matter vs. mind, debate on primacy of, 213—15
Mayan civilization, 327
McCauley, Robert N., 335
McCullough, Michael, 329
Meaning
Geertz on, 293, 299—300, 301, 302, 305, 314,
315, 317, 320
of history, in Judeo-Christian thought,
248—50
as shared cultural context, 300, 302
Meaning of life
in archaic religions, Eliade on, 247-48
in historicism, Eliade on, 251—52
in Judeo-Christian thought, Eliade
0n, 248—50
in Marxism, 252
and religion, Geertz on, 303—4
Means of production, ownership of, Marx on,
119, 124
Mechanical solidarity, 87, 330
Medical materialists, 200—1
Medieval era, Marx on, 119
Meditation
in Buddhist tradition, 163, 165, 206—7,
217, 309
in Islamic tradition, 310
James on, 209
Melanesians, 95
Memory, collective, in Freud, 73—74
Messianic movements, Eliade on, 250
Methodensrreit, 147-48, 347
Methodists, 156, 203
Michelangelo, 54
Middle Ages, 125, 135, 156—57, 165—66,
175, 330
Middle class, Weber on religion of, 163
Mill, John Stuart, 187
Milton, John, 154
Mind
Freud on inherent tensions in, 54—55, 61—64
vs. matter, debate on primacy of, 213—15
primitive
Evans-Pritchard on, 268, 269, 271,
272—73, 275, 278, 279, 283, 285-86,
289, 341
Lévy-Bruhl on, 267—68
Mind cure, 201, 217
Mistletoe, 38—39, 243
Mitra, 160
Modalities of the sacred, Eliade on, 239
Modes of production, Marx on, 118, 119
Modjokuto, Java, 295
Moksha, 210, 219, 248
Mommsen, Theodore, 145
Monism, philosophical, 214—15
Monotheism
Freud on, 67—70, 73
Tylor on, 25, 43—44
Weber on, 161, 172
Montesquieu, Baron de, 84, 88, 267
Moods, Geertz on, 303
Moon gods, Eliade on, 241—42, 244
Moore, G. 13., 220-21, 222
Moral action, James on
religion and, 194—95
types of, 195
Moral helpfulness as criteria for judging
religion, James on, 201. See also
Pragmatism
Morality
Durkheim on, 87, 90
James on, 194—95, 215
Morocco, Islam in, Geertz on, 295, 309, 310—13,
313—15, 316, 319—20, 339
Mosaic law, 173
Moses, 3, 67—70
Moses and Monotheism (Freud), 52, 67-70,
73, 74
Mother Earth, 22
Motivations, Geertz on, 303
Mourning, rituals of, 101—2
Muhammad (pmphet), 161, 309, 311, 346
Muhammad V, Sultan of Morocco, 312, 314
Mllller, Friedrich Max
Eliade compared with, 239
Evans-Pritchard on, 279, 283
and general theory of religion, 6—8
influence of, 9—10
on intellectualist approach, 42
life and career of, l, 7, 264
method of, 231
naturalism of, 93
on origin of religion, 18, 93, 284, 340

366
Miiller, Friedrich Max (Continued)
personal beliefs of, 6, 18, 346
and science of religion, 1—2, 347—48
Tylor and, 18, 22, 25
works by, l, 44—45n5, 326
Murder
of primal father, in Freud, 62, 69—70, 73,
74, 340
taboo against, Freud on, 62
Myers, F. W. H., 211, 217
Mystery religions, 240
Mystical participations, Le’vy-Bruhl on, 268
Mysticism
James on, 206—7
King on, 331—32
Weber on, 165—66, 167—68
Myth 0fthe Eternal Return, The (Eliade), 229,
232, 247—48
Mythology
Durkheim on, 98, 101, 102
Eliade on, 232, 236, 237, 239, 240, 241, 244,
246, 247, 250
Frazer on, 46n2l (See also Golden
Bough, The)
Freud on, 54
Muller on, 1,7, 18
Tylor on, 18—19, 21—22, 25
Nationalism, Islamic, 311—13, 314
Native Americans
American ethnography and, 296—97
cosmology of, 236
cultural development, 25
early Western encounters with, 4
totemism, 95
Naturalism, Durkheim on, 93
Natural religion, 5—6
Natural world
infusion of supernatural into, in archaic
religions, 238—39, 244, 250—51
as threat, in Freud, 64—65. 67
