Theories on Religion

JAMES FRAZER (1854 –1941):

Being a highly logical thinker, Frazer believes that religions and myths have developed due to false logic. Therefore, to Frazer, all myths and religions are wrong. The Golden Bough, his most famous work, documents and details similar magical and religious beliefs across the globe, studying of ancient cults, rites, and myths, including their parallels with early Christianity. Frazer posited that human belief progressed through three stages: primitive magic, replaced by religion, in turn replaced by science. His prime sources of data were ancient histories and questionnaires mailed to missionaries and imperial offices all over the world. He was the first to detail the relations between myths and rituals. His theories of totemism were superseded by Claude Lévi-Strauss and the symbolic cycle of life, death and rebirth, which Frazer divined behind myths of all pedigrees, captivated a whole generation of artists and poets.


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EMILE DURKHEIM (1858 –1917):

As a structural functionalist, Durkheim explores how religion expresses, explains, legitimizes, and celebrates society (society includes social and cultural practices, values and institutions). According to Durkheim, rituals create a sense of collective effervescence bring the society together. Durkheim was specifically interested in religion as a communal experience rather than an individual one. He also says that religious phenomena occurs when a separation is made between the profane (the realm of everyday activities) and the sacred (the realm of the extraordinary and the transcendent); these are different depending what man chooses them to be. Durkheim saw that the ultimate “function” of religion and ritual is the social solidarity, or in other words, to unite, celebrate, and strengthen the society. Durkheim believes that religion emerges from these elated feelings of being together. He thought that the model for relationships between people and the supernatural was the relationship between individuals and the community. He is famous for suggesting that "God is society, writ large." So in general, Durkheim proposes that religions and myths are true, just misunderstood. Religion is the worship of society; it is about the society, not the deity.

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JOSEPH CAMPBELL(1904 –1987):

The fundamental belief of Campbell's was that all spirituality is a search for the same basic, unknown force from which everything came, within which everything currently exists, and into which everything will return. This elemental force is ultimately “unknowable” because it exists before words and knowledge. Although this basic driving force cannot be expressed in words, the spiritual rituals and stories refer to the force through the use of "metaphors.” Accordingly, Campbell believed the religions of the world to be the various, culturally influenced “masks” of the same fundamental, transcendent truths. He suggested that all religions can bring one to an elevated awareness above and beyond a dualistic conception of reality. Campbell tried to summarize these commonalities with the help of Karl Jung’s, an analytical psychologist, ideas on collective unconscious. Campbell describe the universal patterns or motifs which come from the collective unconscious and are constellated around the four patterns of dynamic and static female and male which he summed up with the term archetype. Myths are therefore collective dreams, connects with larger questions of ultimate reality, projections of the collective unconscious. So in general, all mythologies are metaphors of the mystery not just of being – but beyond the categories of being and non-being – beyond all dualities. One tries to reach atonement, trying to reach selflessness with everything around you looking beyond fear and beyond desire. The goal of life is not perfection but completeness, a paradoxical unity of self "that cannot be rationally understood or comprehended." Finally, Campbell called on artists, poets, novelists, and filmmakers for a new mythology for today’s world. As he describes in A Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell composed an archetypical structure of what he called the hero myth. The hero is to transcend the world of categories and duality and follows a remarkably similar structure world-wide.


--The hero's journey--
One | departure
1. The Call to Adventure
2. Refusal of the Call
3. Supernatural Aid
4. The Crossing of the First Threshold
5. The Belly of the Whale / Rebirth
Two | initiation 1. The Road of Trials (Usually Three)
2. Meeting the Goddess
3. Woman as Temptress
4. Atonement with the Father
5. Apotheosis
6. Ultimate Boon
Three | return 1. Refusal of the Return
2. The Magic Flight
3. Rescue from Without
4. Crossing the Return Threshold
5. Master of the Two Worlds
6. Freedom to Live

