of shared religious beliefs stemming from the earlier histori-
cal stratum that he called the religion of Archaic Pygmy Cul-
ture (Religion der Pygmäischen Ur-kultur). Abstracting from
American and Arctic materials in the same manner, Schmidt
outlined the beliefs in a supreme being that characterized a
hypothetical Archaic Arctic-American Culture. Finally, by
comparing his constructions of Archaic Pygmy and Arctic-
American cultures with religious beliefs in southeastern Aus-
tralia, Schmidt postulated the “historical outlines” of earliest
belief in a supreme being.
What Schmidt found in the reconstructed primordial
culture was a supreme being whose nature satisfied all human
needs, in particular, the need for a rational first cause of the
universe and its creatures. In this way, the supreme being was
viewed as the father and founder of social realities, the fami-
ly, and kin alliances as well as the author of moral realities
in his role as lawgiver and ethical judge, who is himself free
from all moral corruption. Schmidt argued that the belief
that the supreme being was a protective father, supportive
of the virtues of trust and love, provided archaic humans
with the capacity to live and work toward supramundane
goals. Rendering labor significant and providing a sense of
responsibility, the belief in a supreme being proved to be an
effective impetus for the forward struggles of human history.
Thus, the supreme being of Archaic Culture was the
lord of human history because he was seen to fill all time and
was the source of the beginnings of human life as well as the
judge at its end. Furthermore, since the supreme being was
believed to fill all the space of the universe, Archaic Culture
could conceive of the existence of only one supreme being,
unique and without peer. This being reigned as sovereign
over all peoples of the earth. In short, through his historical
investigation of ethnographic data, Schmidt contended that
the religion of the most archaic human culture was a primor-
dial monotheism (Urmonotheismus), whose existence could
best be explained through a primordial revelation (Uroffen-
barung) of the supreme being itself at the beginning of time.
Recognizing that the high god is found in contemporary
cultures with less frequency than in the primordial culture,
and acknowledging that the contemporary high god is often
absent from scheduled cult and manifest in many obscure
forms, or even supplanted by other divine figures, Schmidt
atributed this degeneration to the very march of history, to
the effects of change on human life and thought. Lang had
made the same point. Where Lang had attributed the with-
drawal of the high god to the cloak of mythic fancy put on
over time, Schmidt also considered the economic and social
realities of culture history. Thus, the experiences of matrilin-
eal agrarian societies stressed the importance of a female su-
preme being, lunar associations, and blood sacrifices. Patri-
lineal totemic cultures contributed emphases on solar
symbolism of a male supreme being. Patriarchal cattle-
breeding cultures underlined the supreme being as a sky god,
the highest in a pantheon of ranked beings increasingly asso-
ciated with natural phenomena. Through such a historical
process, the kernel idea of a primordial supreme being weak-
ened over time, even while the images of supreme being mul-
tiplied themselves in number and breadth of special applica-
tion. History took its greatest toll on the idea of supreme
being in those cultures with a long history of ethnological
change. For this reason, Schmidt laid great stress on the
study of cultures that remained on the margins of technolog-
ical change.
Schmidt’s historical extrapolations from ethnographic
materials drew criticism from anthropologists. His assertions
of the existence of a primordial monotheism and revelation
disturbed theologians. From the point of view of history of
religions, Schmidt’s greatest shortcoming would prove to be
his lack of appreciation of religious elements other than
strongly rational ones. In short, although he helped break the
stranglehold of evolutionary theories and renewed serious
study of supreme being, he continued a rational tradition of
interpretation that found it impossible to appreciate the
many existential dimensions of myth subsequently disclosed
by a more profound hermeneutics of religion. For these rea-
sons, his ideas never gained widespread acceptance. Never-
theless, Schmidt’s mammoth studies of supreme beings stand
as a monument to his industry and to the existence of the
concept of supreme beings in the general history of cultures.
In Schmidt’s wake. A distinguished school of culture
history grew up around the researches of Wilhelm Schmidt.
Although his disciples were very careful to emend or even to
reject his historical conclusions about a primordial Archaic
Culture and his theological conclusions about a primordial
monotheism, they did continue to hold that the investiga-
tion of supreme beings outside monotheism constituted a
high priority of research. In particular, the researches of Will-
helm Koppers, Josef Haeckel, and Martin Gusinde con-
firmed the importance of the position of supreme beings in
many of the cultures that Schmidt had studied.
Reactions to Schmidt came from both theological and
ethnological quarters. In general, his critics raised their ob-
jections on the basis of material from one special field or an-
other. For the most part, however, other investigators—
Preuss, Radin, Lowie, Söderblom, and van der Leeuw among
them—agreed with Schmidt in recognizing the existence and
importance of a supreme being in many cultures around the
world.
In “Die höchste Göttheit bei den kulturarmen Volkern”
(1922), Konrad T. Preuss claimed that supreme beings did
not form a late stage of human development but rather the
foundation of human thought. In Glauben und Mystik im
Schatten des höchsten Wesens (1926), Preuss pointed out that
the separate ideas concerning the world are woven into a uni-
versal scheme personified by the supreme being of the sky.
Paul Radin, in Primitive Man as Philosopher (1927), put for-
ward the idea that a supreme being was a creation of a special
type of religious person, one inclined toward intellectual re-
flection. Speculative thought inclined itself toward an unap-
proachable, abstract divinity, absent from cult and from theSUPREME BEINGS 8877