Contemporary Views on Comparative Religion in Celebration of Tim Jensen's 65" Birthday Edited by Peter Antes, Armin W. Geertz and Mikael RothsteinPublished by Equinox Publishing Ltd. UK: Office 415, The Workstation, 15 Paternoster Row, Sheffield, South ‘Yorkshire $1 2X USA; ISD, 70 Enterprise Drive, Bristol, CT 06010 www.equinoxpub.com First published 2016 © Peter Antes, Armin W. Geertz and Mikael Rothstein and contributors 2016 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, i cluding photocopying, recording or any information storage or retriev- al system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13 978 178179 139 4 (hardback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Contemporary views on comparative religion: in celebration of ‘Tim Jensen's 65th birthday / edited by Peter Antes, Armin W. Geertz and Mikael Rothstein, pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index, ISBN 978-1-78179-139-4 (hardback) 4. Religions. I, Jensen, Tim, honouree, Il, Antes, Peter, 1942- editor, 1H. Geertz, Armin W., 1948- editor. IV. Rothstein, Mikael, 1961, editor. BLS7.c674 2016 200--de23 2015010619) ‘Typeset and edited by Queenston Publishing, Hamilton, Canada, Printed and bound in Great Britain. Essays on Comparative Religion presented to Tim Jensen on the occasion of his 65th birthdayMorny Joy Said, Edward, 1977. Orientalism, London: Penguin. Said, Edward, 1985, “Orientalism Reconsidered.” Cultural Critique 1(1): 89-107. bittp://dxcdoi.org/10.2307/1354282. Smith, Jonathan Z, 1978. "Map [s Not Territory.” In Studies in Judaism in Late Antiq- ity 23, edited by . jacob Neusner, 289-309. Leiden: Brill. Smith, Jonathan Z. 1982, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown: Chicago, iL: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Jonathan 2. 1998, “Religion, Religions, Religious.” In Critical Terms for Reli- ‘ious Studies, edited by Mark C, Taylor, 269-284. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. “Tweed, Thomas, 2006, Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. . Urban, Hugh, 2003, Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Poltics, andl Power in the Stusy of Religion ‘Berkeley: university of California Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/calt- fornia/9780520230620.001.0001, Professor Morny Joy, Dept. of Religious Studies, University of Calgary, mjoy@ucalgary.ca. 32 Comparative and Historical Studies of Religions: The Return of Science Luther H. Martin “The Past isa foreign country: they do things differently there.” -L.P Hartley Comparative and historical studies of religion have often been consid- ered to be related but different pursuits. As the British novelist L. P. Hartley has fainously reminded us, however, the two inquiries are simni- larly defined by a subject matter that is commonly separated from the researcher by distance: the one by space, the other by time (Hartley 1953: 1). Max Milller, the forefather of a scientific (religionswissenschaftlich) study of religion, promoted and exemplified both of these approaches tothe study of religion and they have both been well represented in the twenty-first century by Tim Jensen in his teaching, research and pro- fessional activities, especially in his role as two-term Secretary General (2005-2015) of the International Association for the Study of Religion, In the following, I should like to make a few suggestions about a recently renewed interest in a scientific approach fo the comparative-and his- torical study of religion. first proposed by Miiller (Miller 1881 [1867], 1898 [1870)).. AReturn to Science ‘The comparative and historical study of religion as an autonomous aca- demic discipline was born from the scientific impulse that swept Europe from the mid-nineteenth century. Like its new sister social sciences, it sought to discover and describe universal laws of human behaviour and 33Luther H. Marcin change (e.g., the positivism of Auguste Comte), By the mid-twentieth century, however, the study of religion became resituated within the humanities, This disciplinary repositioning signalled a shift in religious studies away from a focus on human universals to humanistic interests in values and hermeneutical concerns with particular socio-cultural mean- ings. Recently, some historians and anthropologists have expressed a renewal of interest in a more scientifically oriented approach to their work. Yale historian john Lewis Gaddis, for example, contends that his toriography ~ and I would include the comparison and history of reli gions ~ must at least “approach the standards for verification that exist within the social, physical and biological sciences” (Gaddis 2002: 17). Like the reawakening of a “zoological perspective” in the social sciences, of an-“interest in man’s evolved nature as distinct from his purely cultural nature” (Chagnon 2013: 207; Tiger and Fox 1966), the “return to science” among humanists involved a reconsideration of the role of neo-Darwin- ian evolutionary theory (Pomper and Shaw 2002). As historian Gregory Hanlon argued in his study of “human nature” in @ seventeenth-century Tuscan village, the theoretical constraints of evolutionary theory estab- lish “the larger context” for proximate contextual causes and “sets the limits of what can and cannot occur or endure beyond the short term” (Hanlon 2007: 8). As anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist john Tooby has noted, however, “precluding conditions” established by evo- lutionary theory “are generally neglected in assessing historical causa- tion, as are elements that remained stable and that we could not change, such as human nature” (Tooby 2012). Evolution and the Study of Religion An evolutionary frame for the study of religion situates Homo sapiens within the general domain of life as part of the animal kingdom. In this framing, explanations for human behaviours go beyond the proximate to include ultimate causes that are rooted in evolutionary goals and ancestral challenges, a consideration of which might provide a more complete and satisfying understanding of human behaviours (Kenrik and Griskevicius 2013: 15, 30; Paden 2010). Evolved Behaviours A first attempt to understand religious behaviour from an evolutionary perspective was by the Dublin physician Alexander Macalister, whose research in comparative anatomy at the Dublin Zoo, a centre of such research at the time, was cited by Darwin (eg., Darwin 1872: 10, n.13; 1879: 31, n 30). In 1882, Macalister, proposed en interesting, if curious, evolutionary history of Christian liturgical practices based on the Dar” wwinian “laws” of evolution, which he understood to operate also “in 34 Comparative and Historical Studies of Religions other departments of the material and moral world" (Macalister 1882: 4) Subsequently, Jane Harrison and the so-called Cambridge classicists also famously emphasized the significance of religious ritual as transcultural and transhistorical characteristics of Homo sapiens, the consequence of @ common evolutionary history. Such early attempts to frame a study of religion within evolutionary theory were subsequently abandoned, however, because of a growing but infelicitous application of biological theory to cultural models of progressive social and historical-change. A subsequent cataloguing of cross-culturally inveterate patterns by such phenomenologists of religion as Gerardus van der Leuuw and Mircea Ellade, consequently disregarded any explanations for these patterns in terms of human universals in favour of cultural manifestations of a metaphysical “sacrality.” As, the American anthropologist Julian Stew- ard commented, some three decades ago, that “when human nature is examined in the light of