Chapter 1. Method and Sources: How This Study Reads the Library

Every chapter of this study rests on two decisions: which sources to read, and how to read them. The comparative history of religions has argued over both since the nineteenth century. Its founders compared religions across continents in search of origins and laws of development. Their successors attacked those comparisons as speculation, as theology in disguise, or as products of empire. This chapter sets out that inheritance through the figures the library’s sources keep returning to: Max Müller, Edward Tylor and James Frazer, Émile Durkheim and Max Weber, Mircea Eliade, and their critics. It then explains how the study treats insider and outsider accounts, primary and secondary sources, and arguments about dating and influence, and which shelves of the library it draws on. The thread that runs through the whole book, the relation between religion and power, turns out to be present in the discipline’s own history.

A discipline born comparative: Müller and the philologists

The reference shelf credits Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900) with having “founded the scientific study of religion”. It says he “advocated a comparative method that developed into comparative religion” [Wikipedia: Theories about religion]. He edited the Rigveda and directed the Sacred Books of the East. His best-known thesis was that mythology is “a disease of language”: the gods began as words for natural forces, such as Dyaus, “shining”, and those words later hardened into persons such as Zeus and Jupiter [Wikipedia: Max Müller]. Durkheim later classed this “naturism” with Tylor’s animism as one of the two rival theories of his day. In his account, Müller’s version held that “men adore cosmic forces” [Durkheim, Formele elementare ale vieții religioase, #83739].

The same article shows that the founder’s scholarship was tied to politics. In 1868 he told the Secretary of State for India that “India has been conquered once, but India must be conquered again, and that second conquest should be a conquest by education.” He hoped his Veda translation would show Indians “what the root is”, which he called “the only way of uprooting all that has sprung from it during the last 3,000 years” [Wikipedia: Max Müller, “Views on India”]. The article adds that his views became “more nuanced” later in life. Levi Leonard Paine, another early comparativist, called the field “the latest and most productive field of investigation and discovery that historical science has opened” [Paine, Ethnic Trinities and Their Relation to the Christian Trinity, #55130].

Evolution and survival: Tylor and Frazer

Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917), as the reference shelf summarises him, “defined religion as belief in spiritual beings”. He traced that belief to dreams in which the dead seemed to appear, and he treated practices in modern societies that resembled “primitive” ones as “survivals” [Wikipedia: Theories about religion]. James George Frazer built on Tylor but separated magic from religion. “By religion, then, I understand a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life.” He also proposed a sequence: “If an Age of Religion has thus everywhere, as I venture to surmise, been preceded by an Age of Magic, it is natural that we should enquire what causes have led mankind… to abandon magic” [Frazer, The Golden Bough, #65694].

Frazer also made power a subject of the discipline from the start. “In point of fact magicians appear to have often developed into chiefs and kings,” he wrote, and he catalogued priest-kings and “religious capitals… ruled by pontiffs who wielded at once temporal and spiritual authority, like the popes of mediaeval Rome” [Frazer, #65694]. Juliette Wood, a folklorist, describes the shared framework of Tylor and Frazer as “strict rationally-based cultural progression”, fed by “ethnological data… a by-product of imperial expansion”. [Wood, “The concept of the Goddess”, in Billington and Green (eds), The Concept of the Goddess, #50933, ch. 1].

Society, meaning and charisma: Durkheim and Weber

Durkheim rejected both naturism and animism. He argued that both “pose the problem in identical terms”, building the notion of the divine on sensations produced by natural phenomena: the dream for the animists, cosmic events for the naturists [Durkheim, #83739]. His own definition, in the library’s Romanian translation, describes religion as “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is, separate, forbidden” [Durkheim, #83739]. The reference shelf gives the English form of its second half: beliefs and practices “which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them”. [Wikipedia: Sociology of religion]. Durkheim also set a methodological limit that later critics used against Frazer: “Only what we know well can be usefully compared. By embracing all types of societies and civilisations, we no longer acquire the competence necessary to know any one of them” [Durkheim, #83739].

Max Weber has no work of his own in the library, so the study relies on the reference shelf for him. It reports that he used Verstehen, interpretation of the intention and context of action, and “argues for making sense of religious action on its own terms” and treats religion as an answer to the needs of theodicy and salvation [Wikipedia: Sociology of religion]. Charisma, in Weber’s definition, is “a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers”. The sociologist Paul Joosse, quoted there, comments that “the locus of power is in the led” [Wikipedia: Charisma].

Eliade and his critics

Mircea Eliade (1907–1986), whose works the library holds in Romanian, French and English, argued for the autonomy of the sacred. “The sacred always manifests itself as a reality of a wholly different order from ‘natural’ realities,” he wrote. He held that “from the most elementary hierophany… to the supreme hierophany there is no solution of continuity” [Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, #88579]. The reference shelf records three criticisms: vagueness in his key concepts, “out-of-context comparisons” of the kind made by Frazer and Tylor, and a “pro-religious bias”. It also records his public support for the Iron Guard in the late 1930s, which came “under frequent criticism after World War II” [Wikipedia: Theories about religion; Wikipedia: Mircea Eliade].

