The most popular of these theories was that of animism,
set forth by E. B. Tylor in Primitive Culture: Researches into
the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art and
Custom (1872). For Tylor, the idea of supreme being was
only the last in a long series of developments of religious
ideas, which ultimately began with the idea of the human
soul. The doctrine of a supreme being emerged only in the
“later stages” of human history after it had been transformed,
rationally projected on nature, and developed throughout a
stage of ancestral worship and idolatry. Eventually it emerged
in the form of a “pure” spirit that took its place in a polythe-
istic pantheon over which it gradually stood supreme.
The enthusiasm that greeted animism and other evolu-
tionary theories succeeded in displacing scholarly interest in
supreme beings. In placing the idea of supreme being in the
most recent stages of human history, these theories implied
or stated explicitly that the concept of supreme being was in-
troduced into the cultures of Aboriginal Australia, Africa,
and Native America by Christianity or Islam. In the opinions
of these evolutionary theorists, the concept of supreme being
was not an authentic local tradition. Scarcely heard in the din
of scientific enthusiasm were opinions like those of the theo-
logian C. von Orelli. Examining beliefs in supreme beings
in Africa, Australia, and North America in his Allgemeine Re-
ligionsgeschichte (1899), von Orelli concluded that the origi-
nal form of religion was a monistic belief in a celestial divini-
ty, whose nature was known through revealed truth.
Andrew Lang. A disciple of Tylor, Andrew Lang called
for a reconsideration of supreme beings in the light of materi-
als from southeastern Australia as reported by A. W. Howitt.
Lang pointed to the authentic existence of the idea of su-
preme being among Australian Aborigines, Andamanese
pygmies (Negritos), and certain peoples of Africa and the
Americas, whose life-ways were deemed most simple and
whose religious ideas were therefore considered most archaic.
He thus questioned one of the fundamental presuppositions
of the animistic theory.
Lang never abandoned totally the evolutionary scheme,
but he did challenge its overall simplicity. He argued that the
idea of supreme being stood quite apart from the religious
conceptions of soul and spirit that emerged in response to
such phenomena as death, illness, and dreaming. A supreme
being was an entity with a quality of being unique unto itself.
It could not be an elaboration of earlier and simpler notions,
for, in some cases, the idea of supreme being exists where no
evidence of ancestor worship is found.
In The Making of Religion (1898), Lang presents the su-
preme being as a deathless “maker” of all creation that is not
fashioned by human hands. Lang considered the idea of su-
preme being a sublime religious conception that the human
intellect was capable of conceiving at any stage of its histori-
cal development. Though recognized by the religious intel-
lect, a supreme being was a creative power that the imagina-
tion eventually encrusted with mythical elements.
Consequently, although the conception of a creator was ex-
alted, the forms into which mythic fancy cast supreme beings
were often erratic and degrading.
Lang’s insistence on the authentic existence of a sublime
supreme being in the religious thought of cultures that ani-
mists deemed “lower” or “savage” races met with little success
during his lifetime. Nor was his the only voice to fall on deaf
ears. As early as 1860, in his second volume of Anthropologie
der Naturvölker, Theodore Waitz-Gerland had argued for the
existence of an indigenous African religion whose ideas of su-
preme being were so exalted that they approached the limits
of monotheism. In his History of Religion (1906), A. Menzies,
too, had concluded that there existed a widespread belief in
a vague and remote divinity who managed the world but
found no place in cult, but he was not sure how archaic the
form was.
Wilhelm Schmidt. In the very year of Lang’s death,
Wilhelm Schmidt published the first volume of Der Urs-
prung der Gottesidee (1912), a twelve-volume work that was
to occupy him for the next forty years. An ethnologist of un-
common energies and linguistic abilities, Schmidt studied
supreme beings in a comprehensive fashion. Although he ac-
knowledged his debt to Andrew Lang for having recognized
the existence of supreme beings outside historical monothe-
isms, his main thrust was to situate the study of supreme be-
ings in a more accurate historical framework than the one
provided by an ideology of evolution.
Following Fritz Graebner and Bernard Ankermann,
Schmidt attacked theories of a unilinear and evolutionary de-
velopment of religious history. He argued convincingly that
human history was a more complicated reality. In the place
of simple unilinear development, Schmidt, following the
trend of continental historical tradition, proposed the exis-
tence of a number of culture circles (Kulturkreise), each with
distinctive ecological, economic, political, social, and ideo-
logical components that developed in relative independence
of one another. By first delineating the characteristics of su-
preme beings found in each culture circle and by comparing
those traits seen to be common to distinct culture circles,
Schmidt hoped to arrive, through reliable empirical and his-
torical methods, at that original configuration of the idea of
God existing in the common archaic culture (Urkultur). In
this way, Schmidt argued that the contemporary societies of
Oceania, Africa, the Americas, and Asia ought not to be ran-
ked in any temporal order on a unilinear time line. On the
other hand, features common to many of them pointed to
the existence of a temporally earlier culture of shared beliefs.
Like Lang before him, Schmidt emphasized the moral
and rational capacities, reflected in the conceptions of su-
preme beings, of those peoples who had been dubbed “sav-
age” or “primitive.” In fact, Schmidt exaggerated the impor-
tance of rationality in the nature of religion, for he held that
supreme beings were inextricably bound to the rational pro-
cess of inquiry into the first causes of the universe.
By studying those features common to the religions of
African and Asian pygmies, Schmidt postulated the existence8876 SUPREME BEINGS