“In the beginning God…”

“As every enquiry which regards religion is of the utmost importance, there are two questions in particular which challenge our attention, to wit, that concerning its foundation in reason, and that concerning its origin in human nature.”

—DAVID HUME.

In the beginning… Power? …Spirit? …Gods? …God of the gods? …God? The opening sentence of the Judeo-Christian scriptures affirms the latter, original monotheism; the recognition and worship of one God: “In the beginning God…” (Gen. 1:1). However, modern studies in the anthropology and history of religion have suggested just the opposite: monotheism is the final stage in the evolution of religion. This determination has led many to dehistoricise the Bible. But are they justified in doing so? Just what is the evidence for either ‘final monotheism’ or ‘original monotheism’?

To my surprise, the thesis of final monotheism goes more or less unchallenged nowadays, including, even, by those in the apologetic community. My own personal interest was aroused when I studied the subject under one of the few (if not the only) evangelical scholars that I know of to have published on the subject, Winfried Corduan. His book, In the Beginning God: A Fresh Look at the Case for Original Monotheism (2013), is a fascinating exploration in the evidence for original monotheism, mining gems from religion, language and culture with scholarly attention to detail. It also lends itself as an appraisal of the oft-overlooked monumental 12-volume study conducted by Wilhelm Schmidt (1868-1954): The Origin of the Idea of God (Der Ursprung der Gottesidee), which remained incomplete at the time of Schmidt’s death.

The works of Corduan and Schmidt are truly unique and sorely needed in apologetic presentations today. I am not an expert in the subject of religious anthropology; my purpose here is to provide something of a modest introduction to the area, highlighting some of the largely unquestioned assumptions – presuppositions, predispositions and a priori prejudices – guiding modern studies in the anthropology and history of religion.

The Naturalistic Evolutionary Model of Religion

“A good story is worth telling well, and to tell it well, one may have to bring in a lot of detailed information, even if we would prefer to get to the action right away. This is one of those stories where many details are inevitable.”¹

For the naturalist subscribing to evolutionary theory (by natural selection and random mutation from common descent), it remains an irritating record of history that there has never been a time or place where people have not had some sort of innate proclivity towards the supernatural. According to Charles Darwin (1809-1882), this is more or less a natural phenomenon: “As soon as the important faculties of the imagination, wonder, and curiosity, together with some power of reasoning, had become partially developed, man would naturally crave to understand what was passing around him, and would have vaguely speculated on his own existence.”² In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Darwin’s biological view was applied across the disciplinary spectrum, with new models of human history, including the origins and course of religion. The resulting picture typically looks something like the following:

From the bottom up, Figure 1 depicts a progression beginning at a primitive level characterized by very low complexity known as mana, a proto-Oceanic Polynesian term which connotes a basic feeling or vague awareness of an impersonal transcendent force. Over time it is understood humans began to personify this feeling by attributing it to different entities, whether inanimate objects, plants, or other natural phenomena, in an expression which came to be known as animism (anima; “soul”). According to the naturalistic evolutionary model, there was something of a qualitative transition following the animism stage where humans moved from venerating figment spirits in an animistic sense to worshipping a vast array of specific deity’s superior to themselves in what came to be known as polytheism. Next, from polytheism came henotheism, the isolated worship of one specific god amongst the many gods, before the final stage (to date) arrived on the historical stage of humanity, monotheism: the recognition of a single supreme being worthy of sole worship, though not to the preclusion of other spirits, such as angels and demons. “According to the [evolutionary] hypothesis”, write Corduan, “monotheism was first attempted by the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV), who attempted to substitute for the previously held polytheism the exclusive worship of Aten.”⁴ Whether there remains a further stage beyond monotheism is disputed. Some contend that it is the culmination of religious evolution, while others, such as the American philosopher John Dewey (1859-1952), have advocated a higher stage of secular humanism devoid of supernatural elements.⁵

Today, this naturalistic evolutionary model goes largely uncontested. Yet, as academics across the various domains of cognitive science have expounded evolutionism, there has been a progressive move away from viewing the quest of religious origins as a historical exercise, i.e., a search within an objective space-time narrative, toward the view that it is a matter of phenomenological speculation; a subjective description of the human psyche realized through a combination of pragmatic (e.g., functionalism) and psychological (e.g., structuralism) methods. For example, psychologist Justin Barrett of Oxford University has suggested that “there are functional properties of our cognitive systems that lean toward a belief in supernatural agents, to something like a god.”⁶ The late Stephen Jay Gould of Harvard University, together with his colleague Richard Lewontin, goes even further suggesting that religion is like a “spandrel”, that is, an architectural void which forms as a result of adjoining arches or frames like the triangular space underneath a staircase. While spandrels can be transformed into something of value (e.g., one could place a door underneath the staircase to transform the spandrel into a functional storage space), any such value or ‘use’ would be considered independent of the staircase, as an unintended by-product of the staircase form.