Nature sprites, in Nuer religion, 276—77
Negative cults, 99
Nemi, Lake, 30—31, 39
Neoliberalism, views on Luddites, 152
Neurosis, in Freud, 51,54, 60
religion as, 59—60, 66, 69—70, 71—72, 74—75
New thought movement, James on, 201, 217
Newton, Isaac, 6, 200
New Year’s rituals, 247
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 152
Nirvana, 210, 219, 306
Noetic content of feelings, James on, 195, 219
Nomothelic explanations, 148
Normal behavior, Durkheim on, 89
Norse culture, 38, 243
Nostalgia, Eliade on, 228
Index
Nueer, 274, 280—84
Nuer, The (Evans~Pritchard), 273
Nuer Religion (Evans-Pritchard), 265, 269,
273—83, 287—88, 345
Nuer religion, Evans-Pritchard on, 273—83,
295, 320
ghosts and sculs in, 279—80
lightning-killed individuals in, 274,
276, 280
parallels to Western religions, 291n12
rituals in, 277
sacrifice in, 280—83, 288
sin and atonement in, 274, 280—84
social structure and, 277—78
spirits (kwoth) in, 273—77
supernatural in, 339
symbolism in, 278—79
totemism in, 276, 278
Numinous, Otto on, 233—34
Nygren, Anders, 291n10
Object relation theorists, 71
“Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices‘
(Freud), 60
Obsolescence of religion
Comte on, 84
Frazer on, 40—41, 42
Freud on, 64—67, 329—30
Marx on, 329—30
Tylor on, 26—27, 42
Yinger on, 329—30
Oedipus, King, 57, 58
Oedipus Complex, 57—58, 62—63, 66, 73
Olorun, 239
On Human Nature (Wilson), 335
On the Jewish Question (Marx), 116
Optimistic (healthy-minded) persons, James
on, 201—2
Oracles, in Azande culture, Evans-Pritchard
on, 270—71
Oral phase of development, 56
Orenda, 95
Organic solidarity, 87, 330
Orientalism (Said), 332
Orientalism and Religion in Postcolonial
Theory (King), 331—32
Origin of religion. See also Spiritual beings,
origin of
Durkheim on, 91, 95—99, 102, 340
Evans—Pritchard on, 44, 284, 340
Feuerbach on, 128
Frazer on, 33—34, 41—42, 284, 340
Freud on, 60—64, 71—72, 103, 340
historical vs. psychological, 340
lack of hard evidence on, 43—44, 74, 266,
284, 340
Marx on, 128—29

Index 367
Miiller on, 18,93, 284, 340
as term, 11—12
Tylor on, 15, 21—26, 41—42, 93, 103, 284, 340
Weber on, 175, 178—79
Origin ofSpecies (Darwin), 1, 17, 193
Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology, The
(Doniger), 327
Osiris, 36, 37, 240
Otherworldly perfection, 228
human longing for, Eliade on, 228, 237,
241—42, 246—48, 253
Otto, Rudolf, 233—34, 242, 288
Out—castes, in India, 170
Over-beliefs, James on, 210-11, 212, 219—20
Oxford University, 264, 265
Pan, 245
Pantjasila (Five—Point) Creed, 312—13
Paradise, nostalgia for. See Otherworldly
perfection
Pareto, Vilfredo, 285—86
Pargament, Kenneth L, 329
Pariah theory of Judaism, 173—74, 177
Parsons, Talcott, 181n12, 296, 298, 320, 32ln3
Pascal, Blaise, 197—98, 217—18
Passive morals, 195
Passover, 36
Patriarchalism, 150
Patrimonialism, 150
Patterns in Comparative Religion (Eliade), 229,
232, 238—46
Patterns of Culture (Benedict), 297
Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West
(Horton), 333-34
Paul (apostle), 69—70, 155
Pausanias, 28
Pawnee Indians, 33
Peasants, Weber on religion of, 162
Peddlers and Princes (Geertz), 295
Peirce, Charles Sanders, 186
Penis envy, 57—58
Perry, Ralph Barton, 223n4
Persia, 248
Personality, Freud on inherent tensions in,
54—55, 61—64
Pessimistic (sick) souls, James on, 201, 202—3
Phallic phase of development, 56—57
Phenomenology and religious study, Eliade on,
