The Making of Religion — Story, Setting & Ideas

The Australian Evidence as a Test Case

Lang devotes considerable attention to Australian Aboriginal societies, which he describes as “probably lowest in culture” and “nearest to the primitive model.” He notes that they lack metals, bows, pottery, agriculture, and fixed habitations, and that no archaeological traces of a higher past have been found on the continent. Yet their religious conceptions, he argues, are unexpectedly lofty: they possess a belief in a “Maker” and ethical commandments imparted in secret mysteries, the Bora. Lang cites Dampier’s 1688 account, which records the knocking out of front teeth—a rite still practiced in the Bora—and also notes Dampier’s observation of unselfishness as a key ethical feature. Lang uses this to counter Huxley’s claim that savage theology is merely a belief in malignant ghosts, independent of ethics. The Australian case, he insists, cannot be dismissed as European influence or degeneration from higher culture, because the best religious ideas are tied to ancient, secret ceremonies and there is no evidence of a lost civilisation.

Critique of the Ghost-Theory of Religion

Lang directly challenges the prevailing anthropological model that religion originates from the worship of ghosts. He points out that among Australians, while spirits (often malicious and regarded as ghosts) are believed in and aid the wizard, they are not worshipped. There is no sacrifice to higher gods, which would be expected if those gods were “hungry ghosts.” Instead, the cult consists of keeping certain laws. Lang also engages with the work of Miss Kingsley, who observed that the Bantu appear to have “forgotten half” of their ideas, suggesting degeneration. Lang uses this to argue that the Australian case is different: their religious ideas are not remnants of a higher culture but are integral to their current, low-material-culture state. The implication is that the evolutionary sequence from ghost-belief to god-belief is not supported by the ethnographic record as presented by Tylor and Spencer.

Psychical Research and the Origins of Spirit Belief

In the first part of the book, Lang draws on contemporary psychical research—hallucination, telepathy, double personality, clairvoyance—to argue that the experiences underlying the belief in spirits may not be purely illusory. He notes that anthropologists have not applied these recent psychological findings to savage mental conditions. Lang suggests that the phenomena of hysteria, hypnotic trance, and automatism, studied by French, German, and English psychologists, might indicate real human faculties that could explain how the idea of spirits arose. This is a controversial move: he is not simply dismissing savage beliefs as errors, but proposing that they may be based on actual, if obscure, experiences. The excerpts do not reveal his final conclusions, but the structure makes clear that Lang is using psychical research as a corrective to what he sees as the overly materialist assumptions of contemporary anthropology.

Lang’s book is best approached as a polemical intervention in late-Victorian anthropology, not as a systematic survey. Readers should attend to his use of specific ethnographic cases—especially the Australians—and his willingness to draw on psychical research, a move that set him apart from most of his contemporaries. The two-part structure means that arguments about spirit origins and about high gods are meant to reinforce each other, even if specialists have found the connection strained. The excerpts suggest that Lang is more interested in challenging orthodoxies than in constructing a new theory of his own.

There are books that sit with you quietly, long after the last page. Lang's examination of faith in distant traditions felt that way, like a patient unraveling of assumptions. It reminded me of a gentle collection of answered prayers, recorded not as proofs but as witness—Children's Edition of Touching Incidents and Remarkable Answers to Prayer — Edition Insights. Both hold room for mystery without forcing certainty.