On the naturalistic evolutionary model, religion is something like a spandrel: the cognitive by-product of physical brain matter abstracting from human sense data. In the words of Robin Marantz Henig, “Natural selection, made the human brain big, but most of our mental properties and potentials may be spandrels—that is, non-adaptive side consequences of building a device with such structural complexity.”⁷ Thus, while we may dispute whether religion constitutes an important aspect of human nature, such as how it relates to feelings, thoughts, symbols and so on, what is not in dispute, for those subscribing to the naturalistic evolutionary model, is whether religion is a spandrel of naturalistic evolution. As American philosopher and popular atheist Daniel Dennett writes: “Religion is natural as opposed to supernatural, it is a human phenomenon composed of events, organisms, objects, structures, patterns, and the like that all obey the laws of physics or biology, and hence do not involve miracles.”⁸

Questioning the Status Quo

In support of theories such as that depicted in Figure 1, archaeologists have also stressed the sociological component of religion by focusing their research on the links between ancient religions and symbolic behaviours. For example, archaeologist Colin Renfrew of the University of Cambridge has written that “Religion is a particular form of a larger, social symbolic behaviour.”⁹ Nevertheless, it seems to me that there is a wide gap between the theoretical models of the cognitive sciences and the material records of archaeology given the difficulties which lie at the interdisciplinary intersections of each. For example, what is the irreducibly rational justification for relating, say, what appears to be enigmatic scribbles on a chunk of ochre to a particular belief system? What reason is there to maintain that such symbols serve as a prerequisite for religion? Is it really possible to discern or decode hidden religious messages from ancient burial sites? Couldn’t there be any number of reasons why someone buries something? (Just take a look in a preschool sandbox!) Furthermore, it is not clear to me why we should assume that material development and religious culture are co-relative? Isn’t it possible that a particular culture may have materially regressed as a result of, warfare, epidemics, or natural crises? And further still, what reason do we have to assume a direct correlation of moral and intellectual superiority between different cultures upon the basis that one, for example, uses pottery and the other plastic bottles? “To put it simply,” writes Corduan, “there seems to be a pattern among archaeologists to designate an artefact as a ritual instrument if they cannot identify any other practical function for it.”¹⁰

I think what these probing questions highlight is the way the naturalistic evolutionary model interprets the data to fit within its parameters. And of course, this only begs the question such that when the likes of Dennett say that “religion is natural” we may well respond: ‘how do you know?’ If the answer is ‘naturalistic evolution’ then we need only point out the obvious: if religion is considered a subject of naturalistic evolution, then of course it will be a naturalised. But it seems to me that is entirely circular. The real question needs to be: what are the reasons supporting the naturalisation of religion?

By questioning the status quo, we can begin to reveal the extent to which thinkers have allowed their assumptions to inform their scholarship. We see this most clearly in the kind of misdirection employed by American-Japanese scholar of Chicago Divinity School, the late Joseph M. Kitagawa (1915-1992), who confidently asserts: “the origin of religion is not a historical question; ultimately it is a metaphysical one.”¹¹ But how can this be? Is not a question of origins, by definition, historical? Kitagawa effectively side-steps the issue by repackaging the question as a ‘what’ question of metaphysics rather than a ‘when’ question of history.