231, 245—46, 254
Philosophical reasonableness, James on, 201
Philosophy
Comte on, 84
James on, 208
Phoebus Apollo, 234, 235
Phratres, 94
Physiological materialism, James on, 192—94
Piacular cults, 99, 101—2
Pierce, C. S., 216
Pietism, German, 167
Pilgrim ‘s Progress (Bunyan), 202
Pima Indians, 297
Plato, 28, 56, 192
Platonism, 228
Pleasure principle, 54
Pluralistic Universe, A (James), 191
Poison oracle of Azande people, 270—71
Politico-economic theory, 330—33
Politics
Durkheim on, 85—86, 90
as Marx’s central focus, 130, 131
and religion, Weber on, 167
Polygamy, 89
Popular culture, Eliade on, 253
Poseidon, 25, 26
Positive cults, 99—101
Postcolonial theory, 331—32
Postmodernism, 331
Pragmatism, 223n3
critique of, 220—22, 224—25n40
James and, 186, 198—99, 204, 205—6,
207, 208—10, 211—12, 215—16,
220—22, 223n3
Pragmatism (James), 191
Pragmatism: A New Name for Same Old Ways
of Thinking (James), 215-16, 223n3
Prayer
Frazer on, 34, 4O
Freud on, 67, 74
James on, 209
Preconscious mind, Freud on, 52
Predestination, 155, 176
Presbyterians, 156
Priests
in Nuer religion, 282
Weber on, 159—60
Primitive Culture (Tylor), 17—27
aims and assumptions, 19—20
context of publication, 17-19
encyclopedic scope of, 41
influence of, 8, 16, 28
on obsolescence of religion, 26—27
on origin of religion, 21-26
publication history, 113
on rationality and religion, 21—22
on survivals, 20—21, 27, 30, 31
Primitive Mentality (Lévy-Bruhl), 267—68
Primitive peoples, as model of prehistoric
cultures, 31—32
Primitive religions. See also Archaic
religions, Eliade on; Azande people,
Evans-Pritchard on; Nuer religion,
Evans-Pritchard on; Totemism
divinity of kings in, 35—36
Durkheim on, 91—102

368
Primitive religions. (Continued)
Frazer on, 34-36
Freud on, 60—64
magic as precursor to, 32—35, 40, 43
magic in. 35—40
Marx and, 134
theories of, Evans—Pritchard on, 283—86
Tylor on, 21—26, 103
Weber and, 175
Primitive thought
Evans-Pritchard on, 268, 269, 271, 272—73,
275, 278, 279, 283, 285—86, 289, 341
Lévy—Bruhl on, 267—68
Principles of Psychology, The (James), 185,
191—95, 198, 213, 219—20
Private property
Durkheim on, 86—87
Marx on, 118—19. 124—25
Privileged classes
Marx on (See Bourgeoisie, Marx on)
views on prophetic religion, Weber
on, 162-63
Profane. See Sacred vs. profane
Professional Ethics and Civic Morals
(Durkheim), 90
Profit, Marx on, 122-23, 137—38
Projectionist explanation of religion, 71—72, 75
Proletariat
control of with religion
Marx on, 125, 126—30, 133, 227, 330—31
Weber on, 162—63
exploitation of, Marx on, 119-20, 122—24
Prometheus, 22, 127
Prophetic religions, Weber on, 162-64, 167
Prophets
Evans-Pritchard on, 224—25, 277, 282
of Judaism, Eliade on, 249, 251
Marx on, 68, 69
in Nuer religion, 275, 277, 282
Weber on, 160-61, 171, 172-73
Prostitution, ritual, 35, 36
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, The
(Weber), 153—58, 168, 176, 177, 178, 298
Protestantism
Durkheim on, 89—90
James on, 203
Marx on, 126, 133, 135
Weber on, 153—58, 163, 166, 173, 175,
176, 177—78
Protestant Reformation, 3, 4, 126, 133, 135
Pseudo—Dionysius the Areopagite, 291nl2
Psychic unity (uniformity) principle, Tylor on,
19—20, 21
Psychoanalysis
critiques of, 74—76, 326, 328
Freud on, 51—52, 53-54, 70—71
James on, 213
Index
Psychoanalytic school, views on religion, 70,
328—29
Psychological explanations of religion,
Evans-Pritchard on, 283—84
Psychological theory
