This book makes an unparalleled attempt to analyze the rise of comparative religion as a particular response to modernization. In the mid-nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth, Western scholars began to interpret religion''s history, drawing on prehistorical evidence, recently deciphered texts, and ethnographical reports. Religions that had been rejected as irrational by Enlightenment philosophers were now studied with enthusiasm. Using comparative methods, scholars identified in their own culture traces of ancient, oriental, and tribal religions--not merely as survivals but increasingly as powerful manifestations of a human existence not subdued by rationality.
Hans Kippenberg shows how F. Max M-ller, E. B. Tylor, W. Robertson Smith, J. G. Frazer, Jane Harrison, R. R. Marett, E. Durkheim, Max Weber, William James, and Rudolf Otto included in their reconstruction of the religious past a diagnosis of modern culture. Mysticism, soul, ritual, magic, pre-animism, w