In any case, even if it were true that evolution accounted for the biology of human life – which is quite a separate topic to the one I am pursuing here – it seems to me that, that is no inherent reason to suppose that it likewise accounts for religion. There are many theistic-evolutionists after all. And indeed, if the social Darwinism of Hitler’s Mein Kampf has revealed anything of value, it is the disturbing and extreme ends to which the depravity of mankind can be taken upon the whim of a methodological category mistake.¹²

It seems that the impetus behind the push to move the question of religious origins away from history towards the metaphysical is a consequence of seeking out purely natural explanations for the origin and characteristics of religion. Yet the resultant confusion of this approach is only too apparent. Consider another example, that of the Romanian historian of religion and colleague of Kitagawa, Mircea Eliade (1907-1986). On the one hand Eliade offers a theory regarding how religion may have originated given “the religious significance of the sky… above man’s reach… [which] ‘symbolizes’ transcendence, power and changelessness simply by being there.”¹³ Yet, on the other he suggests in no uncertain terms that “after more than a century of untiring labour, scholars were forced to renounce the old dream of grasping the origin of religion with the aid of historical tools, and they devoted themselves to the study of different phases and aspects of religious life.”¹⁴ So which is it? Are we to take Eliade’s sky theory – what he called hierophanies, literally ‘manifestations of the Holy’ – or is that merely an “old dream?” However one takes it, it remains that phenomenology (a subjective description) and history (an objective narrative) are two very different categories of enquiry.

I think it is also important to highlight that, simultaneous to the advancement of the naturalistic evolution of religion, was the progressive desupernaturalisation of the Bible by higher textual critics. After all, if monotheism could be shown as a later development and primitive religion as some sort of early, intellectual aberration or psychological mirage in biological evolution, then the Scriptural account of original monotheism could be legitimately dismissed. One such example is the German higher textual critic, Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976), who wrote in Kerygma and Myth: “it is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles.”¹⁵ And like Eliade’s anthropology, negative Biblical criticism of this sort is not without its problems. Consider, for example, the contemporary New Testament textual critic and outspoken agnostic, Bart Ehrman, who on the one hand has argued tirelessly that there is insufficient evidence from the extant New Testament manuscripts to adduce the original wording of the autographic text, while on the other he insists that there is sufficient evidence to postulate “the Orthodox Corruption of Scripture.”¹⁶ How can Ehrman claim “corruption” without giving assent to some awareness of the incorruptible standard of the original?

To my mind, all of this goes to show the extent to which scholarly conclusions are framed by the assumptions of their premises. While metaphysical or phenomenological considerations may play a part in helping us to understand the nature of religion and religious experience(s), they do not address the historicity of religious origins as such. As Corduan argues, “Even if human beings carry an abstract representation of God in their subconscious minds, we cannot conclude on that basis that there is no independently existing objective being that is God.”¹⁷

In short: a historical question deserves a historical answer, even if that be the demonstration of its fundamentally a-historical nature, which I would think the naturalist would want to show. Anything short merely side-steps the issue leaving the question in want for an answer.

Towards a Case for Original Monotheism

I do not dispute that each stage presented in Figure 1 are real expressions of religious commitments. What I am disputing is the sequencing of each stage. Beginning with the question of the earliest, anthropologist E. B. Tylor (1832-1917) has argued that animism rather than mana was the earliest stage, having being “devised by human reason, without supernatural aid or revelation; in other words, as being developments of Natural Religion.”¹⁸

Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

Tylor’s disciple, Andrew Lang (1844-1912), steered a decidedly different course to his teacher. Lang set to task by examining the records of travelling scholars who meticulously documented their observations of various cultures and came to find that, unlike the naturalistic evolutionary model, the verifiable records of some of the least developed cultures documented by these travellers, did indeed contain elements of monotheism comparable to that of Jehovah, the God of the Bible.¹⁹ Of particular interest to Lang were the records of A. W. Howitt (1830-1908), who documented his travels throughout South-eastern Australia. Howitt observed that the Australian Aboriginals did, in their relative tribal ways, recognize and worship a single supreme being who they frequently referred to as “Father.” While Lang conceded that he was unable to definitively secure whether in fact religion evolved from animism or monotheism first, he nevertheless concluded section one of his 1898 publication, The Making of Religion, writing: “while the actuality of the supernormal facts and faculties remains at least an open question, the prevalent theory of Materialism cannot be admitted as dogmatically certain in its present shape.”²⁰

Wilhelm Schmidt (1868-1954)

Building upon the findings of Lang was the Austrian linguist, anthropologist and ethnologist, Wilhelm Schmidt (1868-1954). As a practicing Catholic he took the Biblical record of early monotheism seriously. Nonetheless, as the founder of the Anthropos Institute in Vienna, his career was distinguished by contributions to the field of anthropology and the determination that the ethnographic and linguistic data cohered best with a theory of original monotheism.²¹

