Quotes from Winfried Corduan

Fetishism and idolatry are the gateway to polytheism. Certain spirits are elevated in esteem and power so that they are now considered gods. Rituals develop; superstitions give way to prayers and sacrifices; relationships among the deities are recognized and get complicated. Nevertheless, polytheism is still just animism on a bigger scale.

Shockingly, it turned out to be Andrew Lang, perhaps Tylor's most vociferous defender, to call the world's attention to the facts that (1) certain people on the simplest level of material culture had some of the highest moral standards found anywhere in the world, and that (2) those standards were based on their belief in a single God who created them, watched over them, gave them his laws, and enforced them.

Specifically, I said words to the effect that "if it isn't about modal logic or Sanskrit, I don't think I want to write about it anymore.

In many cultures that are primarily animistic but also recognize a supreme god, the mythologies usually refer to a time when the relationship between the high god and human beings was closer than it is today, so that the notion of the anticipation of a future development does not fit at all.

This tendency toward magic and ritual is almost prevalent enough to be elevated to the level of a law analogous to the second law of thermodynamics, according to which randomness increases within any closed physical system: A religious culture left without strong guidance will tend toward increased ritual and magic.[25]

Max Müller took advantage of the new insights of his time into the IE languages and attempted to explain the development of Greek mythology, not by questioning the facts but by analyzing the language used in mythology. His main point was that mythology arose because people misunderstood poetic language used in the admiration of nature and interpreted it as narrative language about divine beings.

According to Müller, during this time language still was not capable of expressing anything that required conceptual thought. It contained no abstract nouns, such as beauty, or any adjectives, such as beautiful, because such words generalized concepts from direct observations. Thus, he claimed that the earliest languages consisted entirely of nouns that referred to substantial objects and verbs describing actions.17

All this was too much for Andrew Lang (1844–1912), a folklorist and disciple of E. B. Tylor, the best-known advocate of the evolution of religion. (We shall focus more on both Lang and Tylor later.) There are two aspects to Lang's reaction to Müller: the weakness of the philological method and the claim that an evolutionary theory can give a better explanation of the content of mythology than philology.