Deep History, Secular Theory

11. Rationalism and Relativity in History of Religions Research

Historians of religion, in their enthusiasm to establish disciplinary autonomy, have distanced themselves from ordinary historiographical practice. As Mircea Eliade asserted programmatically in his 1951 study of shamanism, for example: “the history of religions is not always the historiography of religions” (Eliade 1964, xvi). Although Eliade acknowledged that “historical conditions are extremely important in a religious phenomenon (for every human datum is in the last analysis a historical datum)” (Eliade 1964, xiv), he argues a few pages later that “in the [now really?] last analysis” religious life is “ahistorical” (Eliade 1964, xix; for a discussion of Eliade’s view of history, ...