Schmidt formed a part of the culture-historical school, also known as the Vienna School, which distinguished itself from other anthropological schools by denying “the idea that human cultures progress according to fundamental laws of development, as theorized by Tylor, Frazer, and Morgan. Instead, they claimed that the story of nonliterate people is ultimately not dissimilar from the story of literate people, except that they left no written records.”²² Building upon Lang’s investigations concerning the religions of primitive (pre-literate) peoples, as well as Robert Fritz Graebner’s (1877-1934) methodological principles of culture-historical ethnology,²³ Schmidt devised a sophisticated set of criteria attempting to identify a chronological sequence among prehistorical cultures. Schmidt’s presentation of his methodology occupies some 400 pages alone, and applied to cultures worldwide in a further 11,000 pages across 12 volumes entitled “The Origin of the Idea of God” (Ger. Der Ursprung der Gottesidee, which remained unfinished at his point of death). However, it has been helpfully summarised Henryk Zimoń in a journal article entitled Wilhelm Schmidt’s Theory of Primitive Monotheism and Its Critique within the Vienna School of Ethnology (1986). According to Zimoń, the purpose of Schmidt’s culture-historical ethnology is:

1. To establish by means of form and quantity criteria (by comparing cultural similarities) mutual relations and linkage of cultural elements in space which enable to recognize culture circles (Kulturkreise);
2. To establish by means of specified temporal indices (resultant from spatial location, contact, merging, intersection, overlaying, and the direction of translocation of larger cultural complexes and whole culture circles) temporal sequence of cultural phenomena, and, in effect based on that procedure, to establish the so-called culture strata (Kulturschichten);
3. To explain the internal and external causes of the development of culture; and
4. To investigate the problem of the origin of the particular constituent elements of culture, e.g., tools, institutions, family, state, religion.²⁴

To illustrate Schmidt’s method, Corduan offers two helpful examples. The first is a simple yet effective thought experiment:

“Let us begin by assuming that there are four adjoining cultures, each of which tells a slightly different version of a story. Let us label them A through D:

… All other things being equal, which culture is most likely to have originated that myth? A possible answer is found by looking for the culture that has the most in common with the other three, and that, therefore, is most likely the one that has the fewest innovations. We notice that each of the versions differs by exactly one detail, but there is one that has all of the details that are dispersed over the others, namely B. Thus, it makes sense to infer that B is the original, and that A, C, and D represent variations on C. Assuming one culture of origin and a direct link between it and the receptor cultures, if any of the other three cultures were the source, the transmission would have had to undergo two modifications in two of them, one of which would have been the identical change, occurring independently. This is not impossible, but the probabilities against it are much higher.

The second example Corduan offers helps to illustrate Schmidt’s method relates to the history of humanity and its long story of innumerable migrations. For the sake of the argument, suppose there is a geographical area occupied by two different tribes, A and B, and that part of the territory occupied by A bisects the territory of tribe B in the following manner:

With respect to Figure 2 – and keeping in mind that culture A has numerous cultural forms (e.g., parts of artefacts which do not conform to their functions, such as pottery decoration, curved ends of hunting bows, etc.) that are lacking in B, and for which B has no counterpart – Corduan writes:

“It is a safe assumption that one tribe migrated into the area ahead of the other one. If A arrived earlier, then B would presumably have appeared as a unified tribe, but then split up and settled on the two sides of A’s unusually narrow extension. The previously unencumbered existence of this extension would be rather unusual since B’s settlement demonstrates that both adjoining sides are capable of sustaining life. On the other hand, if B had settled there earlier, it would have existed as a geographically unified tribe for a time until it was divided by A’s invasion, a far more common occurrence. Already it would appear that the latter option is more likely, but let us propose some further data to support the conclusion.

Suppose that culture A has many more cultural “forms” than culture B. By forms Schmidt meant parts of objects that do not contribute directly to their pure function, such as decorations on pottery, curved ends of hunting bows or special designs on clothes. In this theoretical example we stipulate that these and other similar items are found in A, but not in B. If A had been there first, B would have needed to subdue A in A’s former territory, and we should expect to find residual forms of A’s culture (technically called “survivals”) in B’s area, but we stipulated that forms that are popular in A are not present in B’s territory.

