The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

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Comparison: the factor of selectivity

The process of comparison has a basic structure. First, there must be a point of commonality that allows for the comparison of two or more objects. Notably, the very term ‘comparison’ contains this idea, deriving from the Latin elements com, ‘with,’ and par, ‘equal.’ But comparison does not have to be limited to seeing commonalities. It can also perceive difference with respect to some aspect of what is otherwise in common. In everyday terms, for example, one can compare new houses (= the common factor) with regard to price (= the chosen criterion or aspect of difference). Likewise, one could compare religions (= the broad common factor) with regard to their population size, or their types of authority, or their views on gender; or compare purification rites with regard to their specific methods of removing impurity. The history of the comparative study of religion is the history and application of what its scholars have taken these common factors and these criteria of difference to be. Whether similarities or differences are emphasized will depend on the purposes at hand.

Comparison in itself is an activity, and not a theory or ideology, but it has been a tool of many different theories and hence employed for a range of interpretive or historical purposes. Consider two different ‘comparative’ approaches to the biblical story of creation. For the believer, to whom the account may present itself as the unique, authoritative Word of God, any comparison with other ‘origins’ accounts might be to show the superiority of Genesis. In that case, the ancient Babylonian account of creation, the Enuma Elish, could be shown to represent a more primitive ‘polytheistic’ idea of the world, compared to the Bible’s ostensibly ‘pure’ monotheism. The scenarios in the Enuma Elish that describe many gods and goddesses generating offspring and having to fend off chaos, would be picked out to contrast unfavorably with the Genesis version of one supreme god who is in charge of creation from the beginning and has no equals. But for those interested in goddess mythologies, the Genesis story has been presented quite differently. Here the biblical account has been viewed as a latter-day, patriarchal version of mythologies that once honored a primal goddess with her sacred tree and companion serpent. In this comparative sequence, the Hebrew account has been construed as a story that demoted the power of the goddess – who in Genesis becomes the very human Eve, the source of man’s fall, and the prototype of female subservience to males.

While the present article focuses mainly on academic, secular comparativism, rather than on matters of inter-religious relationships where ‘truth’ is typically the concern, the traditional role of religious approaches has been so pervasive that it requires some preliminary attention.

Religious forms of comparison

For those approaching comparison with religious motivation, their own beliefs are understandably used as a standard of interpretation. Historical Christian versions of comparative endeavors provide a range of examples of this. Here the rest of the world and its religions are all seen through the filters of patterns and prototypes set forth in the Bible. Here the overall motif is to demonstrate the superiority of Christianity.

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Examples of Christian ‘comparative religion’

Christian theologians needed to account for the existence of other religions and their gods, and traditional strategies included a whole spectrum of negative and positive interpretations that may be summarized briefly.

Demonic origins

Who or what were these ‘pagan’ gods that received so much devotion? Perhaps they were not really gods at all but demons seeking their own worshippers? How were missionaries to explain the presence of sculpted ‘crosses’ in Mayan temples that pre-dated the arrival of Christianity? Such overt parallels were easily seen as the mocking work of Satan, understood to be aping or imitating the true religion.

Historical diffusion

A second Christian strategy of explanation was the idea of ‘historical’ diffusion. Insofar as nonbiblical religions appeared to have anything truly religious about them, like the belief in a creator god, this could be explained as having been ultimately derived from the original pure monotheism of the biblical patriarchs. Likewise, where there was ‘idolatrous’ religion, such as the worship of forces of nature, this could be interpreted as a historical ‘degeneration’ from that same once pure source. Thus, any religious expression could be seen in terms of a unified theory of historical diffusion which assumed that all religions, as all cultures, could be traced to and from the survivors of the Great Flood. Sometimes etymologies were relied on to explain the transmission of these ‘survivals’ or ‘remnants’ of the patriarchal times. For example, the Hindu god Brahma was understood as a latter-day historical transformation of the biblical name, ‘Abraham.’ On other occasions, the idea of travel contact, perhaps via the lost tribes of Israel, was used to explain how religions like those of the Native Americans were able to obtain their ideas about a creator god.

Allegorical truthsÂ

A third mode of Christian comparison was to view other religions as containing symbols of Christian truths. Christians were already used to the idea that the Hebrew Bible contained images and events that allegorically prefigured the coming of the Christian messiah. Ancient Hebraic sacrifices, for example, were interpreted as symbolizing the sacrifice of Christ. Likewise, deities of other religions could be seen as representing attributes of the true God – for example, the goddess Athena was interpreted as pointing to God’s ‘wisdom.’

