Deep History, Secular Theory

18. The Deep History of Religious Ritual

A historical approach to religious ritual recalls us from recent non-historically oriented fashions in academia to the European roots of our common endeavors in the academic study of religion, an endeavor that has been represented, from the late nineteenth century, as Religionsgeschichte. Increasingly, however, the history of religions became associated with an ahistorical approach in which “history” became a synonym for a phenomenographical corpus of truncated and decontextualized evidence, the temporality of which was disregarded in favor of claims to its being manifestations of a panhuman religious essentialism. This atemporal religious phenomenology commits, of course, the historiographical heresy ...