This research examines non-Western religions. The research will set forth the general nature of the human religious experience, with particular emphasis on prehistoric and tribal religions and then discuss this experience at the basic levels of myth, ritual, symbolism, animism, shamanism, rites of initiation, with a view toward identifying both how primitive religious consciousness may prefigure later Western religious structures and how the non-Western aspects of those structures might persist irrespective of Western divergences therefrom.
According to the sociologist Max Weber, the difference between primitive and historic-era religious traditions is the difference between magical and rational explanations of human experience of the universe (Gerth and Mills 51). But even in the modern period, attachments to nonrational explanations for or senses of the cosmos persist. Ellwood (4) speaks to this when he refers to unconditioned reality as being equivalent to "Divine or Ultimate Reality of religion and philosophy." Throughout his work, the Protestant theologian Paul Tillich also refers to "ultimate concern," or human consciousness of the cosmos that sights the limits of material certainty or indeed reason and logic but that nevertheless also senses importance beyond such certainty or reason. All rational beings experience such limits, says Tillich, which are their ultimate concern and which inhere in a God-concept (ST I 35ff et passim; Ultimate passim).
Tillich's formulation intersects with that of Ellwood inasmuch as he describes the general nature of religion as a back-and-forth experience of conditioned and unconditioned reality, with the latter referring to what "stands over our very-much-conditioned everyday lives" (Ellwood 4). But that distinction between ordinary and extraordinary reality is qualified by the statement that the boundary between the conditioned and unconditioned "is not seen as solid" (Ellwood 5), which mea...