All other things being equal, it seems pretty clear that the people of tribe A came later into this territory than those of B, and that A brought cultural innovations that B is lacking. Most probably, then, B is therefore, the older culture.”²⁷

Corduan is the first to concede that the foregoing examples grossly oversimplify Schmidt’s method.²⁸ Nonetheless, they provide apt illustrations of how Schmidt and his colleagues successfully used the culture-historic method to demonstrate the relative age of a given culture, even those of close geographic proximity and ultimately which of these cultures was the oldest manifesting the fewest cultural accretions.²⁹ Not only did Schmidt affirm that the oldest of these cultures were those that were the least materially developed, he also confirmed Lang’s thesis by identifying these cultures to be precisely the ones Lang had stipulated as originally monotheistic. Furthermore, Schmidt was able to demonstrate a reverse pattern to that of the evolutionary model depicted in Figure 1; as cultures improved in their material standing there was a tendency for original monotheism to decay into other forms of religious expression (such as animism, polytheism, etc.; cf. Rom. 1:19-25) yet never fully ridding themselves of the vestiges of their once original monotheistic beliefs.

The Reception of Schmidt and the Vienna School

So how did the academic world react to Schmidt’s work? Sadly, with very little interest. As Corduan writes:

In the German version of the first volume of Der Ursprung der Gottesidee, published two years after it had been in print in French, Wilhelm Schmidt lamented the lack of thorough factual critiques from which he could learn. There were a number of congratulatory reviews (including one from Andrew Lang), a few dismissive ones deriding Schmidt’s work on the basis of being a Catholic priest, but only a few substantive ones.^[30]

If this short article has served its purpose, I hope it is clear to the reader the non-religious are no less dogmatic in their antisupernaturalist faith than the religious are in their supernaturalist faith. Ideological foundations abound for the reason that no scholarship is ever conducted within an ideological vacuum. A scholar cannot be divorced from his or her scholarship because that is what makes it their scholarship. If criticism is to be constructive in the interest of knowing the truth, it must engage with the content of one’s work as it relates to the subject. With respect to the present subject of final or original monotheism, the contemporary academy has proven a sorry state. That the monumental work of Schmidt and the Vienna School remains to this day largely unread, almost invariably distorted and often dismissed a priori is an indelible mark against the prevailing mainstay of what’s acceptable and what’s not in contemporary academic.

The present scholarly moratorium on the historicity of religion is testimony to the charge that many thinkers within the cognitive sciences today simply refuse to ask the questions that Schmidt and his colleagues answered some time ago. Unless or until they are willing to question the status quo concerning religious origins, there will always be a theo-philosophical impasse, because counterfeit metaphysical answers to objective historical questions will never satisfy.

Some Final Remarks

The lesson for all of us is simple: are we willing to question our own assumptions? I truly believe that if we can find answers better than those offered by the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, Jesus Christ would be the first person to tell us to follow them. As it is, we have within the contours of Scripture the great clash of the supernatural in natural history with the incarnation of the God-man, who suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, buried, and who rose again on the third day. Biblical Christianity without recourse to history is meaningless. And I think that is telling: is the modern quest for the historical origin of religion really dead, or in the absence of any body of evidence is it that we are being read an obituary by those wishing it were dead?³⁰ If it be the latter, then perhaps we have stumbled upon what is really at the heart of the issue concerning the question of origins, namely submission of ones will to the only one, true and living God.

Professor Win Corduan, I hope my humble efforts have fairly represented your excellent work. Thank you.