its extremely diversified manifestations in the many different world cultufes, there is a strong tendency to emphasize the cultural variable and to ignore the biological constraint” (Steward 1957; 206) ~ an emphasis and a neglect that well characterizes the con- temporary study of religion, Evolved Brains One foremost biological constraint on “human. nature” is the human brain, Evolutionary psychologists agree that the morphology and func- tions of human brains are a product of human evolutionary history and, like other bodily organs and their functions, have remained essentially the same since the emergence of anatomically modern humans some 200,000 years ago. Since minds are the material functions of brains, one of the fundamental hypotheses of contemporary cognitive scientists is brain-mind identity. Consequently, our mental functions, like those of our bodies, are, understood to be subject to the same universal possi- bilities of life 2nd to the same constraints of natural selection that gov- ern all biology and, while extraordinarily complex, are, in principle, as explicable as those of any other bodily organ. itis these mental func- tions that provide the theoretical objects for neuro- and cognitive sci- entists, These interdisciplinary researchers seek to explain the kinds of perceptual.and conceptual representations that the mental processing of sensory input allows, the memories, transformations, and transmis- sions of these mental representations’and the ways in which some of these mental representations become public while others languish in one or a few private brains. It is principally the cognitive sciences, with their theoretical frame of evolutionary theory, that currently offer the, most robust paradigm for a scientific study of religionLuther H. Martin 7 Cognition and the Study of Religion ‘The brain is composed of some one hundred billion neurons that fire more or less continuously and are variously comiected by synapses that are both excitatory and inhibitory. The resulting complexes of connec- tions, or what Canadian. neurophysiologist Donald Hebb called “cell assemblies” (Hebb 1949), exhibit domain specific functions, from face and object recognition to a discrete function for word form reco tion (somewhat surprisingly, given different cultural forms of writing) (Dehaene 2009: 75-76, 97; see Dehaene 2014: 87, Figure 13).! Specialized mental functions are located in areas of human brains that, cross-culturally, differ in location by only millimetres (Dehaene 2009: 119). And while there is no mental function at the evolutionary or cognitive level that might be identified as “religious,” it is these ordinary behav- igural and cognitive defaults that are effectively exploited by all success- ful, Le, transgenerational, social institutions such as religions (Boyer 2003). Consequently, it would scem that religious studies scholars would be interested in exploring siich pan-human mental function, especially given the influential phenomenographical descriptions of an earlier era. And yet, Tooby’s complaint that such human “elements that remained stable and that we could not change,” are generally as neglected in assess- ing mental activity as are those associated with our somatic behaviours “Two Mental Systems: Reflexive and Reflective Two human brain functions that have been identified by cognitive neuroscientists show that minds operate generally with two inferen- tial systems: an evolved, non-conscious, automatic, intuitive or reflex- ive response to brain input stimuli, and a conscious, reflective mental activity that is nurtured by learning (Lieberman et ai. 2002; Boyer 2010: 376-379). Recognition of this important distinction should be of interest to any scholar as these two mental functions are often conflated,’ not only in assessments of available evidence but in scholarly methodolo- gies themselves, a conflation, in other words, of a subjective mode of scholarship. and an objective ~ i, theoretically controlled - approach. Reflexive Evidence ‘The “religious” data with which’ comparativists and historians of reli- gion are generally concerned - what Hegel termed the “res gestae” or the 1. Reading for example, is a human cultural production that developed too recently for its neurological architecture to be the consequence of natural selection. Rather, research has shown that the redding architecture of Homo sapien brains exploits the neuronal mechanisms of spatial organization that are located in the same area of primate brains (Dehaene 2009: 127-142). 36 Comparative and Historical Studies of Religions human “things said and done” (Hegel 1956 (1861): 60) ~ are a kind of folk knowledge that is largely the product of the first, reflexive system and has to do with those behaviours and mental representations most robustly shaped by evolutionary and cogeitive biases. These pan-human reflexive underlie the often observed proclivity for, and intuitive famili- |, the recurring mental representations and depictions of human, behaviours in stich genres as literary fictions, dramatic presentations, ‘material mernorials, historical narratives, and religious myths and rituals. Reflectivé Scholarship ‘The second, reflective system is characterized by the methods of “pro- fessional scholars” or what Hegel termed the historia rerum gestarum ~ the “accounts of [human] things said and done” (Hegel 1956 (1861): 60). In contrast to the “mind-blind” processes that characterize reflexive thinking, reflective methodologies require a theoretical “step-back.” An academic study of religion, might well profit from a serious theoretical engagement with “the return of science” that can provide it with empiri- cally-tested theories for that methodological step. Theorizing that incor- porates the cognitive sciences can help religious studies scholars better organize and understand the often fragmentary and inevitably ambigu- ous record of their evidence in ways commensurate with the ubiquitous processes and dynamics of the mental processes that produced them. Evidence: Reflexive or Reflective? Because religious dataare inevitably the product of some level of reflective thinking ini order to have survived, itis important to distinguish the'intui- tive behaviours of religious agents from the reflections of religious special ists and intellectuals - and, from the methodological inquiries of religious studies scholars themselves, To what extent, for example, does the Bible contain data of folk religious behaviours or the theological reflections of religious speciatists? And, the answer is both, and itis both, in their dis- tinction, that constitute the subject matter of the religious studies scholar, And what about the epics of Homer, or the Mahabharata? * The Minds of Religious Agents Research that includes a consideratiori of the minds of religious agents i cognitive biases in addition to iy Donlger's stay of The Hindus: An Alera tive ery Gos) was recently banned in indie folowing protests by Hindu funds mentalist groups that “each chapter” ofthe book." shocking and appalling series of anecdetes which denigrate distor and misrepresent Hinduism and thebistory of tia and indus” hte tndtatodayintodayn/ story /wendy-donige-the-hindus- aheriative-bistory-penguln-scrapped/1/342913.html, accessed 18 Fbruary 2014 37Luther HL Martin the external nexus of material causality. A considerable number of such human brain functions, like that of reflexive processing, occur below the threshold of conscious awareness (Koch 2012: 89). These non-conscious processes, estimated at up to 95% of total brain activity, greatly affect human behaviour and cognition (Mlodinow 2012: 34; Nerretranders 1991: 124-126). Although it is questionable