Founding Fathers, Turtles and the Elephant in the Room: The Quest for Origins in the Scientific Study of Religion

Ingvild Sælid Gilhus

doi:10.33356/temenos.48457

Abstract

The theme of the present article is the quest for origins, founding fathers and the never-ending search for identity in the scientific study of religion. Because the quest for origins and for founding fathers is intertwined with the complex relationship to theology, theology is frequently made into the significant other. The elephant is a metaphor for the preoccupation with theology. The article discusses the longing for origins, and it discusses good fathers and bad fathers, and especially Max Müller’s contribution to the study of religion. It also takes up the new quest for historical origins as well as the quest for generative mechanisms of religion and asks why the study of religion needs the metaphysical boosts of origins. A permanent preoccupation with universal patterns in the study of religion, recent developments in science, contemporary processes of globalization, a renewed general interest in religion, a wish to control the field and the continuous struggle to be different from theology are pointed out as reasons for the never-ending quest for origins. The article suggests that it might be fruitful to let go of the preoccupation with theology, and further that grand-scale comparative studies and universal claims need to be matched by small-scale studies of religion on the ground and by embracing complexity and reflexivity.

Highlights

When and where does the history of religions begin? According to Daniel Lord Smail in Deep History and the Brain, it usually begins in Mesopotamia, because we are still in the grip of sacred history and dependent on the Bible and holy writ (Smail 2009)
The theme of the present article is the quest for origins, founding fathers and the never-ending search for identity in the scientific study of religion
Because the quest for origins and for founding fathers is intertwined with the complex relationship to theology, theology is frequently made into the significant other

Summary

Good Fathers and Bad Fathers

Hayden White suggests that in the quest for disciplinary history we choose ‘a fictional cultural ancestry’ and create a sort of myth of the origin of the discipline, and ‘in choosing a past, we choose a present, and vice versa. Max Müller asked about the origin of religion, which he found in the perception of the infinite (Sharpe 1975, 38–9) He called attention to connections between meteorological phenomena and gods; he presented fascinating theories about how terms were turned into powers – nomina were transformed into numina; and he claimed that mythology appeared as ‘a disease of language’. Since its heroic origins with Max Müller and Cornelis P Tiele, they argue, this study has in the main been too deeply infected with religiousness and theology (Martin & Wiebe 2012, 590), which reflects that ‘in both a political and an institutional sense, theology has been, and to a large extent remains, the matrix out of which the academic study of religion has emerged’ (Martin & Wiebe 2012, 590–91). The phase of origin, when the Fathers were alive and kicking, is the Golden Age, which it is impossible or at least extremely difficult to recreate

Origins Revisited

The Turtles and the Elephant in the Room