The First Theory of Evolution in Religious Studies

Back to the origins

The works of Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) are undoubtedly among the first drafts that had a lasting influence on religious studies. Tylor’s first major scientific work entitled “Researches into the Early History of Mankind” was written in the early 1860s, a period in which Darwin’s “Origin of Species” set the framework for the discussion of evolutionary processes in biology, while Spencer’s “System of Synthetic Philosophy” focused on the description and analysis of the social development of mankind. During this time, public interest turned increasingly to ethnological topics. Not only the extremely popular travelogues of Wallace, Darwin, and others and the formulation of the theory of evolution had contributed to this. The rapid growth of ethnographic data, but above all the discovery of the remains of fossil humans and their artifacts, as well as speculations about the possible age of the human race, had drawn the attention of science and the lay public to the question of the origins of cultures.

Originally living peoples with their strange-looking customs and their little developed technology seemed to be close to this presumed beginning and provided a direct insight into the nursery of mankind.

It was therefore only natural that Tylor, under the impression of a study trip to Mexico, which he had taken for health reasons, devoted himself intensively to the study of travel reports, prehistoric investigations, and ethnographic, archaeological, and cultural-historical writings.

In 1865, Tylor’s first major scientific work emerged from these travel impressions and these extensive literary studies. Under the title “Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilisation”, it placed various aspects of human culture in a loose context and still discussed them unsystematically from the perspective of developmental history. His remarks, more a series of essays than a complete work, dealt with the development of artifacts and weapons as well as the emergence of customs and traditions, art, myths, and religion, a subject that was completely new and unfamiliar. Tylor’s study of human cultures from their primitive beginnings to the present day closed a gap in knowledge at the time and struck a chord with the times by emphasizing the dynamics of development. In thirteen chapters, Tylor attempted to demonstrate the evolution of human culture from simple to complex forms through comparative study. Tylor was particularly fascinated by the mythology of different peoples. Tylor once attributed similarities in the mythical treasure trove of the peoples to an identical structure of human consciousness — the human mind produces the same thing under the same circumstances. On the other hand, however, Tylor did not want to completely exclude a possible diffusion through cultural contacts, which seemed to speak for the parallels of the ancient cultures of Asia and America.

This problem arose because, as a non-biologist and therefore untrained in systematics, Tylor did not distinguish between analogies and homologies. Thus, he had to include all characteristics, regardless of their value, in his systematics and therefore did not arrive at clear kinship relations, which could have provided him with a family tree of cultural development already here.

In his main work “Primitive Culture” Tylor took up the questions raised again, but in the meantime, he clearly focused his discussions on non-material cultural assets and here especially on religion, whose classification in an evolutionary scheme was as unusual as it was new.

This is also where Tylor’s now famous, comprehensive definition of culture can be found, which in his time had to be considered revolutionary because he also conceded something like culture to the so-called savages or primitives: According to Tylor, culture is “that complex whole which includes knowledge, faith, art, morality, law, custom, custom, and all other abilities and habits that man has acquired as a member of society. “

The goal of Tylor’s investigations was not only to describe the different cultures of mankind but above all to analyze them, which was to lead to the formulation of a universally valid law of development.

The comparison with researchers such as Darwin and Spencer does not only come to the mind of today’s reader (though only when reading the first chapters); a similar and equally important investigation, albeit with its methodology tailored to the requirements of the subject matter, was intended by Tylor.

Like biology, the science of man, which is part of animate nature, must be understood as natural science and therefore be researched with the help of scientific methods. The development of human culture can, therefore, according to Tylor, also be understood as an evolutionary event. To grasp exactly this evolutionary event, however, Tylor did not fall back on the very popular findings of Wallace, Darwin, or even Huxley, which are also known among non-biologists, but oriented himself on the authors who had already described an evolutionary event in the area of society and culture — and these were Spencer and Comte. Tylor did not notice that neither the historically arguing Comte nor Spencer, who thought in developmental stages, had recognized the character of evolution, namely the interplay between the occurrence of varieties and the selection acting upon them. Consequently, only those developmental stages are to be found in Tylor’s work that has established themselves as a constant in the humanities since Comte and Spencer. These developmental stages, which Tylor had also identified, were to be the result of the preceding stages and to a certain extent determined what followed. The fact that not all peoples are completely equal even within the individual developmental stages did not, according to Tylor, speak against the justification of classification of stages, because just as in biology there are varieties of a species, the different expressions of the cultures must then be understood as varieties of the corresponding stage. On the other hand, Tylor attributed parallels in the appearance of cultures to the human mind, which produces the same results under the same conditions.