that the intuitions of spe~ cific religious agents can ever be inferred from the reflective evidence (Goyer 2010: 380), the cognitive sciences can identify pan-haman cogni- tive biases with respect to populations of religious agents but also as a corrective restraint on the investigations of religious studies scholars themselves. “These evolutionary and cognitive defaults include a number of devel- copmentally early behavioural practices and mental figurations fre- quently associated either with "folk," as well as with scholarly, under- ‘Standings, and can offer explanations for their existence and historical perseverance. For example: Religious Agents ‘Aheightened intuitive detection of agency in the environment provides an evolutionary advantage for any organism, since it alerts that organ- ism to possible predatory threat as well as to propitious prey. As with an agentic bias for causal explanations generally, which, in some form or other, recur cross-culturally, reflective explanations for causation in historical and comparative studies often focus largely on assumptions about religious agents, for example, about the significance ~ even the existence of ~ founders, or about the influence of “charismatic” leaders. However, our capacity for identifying agency in the environment often results in false positives based on ambiguous evidence and uport mental presumptions where, as is the-case of religion, none exists. Cognitive scientists of religion have demonstrated that agentié claims that violate cognitively normal expectations about the world are highly memorable, Cross-cultural claims about ghosts, for example, conform to cognitive expectations about agents: they move, they speak, they have memories, etc however, they are also able to pass through solid objects in violation of normal expectation about agents. In addition to ghosts, such violations explain much about the way humans represent mumer- ‘ous superhuman agents, such as invisible friends, fairies, leprechauns, and, of course, gods, spirits, and demons. The identification of agent causality in the environment is, of course, a necessary aspect of “lived religion” (though not a sufficient one). ‘But insights from the cognitive sciences about agentic biases, which range from claims about the virgin birth of Augustus to, more interest ingly, claims of “charisma” as explanations for the leadership capabili- 38 Comparative and Historical Studies of Religions ties of religious figures, have been little considered by religious studies scholars. Such a consideration of reflexive assumptions about, agent- causality, whether actual or imaginary, can, however, contribute to scholarly efforts to explain otherwise puzzling human beliefs, sles and actions. ‘Social Agency : We have evolved as social creatures; consequently our. brains have evolved to engage our environment in social ways. Experimental evi- dence has shown that we have a developmentally early disposition for lunderstanding the mental states of social others in terms of intentional- ity ~ an evolutionary advantage for distinguishing between friend and foe. This “theory of mind," or “intentional tance" (Dennett 1987), under- lies such folk explanations forthe world as an intentional creation. But, while theory of mind provides significant insight into social relations in 4 shared context, itis questionable to what extent this understanding might extend to those in a non-shared context, such as from the past or from another country, apart from some theoretically informed, and, thus, corrective, frame such as evolutionary and cognitive theorizing, Secio-cultural Particulars and the Study of Religion ‘Although the identification of human universals by evolutionary and cognitive scientists might provide a baseline against which religious variation and diversity might better be measured and understood, his- torians and social-scientists have been most productive in their docu- mentation of the specifics of particular landscapes, historical and geo- graphical, and of the differences of these landscapes from one another. Landscapes Stanford archaeologist lan Morris has argued that it is geography which accounts for differential particulars between and among human socie- ties, For Morris, geography comprises such causes for hurman particu larities as the effects of climate change, famine, migration, and disease (Morris 2010: 29n), Morris, who tracks human differences from the Ice Ages, proposes four metrics for quantifying the ecological perturbations of geography: energy capture (e.., the generation and organization of physical energy, agriculture, wind, coal); urbanization (as a rough guide to the human capacity for social organization), information processing (je., the communication of knowledge); and the ability to make war (to control material resources or to secure a reproductive advantage) (Mor- ris 2010: 147-149). In the spirit of consilience, Morris contends that the human sciences require “the historian’s focus on context, the archaeol- ogist's awareness of the deep past, and the social scientist's comparative 39Luther H. Martin methods” (2010: 23~24)° Such a quantification of historical and cultural trends is currently being pioneered by those working with digitalized Big Data (Aiden and Michel 2013), but has only begun to be suggested as productive by religious studies scholars (e.g, Engler 2014). ‘Mindscapes Some scholars, with reference to the complexity and plasticity of brains, emphasize the influence of culture on cognition, from a reailocation of basic resources (e.g,, lactose toleration) to popular practices of “mind- fulness” (e.g., Pickert 2014) However, the fundamental weaknesses in such emphases on the influ- ence of culture ~ including religion - on cognition is a lack of specify- ing which specific cultural influences are being referenced, a neglect in identifying the specific mechanisms of thase influences on the brain, and hypotheses about such influences that are formulated in ways that are not subject to scientific control or testing, There are, however, some promising exceptions to over-emphases on the influence of culture on ‘cognition, Neurohistory ‘ne proposal that details mechanisms whereby culture influences cogei- tion isby Daniel Lord Smal. Like Morris, Smail proposes a"‘deep history” of Homo sapiens that would however, focus on our evolved biocognitive substrate. This history would trace the development of, changes in, and the effects of relationships, between various practices and behaviours that violate, manipulate, or modulate the evolved neurochemical sys- tems of our brains. As with metrics for geography, these mental per- turbations could be precisely measured against baseline brain functions to develop the possibility of what Smail calls a “neurohistory” of Homo sapiens (Smail 2008: 112-156). ‘As an example of such a neurohistory, Smail documents the exponen- tial increase in the range of psychotropics that became readily available and widely used in eighteenth-century England - for example: coffee, tea, sugar, chili peppers, chocolate, tobacco, fortified wine and spirits, opium and nitrous oxide. All of these substances reinforce or inhibit syn- apses and receptors and stimulate the production or reuptake of various neurochemicals- as do sports, novel reading, pornography, recreational sex, gossip, military training, and religious rituals - and, of course, all of these occasioned an economy that developed for their production and commerce (Smail 2008: 118). 3. By social scences, Morris emphasizes those academic areas "where biclogy and the social slences meet, especially demography and psychology” (2010: 27, n}. 