Examples:
JESUS BUDDHA
virgin birth virgin birth from heart
baptism from John the Baptist sees suffering
mentor seeks mentors
40 day quest the long quest
3 temptations 3 temptations
1. desire (bread from stone) 1. desire (women)
2. power (rule the land) 2. fear (armies attack)
3. God (jump from temple) 3. duty (infinite compassion)
Father Atonement World Atonement
belief / be saved enlightenment / save yourself

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CLAUDE LEVI –STRAUSS (1908 –):

Lévi-Strauss identified myths as a type of speech through which a language could be discovered. How else, he thought, could tales so fantastical and arbitrary be so similar across cultures? Thus he sought to find the fundamental units of myth, namely, the mytheme. He believed that there is no one “authentic” version of a myth, that they are all rather manifestations of the same language. He broke each of the versions down into a series of sentences, consisting of a relation between a function and a subject. Sentences with the same function were given the same number and bundled together. What Lévi-Strauss believed he had discovered when he examined the relations between mythemes was that a myth consists of nothing but binary oppositions. Or, the meaning of a myth is determined by its position among other myths in the overall structure and the way that particular myth is different from other myths. Strauss believed that the human thought process is based on these binary oppositions and their unification (the thesis, antithesis, synthesis triad), and that these are what make meaning possible. Therefore, Strauss’s core concept is that reality (or at least what makes sense to us or has meaning for us) is not made up of things but of relationships. Every “thing” is only meaningful because of its relationships with other “things,” and its meaning is in someway determined by the whole structure of things of which it is a part. Understanding the structure and order of all this requires a focus on relationships between things rather than a focus on the things themselves.


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VICTOR TURNER (1920 –1983):

While working among the Ndembu, a central African tribe, studying their society and religious practices, Turner became intrigued with ritual and rites of passage. As a professor at the University of Chicago, he began to apply his study of rituals to other world religions and the lives of religious heroes. Turner gained notoriety by exploring Arnold van Gennep’s threefold structure of rites of passage and expanding theories on the liminal phase. Van Gennep's structure consisted of a pre-liminal phase (separation), a liminal phase (transition), and a post-liminal phase (reincorporation). Turner noted that in liminality, the transitional state between two phases, individuals were "betwixt and between": they did not belong to the society that they previously were a part of and they were not yet reincorporated into that society. Liminality is a limbo, an ambiguous period characterized by humility, seclusion, tests, sexual ambiguity, and communitas. Communitas is defined as an unstructured community where all members are equal. He focuses on this as a stage of reflection. Separated from the norms and statuses of their society allows for reflection on them. Turner also examined ritual and symbols and how they operate in the social process. He composed of a three level procedure of examining symbols: exegetical (what ordinary people believe the symbols mean), operational (what people do with the symbol), and positional (how does the symbol relate to other symbols). Edith Turner, Victor Turner's wife, has also both built upon and developed innovative ideas that complement notions of liminality, communitas, and the ritual process.


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CLIFFORD GEERTZ (1923 –2006):

Geertz’s theoretical contributions start with his explanations and descriptions of culture through the use of symbols.  He believes that cognition is largely the same throughout cultures, while the symbols that people use to communicate are different.  Therefore, culture is accessible through intersubjective meanings of symbols. Culture is also not a force or causal agent in the world, but a context in which people live out their lives. Geertz believed the function of culture is to impose meaning on the world and make it understandable. The job of anthropologists is to try (though complete success is not possible) to unravel the webs of meaning and interpret the guiding symbols of each culture. From this, he defined religion as “a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, persuasive and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic” Geertz then breaks down his definition to examine exactly what the study of religion as a cultural system should be. Religion must establish something.  What this “something” is differs from culture to culture, but in each culture this “something” must make sense of the lives people are leading.  In addition, this something must be perceived as “uniquely realistic”; i.e., this feeling should be the ground-level interpretation of a culture.  A man may not be religious, but when a man needs to find meaning at its deepest level, religion will be the system of symbols he uses.


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