The broader reaction came from fieldwork. E. E. Evans-Pritchard called Müller, Tylor and Durkheim “armchair anthropologists” and their theories “untestable speculation”. Clifford Geertz “questioned the validity of abstracting a general theory of all religions” and defined religion as “a system of symbols” [Wikipedia: Theories about religion]. Chapter 2 applies these criticisms to prehistory. The positions are summarised below.

Insiders, outsiders and the grades of sources

The reference shelf lists “‘insider’ versus ‘outsider’ perspectives (roughly corresponding to emic versus etic descriptions)” as a basic division among theories of religion. It notes that the early theorists relied on reports by “missionaries, discoverers, and colonial civil servants” who looked at religion “from the inside” [Wikipedia: Theories about religion]. Moulton’s account of the clash between the Parsi tradition and the comparative school is a concrete case (see ch. 6).

This study sorts its material into three grades: primary texts in translation (the Avesta, the Rigveda, scripture, inscriptions), scholarly secondary works (Boyce, Eliade, Durkheim, Wood), and insider or advocacy works, which are read as evidence of what their authors believe. Albert Pike’s Morals and Dogma is an insider’s account of Freemasonry [Pike, Morals and Dogma, #378717]. Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor write openly as advocates of a Goddess religion [Sjöö and Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother, #51023]. The Keshe workshops are a founder’s account of his own teaching [Keshe Foundation, KSW Summaries 1-393, #378714].

Dating and influence: how the arguments work

Two kinds of argument recur throughout the book. The first concerns dating. Eliade warns against confusing “the appearance of a belief with the date when it is first clearly attested”. Applied strictly, he says, that rule would date German folktales to 1812–1822, the years the Grimm brothers published them [Eliade, Istoria credințelor și ideilor religioase, #44122, ch. I §2]. The same problem lies behind the long dispute over Zarathustra’s date (ch. 9). In that dispute a late manuscript does not prove a late doctrine, and an archaic doctrine does not prove an early manuscript.

The second concerns influence. A resemblance between two traditions can be explained by borrowing in one direction, borrowing in the other, a common source, or independent parallel development. George William Carter, writing on Zoroastrianism and Judaism, asks of post-exilic Jewish ideas: “How shall we explain it? In part by foreign influence.” He concludes that “to this foreign contact… we probably are indebted for some of the loftiest and most spiritual conceptions, which came into Judaism and passed from Judaism into Christianity” [Carter, Zoroastrianism and Judaism, #55114]. A footnote in the same work records that scholars such as Spiegel and Darmesteter held “a late origin” for some of the Iranian material [#55114]. If that dating is accepted, the direction of the argument changes. Werner Sundermann approaches the question through single, precisely traceable motifs, such as the demon Asmodaios in the Book of Tobit, rather than general resemblances [Sundermann, Zoroastrian Motifs in Non-Zoroastrian Traditions, #55067]. Part 4 returns to the question in full (ch. 28–37).

The shelves and the thread of power

The library’s file paths show the shelves the study draws on. Most of the scholarship (Boyce, Moulton, Carter, Durkheim, Eliade) sits under Religion & Spirituality. Esoteric & Mysticism holds Pike, Frazer and the Goddess literature, while Mythology & Folklore, History and Paranormal & Conspiracy supply the rest. The Keshe workshop transcripts, several hundred in number, are filed under Plasma Science [Keshe, KSW 361, #378073]. The offline reference shelf, chiefly the English and Romanian Wikipedia, supplies dates, names and mainstream summaries.

Power runs through the discipline itself. Frazer’s magicians became kings and his pontiffs held “temporal and spiritual authority” [#65694]. Müller expected comparative scholarship to help in a “second conquest” of India [Wikipedia: Max Müller]. Weber located charismatic power “in the led” [Wikipedia: Charisma]. Wood argues that modern Goddess-studies turn a felt marginalisation of women into a historical “Ur-culture” [#50933, ch. 1]. The chapters that follow test such claims on the evidence, starting with prehistory (ch. 2) and the Indo-Iranian inheritance (ch. 6).

Key points

• The reference shelf credits Max Müller with founding the comparative study of religion. He explained myth as “a disease of language” and wrote of a “second conquest” of India.
• Tylor defined religion as belief in spiritual beings. Frazer placed an “Age of Magic” before an “Age of Religion” and held that magicians “often developed into chiefs and kings”.
• Durkheim defined religion through sacred things and the moral community they create. Weber’s charismatic authority places “the locus of power” “in the led”.
• Eliade argued for the autonomy of the sacred. Evans-Pritchard, Geertz and others criticised grand comparison as armchair speculation.
• The study separates primary texts, scholarly works and insider or advocacy works, and attributes every claim to the author who makes it.
• Dating arguments must separate a belief’s first attestation from its origin. Influence arguments must weigh borrowing, common source and parallel development.
• Religion and power, the study’s thread, already runs through the discipline’s own history.