was mainly used to describe the later stages of Greek and
Roman religions, with their many imports from Near East-
ern cultures (J. Réville, La religion à Rome sous les Sévères,
1886) or its identification of divinities such as Asclepius and
Zeus (“synkretismus oder religionsmischerei,” H. Usener, Göt-
ternamen, 1895 [1949], p. 337); as a precursor, J. A. Hartung
had described the reception of Greek elements into Roman
religion as Vermischung (Die Religion der Römer, 1836,
p. 249). But as early as in the 1880s it was used in other reli-
gions, such as Talmudic Judaism or Avestan religion (see
Journal of the American Oriental Society 11 [1887]: 114, or
16 [1894]: 76). From the perspective of a church historian
following the church’s traditional evaluation, Adolf von
Harnack used the concept to characterize gnosticism (Lehr-
buch der Dogmengeschichte, vol. 1, 1886; see A. Hilgenfeld,
“Religionsmischung,” Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Theolo-
gie 33 [1890]: 1). Negative connotations are obvious, and
“syncretistic” almost equals “heretical.” Thus, syncretism was
and still is used as a normative term. Its scholarly use as a
descriptive term creates the same complex problems as the
use of the term magic: it has proved almost impossible to free
it entirely from normative connotations.
Two assumptions underlie the descriptive usage: reli-
gions can be understood as autonomous entities, and purity
is their early (“original”) stage; in a simple evolutionary con-
cept, syncretism (impurity) is seen as a later phenomenon
(lucid in G. van der Leeuw, La religion dans son essence et ses
manifestations, 1948, pp. 167 ff., 589–593). This appropria-
tion of elements from other, especially Asian religious cul-
tures was often viewed as a sign of weakening (“effete times,”
Journal of the American Oriental Society 11 [1887]: 114) and
a result of the population mix in the great urban centers of
later antiquity (“syncretism and cosmopolitanism,” Journal
of the American Oriental Society 11 [1887]: 16, and [1894]:
76). Subtexts are the negative view of city life in an industri-
alized society whose ideals were still derived from a rapidly
disappearing rural life, and the equally negative view of the
Semitic East as a foil to Greekness, Romanness, or Christian-
ity (e.g., M. Olender, Les langues du paradis, 1989,
pp. 75–111 on Ernest Renan). Political implications are evi-
dent, and it would be interesting to compare the contempo-
rary development of the terms nation and nationalism: the
rise of two major European nation-states, Germany and
Italy, falls into the same period as the rise of the term syncre-
tism. In an interesting inversion, the term also characterized
the religious imperialism of the Roman emperors who appro-
priated foreign cults as part of a strategy of homogenizing the
empire (“all the varieties of mankind... restamped at the
Caesarean mint,” Frazer’s Magazine for Town and Country
47 [1853]: 294): this prepared for its critical use in colonial
history.
As a scholarly term, syncretism has been used for describ-
ing a wide variety of phenomena, such as the influence of one
religion on another (Christian or Islamic influence on Afri-
can religions), the interpenetration of two religious systems
(such as Sumerian and Assyrian religion), the mutual influ-
ence of local religions (as in ancient Egyptian religion), the
appropriation of foreign divinities (such as Mithra in Rome),
or the combination of different divinities into one entity
(such as Zeus and Asclepius). Some of these phenomena were
viewed as unconscious, others could be seen as a conscious
blending of religious elements; usually, however, an evolu-
tionary approach prevailed that had no interest in individual
agents of syncretism. The usefulness of the term was debated
well before Karsten Colpe’s above entry in this encyclopedia,
and the debate continues, with good reasons. A successful
scholarly term is an instrument that enables succinct com-
parison between phenomena that are viewed as related; in
order to do so, it has to have a precise content and its mean-
ing has to find wide agreement in the scholarly community.
If the content is vague and fuzzy, comparison is impossible,
and if the community does not agree on the definition, com-
munication outside a narrow circle of initiates breaks down.
RECENT APPROACHES. In the years after Colpe’s entry (and
already before that), the term underwent more and some-
times radical criticism; some of the critics rejected it in favor
of another term.
Redefinition. A first approach insisted on the extreme
fluidity of the concept and its lack of definition, which re-
duces its heuristic value. Instead of rejecting the term alto-
gether, several critics paralleled Colpe’s own move to rede-
fine the term. Perhaps the most interesting proposal is Ulrich
Berner’s (1992, 2001). Using Niklaus Luhmann’s system
theory, Berner differentiates between the religious system
(such as Greek religion, or Christianity) and the elements of
this system; he regards religions as systems whose elements—
both their own form and their relationship to the overall sys-
tem—are constantly changing. He defines syncretism not as
the result of a process (as many earlier scholars had done) but
as the process itself. This leads him to locate syncretism on
both levels of the system: syncretism acts either between dif-
ferent religious systems (say between Shintoism and Chris-
tianity) or between single elements of the same system (say
between two Greek divinities); for the latter process, he also
proposed to use the term rationalization, leaving syncretism
to designate processes between different religious systems.
On both levels, he then introduced several other terms to
deal with phenomena that traditionally were also called syn-
cretism.
This approach to religious terminology shares its prob-
lems with many comparable approaches in which a tradition-
al but vague term is retained with a new and specific defini-
tion: it has to find a consensus group that shares its meaning.
In the case of syncretism, such a consensus has not been
reached. In Colpe’s proposal the term remains so loose, de-
spite the initial definition, as to comprise a large group of dif-
ferent phenomena; in Berner’s case, one might argue that it
would be easier to replace syncretism with yet another new
term than to retain it in its strictly confined meaning; in fact,
Berner also uses systematization to denote processes that af-SYNCRETISM [FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS] 8935