of James, 191—95
modern, 328—29
Psychology
as field, James and, 185
materialism and, 192—94
Psychopathology of Everyday Life, The (Freud),
52, 54
Pueblo Indians, 297
Purification rites, Eliade on, 243
Purim, 36
Puritans, 156, 165, 171
Purity and Danger (Douglas), 334
Pysaiennen, Ilkke, 336
Quakers, 16
Question of Lay Analysis, The (Freud), 52
Quran, 23
Racialists, i9
Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 104, 265, 268, 334, 335
Rain gods, 240, 241
Rain King, 33
Rama, 163
Rangda, 304, 319
Rank, Otto, 5]
Rational choice theory, 332-33
Rationality of faith, James on, 195-99, 217—18
Rationalization, of Western culture, Weber on,
158, 177
Rationalized religions, Geertz on, 305-8
Raw and the Cooked, The (Levi-Strauss), 335
Reason. See also Intellectualist approach to
religion; Science
Deism and, 5—6
Durkheim on, 85
Frazer on, 34—35, 39—40, 59
Freud on, 59—60
ground of, as issue, 197
intellectualist view of, 42, 61
Tylor on, 19—22, 23—25, 26—27, 59
Weber on, 148
Rebirth. See Death and rebirth myth and ritual
Redemption rites, Eliade on, 243
Reductionism
of Durkheim, 108—9, 143, 340, 342, 346
Eliade and, 228, 230—31, 253, 254, 258,
260n33, 286, 340, 341, 347
Evans-Pritchard and, 277—78, 286—87, 340,
341, 347
of Freud, 72, 108, 143, 340, 342, 346
Geertz and, 294, 315, 340, 341, 347, 350n9
genetic research and, 336

Index
James and, 340, 341. 347
limitations of, 143
ofMarx, 103, 132—33, 138, 143, 340, 342, 346
motives underlying, 340
Weber and, 175, 176—77, 180, 340, 341, 347
Reincarnation, 24, 170—71, 179-80, 248, 344
Relations of production, Marx on, 118, 119
“Religion as a Cultural System” (Geertz),
302, 313
Religion Explained (Boyer), 336
Religion in Sociological Perspective
(Wilson), 330
Religion of humanity, 84
Religion ofl’ndia (Weber), 179—30
Religion of Jo va, The (Geertz), 295, 302, 316
Religion of the Semites, The (Smith), 29
Religions, Values, and Peak-Experiences
(Maslow), 328
Religions of Mesoamerica (Carrasco), 327
Religious experience, James on
Christianity as primary focus of, 204,
216—17, 218—20
conversion experience. 203—4, 205, 209—10,
216, 218—19, 222, 328
criteria for evaluating, 200—201, 204, 205-6.
207, 208—10, 211—12, 220—22
as feelings-based, 208—9
mysticism, 206—7
over-beliefs, 210—11, 212, 219—20
saints and mystics, 200, 204—6
universal core experience of, 209—10
Religious leaders, Weber on, 159—61
Rembrandt, 126
Renan, Ernest, 84—85
Renewal gods, Eliade on, 241
Renouvier, Charles, 190, 194
Repression
Durkheim on, 97
Freud on, 51, 53-54, 55, 60, 66, 69
Researches into the Early History of, Mankind
and the Development, ofCivilization
(Tylor), l6
Resurrection, Tylor on, 24
Rethinking Religion (Lawson and
McCauley), 335
Revealed religion
debate on, 17—18
Deist critique of, 5—6
Mijller on, 23
Tylor on, 23
Revivalism, 203
Revolution
English, Marx on, 125—26
ofproletariat, Marx on, 119—20, 124, 129. 136
Rex Nemorensis, 30—31, 38—39
Ricci, Matteo, 4
Richard, Gaston, 107
369
Ritual
Durkheim on, 94, 96, 98—102, 104—5
Eliade on, 235—36, 238, 242, 247, 253
Frazer on, 33, 34, 35, 36—40
Freud on, 59, 60, 62—63
Geertz on, 304, 319
in Nuer religion, 277
Weber on, 165
Roman Empire
as barbaric age, 25
and Christianity, 3, 151, 306, 307
Frazer’s interest in, 28, 29—30
mythology of, 30—31, 38—39
religion of, 134, 164
rise of Christianity in, 131
studies on, 85
Romanticism, 6
Routinization of charisma, 150, 161
