Heiler, however, went beyond the scientific study of religion in attempting to promote interreligious fellowship, partly through the Religiöser Menschheitsbund (Union of Religious Persons), which he helped to found. This approach, pioneered by others before Dumézil, also was skeptical of the easy identification of gods with natural forces and emphasized the sociological functions of the divinities-without, however, holding to a reductionist theory. Wach, however, was not committed to a religious neutralism in his use of the idea of a “science of religion.” For him, Religionswissenschaft deepens the sense of the numinous and strengthens, rather than paralyzes, religious impulses. He considered that the former cannot exist without the historical sciences-e.g., history, philology, and archaeology-but that it supplies scholars in the latter fields a sense of the religious significance of what they discover. During the latter part of the 19th century an attempt was made to place comparative methodology on a systematic basis (often called the “science of religion”), and in this connection the work of the Dutch theologians Pierre Daniël Chantepie de la Saussaye (1848-1920) and Cornelis Petrus Tiele (1830-1902) was important. The first congress of Religionswissenschaft (“science of religion”) took place in Stockholm in 1897, and a similar one in the history of religions took place at Paris in 1900. Later, the International Association for the History of Religions, dedicated to a mainly nonnormative and nontheological approach, was formed.

A great amount of the work of scholars in the field has been devoted to exploring particular histories-piecing together, for instance, the history of gnosticism (a Hellenistic-Christian heretical sect that emphasized dualism) or of early Buddhism. Every structure is thus inhabited by its particular spirit: the domovoy in the house, the ovinnik in the drying-house, the gumenik in the storehouse, and so on. This can range from the attempt to establish rather particular comparisons, such as Otto’s comparison (in his Mysticism East and West) of the medieval German mystic Meister Eckhart and the medieval Hindu philosopher Shankara, to a systematic typology, as in Religion in Essence and Manifestation by the Dutch historian of religion Gerardus van der Leeuw. Zaehner (1913-74), notably in his work on mysticism, as in his Mysticism Sacred and Profane. Zaehner’s was a definitely Christian approach rather than a scientific-descriptive one, and his concern was to distinguish between theistic and other forms of mysticism, such as monistic mysticism as found, according to him, in Yoga, Advaita, and even Theravada Buddhism. The very late date at which they came into the light of recorded history (even their name does not appear before the 6th century ce) and the scarcity of relics of their culture make serious study of the Slavs a difficult task.

Many of these Roman wars were against external threats, opposing empires trying to maintain their own base of power or even increase it. Dumézil’s theory was partly stimulated by discoveries in the Middle East, notably that of Boğazköy (Turkey), which revealed a similarity between some of the chief gods of the Indo-European Mitannians and those of the Indian Vedic tradition. Brandon (1907-71) in his treatment of ideas such as creation and time in different religions, but with special reference to the ancient Middle East, and the English Indo-Iranian scholar R.C. Thus, the Enuma elish, the Babylonian creation epic, was discovered to be no mere set of stories but rather a mythic drama reenacted every year at the spring festival, at which time the foundation of the world is ritually renewed. Thus, the work of Nathan Söderblom, who, as well as being a historian of religions, was prominent in the ecumenical movement, combined the two aspects in his Living God. Thus, God can appear both as wrathful or awe-inspiring, on the one hand, and as gracious and lovable, on the other.

In this article, we will explore how you can use the names of God as a source of inspiration in your daily life. Their prayer rituals are nearly identical, with slight variations: For example, Shiites will stand with their hands at their sides, Sunnis will put their hands on their stomachs. Compared to them, Sunnis have greater legal protections. Over the years there have been several arson attempts of messianic congregations. Over the years, the number of exemptions has grown to about 10% of conscriptable manpower. Throughout the history of their religion, Christians (both Catholic and Protestant) have interpreted Pentecost as a call to spread their faith to people the world over. Pettazzoni, in his concern for problems of method, was critical of the sharp division between phenomenology and history. The phenomenologist of religion who probably has had the greatest influence after Otto, partly because he is fairly explicit about method, is Gerardus van der Leeuw (1890-1950), who was somewhat influenced by the French anthropologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857-1939) and his notion of prelogical mentality, which he applied to nonliterate cultures to distinguish them from literate ones.