of scholars interested themselves in one or another specific
aspect of the problem and contributed to the understanding
of supreme beings.
Early studies. During the nineteenth century many
scholars of religion investigated religious texts from cultures
in the Indo-European language family. Their main concerns
were philological. When they investigated the meaning of
specific religious images and forms, they took a special inter-
est in those forms that were associated with natural phenom-
ena. Nevertheless, the comparative philology of Indo-
European languages pointed to the existence of a supreme
sky god. The identification of the Indo-European radical dei-
wos (“sky”) in designations meaning “god” (for example, in
Old German tivar, Lithuanian diewas, Latin deus, Iranian
div, and Sanskrit deva) lent support for a theory like that of
Charles Ploix, who contended in La nature des dieux: Études
de mythologie greco-latine (1888) that the sky was the princi-
pal subject of myth and religion.
In this way, the nineteenth-century attempt to discover
a theory of origins of religion in natural phenomena made
way also for a sky-dwelling supreme being. Unfortunately,
a shallow understanding of myth in general led to the conclu-
sion that supreme beings were merely personifications of one
or another natural phenomenon. In Die Herabkunft des
Feuers und des Göttertranks (1859), Adelbert Kuhn gave a
privileged place to meteorological phenomena such as rain,
lightning, storms, and thunder, holding that these celestial
phenomena were responsible for the development of mytho-
logical themes.
In Die Geschichte der Religion (1869), Otto Pfleiderer
also laid great stress on the importance of a celestial supreme
being. He considered the sky god a natural starting point for
the development of monotheism. By postulating that the ori-
gins of religion lay in the personification of natural phenom-
ena in the heavens and by hypothesizing about the connec-
tion between the sky god and monotheism, he provoked
reactions from investigators with theological concerns. E. G.
Steude, in Ein Problem der allgemeinen Religionswissenschaft
und ein Versuch einer Lösung (1881), argued that early belief
in a sky god, although a vague form of monotheism, might
easily degenerate into polytheism through the personifica-
tion of other celestial phenomena. Therefore, “primitive” be-
lief in a supreme being ought not to be judged a true mono-
theism.
F. Max Müller, the foremost spokesperson of the school
of nature mythology, attempted to avoid the theological pit-
falls by positing the origin of religion in an innate capacity
of the human soul to respond to the infinite. Consequently,
in his studies of comparative mythology Müller placed great
stress on those objects that are wholly intangible and that
best express infinity: the sun, the dawn, and the sky. The ex-
perience of the infinite made available in the contemplation
of these intangible objects (numina) ultimately gave rise to
their designation by name (nomina). Through a “disease of
language,” the named objects were personified as gods,
whose exploits were recounted in myths. According to Mül-
ler, the origin of supreme being lies neither in polytheism nor
in monotheism but in what he termed “kathenotheism,” the
tendency of the religious perception to treat any particular
god as the only one in any specific moment.Much of the early interest in Indo-European supreme
beings culminated some years later in the work of Leopold
von Schroeder. In the first volume of his Arische Religion
(1914), he presents in an exhaustive fashion the instances of
supreme sky beings: Indian Dyaus-pitr, Latin Jupiter, Greek
Zeus Pater, Scythian Zeus-Papaius, Illyrian Daipatures, and
Thraco-Phrygian Zeus-Pappos. However, by the time von
Schroeder’s useful collection of researches had been gathered
together, the investigation of supreme beings in the history
of religions had already passed beyond the relatively narrow
confines of Indo-European texts. An increasing amount of
reliable ethnographic data and a better awareness of the enor-
mity of culture history demanded that the question be debat-
ed on wider grounds. Rather than a contribution to the gen-
eral history of supreme being, von Schroeder’s work became
a masterful synthesis of a generation of research by specialists
in only one area of religion.Evolutionary theories. At the end of the nineteenth
and the beginning of the twentieth century, when scholars
turned systematic attention to the history of religions outside
Indo-European cultures, interest in the nature and meaning
of supreme being waned. In their enthusiasm for evolution-
ary theories of the development of human ideas, various
schools of scientific thought placed the concept of supreme
being on the opposite end of history from the origin of reli-
gious thought. The idea of supreme being and its manifold
forms were thus deprived of the prestige of origins.Sir John Lubbock, for example, contended that the ear-
liest stages of human development gave evidence of a total
absence of religion. Religious inclinations began with a belief
in fetishes and arrived at the concept of a supreme being only
after passing through the intervening stages of totemism,
worship of nature, shamanism, and anthropomorphism
(idolatry). In a similar way, Herbert Spencer attributed the
origin of religious ideas to a vague belief in ghosts, which cul-
minated in ancestor worship. The worship of distinguished
ancestors eventually gave rise to the notion of supernatural
beings. Ultimately, the concept of supreme being was the
outcome of a lengthy historical process of reflection on
human personalities such as a chief famous for strength and
bravery, a medicine man of high esteem, or a stranger with
superior knowledge of arts and inventions.Various evolutionary theories found it inconceivable
that an exalted notion of supreme being could exist in antiq-
uity. Instead, religious history was seen as a development
from simple ideas to more complex ones. In this way, the
“origin” of supreme beings was postulated in animal totems,
rudimentary human emotions, the human will at work in
primitive magic, or a vague universal magic force.SUPREME BEINGS 8875