40 Comparative and Historical Studies of Religions Such a neurohistorical perspective might question previous historio- graphical conclusions, such as, for example, the cause for the seculariza- tion characteristic of the eighteenth-century England. This secularizing trend, as measured by declining attendance at religious services, is con ventionally attributed to the rationalizing effects of the Enlightenment. However, cognitive scientists have shown that abstract concepts, stich as those articulated in Enlightenment philosophy, are unlikely to spread readily throughout a population, especially, in so short a time, Rather, this “secularization-effect” might better be explained as a turn away from participation in the austere religious rituals of the time as sources of gratifying chemical messengers and towards the newly available cor- nucopia of psychoiropies, which were, in any case, consumed in more convivial social contexts, such as coffee houses, restaurants, or even in the privacy of one’s boudoir (Martin 2014: 257-258). Cultural History Many scholars interested in the relationship of cognition and culture confuse the difference between biological adaptations to novel envi- ronments as a non-teleological consequence of natutal selection and learned adaptations, which are, of course, intentional functions. For ‘example, crows in an urban context, unlike birds and animals in the wild that normally avoid people, learn to disregard humans who avert their gaze but still scatter when approached by people who look at them. This experimentally established response by crows is a cognitively-complex safety adaptation to urban life. And, unlike biological adaptations that are transmitted genetically, the adaptive behaviour of the urban crows is learned from their cosmopolitan peers, and is passed on to their young over time (Clucas et al. 2013). Humans’ adaptions to harsh environmen- tal change, eg. discovering how to construct shelters and to sew warm clothing, or how to cope with new or shifting resource bases, are simi- larly learned adaptations to changing environments that are passed on to kith end kin, and are the stuff of cultural history, Religious rituals are one technology of learned adaptations, History of Religions Ritualized behaviour has been shown to be a universal practice whereby social environments are organized (Boyer and Lignard 2006). And as Smail has argued, rituals, religious and otherwise, modulate the evolved neurochemical systems of our brains in predictable ways. Such ritu- als as the initiation rites of the Graeco-Roman mystery cults not only exeinplify specific techniques for modulating the brain’s neurochemical systems but specific cognitive vulnerabilities for directed learned adap- aLuther H, Martin tations that their particular modulations produced (Martin 2005, 2006): Initiation into the Roman cult of Mithras, for example, involved “iearn ing” a “reduced” astrological mode! of the cosmos in face of a new, highly abstract, astronomical representation of the cosmos that was effectively incomprehensible to non-mathematicians ‘This more comprehensible Mithraic microcosm was represented in the architecture and astrologi cal imagery of every Mithraic temple or mithraeum. Through psych tropically induced and emotionally arousing rituals conducted in this specific Mithraic context, initiates, like the urban crows, acquired @ ‘cognitively-complex safety adaptation to a scientifically-innovative cos- mology that remained for ordinary folk a perplexing and frightening world (Martin 2014: 330-33). Such ritual behaviours are an object of study for a history of religions. Cognitive Constraints on Culture ‘These three specific examples of how culture might influence cognition exemplify the importance of understanding how biological factors pro- vide the preconditions for such human socio-cultural constructions as religions. While no one doubts the influence of the environment, includ- ing the cultural environment, on mental expressions, these influences are, as French cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene emphasizes, still necessarily processed by the evolved mechanisms of genetically constrained circuits (Dehaene 2009: 7) that define a mental “landscape of opportunities” for the production of culture (Dchaene 2014: 79). ‘And although Homo sapiens isthe only species that, to our knowledge, is capable of counter-evolutionary thinking, i., of reflective thought, “all learning,” Dehaene insists, nevertheless, “rests on rigid innate [mental] machinery” (Dehaene 2009: 142), "Cultural innovations,” he concludes, “can only be acquired insofar as they fit the constraints of our brain architecture” (Dehaene 2009: 146). The fundamental problem, as again framed by Julian Steward is that, we must understand "{jJust how these [mental] factors have imposed limits on the range of cultural variation, how they have channeled directions of the evolution of any culture and how they have interacted with cultural forms to give the latter special function and meaning” (Steward 1957; 210). Comparative and historical studies of religion would benefit from understanding the specific cul- tural channelings of those universal behavioural and mental factors that establish religious behaviour as being, in fact, a form of ordinary human behaviour and existence. 4. Although there is no connection, either historically or cognitively, between my ex- ample of crows fr leamed adaptations and Mithraic initiates, tis serencipitously the case that the first grade of Mithrae initiates was known as coax, "raven oF 2 ‘Comparative and Historical Studies of Religions Conclusion 1 do not suggest that possibilities for a “return of science” to compara- tive and historical studies of religion can, or should, usurp traditional methods of research. Rather, such a return can supplement and provide corroborations or:correctives to conclusions arrived at by traditional methodological tools. It can do so by offering another tool for purst- ing the explanatory and interpretive work of religious studies scholars with greater confidence than they might if working from intuitive inter- pretative biases or from folk theorizing. And it can do so by identify. ing and explaining data that have been produced by ordinary pracesses of human behaviour and cognition that have otherwise been neglected in favour of more accessible forms of public evidence that traditional scholars have come to privilege, such as texts. These theories can also explain how and why socially constructed institutions, such as the vari- ous religions, have been able efficiently to legitimate and successfully to transmit their particular agendas of behaviour or morality, of know!- edge or ideology. In addition to employing evolutionary and cognitive insights and mod- els in their work, historians and comparativists of religion can produc- tively participate in these scientific projects themselves, by assessing the “real-life” validity of evolutionary and cognitive models, After al, if the behavioural and cognitive defaults identified by evolutionary psycholo- gists and cognitive scientists under laboratory and experimental condi- tions are, in fact, panhuman proclivities; then their effects should be read- ily documented from the entire deep religious history of Homo sapiens. References Aiden, Fez, and Jean-Baptiste Michel. 2013. Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on uma Culture. New York: Riverside Books. Boyer, Pascal. 7003, “Religious Thought and Behaviour as By-products of Brain Function.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 1(3}: 119-124, htps//dx.doi org/t0.1016/51364-6613(03)00031-7. Boyer Pascal. 