The evolution of religion — Key Ideas to Explore

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Authors: Farnell, Lewis Richard, 1856-1934 Digital Source: Project Gutenberg Gutenberg Release Year: 2023 First Publication Year: Not confirmed

Key Word: Rites and ceremonies; Religions; Prayer Target Reader: Readers of public-domain and historical texts

Book Edition: Project Gutenberg digital edition Book Language: en

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Words 43,881

Reading time 191 min

Text sections 6

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An anthropological study of purification rituals and prayer, tracing their evolution from primitive to ethical forms, with a focus on Greek evidence and comparative method.

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s speech”: it is obvious that the original motive of the rule {115} was to guard against the utterance of any impure word that might produce an ill-omened condition of mind in the congregation.

Of this development of the idea of spiritual from that of ritualistic purity, the language of certain of the higher races affords the same indication as we find in the Basuto phrase: the Latin “purus” and the Greek καθαρός and φοῖβος themselves have an original material or physical significance; the blood that is shed and the unburied corpse emit a “miasma,” a defiling atmosphere charged with dangerous spirits, and the same word μίασμα comes to denote a spiritual corruption of the soul: touching a corpse is called “sin” in the Zend-Avesta;[115.1] and it is significant that the same word which is used to express the material idea of impurity in the Old Testament in the earlier books of the Law is employed in the later and more advanced ethical vocabulary of the Bible for a real sin against God as understood in the modern sense.

Again, we have other evidence besides the linguistic that the earliest conception of sin which we can call spiritual was still half-materialistic, and was still closely allied to that of bodily impurity. In the theory of earlier ritual, the sin can be washed away like a physical taint, the atonement takes the form of certain lustrations, and repentance is not considered necessary as a moral condition of release. And to the same middle stage of development belongs the process known as the transference of sin, whereby the sin can be extracted as if it were a substance from the person of the sinner and transferred into another man or animal or even an inanimate object. Think of sin as an inner vapour or exhalation and the idea of quasi-mechanical transference is intelligible.[116.1] It no doubt belongs to a comparatively early {117} period of savage religion. Among the Atkans, for instance,[117.1] we hear of such a release as this: the sin, which in this case was a gross violation of a natural law of the sex-instinct, was made to enter into certain weeds which were worn about the person, and then, under a clear sun were carefully thrown away, the sun himself being called to witness the act of transference. In the ancient Peruvian Church, the shaking off of evils was a great public festival: bands of warriors marched forth crying out, “Go forth, all evils,” and then bathed in the river, while the people shook out their clothes from the doors.[117.2] A similar record speaks of the Inca praying to the river-god to bear away his sins, which he had confessed in the sight of the sun. And during the Peruvian purification a similar rule prevailed to that which was noticed above, that all abusive language and strife was to be avoided. Or again, the {118} belief that the sin is an evil spirit that can be induced to find another living-lodgment, suggests the scapegoat, a familiar figure in Leviticus and in Greek ritual, the animal who bears away with it into the wilderness the sins of the people, or is put to death with the uttered prayer that into it may enter all the evils of the community. The Judaic record tells us that Aaron “confessed over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel… putting them on the head of the goat”; after this, as the animal was in a high degree of sin-infection, both Aaron and the man who led it away into the wilderness must wash and change their clothes.[118.1] The Egyptian rite described by Herodotus,[118.2] shows us the same idea differently worked out: the head of the animal is severed with the imprecation that it may bear the evils of the community, and is then either thrown into the river so that the stream may carry them away, or is sold to the Hellenes wherever there happens to be a Hellenic market: Herodotus {119} does not tell us the reason of this, which, however, is easily divined: the Hellene is the stranger who, as the Egyptians hoped, might eat the infected flesh and thereby absorb into his alien person the people’s sins; for the eating of other people’s sins is a recognised primitive process of transference.[119.1] What is unique in the Egyptian management of the ceremony is the skilful combination of religion and trade.

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Farnell opens his Hibbert Lectures with a frank admission: the book is small, the subject vast, and the work tentative. Rather than a comprehensive survey, he offers two focused inquiries—the ritual of purification and the development of prayer—drawn from his ongoing research on Greek cults. The preface signals a methodological concern that recurs throughout: how to balance comparative anthropology with the specificity of historical evidence. Farnell insists on original study, and the excerpts bear this out: he moves from Argive funeral rites to Orphic brotherhoods to an inscription from Hadrianic Rhodes, each step anchored in textual or archaeological detail.