1. Winfried Corduan, In the Beginning God: A Fresh Look at the Case for Original Monotheism (Nashville, Tennessee: B&H Academic, 2013), 1.
2. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1876), 94.
3. Figure from Winfried Corduan, Neighbouring Faiths: A Christian Introduction to World Religions, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, 2012), 33.
4. Ibid., 38.
5. See John Dewey, A Common Faith (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1934).
6. Justin Barrett in Elizabeth Culotta, “On the Origin of Religion,” Science 326, no. 5954 (06 November 2009): 784-87.
7. Robin Marantz Henig, “Darwin’s God,” The New Work Times Magazine, March 4, 2007, accessed March 5, 2018, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/04/magazine/04evolution.t.html.
8. Daniel C. Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 25.
9. Colin Renfrew in Culotta, “On the Origin of Religion.”
10. Corduan, In the Beginning God, 62.
11. Joseph M. Kitagawa, The History of Religions: Understanding Human Experience (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987), 23.
12. Hitler writes, “If nature does not wish that weaker individuals should mate with the stronger, she wishes even less that a superior race should intermingle with an inferior one; because in such a case all her efforts, throughout hundreds of thousands of years, to establish an evolutionary higher stage of being, may thus be rendered futile.” Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf (London: Gurst and Blackett Ltds, Publishers, 1939), 239-242.
13. Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, trans. Rosemary Sheed (Denver: Bison Books, 1996), 38-40.
14. Mircea Eliade, The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1969), 50.
15. Rudolf Bultmann, Kerygma and Myth (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), 5.
16. See Bart D. Ehrman, The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture: The Effect of Early Christological Controversies on the Text of the New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
17. Corduan, Neighbouring Faiths, 31.
18. E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches Into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom. vol. 1 (The University of Michigan: J. Murrary, 1871), 427-428. As a good nineteenth-century anthropologist Tylor proceeded on the premise that the ancient past has preserved itself (principle of uniformity); i.e., human beings living on a stone-age level must have preserved their stone-age culture so that if we wish to learn about them today we just need to find a contemporary stone age or primitive culture, travel there, and study them. This type of study is often called “ethnology” and it assumes: (1) a distinction between levels of material development in human cultures; (2) that present day less developed cultures represent earlier, primitive cultures; (3) that material levels of a culture parallel their religious culture (a Darwinian anthropological assumption, that primordial religions must be simplistic and childlike/incredulous).
19. Lang even devotes an entire chapter comparing Jehovah to the supreme being of the Australian Aboriginals (the latter of which he prefers). See: Andrew Lang, The Making of Religion, 2nd ed. (Charleston, SC: Bibliobazaar, 1900), 253-269.
20. Lang, Making of Religion, 158.
21. In a Patheos article entitled Original Monotheism, author Peter Leithart writes: “Corduan is particularly incisive in showing why Schmidt’s arguments have been marginalized. Few plow through all 11,000 pages of Der Ursprung. Some dismiss Schmidt because he believed in revelation. Some unfairly characterize him as a rationalist or claim (as Eliade does) that Schmidt reduces the complexity of religion and ignores man’s encounter with the sacred. What is most interesting about the dismissal of Schmidt is that most theorists offer no alternative account of the origin of religion. Some have concluded that we can no longer trace the origins of religion into the mists of the distant past. Apparently, they would rather give up the quest than consider the possibility that God had something to do with the origins of the worship of God.” Peter Leithart, “Original Monotheism,” Patheos, February 6, 2015, accessed March 7, 2018, http://www.patheos.com/blogs/leithart/2015/02/original-monotheism/.
22. Corduan, In the Beginning God, 138.
23. See Schmidt’s foreward (Anthropos 1906: 553 f.) of B. Ankermann, L’ethnographic actuelle de l’Afrique rae’ridionale, published in Anthropos 1906: 552-592, 914-949; Schmidt 1906b: 652, cf. also 1906a: 364, 978 (offprint: Salzburg-Wien 1906: 39, 91); Hestermann 1925: 3.
24. Zimoń Henryk, “Wilhelm Schmidt’s Theory of Primitive Monotheism and Its Critique within the Vienna School of Ethnology,” Anthropos 81, no. 1 (1986): 243-60. Available at: www.jstor.org/stable/40462034 (accessed 7 March 2018). Cf. Schmidt 1937a: 13, 225 F., 287; Schmidt und Koppers 1924: 64 f., 67, 72-75; Schmidt 1930: 14, 209; 1932: 1208-1210; 1955e: 99 f., 105, 113-117; 1952c: 380-384; 1954c:61 f.; 1955a: 21 f.
25. Corduan, Neighbouring Faiths, 42.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.
30. Interestingly, it was Socrates around 500 B.C. who, not known for his piety, expressed his contempt for mining supposed mythological claims for historical kernels. In Phaedrus, Plato records Socrates as asserting: “I have no leisure for such enquiries; shall I tell you why? I must first know myself, as the Delphian inscription says; to be curious about that which is not my concern, while I am still in ignorance of my own self, would be ridiculous… Therefore I bid farewell to all this; the common opinion is enough for me.” Evidently it did not occur to Socrates that perhaps by mining for such kernels was the very key for ascertaining knowledge of the self.