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This chapter presents the ideas of agency, intentionality, and teleo-functional reasoning. Agency is something we infer from the regular patterns we observe in an entity’s behavior. Such patterns trigger assumptions about animacy (liveliness, self-propelledness) and may also lead to attribution mentality (beliefs and desires) to the behaving entity. Agency is something that is inferred; therefore it is immaterial and detached from a bodily implementation. Observing regular patterns also in purely natural events may trigger assumptions about invisible agents responsible for this apparent order. Such proclivity to “promiscuous teleology” makes concepts of supernatural agents salient and easy to adopt. Supernatural agents are also believed to have open access to all minds and thus to know everybody’s thoughts. Such omniscience is explained by combining Tylor’s idea of religion as belief in spirits with Durkheim’s idea of religion as the social “glue” that ties a group of people together.

Gladstone changed his mind about aspects of Homer during the period when he was writing about the poet. Instead of rejecting the possibility that the poet drew his ideas from nature worship, Gladstone argued in 1869 that it was Homer’s genius to incorporate the phenomena of nature into a pantheon in which the human predominates. The anthropomorphic principle meant that the gods and goddesses of Olympus were characteristically depicted in human form. The human element in the divine, which Gladstone had previously presented as a debasing influence, was now shown to be an elevating factor. Gladstone subsequently publicised the findings of Heinrich Schliemann on the site of Troy and argued for connections between ancient Greece and the civilisation of the East. In his last years, he was planning a book to repudiate the views about Homer of the evolutionary school of anthropology associated with Edward Tylor.

As a gifted folklorist, Andrew Lang grasped mythic function in ways most cultural anthropologists could not. E. B. Tylor’s positivistic model of social development viewed religion as a species of bad science. Lang took his mentor’s outlook as the sign of a larger problem, one that would eventually extend well beyond anthropology. Science, such as it was, would make for bad religion, killing off the imaginative sources from which civilizations arise. In the 1880s, Lang made his case as a literary wit, pointing to the grim sociology of the modern realist novel: a journey of anxious introspection taken in lieu of a thrilling adventure. Lang famously championed Rider Haggard's “anthropological romances,” in language that was often gendered, racial, and juvenile. Still, Lang was subverting the hierarchy of knowledge: imagination was virile, reason emasculated. In the 1890s, Lang’s proxy battle became direct, as he began to romanticize anthropology with the aid of psychical research. Contemporary evidence for telepathy, clairvoyance, and even telekinesis gave validity to patterns of supernatural wonder repeated around the world. Lang’s new discipline of psycho-folklore was empirically grounded but not physically reductive, suggesting a new kind of scientific encounter with the sacred, one that need not profane it.

Locating cognitive studies of religion within the history of imperial relations between Great Britain and South Africa, with special attention to the work of Charles Darwin and E. B. Tylor, this chapter examines Darwin's theory of the origin of religion, based on an animal psychology shared by dogs and savages, in the attribution of life to inanimate objects and the submission to a higher power. Against this background, the chapter explores how imperial psychology of religion intersected with race, gender, and social class. Turning to the father of British social anthropology, E. B. Tylor, the chapter traces Tylor's theory of animism to reports about Zulu dreaming, especially the diviner who became a “house of dreams” in Henry Callaway's Religious System of the Amazulu (1868-70). Tylor's reduction of religion to animism ignored not only the colonial conditions in which his data was produced but also the hermeneutics and energetics of dreams in Zulu religion.

Focusing on the authentication of knowledge about religion and religions, this chapter examines three versions of authenticity—interfaith, theosophical, and critical—that emerged within imperial comparative religion. Interfaith comparative religion, which is illustrated by the Religions of Empire Conference organized in 1924 by the colonial agent and nature mystic Francis Younghusband, was authenticated by adherents describing their own faiths. The presentation by South African Albert Thoka demonstrated problems in this approach by rendering African religion as nature mysticism. Theosophical comparative religion, which invoked secret wisdom as authentic knowledge, directly challenged mainstream scholarship. In 1927, the theosophist Patrick Bowen published his discovery of secret wisdom among the Zulu of South Africa that was authenticated by being the same as Theosophy. Critical comparative religion, which relied on the authenticating power of the footnote, is illustrated by comparing the handling of the Zulu term Itongo (spirit) by Friedrich Max Müller, E. B. Tylor, Andrew Lang, and James Frazer.