2020." Why Evolved Cognition Matters to Understanding Cultural Cognitive Variations.” Interdsciplinary Science Reviews 25(3-4): 376-226, (dx do\org/10.1179/030801810X1277214341040. Boyer, Pascal, and Pierre Lignard. 2006, “Why Ritualized Behavior? Precaution systems and Action Parsing in Developmental, Pathological and Cultural Rituals” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 29: 595-650, ‘Chagnon, Napoleon A. 2013, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes— the Yanomams and the Anehropologiss. New York: Simon & Schuster aLuther H. Martin lucas, B. J.M. Marzluff, B, Mackovjak and I, Palmquist, 2013. “American Crows. ‘and Human Gaze and Expressions” Ethology 119(4): 296-302. http:// stxcdoi.org/ 10.1111 /eth.12066. Darwin, Charles. 1872. Expression ofthe Emotions. London: John Murray. http:// 383-395. tsp://dscdoi. corg/10.1163/157430106779024644, 44 Comparative and Historical Studies of Religions ‘Martin, Luther H. 2014, “The Deep History of Religious Ritual.” In Secular Theory, Deep History: Scientific stds of Religion, Collected Essays of Luther Ht. Martin, 254-271, Berlin: de Gruyter Mlodinsi, Leonard. 2042, Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behav ‘or. New York: Pantheon Books. ‘Morris, la. 2010. Why the West Rules—For Now: The Peterhs of History and What they Reveal About the Future. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Miller, Friedrich Max, 1881 [1867]. "Essays on the Science of Religion” In Chips {rom a German Workshop, Vol. 2. New York: Charles Seefbner's Son Miller, Friedrich Max, 1893. traduction tothe Science of Religion. London: Longe tans, Green, and Co. (Original work published 1870) Norretranders, Tor. 1991, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Doin to Size. New York: Viking. Paden, William €, 2010, “The History of Religions and Evolutionary Models: ‘Some Reflections on Framing a Mediating Vocabulary In Chasing Down Religion: tn the Sights of History andthe Cognitive Sciences: Essays in Honor of Luther Matin, edited by P.Pachis and D. Wiebe, 337-350. Thessaloniki: Barbounakls Pickert, Kate, 2014. “The Art of Being Mindful” Time 183(4): 40-46, Pomper, Philip, and David Gary Shaw, eds, 2002. The Return of Science: Evolution, istry, and Theory, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. ‘smail, Dantel Lord. 2008, On Deep History and the Brain, Berkeley: University of California Press. Steward Julian H, 1957. “Problems of Cultural Evolution.” Evolution; international Journal of Organic Evolution 112: 206-210, Tiger, Lionel, and Robin Fox. 1966. “The Zoological Perspective in Social Set ence.” Man 1(1 75-81. http/éx.dok.ong/10.2807/2795902. Tooby, John. 2012, “Nexus Causality, Moral Warfare, and Misattibution Arbi- trage" In This will Make You Smarter ed. J. Brockman, 34-35, New York: Harper Perennial. Professor Emeritus Luther H. Martin, The University of Vermont, luther. martin@uvm.edu, 45The Historical and Comparative Study of Religions: A Rhetorical Approach Jorgen Podemann Sorensen When the University of Copenhagen appointed Edvard Lehmann as the first Danish chair in History of Religions, the Faculty of the Humanities described the new discipline as the historical and comparative study of religions.” At that time, in the year 1900, the Sorbonne in Paris already had a department, and in Holland, Amsterdam and Leiden had chairs in History of Religions, The idea of a comparative discipline that was to shed light on religions past and present was everywhere current, but the aimn and scope of comparative studies was by no means clear. For the sake of brevity, this modest contribution will anchor its arguments in the early discussions. In fact, the basic or matrix positions reproduced in later debates were well articulated in the years around 1900. From this point of departure ~ almost ex illo tempore - we shall suggest, in the form ofa brief sketch, a program for comparative studies of religion as a necessary complement to specific historical studies today. Phenomenology and French Sociologists 1m 1887, the Dutch theologian P.D. Chantepie de la Saussaye, the author of the first truly comprehensive scholarly textbook in History of Reli- gions, had invented the phenomenology of religion (1887-1888: 48-170) Te was @ 120 pages introduction to the historical chapters on specific 2, Om the early institutionaization and debate on comparative studies, cf, Sharpe 1975: 19-171 47Jargen Podemann Sorensen aveas-and religions. His pre-Husserlian idea of phenomenology was derived from Hegel's Phinomenologie des Geistes, but his introduction was largely a survey of basic, cross-culturally applicable, descriptive terms like nature-worship, gods, magic and divination, sacrifice, prayer, sacred texts, mythology, etc., of course with examples from a wide range of caltures and religions. On a more theoretical level, however, Chantepie saw the phenomenology of religion as closely connected to psychology since it deals with contents of the human consciousness, perhaps evel with its basic structures and dispositions. Ultimately, the forms of rel gion encountered in historical studies must, according to Chantepie, be understood as the result of a peculiar “relation” in the psychologi- cal constitution of man. While the nature of this “relation” is a matter for philosophy to explore, the phenomenology of religion must stick to description and classification of visible forms of religion (1887-1886: 48) ‘The idea of some deep, only indirectly accessible mental faculty or dis- position at the very foundation of religion, he shared not only with Max Miiller and his Leiden colleague C.P. Tiele} in Paris, A. Réville (1886: 34) had, in a very similar manner, defined religion as the determination of human life by the feeling of a union or bond with "the mysterious spirt.”: In fact, the long life of this idea, often connected with the designation “phenomenology of religion,” is well known. In 1929, it was among the positions taken by C.J. Bleeker (1929: 90), co-founder and later secretary general of the IAHR through 20 years, in the defence of his doctoral dis- sertation at the University of Leiden. Also Rudolf Otto and Mircea Eliade somehow situated their idea of the holy - or at least the capacity to con- ceive of one in the innermost homo religiosus. In more recent years, the idea has even achieved a prolonged life through the cognitive studies in religion, It is, however, not a good idea at all, arid it was in fact, albeit rather discretely, refuted already by Emile Durkheim (1898), In the early. days of our discipline, he might have had an easy task, for to found a new comparative study of religion by claiming the ultimate inaccessibility of its object was not the most promising project, But Durkheim based his argument on comparative insights: In view of the utter diversity of religious ideas around the world, one should not from the outset define religion by some preconceived idea of the content of religious life. Such an idea might be the result of comparative studies, but as part of a defi- nition from the very outset, it may possibly exclude significant data from consideration. Still ater more than a hundred years of compara- 3. The early Dutch phenomenology of religion is excellently surveyed and discussed, InJensen 2003: 73-102 4. For Otto's sensusnuminis, ef, Otto 1952 Eliade is perhaps less explicit on this point, but of. the instructive survey by Ti Jensen (1984) 48 The Historical and Comparative Study of Religions tive studies, this argument stands: a definition should not anticipate the kind of results to be expected from an investigation. And we might add that if the content of religious life - or its matrix ~ is situated in the very constitution of man, history of religions may, as pointed