Seven Theories of Religion

Seven Theories of Religion, by Daniel Pals

This important text introduces 8 classical theorists whose work helped

develop the discipline of Religious Studies. An understanding of Durkheim, Marx, Eliade, and Geertz (all presented in this volume) is integral to an understanding of contemporary theories and their development. This text is a very accessible introduction to the thoughts of these men, as well as some critical reflection about their presuppositions and the implications of their theoretical positions. Pals' text provides a strong foundation for the needed further exploration of these scholars' work. I read this as an undergraduate sstudent and then again as a graduate student (in conjunction with excerpts of the scholars' own writings), and it aided my understanding of these scholars' work tremendously.

Outline - Religion and Social Theory

(General approaches plus secularization & rational choice theory)

Pals, Seven Theories of Religion

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Taken from Daniel L. Pals, Seven Theories of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 24-26 and 34-37.

E.B. Tylor
    Tylor . . . recognizes, of course, that we cannot explain something unless we know what it is; so religion must first be defined. He recognizes further 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 Christians and Jews. He therefore proposes, as a more suitable place to start, his own minimal definition: religion is "belief inspiritual beings." This formula, which others, following Tylor, have adopted as well, has the merit of being simple, straightforward, and suitably wide in scope. For though we can find other similarities, Tylor feels the one characteristic shared by all religions, great or small, ancient or modern, isthe belief in spirits who think, act, and feel like human persons. The essence of religion, like mythology, seems to be animism (from the Latin anima, meaning spirit)--the belief in living, personal powers behind all things. Animism further is a very old form of thought, which is found throughout the entire history of the human race. So, Tylor suggests, if we truly wish to explain religion, the question we must answer is this: How and why did the human race first come to believe that such things as spiritual beings actually exist?
    Stating this question is easy; answering it is another matter. Devout people will want to say that they believe in a spiritual being, such as God, because that being has actually spoken to them, supernaturally, through the Bible or the Quran or some other scripture. For Tylor . . . appeals to divine revelation are not acceptable. Such statements may be pleasing as personal confessions, but they are not science. He insists that any account of how a human being, or the whole human race, came to believe in spiritual-beings must appeal only to natural causes, only to considerations of the kind that scientists and historians would use in explaining an occurrence of any sort, nonreligious as well as religious. We must presume, he says, that early peoplesacquired their first religious ideas through the same reasoning mechanisms they employed in all other aspects of their lives. Like us, they undoubtedly observed the world at work and then tried to explain it.
    What observations, then, did these primitives make? And what explanations did they choose? Tylor at this point peers backward, deep into prehistoric times, to reconstruct the thoughts of the very first human beings:

It seems as though thinking men, as yet at a low level of culture, were deeply impressed by two groups of biological problems. In the first place, what is it that makes a difference between a living body and a dead one; what causes waking, sleep, trance, disease, death? In the second place, what are those human shapes which appear in dreams and visions? Looking at these two groups of phenomena, the ancient savage philosophers probably made their first step by the obvious inference that every man has two things belonging to him, namely, 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." From their vivid encounters with both death and dreams, in other words, early peoples reasoned first to a simple theory of their own lives: every human being is animated by a soul, or spiritual principle. They thought of this soul as "a thin, unsubstantial human image, in its nature a sort of vapour, film, or shadow; the cause of life and thought in the individual it animates." From this premise, they then reasoned, as we all do, by analogy and extension. If the concept of a soul explains the movements, activities, and changes of the human person, why should it not also be applied more widely to explain the rest of the natural world? Why should not plants and trees, the rivers, winds, and animals, even the stars and planets also be moved by souls? Further, since souls are separable from the objects they animate, why may there not also be, behind the visible scene of nature, beings who do not even need to be connected to physical objects--why not spirits, pure and simple? If there are souls in humans, could there not actually be such powerful beings as demons and angels who have no necessary attachment to normal physical objects, though they certainly can enter and "possess" them if they wish? Last, and above all, could there not perhaps be certain supreme spirits, the beings we call gods?
    Through this natural, almost childlike chain of reasoning, says Tylor, early humans arrived at their first religious beliefs. Like their myths, their religious teachings arose from a rational effort to explain how nature worked as it did. And from this perspective, all seemed quite clear: as souls animate persons, so spirits must animate the world.
    Tylor further argues that the value of this animistic theory to primitive peoples is apparent from the great variety of early beliefs and customs it can readily explain. Doctrines of a future life provide an example. In Oriental cultures there is widespread belief in reincarnation, while in religions of the Western world, like Christianity and Islam, there are the doctrines of resurrection and immortality of the soul. All of these can be understood, in animist terms, as ways of extending the life of the soul beyond the time of death. Being separable from the flesh, the soul has an afterlife and destiny of its own. Animism also explains why sacred objects and trinkets--things called "fetishes"--are important to primitives. Such people are not "idol-worshippers," as narrow-minded Christian missionaries used to describe them. They do not worship sticks and stones; they adore the "anima" within, the spirit which--not wholly unlike the god of Christians themselves--gives the wood of the stick or substance of the stone its life and power. Knowing the nature of animism, we can also make sense of tribal medicine. When a man shakes uncontrollably with fever, he knows that he does not make himself do this; he believes he is "possessed" by a demon within. To be cured, he needs not a medicine but an exorcism. The evil spirit must be driven out of his body.
    Throughout most of the entire second volume of Primitive Culture, Tylor provides detailed demonstrations to show just how far-reaching was the doctrine of animism in the earlier centuries of human civilization. He describes it as a system that spread worldwide, becoming the first "general philosophy of man and nature" ever devised. Moreover, as it was absorbed by a tribe or clan or culture, it spread into every aspect of daily life. If one asks why, across almost all cultures, the gods have human personalities, the answer is that they are spirits modeled on the souls of human persons. If we want to know why gifts are given to the dead at primitive funerals and why the services, especially for great and powerful men, sometimes even include human sacrifice, animism gives the answers. The gifts provide support for the soul in its new residence beyond the grave; the sacrifices furnish the king or prince with the souls of servants to wait upon him in the realm of death, just as they did in life. Why do the Indians of America talk to animals as they would to each other? Because, like themselves, animals are owners of souls. Why does the water move, or the tree grow? Because nature spirits inhabit them. Why does the medicine man fast or use drugs? To qualify himself "for intercourse with the . . . ghosts, from whom he is to obtain direction in his craft."
    In this systematic, sequential fashion, with hundreds of examples at his disposal, Tylor proceeds through the whole range of primitive life, thought, and custom. At each point he shows how the doctrine of animism makes sense of ideas and behaviors that otherwise would strike us as nothing more than irrational and incomprehensible nonsense.