This chapter examines the emergence of a category, “belief in spiritual beings,” which drove certain “intellectualist” assumptions about the essence, origin, and persistence of religion. Like many terms in the study of religion in Europe during the late nineteenth century, animism arose through a global mediation in which an imperial theorist, in this case the father of anthropology, E. B. Tylor, relied on colonial middlemen, such as missionaries, travelers, and administrators, for evidence about indigenous people all over the world. Among other colonial sources, E. B. Tylor relied on the Anglican missionary Henry Callaway for data about Zulu people in South Africa. Drawing on Callaway’s reports about Zulu dreaming and sneezing, Tylor distilled his basic definition of religion as belief in pervading and invading spirits. Against a broad imperial and colonial background, this chapter explores the historical emergence and ongoing consequences of the category animism in the study of religion.

In the unsettled and formative 1860s, many essays in the British anthropological journals adopted a conjectural form, as did foundational work by E. B. Tylor that established the defining idea of culture as an organic unity. Conjectural thought and form also underlay the work of Morgan on kinship and the family, which was adapted by Marx and then by Engels in their late anthropological writings.

This chapter introduces the questions and issues that shape this particular study. Within the overall framework of a consideration of the cultural construction of nature, it re-examines such concepts as personhood, animism, anthropomorphism, idolatry, popular religion, and other related notions associated with tree worship and frequently demonized in the “modern” world, asking anew what possibilities lurk within these much-maligned concepts. The hierarchically progressive nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century theories of Edward Tylor, James Frazer, and Robertson Smith are explored and questioned with reference to more contemporary figures interested in the cultural construction of nature, such as Lynn White, Neil Evernden, Philippe Descola, and Nurit Bird-David. Animism and anthropomorphism are given particular attention, while thinking with the recent theories of the anthropologist Stewart Guthrie and ethologists, such as Jane Goodall. This chapter ends with a brief consideration of the personhood of trees.

This chapter is concerned with the use of language, the common medium through which both literary and scientific texts come into the social world. Charting key points of contest in the Victorian debate about the origin and evolution of human speech, the chapter focuses on the contributions of F. Max Müller and Edward B. Tylor in particular. It argues that, in Müller’s work, the very attempt to demonstrate that there is a quasi-divine reason at the “root” of each word makes the writing develop a poetical logic and, as a consequence, outgrow its own theoretical foundation. In this way, Müller’s lectures intimate, even though they do not say it, that the logic of language inheres in the multiple ways in which it is used, rather than dwelling in a place or “root” outside of them. As a result, Müller’s work not only enacts its own theory about the creative power of metaphor; it also aligns itself, unwittingly, with the philosophy of Edward B. Tylor whose attempts to reconcile the ideal meaning of words with the material practice of gesturing and drawing seem otherwise to deviate sharply from Müller’s approach.

In eighteenth-century Britain, “culture” referred to the care of crops or animals. No author used the term "oral culture," for the anthropological idea of a culture as a way of life did not exist. In the nineteenth century, the idea of culture as the outcome of a process of human cultivation developed into what anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor called culture in its "wide ethnographic sense." In the 1960s, Walter Ong popularized “oral culture" -- as Marshall McLuhan popularized "print culture" -- and the idea of oral culture generated major research in fields such as history, sociology, folklore, and literary studies. The term dates to the 1960s, but the idea long preexisted the term. The reflection on oral tradition and oral discourse analyzed in this book represents a key phase in the history of these concepts. Throughout the eighteenth century, one finds ethnographers, anthropologists, and theorists of what we would now call oral culture. To trace the historical development of an abstract concept of the oral has required us to identify and analyze embryonic ideas as well as explicit statements. This book argues that the eighteenth-century invention of the category of the oral was a back-formation of the spread of print.

