Patterns across traditions — myth, ritual, sacred text and ethics compared, and what the category of religion holds.
9 topics · 8 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
The Golden Bough
James George Frazer · 1890
Argues that magic, religion and science are successive stages of one evolving attempt to control the world, and traces a single recurring myth of the…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Introduction to the Science of Religion
F. Max Müller · 1873
Proposes studying the world's scriptures comparatively, side by side, on the argument that whoever knows only one religion knows none — founding…
Primary sources and full treatments.
Lectures on the Religion of the Semites
William Robertson Smith · 1889
Argues that ancient Semitic religion was organised around shared ritual and communal sacrifice rather than belief, with myth arising afterward to…
+5 more at this level
8 works
James George Frazer
Argues that magic, religion and science are successive stages of one evolving attempt to control the world, and traces a single recurring myth of the dying and reviving king across cultures that never had contact with one another.
about 27 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026F. Max Müller
Proposes studying the world's scriptures comparatively, side by side, on the argument that whoever knows only one religion knows none — founding comparative religion as an academic discipline distinct from theology.
link checked 17 Sept 2026William Robertson Smith
Argues that ancient Semitic religion was organised around shared ritual and communal sacrifice rather than belief, with myth arising afterward to explain rites whose original purpose had already been forgotten.
link checked 17 Sept 2026L. T. Hobhouse
Traces moral codes across religious traditions and stages of social development, arguing that ethical progress can be tracked by the widening circle of who is treated as a moral subject at all.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Émile Durkheim
Defines religion sociologically as a system organised around the distinction between the sacred and the profane, arguing it functions above all to bind a group into a single moral community.
about 15 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026A. D. Nock
Traces how individuals in the ancient Mediterranean moved between religious cults, and argues that only Judaism and Christianity demanded the deliberate, total reorientation of the self that the word 'conversion' now means.
link checked 17 Sept 2026René Girard
Argues that ritual sacrifice exists to discharge a community's escalating mimetic rivalry onto a single victim, and that this scapegoat mechanism is the concealed foundation of archaic religion.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Charles Stewart & Rosalind Shaw
Argues that 'syncretism' is not a neutral description of mixed religious practice but a politically loaded label, applied or refused depending on who holds the authority to define orthodoxy.