The latter argument, with which Tylor took a stand in the lively discussion about the unity of the human species, put him in contrast to such scientists who denied equal mental abilities to the non-Caucasian “races”, i.e. all non-whites. It is precisely this advocacy of the fundamental equality of all human beings, regardless of skin color, that distinguishes Tylor pleasantly from many of his contemporaries, who accused the indigenous peoples in the colonies of the British Empire of having inferior intellectual and also moral abilities; also to justify their subjugation, disenfranchisement, and extermination — a process that, as is well known, had also filled Darwin with disgust. However, the assumption of a mind that works the same for all humans was a necessity for Tylor, without which his comparative cultural approach would have been deprived of any foundation. For only if the foundations of the highly civilized European thinking and acting are ultimately the same as those of the “primitive” can their immaterial cultural assets also be compared, and only then can general trends in development be worked out with the help of comparison!

These developmental tendencies can now, however, be most easily identified using technical developments such as progress in weapons technology (cf. again the same argumentation as Spencer); at the same time, the corresponding series document the historical links between the individual developmental steps: Thus, the advanced form did indeed emerge from the simpler one and not an independent new development. Not everything within a culture changes, however: Tylor was able to identify a group of phenomena that were taken over unchanged from an earlier stage of development into the following one, where they represent a foreign body. These so-called “survivals” allow the scientific observer a direct insight into earlier stages and thus provide important services for research. Survivals include such customs as the Midsummer Night’s Fire, the All Souls’ Day, but also modern superstition. While such customs and traditions have often been reduced to mere folklore in today’s Central Europe, according to Tylor they are still in full bloom in overseas countries and are an integral part of the local culture — a culture on a lower level, of course!

The comparative method, however, does not only allow for the classification of known historical and contemporary cultures in a developmental scheme. Archaeological artifacts can also be used to explore prehistoric times by comparing them with contemporary “wild tribes”. Since many elements in the culture of the peoples who are still at the lowest level of culture show strong similarities with the archaeological remains of extinct peoples in prehistoric times, a general agreement between prehistoric and modern primitive cultures must be assumed, according to Tylor. Today’s primitive cultures are therefore ultimately nothing else but the “remains” of an early stage of human history. This means, however, that human culture must have developed continuously from a stage of savagery to the present state of civilization.

Tylor’s equation of today’s wild-gathering peoples with prehistoric man is of course out of the question today and would rightly be considered as malicious discrimination against indigenous peoples. At a time when there was serious discussion whether Africans or the natives of Australia belonged to the same species as the Caucasians (whites) at all, or whether they were separate human species, the equation of the so-called “savages” of Africa with the ancestors of the Europeans meant an enormous revaluation of contemporary, non-European cultures including their religions. Especially the study of the religions of so-called “Primitive r” was dismissed as uninteresting by several representatives of established Victorian science — the primitive thinking of less capable races could hardly be of interest to the civilized Central European.

Tylor’s approach, however, put these so-called savages on a par with their ancestors. The European could by no means feel himself to be the representative of a superior race (as Chambers had still postulated in his “Vestiges”) but had developed from exactly those primitive origins which “uncivilized” peoples still show today. Not only that but numerous survivors — survivors, in biological terminology they would be plesiomorphs — also proved that primitive thinking was by no means completely overcome. These primitive origins also had to be pursued in religion, as they opened up an unobstructed view of the past. Tylor, who, unlike many of his contemporaries, did not start from a theological standpoint but thought ethnologically, believed he could prove a unilinear, ascending development of religion from the most primitive beginnings to enlightened Christianity. This had to mean, however, that Christianity had not always been the superior religion as it now appeared to be, but that the traces of its primitive origins had to be proven here as well. Moreover, without precise knowledge of the primitive religions of the contemporary “savages”, the Christian religion in its present form could not be understood. For Christianity, which in Tylor’s time was still considered quite naturally a revealed and thus correct religion that could not be further questioned, this was nothing less than a malicious attack. One had just recovered from the blow that Darwin’s “Origin of Species” had dealt with this time-honored and established religion when a Tylor came and wanted to see in the Christian services with their dignified high offices nothing else but the endpoint of a development that had begun with the ecstatic dances and crude magical practices of savages!