“The Shadow of God,” highlights a crucially important dialectical movement. It shows how a putative opposition between religion and science, combined with fears of despiritualization and mourning for the death of God, motivated the rise of spiritualism and occult movements, and contributed to the birth of religious studies as a discipline. Looking at Edward Burnett Tylor, Friedrich Max Müller, Éliphas Lévi, and Helena Blavatsky, it demonstrates how scholars, spiritualists, and magicians not only moved in common social circles, but also shared an engagement with spirits, mysticism, and “Oriental” mysteries. The chapter maps out the messy intermediate terrain between two spheres that considered themselves to be different and were sometimes opposed, but nevertheless exhibited the same basic habits of thought—including a myth of lost magic.

Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) is often considered the father of anthropology. This chapter presents Tylor’s main theories in the field of anthropology. One of Tylor’s major areas of interest was the use of anthropological evidence to discover how religion arose. This preoccupation resulted in his influential account of animism. Tylor’s Quaker background, later religious scepticism, and personal life are connected to his intellectual work. Assumptions such as his evolutionary view of human culture and intellectualist approach to ‘savage’ customs, his use of the comparative method, and distinctive notions of his such as ‘survivals’ are explained, and then the discussion is taken a step further in order to demonstrate how they were deployed to influence contemporary religious beliefs. Tylor argued that the discipline of anthropology was a ‘reformer’s science’. Working within the warfare model of the relationship between faith and science, the study reveals the extent to which he used the tools of this new field of inquiry to bring about changes in the religious convictions of his contemporaries.

By the end of the decade the time revolution was a done deal. Moulin-Quignon still reverberated, but in 1865 Lubbock produced the first guided tour of the Old Stone Age, in which he accused Lyell of plagiarism. In Pre-Historic Times he filled the new space of deep history with stone tools to show an evolutionary pathway from St Acheul to the Neolithic monuments of Avebury and Stonehenge. Tracing history back was matched by the anthropologist Edward Tylor, who traced it up. Both men were interested in the evolution of racial groups and accounting for the world’s hunters and gatherers. In a typically upbeat assessment, Lubbock saw the lesson of the past as providing hope for the future. Victorian ‘savages’ at the uttermost ends of the earth had not degenerated from a civilized state. They had the potential to evolve, as his ancestors in Europe had done. Unwritten history was making universal history possible. The decade saw deaths and career changes. Prestwich largely abandoned the time revolution, married Falconer’s niece, Grace McCall, and became an Oxford professor. Falconer and Boucher de Perthes died, while Lubbock entered Parliament in 1870. Prestwich’s fixed notion of a single ice age was challenged by James Croll, who painstakingly worked out the changes in the elliptical orbit of the Earth, and from these proposed multiple ice ages. As a bookend to the decade Evans published his fact-rich volume on ancient stone implements. The path of deep history was now set in stone.

In Plato and Platonism (1893) Walter Pater offers a new, experiential approach to Plato’s metaphysics through his presentation of an animistic religiosity. Adapting Edward Burnett Tylor’s anthropological work on animism in Primitive Culture (1871), Pater presents the Ideas as ensouled agencies having the characteristics of persons. Far from echoing back to us in clear and reassuring tones our own prejudices about the world, the Platonist’s pursuit of Ideas brings her face to face with both her own subjectivity and the elusive subjectivity of others. A broader animistic Platonism was already in formation in the 1870s and 1880s in Pater’s aesthetic theory and practice. This includes his location of an animistic Platonist sensibility in Romantic poetry, his presentation of ancient Greek statuary as aesthetic objects that function very much like Platonic Ideas, and his treatment of the ‘gods in exile’ theme in the story ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893).

The legacies of rejected nineteenth-century models of evolutionary anthropology remain influential. Nineteenth-century founders of the discipline such as E. B. Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan aspired to study human societies, including morals and religion, as natural phenomena, reflecting a natural order. In the context of shared assumptions about race and empire they postulated a trajectory from primitive society to civilization, identifying ‘primitive’ societies as remnant populations arrested at early stages of evolutionary development—the ‘childhood of the race’. Rejecting the racial and teleological implications of this trajectory, Franz Boas argued that anthropology and other historical sciences differed fundamentally from the nomothetic, law-giving physical sciences. Naturalism has become problematic for some anthropologists—not in the sense that the ‘God hypothesis’ has returned as methodology, but manifested in an uneasiness about definitions of culture and of human nature in naturalistic, deterministic, reductionist, and biological terms.