Stage

At the lowest stage of its development, religion is perhaps a personal matter between the savage and his deity, and concerns only individual material needs. At a higher level, religion is often the work of a family, a tribe, or a Union of tribes, and as it expands, so do religious demands, becoming less and less personal; religion becomes a General cult, and its aims take on a social character. When society becomes more humane, the cruel and bloody rites of religion, however long they may remain in force among the most ignorant and most easily excited, begin to lose their charm for the public mind, and in the end either change or are destroyed. Thus, the development of religion goes hand in hand with the development of civilization” (Menzies).

It goes without saying that religion reflects not so much the external culture of a certain people, but mainly its internal aspirations, higher aspirations and hopes. “The General mood of a man’s spirit, all his views of life and the world, are necessarily reflected in the ideas which he forms of God or the gods and their relation to himself; thus, as far as possible, he transfers his feelings and views to his God, so that every change that takes place in them produces a change in his Everything that is born in man of the highest and most ideal finds its expression in religion, at least among those peoples and those societies in which it has a predominant significance in comparison with science, philosophy, and art.

Taking into account this mutual influence of religion and culture on each other, it will not be difficult to understand what importance the history of religions should have in the study of the General history of the development of both all mankind and individual peoples. In fact, neither the external life of a certain people, nor its spiritual aspirations and ideals will be revealed to us with due fullness, if its religion, which is essentially the inner side of civilization, is not sufficiently studied; it expresses the basic spirit of human life in different times and among different peoples.