out by Ugo Bianchi, president of the IAHR 1990-95, find itself confined to discover- ies of the type “es spukt hier” (1961). , Durkheim's solution was to focus on religious practice, and in this way he settled on “sacred things” as an abstract and common denominator of what religious practice was about. The aim of religious practice could be viewed as accumulating sacredness in objects and persons, avoiding or seeking types of contact with sacred places, things, persons etc., or transferring sacredness between places, things, and persons. His idea of sacredness implied no peculiar religious ideas, only a relation of respect and care. The sacred would thus always need a group to keep it sacred and to transmit a set of mandatory ideas to support its sacred charac: ter, and on the other hand, it would imply rules of behaviour and si ranks and thus be at the very root of human society. This brilliant idea, which still today inspires studies of religion, situated the matrix relation not in the depths of the human mind, where Chantepie had imagined it (as an object of psychological and philosophical studies), but in society. ‘Theoretically, this root idea would position the Durkheimian approach very far frotn the early — and the later ~ phenomenologists. Except, in fact, Chantepie who had been wise enough to relegate the matrix rela- tion to philosophy. Although Durkheim and his followers wanted it to be more, sociology was in their day very much a branch of philosophy, although perhaps not exactly the branch imagined by Chantepie. And at least to Durkheim's two closest collaborators in the field of religion, Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, the comparative study of religious phenomena was not incompatible with the findings of Chantepie.? As a sequel to Durkheim’s refutation of Max Milller’s and A. Reville’s ideas of a mental facnlty as the matrix of religion, in the same volume of the Année Sociologique, they published their classic essay on sacrifice, the first modern, comparative study of a religious phenomenon, Like van Gennep's cate study of rites of passage, i i stil base to theorizing about ritual, Hubert and Mauss (1898) developed their scheme of sacrifice on the basis of extensive and meticulous comparative studies. Unlike their 1m bis important and excellent book on Hubert and Mauss’ theory of sacrifice, wan Strenski (2003: 160-163) deseribes thelr attitude not only to Tiel, but aso to Chantepie, ae very negative. As far as the later is concerned, this seems to me Jan exaggeration; there Is clear evidence that Hubert (1904: Vi, XVI) considered CChantepie serious contributor to the project of developing set of descriptive and analytical concepts for the new discipline. 49Jorgen Podemann Sorensen evolutionist predecessors who went for the primitive, they were very conscious that a general theory of sacrifice could not be based on eth- nographic data alone, but must also consider religions with a rich liter- ary tradition. In addition to current ethnographic materials, they were well versed in the religious literature of Vedic India and Judaism as well as in the sources for the study of Greek and Roman religion, Through comparative analysis of examples from these fields, Hubert and Mauss ‘managed to establish a general model for the description of sacrifice as a ritual that accumulates sacredness in a victim or sacrificial material and then transfers the sacred qualities to the sacrifiant or sponsor of the sac- rifice - or to the object of the ritual, e.g. the harvest or the cattle. What they did was very different from the way in which a historian exam- ines the extant sources and argues e.g that Philip of Macedon did in fact mistreat his queen or that the causes of a civil war were both religious and economic, And unlike their predecessors, they were fully aware of this; Robertson Smith and Frazer were also somehow aware of the gen- eral importance of their work, but they never completely gave up the role as historians tracing the savage origins of Jewish or Roman religion. Hubert and Mauss were aware that their examination of source material served to establish a theory or an analytical model and to demonstrate its cross-cultural applicability. Intheiressay on sacrifice, they used the Durkheimian idea ofthe sacred, and in as far as this idea implied a society or at least some structured col lective, their study was sociological in scope, But otherwise there are no references to the structure of societies as a context for sacrifice, and no study of concomitant variation of social setting and sacrificial ritual, The relation with society is a general one, defined only on a very high level of abstraction. The great innovation in their essay on sacrifice was not sociology in the modern sense, but the comparative, synchronic study of single religious phenomena. The aim of such comparative studies was, according to Hubert and Mauss, to establish general concepts and theo= ries and a scholarly terminology in the novel discipline called History of Religions. They did not imagine that the debate on concepts and termi- nology should continue for more than a hundred years; but this is what we know now. Hubert and Mauss may thus be considered the true founders of the synchronic comparative study of religions. They do, of course, share the honour with the early phenomenologists, but they were the first to con- duct explicitly comparative studies of single religious phenomena with the clear objective of establishing cross-culturally applicable analytical ‘The Importance of developing analytical and descriptive concepts aad a scholarly terminology was a vital concorn in thelr early works: cf Hubert and Mauss 1902: 1-2 (-Maus 1983: 138-139) and Hubert 1908: YI. 50 The Historical and Comparative Study of Religions tools and categories. Their approach as well as their theoretical founda- tion is still compatible with contemporary scholarly ideals, except, per- haps for the general Durkheimian theory of religion implied in the use of the idea of the sacred. This theory is still acknowledged as seminal, perhaps even as valid on a certain level of abstraction, but at least as it ‘was developed in Durkheim's main work, Les formes¢lementaires de la vie réligieuse (1912) it does consider the religion of a very stable and homog- enous society and cannot easily handle religious pluralism, conflict, and change, Even its foremost promoter in Britain, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, had to admit that when different churches or religious groups occur, “the relation of religion to the total social structure is in many respects indirect and not always easy to trace.” (1969: 177). Asis well known, later developments in anthropology and sociology have made it clear that the Durkheintian vision of religion and society can no longer count as a gen- eral sociological theory of religion. It is worth noticing, however, that the shortcomings of Durkheimian theory that have been shown do not seriously affect the early work of Hubert and Mauss. They shared Durkheim's vision of religion and soci- ety and certainly wanted to contribute to the elaboration af his theory, but they did not link their general scheme of sacrifice to social structure. Therefore, their work isin fact applicable not only to traditional culture, but also to sacrifice in rival churches and religious movements or in the context of a strategy towards religious and social hegemony. The idea of the sacred did, of course, link their scheme of sacrifice to society, but only in the most general way. The sacredness administered in their scheme might in fact be the postulate of some alternative move ment or apostate group or even express