Royal Institution, 1
Royce, Josiah, 214
Rudra, 160, 240
Rules ofSociological Method, The (Durkheim),
83, 88—90
Russell, Bertrand. 220—22
Russian Revolution of 1917, 113, 331
Ryle, Gilbert, 299—300
Sabbath, 99
Sabellius, 291n12
Sacramental experiences, Eliade on, 228
Sacred and the Profane, The (Eliade), 232—37
Sacred Canopy (Berger), 330
Sacred ground, Durkheim on, 99
Sacred vs. profane
Durkheim on, 91—92, 93—95, 97—98, 98—99,
102, 106—7, 233
Eliade on, 229, 232—37, 254, 258
good vs. evil distinction in, 92
Otto on, 233—34, 242
purpose of, 91—92
Sacrifice. See also Animal sacrifice; Human
sacrifice
anthropological theory on, 282
by Hebrews, ancient, 29, 68
Leach on, 334
in Nuer religion, Evans-Pritchard on,
280—83, 288
Sadism, Freud on, 58
Said, Edward, 332
Saints and mystics, James on, 200, 204-6
Saint-Simon, Henri, Comte de, 84, 267
Salafi, 312
Salvation religions. See also Saviors
James on, 202, 209
Weber on, 163—64, 164—67, 172—73, 180
Samadhi, 206
Samoans, 22

370
Samsara (reincarnation), 24. 170—71, 179—80,
248, 344
Santa Claus, Russell on, 221
Santayana, George, 218
Santrt’ schools, 312
Sanusi, 265, 295
Sanusi of Cyrenaz’ca, The
(Evans-Pritchard), 265
Satan, 3
Savage Mind, The (Levi-Strauss), 335
Savage stage
Frazer on, 32-34
Tylor on, 25, 26—27
Saviors. See also Salvation religions
Eliade on, 240
Weber on, 163
Scandinavians, 22, 38, 39, 43, 235
Scapegoats
Eliade on, 247
Frazer on, 37—38
Schmidt, Wilhelm, 43
Science
anthropology and, 317—18
Durkheim and. 86. 88—90, 103—4, 344
Eliade and, 255
Freud and, 73—74
Geertz and, 298, 301, 317-13, 321—22n20
James and, 188, 189, 191—94, 208
Marx and, 134—35
and obsolescence of religion, 26~27, 40—41,
42, 66, 84
and projection of systems onto world, 75
psychoanalysis and, 75—76
and rationality of religious belief, 196—99
Weber and, 148, 151, 179—80
Science of religion
early theories on, 2—3
introduction of, 1—2, 6—8
James on, 191
modern theories on, 5—9
Miiller on, 347—48
Tylor and, 19
Scientific ethnography, Evans-Pritchard
and, 271
Scientific materialism, James on,
189—90, 213—14
Scientific Study ofReligion (Yinger), 329—30
Scope vs. force of religion, Geertz on, 314
Scripturalist revolt in Islam, 311—13, 314. 315
Secularization. See also Obsolescence
of religion
human genetics and, 336
and Islam, 313, 314,315
modern theorists on, 330
Self-alienation, Marx on, 121—22
Seligman, C. G., 264, 266
Index
Sexuality
Freud on, 55, 56—58, 62—63
Weber on, 167—68
Sexual practices, ritual, 35, 36
Shakespeare, William, 54
Shamanism, Eliade on, 342
Shankman, Paul, 317
Shertfs, 310
Sick (pessimistic) souls, James on, 201, 202—3
Sin
Christian views on, 156, 306
Freud on, 63, 70
Marx on, 130
in Nuer religion, Evans-Pritchard on,
274, 280—84
Sky gods
Eliade on, 231, 239—40
Evans—Pritchard on, 274
Slavery, Marxist perspective on, 133
Smith, William Robertson, 29, 37, 62, 93, 99,
282, 284
Snakes, in mythology, 236—37, 241
Social anthropology, 265, 267, 297
Social Anthropology (Evans-Pritchard), 265
Social classes. See also Caste system of India
in Bali, 307, 308
in religion, Weber on, 162—64
Social contract
Durkheim on, 86
Freud on, 62, 64
Social facts, 88
Social groups, in religion, Weber 0n, 162—64
Social History ofan Indonesian Town, The
(Geertz), 295
Socialism, Durkheim on, 90
Social justice, concern for in Judaism, 172
Social psychology, Durkheim’s influence
on, 103