Let’s take a closer look at this development as Tylor imagined it: In “Primitive Culture” (published in 1871), the work that was to make Tylor famous, Tylor tied in with his previous ideas of social progress, which were oriented primarily to the state of mechanization and science, then to social organization, and finally to morality and religion. The yardstick of this classification was again the state of technological development, with the conditions in the technically and industrially highly developed nations of Western Europe and North America representing the standard of evaluation. Such an assessment made it possible to arrange the cultures on a scale of development on which the peoples of the Australians, Tahitians, Aztecs, Chinese, and Italians demonstrated the individual steps of continuous cultural development in the order mentioned above. The classification criterion for the different cultures was the general progress of mankind based on a higher degree of organization of society and the individual, resulting in greater happiness for all. Here Tylor follows Spencer very closely, although he does not mention or even discuss him, and perhaps for this very reason, he repeats Spencer’s mistake of classifying cultures — or whatever units they may be — only based on a single and possibly meaningless characteristic; a deficit that had already been overcome in biology with Linné, but above all with Cuvier. This grave error in a systematic way led to the fact that Tylor did not — contrary to his declared intention — proceed biologically, but, true to the humanistic tradition going back to Comte, distinguished three stages, the stage of savagery, the stage of barbarism and the stage of civilization. Tylor cited history as positive, scientifically proven evidence for the validity of his developmental hypothesis: Modern civilization was based on the Middle Ages, the Middle Ages themselves on antiquity. From this statement, Tylor derived a general principle, verified by observation, that a high culture must be preceded by a middle culture and a lower one by a lower one. It was precisely the application of this principle, which Tylor believed had to be given the value of scientific law, that allowed the description of human society even where observation failed. As forerunners of the known cultures and thus of European civilization, only those cultures that represented the stage of savagery came into question — but these were precisely those cultures that could still be observed in contemporary “savages”.

Some traditions, however, such as the survivors, may not have contributed much to the general cultural progress, for which both ethnography and archaeology have provided a great deal of evidence. On the contrary, they change so little from generation to generation even under changing conditions that they can still be observed in a modified form centuries later. According to Tylor, magic is one of the oldest phenomena of human culture and is still widespread today among those peoples who had little or no part in the “education of the world”. From this, according to Tylor, it can be concluded that the spread of magic must diminish as cultural development progresses to appear in the most highly civilized countries only as a rudiment, as occasional superstition. At the same time, magic is magic, Tylor also calls it pseudo-science in this context, the substitute for the still missing knowledge of causal connections. As knowledge increases, the individual peoples learn and gradually give up magic in favor of scientific knowledge and the resulting solutions to problems.

With the description and analysis of the myth, Tylor comes to speak about his real field of interest, the religions, whose diversity he analyzes to identify common foundations and consistent developmental tendencies. Myths are not the result of human imagination, but rather are based on a common set of motives that have been subject to numerous changes in the course of their developmental history. Among these motifs, around which the myths of both historical and contemporary peoples are entwined, are the myths of nature, which according to Tylor can be seen as the result of a still childishly undeveloped, inquiring mind. Nature mythology is thus an early form of knowledge of nature that precedes scientific knowledge.

The individual developmental steps can be identified as an initial reflection on the causes of natural phenomena and their naming (a god of thunder), philosophical speculation resulting in complex mythology (the polytheistic pantheon), and finally philological investigation and fairy-tale narrative. Similar mythical themes among different peoples can be interpreted as the result of a similar problem solution as a result of the identical mental activity of man. Since the human mind tends everywhere to animate and anthropomorphize the things of its environment, the idea of animated objects or their mythical personification will not only be found in the worldview of the child who endows his doll with human qualities but will permeate the imagination of all primitive cultures.

These anthropomorphizing tendencies can be seen in the personification of celestial objects, as the god Helios in Greek mythology stands for the sun, but also in natural phenomena (Zeus, Demeter). The creation of the myth can therefore be presented as the result of a still childishly uneducated but poetically powerful mental activity, which is in full bloom in the “savage”, continues with the barbaric or semi-civilized peoples, and loses its meaning as a declaration of nature in the civilized world and becomes imaginative poetry.