the aspirations of an individual. Of the latter, there is an excellent example in the Landnamabsk, the Old Norse story of the settlers of Iceland. One of them was Thorolf Moster- skegge,’ “a great blétmadr,” i.e, renowned for his rich sacrifices. Like many others, he had left Norway and the violent régime of king Harald Haarfager with his family and household in order to start a completely new life in Iceland, a north Atlantic island till recently unpopulated, ‘more than 1000 kn from his home. He brought with him his god, Thor, and the pillars of his own chief- tain seat, in which the image of Thor was carved. On approaching land, he threw the pillars overboard, and where they first reached land, he had decided to settle and also to name the land after Thor and keep it sacred, The geographical frame of his future life ~ his promised land, as it were ~ was thus pointed out to him in an act of divination. The pillars reached land at a peninsula still called Thorsnes. Thorolf settled 7, Landnamabsk 1900: 31-92 (Hausb5k e. 73); English ts. Paleson 2006: 45 51Jorgen Podemann Sorensen there and builta shrine for his god. A small mountain on the peninsula is still called Helgafjell (Sacred mountain); Thorolf considered it so sacred, that nobody was allowed even to look in that direction without being ritually purified, and it was his belief that the mouritain should be their abode after death, Also the whole area on the peninsula was to be kept sacred, It was the place of the thing, the formal gathering for decisions and lawsuits, and during the negotiations, nobody was alowed to relieve nature on the peninsula, but people had to withdraw to an offshore rock to relieve themselves to avoid polluting the area sacred to Thor. When ‘Thorolf died, however, and his son was still very young, there were peo- ple who refused to observe this rule. This started a feud; some men were killed and many wounded, and the area, polluted by bloodshed, could no longer be used for the thing. The story is a beautiful illustration of the sacted as a relational cat- egory at the very root of society, It takes us into a small scale, traditional society, where an observant attitude to the sacred is also an acknowl- edgement of the leader and the basic institutions. There is no descrip- tion of how sacrifice was practiced, but it seems safe to imagine, that Thorolf’s regular sacrifices to Thor would also transfer sacred qualities to him and in this way renew the authority by which he enforced the rules of dealing with the sacred and thus secured the acknowledgement of his leadership and the institutions of his little society. But at the same time, this small scale, traditional society is the novel religious vision of one man, designed according to tradition, but extempore imposed on the new surroundings as Thorolf’s strategy towards a stable community with himself as leader. The sacrificial scheme of Hubert and Mauss ~ and, on the whole, the Durkheimian idea of the sacred - would work perfectly in these new surroundings, even as part of a strategy: But the story also teaches us that religious authority and sacred observance may corrode and leave the field to more elementary forces. By imposing sacredness and cor- responding observances on others one may, under some circumstances, obtain stable rule or hegemony, but this does not always happen. All the expressions of the sacred, the rituals, the sacred places, the pfous obser- vances, etc, are rhetorical options that may or may not convince others. Religious claims are sometimes ridiculed, while on other occasions they commit people to the cause they plead or agitate, or to the hegemony they somehow denote. Religion is not in itself a mysterious social force ora deep motivation built into the human mind, This is an idea favoured by religious traditions and lay prejudice alike, but the historian should understand, as accurately as possible, the anatomy of the rhetoric that gained influence as well as the particular situation or the particular circumstances that accommodated that influence. What the historian 52 The Historical and Comparative Study of Religions needs, then, isto be well versed in the many different ways in which reli- lous expressions stage religious authority, i, in the rhetorical options that; make up religion. In order to handle these options, he needs a set of analytical concepts and, on the whole, a scholarly terminology. This was in fact what Hubert and Mauss set out to develop in their early compara~ tive works, By establishing the sacred as the centra} term, they implied only at the most general level that the rhetorical options involved in eg, sacrifice might have a social impact or support a social structure. In each historical case, the impact or the social structure supported should of course be described in detail, but the comparative perspective was about rhetoric. ‘The perspective of the early ~ and the later - phenomenologists was different and rather more pretentious. They somehow believed that it ‘was possible to learn something about the religious depths of the human mind through comparative studies. All studies in the humanities will of course contribute to our understanding of the human mind, but this per- spective is obviously too broad to be the basis of a scholarly discipline. And it is hardly a solution to limit the perspective to certain unknown depths of the human mind. A slightly different perspective, found in some of the later phenom- enologists, is that of religious experience. G. van der Leeuw (1970: 785) insisted that phenomenology was not a kind of psychology, but an inde- pendent discipline dealing with religious experience. Religion was to him ““Grenzerlebnis” (1970: 782), a border experience, probably to be understood as an experience about to transcend the everyday human condition. Experience, although it involves human subjectivity, is not necessarily a psychological concept, and both Durkheim (e.g. 1925: 547) and Lehmann’s successor in Copenhagen, Vilhelm Granbech (e.g, 1915: 8), considered collective experience to be at the very root of religion. They were undoubtedly right, and who would deny experience, individ- valor collective, a role in religious creativity. But it remained a very gen- eral idea, perhaps a framework behind analytical concepts, but certainly not an analytical tool in itself, Although van der Leeuw was convinced that religious expressions somehow codified religious experiences, he never explicitly followed a course of reconstruction from the religious expression back to the experience behind it. But it was his general idea that his analytical work contributed towards some such reconstruction. A Rhetorical Approach Similar general ideas have guided several later comparative studies. Although innocent in themselves, they tend to turn religious expres- sions - texts, images, performances - into source material for the study of religious experience or some analogous, imagined, core of religion, 53Jorgen Podemann Sorensen But texts, images, and performances are used in religious practice, and as source material, they bear witness, in the first place, to the practice which is their Sitz im Leben. itis true that they articulate cosmology and religious ideas, but sometimes as improvised as those of Thorolf Moster- skegge and always adapted to the practice, of which they are part. For teaching purposes, I sometimes use an eighteenth-century evening prayer of a Danish country gir! as an example. Alter spitting, she directly addresses the dangers that might possibly threaten her: “Avaunt, O Devil and ye 7 evil spirits: Lucifer and Salapax, Clapperhead and Drip-ass, Smoke-bum and Shitaround .." (DT 1070a, cf Ohrt 1917-1921: 