Social science. See also Sociology
Durkheim and, 82, 104
19th-century debate on, 147—48
values and, 151—52
Weber and, 179—80
Social solidarity, Durkheim on, 87, 330
Social systems, Parsons on, 298—99
Social theory, Geertz and, 298—99
Society
vs. culture, in anthropology, 297
in Durkheim
as basis of morality and religion, 87,
91—92, 93—102, 103, 104—5, 108,
267, 334
central importance of, 81—82, 86—87
nature of modern society, 85—86
Geertz on, 295, 305
in Marx, as servant of ruling class, 124—25

Index 371
tensions between basic drives and, in Freud,
55—56, 59, 64
in Weber, 144
Sociology
Durkheim and, 81, 82, 86—90, 174,267, 329
Evans-Pritchard and, 267—68, 284—85
explanations of religion, Evans-Pritchard on,
283—84
French, 267—68, 298
vs. historians, methods of, 180
interpretive, 147
structuralist, 33S
theory, 329—30
Weber and, 143—44, 147—52, 174, 179—80
Sociology ofReiigiort. The (Weber), 153,
158—68, 177. 178
Soma, 236
Sombart, Werner, 146
“Son” gods, 240
Sophocles, 54, 57, 63
Sorcery, in Azande culture, Evans-Pritchard
on, 271
Soul
James on, 192
in Nuer religion, Evans-Pritchard
on, 279—80
origin of concept
Durkheim on, 97
Eliade on, 248
Tylor on, 22—25
Soviet Union, 131, 331
Species-life of humanity, 122
Spencer, Baldwin, 37, 93, 107
Spirit of the Laws (Montesquieu), 267
Spirits of the above, 274—76, 277
Spirits of the below, 274, 276—77
Spiritual beings
in Nuer religion, Evans-Pritchard on, 273—77
origin of
Durkheim on, 97—98, 101
Evans-Pritchard on, 280
Frazer on, 34—35
Tylor on, 22—25, 279—80
Spiritualism, James and, 217
Spivak, Gayatri, 332
Stark, Rodney, 333
State power, Durkheim on, 90
Stoic philosophers, 2—3. 202
Stones as symbol, Eliade on, 238, 242
Storm gods, Eliade on, 240
Strehlow, Carl von. 93
Structural functionalism, 334
Structuralism, French, 335
Structural linguistics, 335
Structure and Function in Primitive Society
(Radcliffe-Brown), 334
Structure of Social Action, The (Parsons),
298—99
Studies on Hysteria (Freud), 51
Subaltern studies, 331
Substantive definitions of religion, 11
Substantive theories of religion, 12
Sudan, 264—65, 269
Sufism, 165, 206, 265
Suicide, Durkheim on, 89—90
Suicide (Durkheim), 83
Sukarno, 312—13, 314, 318
Sun gods, Eliade on, 241, 244
Superego, 55—56
Supernatural forces
Durkheim on, 91, 101, 106—7
as impossibility
Frazer on, 41, 346
Mu’ller on, 18, 23
Tylor on, 18, 23, 41, 346
infusion into natural objects, Eliade on,
238—39, 244, 250—51
as necessary component of religion. 338—39
Superstructure of society, Marx on, 124—26,
131, 134
Supreme Spirit, 306
Surplus value, Marx on, 123, 137—38
Survivals
Frazer on, 30, 31—32, 40, 208
Tylor on, 20—21, 27
Swedenborg, Emanuel, 186
Symbolism
Eliade on, 228, 232, 237—46, 244
changes over time, 245—46
critique of, 257, 258
and infusion of supernatural into natural
objects, 238—39, 244, 250—51
patterns in, 238, 239-43, 246
ranking of, 244-45, 258
symbol systems, 244
Geertz on, 302, 303—5, 320, 339
in Nuer religion, Evans-Pritchard on, 278—79
Sympathetic magic, 32—34
Synthesis, Hegelian, 120—21
Systematic anthropomorphism, 336
Taboo
Douglas on, 334
Durkheim on, 99
Frazer on, 29, 36
Freud on, 61—64
Tammuz, 36
Tao, 161, 319
Taoism, 169
TennysonI Alfred Lord, 187
Terror of history, Eliade on, 247—48
Thanatos, Freud on, 55, 58
t

372 Index
Theater states of Indonesia, 309—10, 313
Thek, 274, 280—84
Theodicy, Weber on, 164—65
Theophany, Eliade on, 245
