The History of Religions in Retrospect: 1912–1962

HE year 1912 was a significant date in the history of the scientific study of religion. smile Durkheim published his Formes elmentaires de la vie religieuse and Wilhelm Schmidt finished the first volume of his monumental work, Ursprung der Gottesidee, which was to be completed only after forty years, with Vols. XI and XII appearing posthumously in 1954-55. Also in 1912, Raffaele Pettazzoni brought out his first important monograph, La religione primitiva in Sardegna, and C. G. Jung his Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido. Sigmund Freud was correcting the proofs of Totem und Tabu, to be issued in book form the following year. Four different approaches to the study of religion-none really new-were illustrated by these works: the sociological, the ethnological, the psychological, and the historical. The only new approach potentially, that of the phenomenology of religion, was not to be attempted for another ten years. But Freud, Jung, Durkheim and Wilhelm Schmidt did apply new methods and claimed to have obtained more enduring results than their predecessors. Significantly enough, with the exception of Pettazzoni, none of these men was a historian of religion. Nevertheless, their theories were to play a considerable role in the cultural life of the following decades. Though very few historians of religion have been exclusively dependent on them, Freud, Jung, Durkheim, and Schmidt, and especially the first two, have contributed highly to the Zeitgeist of the last generations and their interpretations of religion still enjoy a certain prestige among no pecialists. In the course of elaborating their hypothees, all these authors were reacting, positively r negatively, to their immediate predecessors or contemporaries. Around 1910-12, the German astral-mythological and pan-Babylonian schools were declining. From a rather abundant production,' only P. Ehrenre ch's Die allgemeine Mythologie und ih e ethnologischen Grundlagen (1910) an A. Jeremias' Handbuch der altorientalischen Geisteskultur (1913; 2nd ed., 1929) r tained a certain value for the ensuing generations of scholars. The most important contributio s to the history of religions appear ng in Germany between 1900 and 1912 depended, directly or indirectly, on E. B. Tylor's theory of animism.2 But, as against the situation for the previous thirty years, this theory was no longer universally accepted. In 1900, R. R. Marett published his "Preanimistic Religion," an article destined to b come famous, in which he tried to prove that the first stage of religion was not a universal belief in souls, but an emotion of awe and wonder aroused by the encounter with an impersonal power (mana).a A large number of scholars accepted and elaborated this theory. Mana (or orenda, wakan, and the like) became almost a cliche, and, in spite of criticism by competent ethnologists,4 it is still believed in many scientific circles to represent the primordial stage of religion. Another very popular pre-animistic hypothesis was brought forward by J. G. Frazer in his famous Golden Bough (2nd MIRCEA ELIADE, the celebrated historian and theorist, is Chairman of the Department of the History of Religions, University of Chicago, and co-editor, with Joseph M. Kitagawa and Charles H. Long, of the recently-initiated journal, History of Religions.