Diction of Purity: From Miasma to Moral Stain

Farnell’s vocabulary for impurity shifts markedly as he traces Greek thought from ceremonial defilement to ethical guilt. Early passages speak of miasma contracted by contact with death, and of tapu—a Polynesian loanword that signals his comparative frame. The mourners at Argos eat sacrifice to Apollo to “destroy the miasma within and around them.” Here purity is physical, contagious, removable by ritual ingestion.

Later, the lexicon changes. A saying attributed to Charondas calls “foul speech a defilement of the soul.” Epicharmos declares: “If thou art pure of soul, thou art pure of all thy body.” The word soul now carries the moral weight. Farnell juxtaposes these registers without comment, letting the diction itself argue for a conceptual evolution. The shift from miasma to stain of evil is not merely semantic; it reflects a redefinition of what religion must cleanse.

The Voice of the Inscription: Blending Codes

Farnell’s most telling evidence is an inscription from Rhodes, dated to the time of Hadrian. He quotes its preamble: “The first and greatest rule is to be pure and unblemished in hand and heart and to be free from an evil conscience.” Then follows a list of traditional ceremonial rules—impurities of food, funerals, bodily affections. The final clause permits entry “on the same day after lawful married intercourse,” which Farnell interprets as excluding adulteresses.

The inscription thus preserves two voices: an ethical ideal of inward purity and a detailed code of external observance. Farnell does not resolve the tension; he presents the blend as characteristic of advanced Greek ritual. The document is not a philosophical treatise but a regulatory text, and its coexistence of high principle and petty rule is, for Farnell, precisely the point. The Rhodian code shows how slowly moral abstraction penetrates institutional religion.

Structure as Argument: The Comparative Frame

Farnell organizes his lectures by moving from general methodological questions to specific case studies. The first two lectures defend comparative religion against charges of superficiality; the later ones examine purification and prayer. This structure itself makes an argument: that method must precede evidence, and that the anthropologist must define terms like religion and evolution before applying them.

Within the purification section, Farnell proceeds geographically and chronologically: from Greek evidence to Egyptian (regretted as incomplete), then to Roman and Jewish parallels. Each step is introduced with a transitional phrase such as “It remains to trace its action in…” The effect is cumulative, not narrative. Farnell does not tell a story of progress; he assembles a mosaic of practices and texts, letting the reader see both continuity and change. The structure mirrors his claim that evolution is not linear but uneven.

Recurring Detail: The Lustral Water and the Ocean

A single image recurs across Farnell’s excerpts: the contrast between a small amount of lustral water and the vastness of the sea. In an epigram he quotes, the oracle says: “lustration is an easy matter for the good, but all ocean with its streams cannot cleanse the evil man.” Another oracle declares: “no stain can ever cleave to virtue.” The image is paradoxical—water, the universal cleanser, is powerless against moral impurity.

Farnell does not belabor the motif, but its repetition suggests a deliberate choice. The lustral water is a concrete ritual object; the ocean is a natural sublime. By setting them against each other, the epigrams make a theological point: ritual is finite, virtue infinite. Farnell’s own prose remains dry and scholarly, but the quoted verses introduce a poetic counterpoint. The detail of water—measured, poured, sprinkled—runs through the Greek evidence, from the mourner’s bath to the temple inscription, anchoring abstract ethics in physical practice.

Farnell’s study resists easy summary. He offers no grand theory of religious evolution, only a careful examination of two strands—purification and prayer—as they appear in Greek and comparative sources. Readers should attend to his footnotes and citations, which often carry the weight of his argument. The book is best read as a series of connected essays, each testing a hypothesis against specific evidence. Farnell’s caution is a strength: he knows when the evidence is incomplete, and he says so.

Years spent among these stacks, I’ve noticed how The Evolution of Religion traces purification’s slow path from outward washing toward inner intent. It reminded me, gently, of another ancient voice saying much the same—that prayers and judgments must come from a clean heart. They keep that quiet kinship, those two, like old friends sharing a single, hopeful secret. The Book of the Dead — Background and Themes reflects that very longing back.