Theories. See also General theory of religion
ancient, 2—3
evaluation of, 337
genetics-based, 335—36, 349
mixed (“toolbox”), 327—28
range of, 341—43
recent schools of, 325—36
as term, 10—11, 11—12
types of, 339—41
Theories of Primitive Religion (Evans-
Pritchard), 263, 269, 233—86, 290, 340
Theresa of Avila, Saint, 216
Theses on Feuerbach (Marx), 130
Thesis, Hegelian, 120—21
Thick description, Geertz on, 299—301, 302,
314, 317
“Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive
Theory of Culture” (Geertz), 299—301
Thoreau, Henry David, 186
Thoresen, Carl E., 329
Three Essays on the Theory ofSexuality
(Freud), 52, 56
Tindal, Matthew, 5
Tocqueville, Alexis de, 88
Toland, John, 5
Tolerance, Deism and, 5
Tolstoy, Leo, 202
Torah, 172
Total ethical personality. 165, 173
Totalitarianism, Marxism and, 137
Totem and Taboo (Freud), 52, 60—64, 66—67, 73
Totemism
Durkheim on
and development of religion, 97—98, 102
as fundamental form of religion,
94—95, 102
ritual, function of, 98—102
social functions of, 93—102
totem as symbol of clan, 95—96, 100
Evans-Pritchard on, 276, 277, 278, 282, 285
Frazer on, 29, 37, 46n21, 94
Freud on, 61—64
Smith on, 29, 37, 62
Tylor on, 94
Toward the Critique of Hegel ‘s Philosophy of
Right: Introduction (Marx), 116, 128
Traditional actions, Weber on, 148
Traditional authority, Weber on, 150
Traditional vs. rationalized religions, Geertz
on, 305—8
Trees, sacred, Eliade on, 242—43, 245
Tree spirits, 30—31, 38—39
Treilschke, Heinrich von, 145
Tribal medicine, Tylor on, 24
Trobriand Islands, 264
Troeltsch, Ernst, 145
Turner, Victor, 334—35
Twins, in Nuer culture, 278
Tylor, Edward Burnett, 7—8, 9, 12, 15—27. See
also Primitive Culture (Tylor)
analysis of theories, 41—42
on animism, 8, 15, 22—27, 93, 105—6
and anthropology, 15—16, 17, 41, 43, 266-67
background of, 15—16
and comparative method, 19, 41, 88,
296, 342
comparative view of, 325, 333
critique of theories, 42—44, 333
Durkheim compared with, 84, 88, 91, 93, 94,
101, 103, 104,105
Eliade compared with, 233, 254
Evans-Pritchard compared with, 269, 289
Evans-Pritchard on, 266—67, 279—80
evidence, approach to, 343
and Frazer, influence on, 15, 27, 28
Freud compared with, 52, 59, 60, 61, 66, 71
influence of, 42, 44, 341
intellectualist approach of, 42, 61, 71, 105
James compared with, 208
Marx compared with, 132
method of, 41—42, 333
on mourning rituals, 101
on origin of religion, 15, 21—26, 41—42, 93,
103, 284, 340
personal beliefs of, 16, 17,346
scientific method of, 17
on totemism, 94
Weber compared with, 175
works by, 16
Tyndall, John, 193
Unconscious mind
collective, Jung on, 70
Freud on, 51, 53—56
and religious impulse, 61—64, 71—72
repressed thoughts in, 53—54
James on, 204, 211, 213
Union for Social Policy (Vereinft’ir
Socialpolitik), 145, 152
University College of Wales, 283
University of Berlin, 115, 143, 145
University of Bonn, 115
University of Bordeaux, 83
University of Bucharest, 228, 229
University of Calcutta, 228
University of California, Berkeley, 215—16, 295
University of Chicago, 228, 230, 295
University of Heidelberg, 145, 146
University of Paris, 83
University of Vienna, 146

Index 373
Upanishads, 217, 248
Usury, Weber on, 156, 167, 173
Value, Marx on, 122—23, 137—38
Value-rational actions, [48
Values
and sociological inquiry, in Weber, 151—52
universal. Weber on origin of. 160
Varieties of Religious Experience. The (James).
