zoni documented the existence of all-seeing, celestial su-
preme beings in Australia, Asia, Indonesia, Melanesia, Africa,
and the Americas. Cultures in all of these places provide evi-
dence of the existence of an ambivalent supreme being, both
passive creator and omniscient sky god, who oversees the
moral order and who is inclined to cede his place to more
specialized forms of weather divinities.
Pettazzoni’s contribution to the study of supreme beings
was his positive evaluation of myth. Rather than viewing it
as a degeneration or trivialization of a pure and primordial
rational idea, Pettazzoni considered myth the most suitable
vehicle for the expression of the sublime and exalted truth
contained in the nature of the transcendent and omniscient
supreme being. The full existential meaning of supreme
being is manifest in myth as in no other form of rational dis-
course.
Mircea Eliade. In several of his studies in the history
of religions, Mircea Eliade has given priority to the investiga-
tion of supreme beings. In his great morphological treatise,
Patterns in Comparative Religion (1958), the nature and
meaning of supreme being becomes the foundation stone for
his approach to the study of religion. Observing the results
of earlier investigations, Eliade concludes that in every in-
stance supreme being is a complex figure representing a very
involved historical process of religious experiences, revela-
tions, and theoretical systematizations. Nonetheless, Eliade
agrees with Pettazzoni that supreme being best manifests its
unique spiritual quality as a hierophany of the sky. Height
and infinite space become especially suitable manifestations
of what is transcendent and supremely sacred. Such supreme
beings are primordial; they preexist the world as it is now
known, and they act as creators who are beneficent and eter-
nal. They establish the order of creation and become the up-
holders of its laws. Consequently, Eliade holds that supreme
beings are more than simple hierophanies of the sky. Instead,
they possess a quality of being that is uniquely their own.
Eliade’s special contribution to the study of supreme be-
ings is his illumination of the process of their withdrawal or
disappearance. He draws attention to the fact that myth
often narrates the withdrawal of a supreme being to remote
heights, whence he presides over the larger contours of life,
destiny, and the afterlife of the soul, without, however, as-
suming any dominant role in public cult. In retirement, su-
preme beings are often replaced by other religious forms: by
divinities of nature, by ancestors, by powers of fertility, by
solar or lunar divinities, and so forth. Eliade contends that
this tendency to give way to more concrete and dynamic
forms is an essential element of the stucture of supreme
being.
Further, Eliade holds up the withdrawal of supreme be-
ings as the exemplary model for the very process of the reli-
gious imagination in history. Considering “the sacred” as a
structure of human awareness, he points to its historical oc-
cultation or withdrawal even as it manifests itself in concrete
and, one could say, profane forms. The withdrawal of the su-
preme manifestation of being and the occultation of its full-
ness before active but more circumscribed divine appearances
lead to a process of experimentation with sacred forms. This
process constitutes the history of religious experience: a reli-
gious quest for the full manifestation of supreme being,
which myth describes as existing “in the beginning.”
Eliade has made a historical application of his morpho-
logical analysis of supreme beings in Australian Religions: An
Introduction (1973), in several articles on South American re-
ligions, and in A History of Religious Ideas (1978–1986) as
well as in other works. At first, Eliade draws attention to the
replacement of supreme beings by other divine forms that
share the celestial sacrality of supreme being even though
they lose something of its transcendent omnipotence: weath-
er, storm, solar, and lunar gods as well as universal sovereign
gods who reign from on high. To this extent he develops sug-
gestions made by Pettazzoni. However, his more general
point is that supreme being is replaced in the religious imagi-
nation by a range of epiphanies of elementary life forces that
come to compose a cosmic sacrality: water, stone, earth, veg-
etation, and animals. These epiphanies reveal themselves as
particular modes of being of which a supreme being is the
fullest manifestation. Because of this relationship to supreme
being no longer fully manifest in history, each cosmic reli-
gious form tends, by “imperial” expansion of its meaning to
all realms of life, to express itself as a revelation that, like su-
preme being, includes all other possibilities. However, these
limited revelations are, by their very nature, incapable of ex-
pressing fully the sacred. They provoke the need for the expe-
rience of other forms.
Concluding remarks. Understanding the nature, struc-
ture, and meaning of supreme beings outside monotheism
has remained a priority for scholars who study religion in a
comparative and historical frame of reference. The study of
this important being has played a singular role in expunging
several futile assumptions that plagued the early stages of in-
vestigation. Specifically, the naive premises that the origins
of religion might be found in a single simple cause, that valid
religious experience might be exhausted through rationalistic
explanations, and that religious history is a unilinear progres-
sive development had all to be abandoned. In their place, the
study of supreme beings has substituted a deeper apprecia-
tion of the complexities of human experience in all cultures
and in all times and a more profound understanding of the
wider existential dimensions of mythic truth.
In particular, better acquaintance with supreme beings
has underscored not only the inestimable value of the reli-
gions of Asia, Africa, Oceania, the Americas, and archaic cul-
tures but also the inescapable need to know them well in
order to understand the religious experience of humankind.SEE ALSO Ahura Mazda ̄ and Angra Mainyu; All-Father; An-
imism and Animatism; Axis Mundi; Cosmogony; Deus
Otiosus; El; Eliade, Mircea; Evolution, article on Evolution-
ism; God; Jupiter; Kulturkreiselehre; Lang, Andrew; Leeuw,
Gerardus van der; Lowie, Robert H.; Mawu-Lisa; Meteoro-SUPREME BEINGS 8879