J.G. Frazer
Once introduced, the subjects of magic and religion become a central theme of The Golden Bough . . .. A Study in Magic and Religion is, in fact, the subtitle given to the book in its second edition. To appreciate the crucial importance of both these enterprises to primitive peoples, says Frazer, we must notice a fundamental fact of early human life . . .. It centered on the struggle to survive. Hunters needed animals to kill; farmers needed 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 assumed 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 prehistorical peoples) 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 connections 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 similarity; 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 a thundershower, 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 himself supplies them in great number. When, as traders report, the Pawnee Indians touched the blood of a sacrificed maiden to their field tools, they did so because they firmly believed that, merely by contact, its lifegiving power would be transferred to their seeds of maize. When drought strikes certain villages of India, the people dress up a boy in nothing but 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 do so because 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. Moreover, 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, when the Brahmin priest makes his morning offering to the sun, he firiffly believes it will not rise without his ritual. So too 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. Moreover, the confidence placed in such rites shows that they form a kind of science for primitive peoples. They offer certainty about 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 knowledge of the magical art. It is not by accident, he observes, that in primitive cultures the person who can claim mastery of its tech niques--whether called a magician, medicine man, or witch doctor--almost always holds a position of considerable prestige and power. Usually, in fact, 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 supports the conclusion that among tribal peoples, nothing is more common than for the magician to be also the village chieftain or king.
    The power that magic can confer on people in primitive societies ought not to blind us, says Frazer, to the fact that it is also faced with a quite fundamental problem. It may look real science, but it is a false science. Primitives can perhaps be deceived, but moderns are not. As every thinking person today certainly knows, the laws of imitation and contact do not apply to the real world. Magic cannot work because the primitive magician, for all his shrewd magical skill, is simply wrong. In point of fact, the real world does not work according to the pattern of sympathies and similarities he mistakenly applies to it. Over time, therefore, the more critical and thoughtful minds 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 himself, but the facts cry out loudly that it is the system, not the man, that is mistaken. The general recognition of that error is for Frazer a momentous development in the history of human thought, for as magic declines, it is religion that 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 ultimately it is the personalities of the gods that control nature; it is their anger that can start a storm, their favor that can save a life, their sudden shift of attitude that can calm a troubled sea. For Frazer, wherever there is belief in these supernatural beings and wherever there are human efforts to win their help by prayers or rituals, human thought has 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. Religion actually improves on magic and marks and intellectual advance for the human race. Why? For the simple reason that religious explanations are found to be better than magical ones in describing the world as we actually experience it. Magic, 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, on the other hand, is quite different. It never claims, in the first place, 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 force 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 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--sometimes it does not.

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