186. 191, 199—212, 216, 218,
219-20, 328
Varuna. 160
Vedas, 1, 7, 170
Vedic rituals, 163
Vegetation gods, 36—38, 240
Vegetation myths, Eliade on, 242—43
Vengeance (cien), by ghosts, in Nuer
religion. 279
Vereinfiir Socialpolirik (Union for Social
Policy), 145, 152
Verstehen (understanding), Weber on, 147—49,
152, 176, 293, 329, 333
Vienna Psychological Society, 51
Vienna school of economics, 332—33
Villages in archaic cultures, location of, 235—36
Virbius, 30—31, 38—39
Virgil, 145
Virtuoso sanctification, Weber on, 165, 171
Voltaire, 5
Voodoo, 32
Wager argument for belief in God, 198, 217—18
Wainright, William J., 224—25n40
Wakan, 95
Water as symbol, Eliade on, 242
Weber, Helene Fallenstein, 144
Weber, Marianne Schnitger, 145—46, 181n12
Weber, Max. 9, 12
analysis of ideas, 174—77
antireductionism of, 175, 176—77, 180
and antisemitism, 173—74, 177
on capitalism, rise of, 153—58, 168—74, 175,
176, 177—78
comparative view of, 325, 333
critique of theories, 177—80
Durkheim compared with, 143—44, 158, 166,
174—75, 176, 180, 185
Eliade compared with, 228. 253, 254
Evans-Pritchard on, 285—86
evidence, approach to, 343
Frazer compared with. 159, 175
Freud compared with. 158. 176, 130
on ideal—types, 155, 157—58, 158—59, 160. 161.
162, 164—65, 175, 177, 179, 180. 308
theory of, 149—51
influence of, 9, 158, 177, 298, 299, 305-6,
326, 327, 330
influences on. 152
on Islam, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168,
‘ 178—79, 180
life and career of, 143—44. 144—47
Marx compared with, 135, 158, 162, 175—77,
178-79, 180
method of, 174—75, 176—77, 179—80, 227
personal beliefs of, 144, 347
on religion. 153—74
critique of, 177—80
evil, as problem, 164—65
interplay with other spheres, 167—68
origins of, 175, 178—79
protestant ethic, 153—58
rationalized vs. traditional, 305—3
religious leaders, 159—61
salvation religions, 163—64, 164—67,
172—73, 180
social classes and groups in, 162—64
world religions, economic ethic of, 168-74
and sociology, 143—44, 147—52, 174, 179—80
Tylor compared with, 175
on Verstehen (understanding), 147—49, 152,
176,298,329, 333
works by, 145, 148, 153, 168, 177, 181n12
Weber, Max (father), 144
Weber thesis, the, 153—58
Wesley, John. 6, 201
Western civilization, religions of, 161, 164, 166
Westphalen, Baron von, 115
Wiebe, Donald, 260n33
Will to Believe, The (James), 191, 195
“Will to Believe, The” (James), 195—99, 212,
217—13, 333
Wilson, Bryan, 330
Wilson, David Sloan. 336
Wilson, E. 0., 335
Windelband. Wilhelm. 148
Wit and [is Relation to the Unconscious
(Freud), 54
Witchcraft. Oracles. and Magic among the
Azande (Evans-Prilchard). 265. 269—73
Witchcraft of Azande people, Evans-Pritchard
on, 269—73, 289. 339
Win, 274
Women, social status of, Weber on, 168
Workingmen’s International Association, 117
World—view, in religion, Geertz on, 304—5,
313—15,319—2O
World War I
Durkheim and, 84, 104
Freud and, 52, 59
Marxist theory and, 136
World War II
Eliade and, 229
Evans-Pritchard and, 265
Freud and, 50, 67

374
Wretched of the Earth, The (Fanon), 331
Wright, Chauncey, 214
Wundt, Wilhelm, 83
Wyman, Jeffries, 214
Yahweh, 3, 68, 69, 172, 173
Yggdrasil, 243
Yinger, Milton, 329—30
Yoga, 170, 206, 228, 254
Index
Yoga: An Essay on the Origins of Indian
Mystical Theology (Eliade), 229
Yoruba, 239
Young Hegelians, 115, 127
Zeus, 2, 25, 231
Zoroaster, 161, 165, 248
Zoroastrians, 164