476-477). While the first mame and perhaps the second are traditional lore, the last three were definitely not taught her in the Sunday school. They are not even beings imagined, but rather names to be invoked for this particular purpose: addressing and averting the dangers that might threaten the girl. What the prayer illustrates is that both traditional and improvised motifs are articulated as part of a religious practice. A more productive approach to religious expressions, then, would be to study them as a rhetoric that supports or in itself constitutes a practice. ‘As to the aim and scope of comparative studies, we have thus settled very much on the position of Hubert and Mauss: Comparative studies of religious phenomena serve to establish cross-culturally applicable descriptive and analytical concepts and categories. Our considerations have, however, lead us to replace their Durkheimian idea of the sacred as a root concept with the more open idea that religious expressions are thetorical options, ways of staging authority, ritual efficacy, etc, Com- parative studies may thus, without postulating a universal inventory of religion, establish types of rhetorical options that will be useful in his torical studies of religion at given times and places. For the historian, we must remember, should understand both the anatomy of a rhetoric that gained influence and the circumstances that accommodated it. With the idea of rhetorical options we are able, on a comparative basis, to develop more detailed models for the analysis of religious expressions. For the sake of brevity, we shall limit ourselves largely to religious texts, but suggest that analogous reasoning will be possible about images and performances. Very basic to rhetoric is text linguistics, the discipline that deals with the constituents of texts. all such constituents are, of course, relevant to the analysis of any text, but one is of special rele- vance in dealing with religious texts: the situationality, ie., the adap- ‘3. The discipline i often divided into text grammar and text pragmatics cf. Dressler 1973, updated in de Beaugrande and Dressler 2002, My considerations of situation- ality in what (ollows may be taken as belonging to pragmatics; i important to notice, however, that we are dealing with the linguist representation of situation Inroligious texts. 54 The Historical and Comparative Study of Religions tation to a certain situation in the wording of a text. We have always known that texts are adapted to situations of use, but an the other hand itmeans thata text will, usually in its wording, presuppose or dramatize a situation, Ifa text isheld in the second person, it presupposes and thus dramatizes a situation of communication. In this way, prayer dramatizes communication with an invisible or remote addressee, or a spell may dramatize a situation in command of nature, in both cases, highly privi- leged situations of speech are implicitly postulated, and in this way rit- ual efficacy is staged. Usually, the implicit postulates are extended and elaborated, and most religious traditions have a rich repertoire of motifs that may be used for such elaborations. ‘There is a point in thus descending to the very foundation of religious rhetoric or the level of textual linguistics: Earlier comparative stud- jes were very much studies of beliefs and religious ideas and therefore tended to understand all motifs involved in religious practice as beliefs and even the practice itself as implying beliefs, e.g. in the extraordinary hearing of God in his heaven. By considering the motifs not as beliefs, but as elaborations of the basic situationality of the texts we shall, I believe, be less exposed to absurdities and better equipped to understand the anatomy of a given religious rhetoric. On the whole, religious texts are full of implicit postulates that stage their authority. Myths and eschatologies are narratives implying a very privileged knowledge. What they are able to tell about the first begin- rings or the latter days stages the world-view and the teachings they expose as very fundamental or even urgent. And once again, there is a point in starting at the level of textual situationality and implicit postu- lates, Earlier studies have usually considered beginnings as the subject matter of myth and the latter days as the subject matter of eschatology. We should not, of course, exclude @ healthy amount of scholarly curi- osity in myth-tellers and eschatologists, But the rhetorical approach, which starts with situationality and considers the mythical and eschato- logical motifs an elaboration of that situationality, is able aso to identify the message, as it were, of the narrative: its world-view or the ethical rules it prescribes, As is well known, mythical motifs may also be part of ritual perfor- marice and thus situate the whole performance as primeval, as a re- enactment of foundational events, Other ritual performances dramatize that their object is in a state of only preliminary existence, susceptible to whatever change or renewal the ritual may inflict on it. In both cases, the situationality of the performance stages the ritual efficacy and the authority of the act.’ 9. Examples ofthis approach to ritual: cf. Podemann Sorensen 2003 and 2012 55Jorgen Podemann Sorensen Religious images have multiple Functions and are not linguistic signs. But they are part of religious rhetoric; the addressee of a prayer or the mythical motifs re-enacted in ritual may be represented by an image. Broadly speaking, images of gods and mythical beings will probably always have a share in what Jean-Pierre Vernant (1992: 151) saw as the original function of images in ancient Greece, that of “the ‘presentifica- tion’ of the invisible” ~ and in this way they will contribute to the situe ationality of performances. Conclusion. ‘Along the lines briefly sketched here, itis possible in scholarly research and education to conduct comparative studies of religious expressions with the aim of developing analytical and descriptive categories and concepts. Earlier dominant approaches, “phenomenological” and Dur- kheimian, have considered religious expressions very much as source material for the study of the roots of society and religious beliefs. We have argued that the comparative study of religious expressions - texts, images, and performances ~ should not be fettered in preconceived ideas of the social or psychological role of each type of expression, Not every doomsday prophet becomes a leader, spells and prayers are not fully understood as remedies against anxiety, and, had it not been for Thorolf, people might fail to observe the sanctity of Thorsnes. Religious expressions should be compared in order to establish types of rhetoric, and this is in fact what is done in the first modern comparative study of a religious phenomenon, Hubert and Mauss’ essay on sacrifice, In prin Ciple, their use of the concept of the sacred inscribes their analysis in Durkheitnian theory, but in actual fact it characterizes their sacrificial scheme as a type of rhetoric with potential social impact. ‘Once the rhetorical nature of the comparative study of religion is real- ized and acknowledged, immense possibilities open up. Religious motifs inthe broadest sense, including gods, demons, spirits, cosmos and chaos, the beginning and the end of the world, may now be viewed not as the subject matter of religion, but as means to establish religious expres- sions - and the historian of religions no longer has to act as a theologian onbehalf of others, but may safely proceed as a student of the rhetorical anatomy of religious expressions. 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