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TSR Wiki > Study Help > Subjects and Revision > Revision Notes > Anthropology > Origins of Religion

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• Dreams (dead ancestors encountered in dreams)
• Ghost-souls (some part of people exists outside their physical bodies)
• Spirits/ Animism (animals, plants and inanimate objects also have spirits)
• Polytheism (more powerful spirits: many gods)
• Monotheism (one God)
• Criticism: Ethnocentric. The anthropologist (Tyler) was a Christian- this progression means Christianity is the perfect result of years of evolution.
• Religion and the Environment
• Control -
  • spiritual (influence over nature and the elements)
  • social (social organiser benefiting within whole society) (physical level)
• Christianity is not concerned with nature, but also has spiritual control (nature of religious ideas influenced by the society's circumstances, e.g. Christianity has an urban environment). Christianity is more concerned with the moral/psychological world, than societal structure Usually, a case of similar values applied in different circumstances.
• Religion: Ritual, Myth and Cosmos
• Magic- Magic represents human attempts to manipulate chains of cause and effect between events that, to us, are unrelated, in ways that to us, are irrational.
• Cosmology- An ideological system that explains the order and meaning of the universe and people's places within it.
• Magic deals with specifics, cosmology is an attempt at understanding an entirety. Both, however, relate to the supernatural.
• Religion and Social Structure
• Religion reflects and inverts social being. The concept of the world is generated by direct inversion of the characteristics of ordinary experience. This world is inhabited by mortal, impotent men, who live out their lives in normal time the other world is inhabited by immortal, omnipotent beings who exist perpetually in abnormal time in which past, present and future all coexist.

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