Natural vs. revealed religionÂ

Christians also developed the idea of natural vs. revealed religion. This is the notion that all humans, by being made in the divine image, have a natural potential to know God. Such endowment could therefore account for the presence of other religions. Yet, while all humans have access to a basic knowledge of God, ‘revealed’ knowledge was God’s full revelation through Christ to the biblical communities. In comparison, Christ could naturally be seen as the fulfillment of the innate yearnings of other religious peoples, and Christianity would be understood as religion in its highest, most complete, and universal form.

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Dialogue

From modern theology has come the idea of ‘dialogue’ between religions. This means adopting a ‘listening’ stance toward others, and not merely a dogmatic, prejudging position that stereotypes others. For example, a statement of the Roman Catholic Church (from the Second Vatican Council, 1962–1965), urged its members to appreciate the presence of ‘the holy’ in other traditions, and also established a permanent commission to study the other faiths and explore their meaning through open dialogue. Wilfrid Cantwell Smith (1916– 2000), an influential comparativist and specialist in Islam, emphasized that the comparative study of religion needs to responsibly describe the living qualities of other peoples’ faiths in a way that those other persons themselves would be able to recognize as their own position.

Universalism

In contrast to Christian comparisons, there is another religious approach that may be termed universalism. This affirms that all religions refer to the same underlying spiritual reality, but do so through different cultural forms and languages. Just as water is water, regardless of what it is called, so, in universalistic thinking, God is God, regardless of name. Even in the world of ancient Greece, there was a well-known doctrine of ‘the equivalence of the gods.’ Thus, the fifth-century bc Greek historian Herodotus reported that the gods of Egypt were basically Egyptian names for Greek divinities: Ammon was but another name for Zeus, Horus was the same as Apollo, and Isis was taken as equivalent to the goddess Demeter.

Universalism became highly developed in classical Stoicism and during the European Renaissance, and was later fostered by the Romantic, Transcendentalist, and New Age movements. It has been a basic premise of many Asian and mystical traditions. In the Far East, Buddhists commonly interpreted native Chinese and Japanese gods as ‘manifestations’ of cosmic buddhas. Buddhas were the ‘originals,’ and the local gods were their ‘appearances.’

Universalism has variants. For some, it is motivated by a sense that all humans are basically alike. Many find a common set of precepts undergirding the world’s religions, such as the need to honor a divine being and assume ethical responsibility. Some look for common affirmations about peace or nonviolence. Still others understand the universal basis of religion in terms of a core spiritual experience or revelation of the divine. In that outlook, institutional and doctrinal differences are merely seen as the secondary, outward elaborations of a shared, intuitive sense of the ‘wholly other’ mystery that grounds all life.

The rise of comparative religion as an academic field

Interpreting and comparing religions evolves along with expanding knowledge of other cultures. One can only compare what lies within one’s horizon of information. One can only study ‘others’ on the basis of the kind of knowledge of other cultures that is available at the time. In the Hebrew Bible, for example, references to other religions are always citations of other Near Eastern religions, not of Chinese, Japanese, or Indian religion. As recently as the early nineteenth century, Western Christendom still basically classified all religion into only four kinds, namely the three biblical monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) and all others, lumped together as ‘idolatry,’ or ‘paganism,’ a derogatory term referring to those who supposedly worshipped false gods. Accounts brought back by missionaries and travelers continued to support the stereotype of the benighted state of non-Western or non-biblical peoples.

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By the mid to late nineteenth century, however, the comparative study of religion, by that name, was being put forth as a modern academic field of knowledge. Several developments made this possible. One was the expanding knowledge of Asian religions, particularly through access to translations of their scriptures. A second was the emerging knowledge of pre-literate cultures, produced partly by the new field of anthropology. A third was a new idea of history, namely that the whole of human culture had undergone a long evolution from primitive origins (in contrast to the biblical account of human origins). And a fourth was the general trend toward classifying and mapping the data of the world’s various subject matters. Together, these factors created a broad, new canvas for the study of religion.

The most influential nineteenth-century advocate of comparative religion was F. Max Müller (1823–1900). A native of Germany and then scholar at Oxford University from age 23, Müller was an authority on Sanskrit, the classical religious language of India. He edited an important 50-volume translation series termed The Sacred Books of the East. He urged that the study of religion should no longer be limited to the religions of the Mediterranean and that the great civilizational religions of the East, and their scriptures, should be taken seriously. Asian religions were to be brought into a horizon of respectful comparability with biblical religions. Here the older, parochial Western view of religious history as a simple contest of biblical vs. pagan traditions was to become obsolete.

Along these lines, more accurate histories of religion were produced. These replaced the previous provincial notions that all human languages derive from Hebrew, that all cultures and religions were traceable to the family of Noah, and that the dating of scriptures – whether biblical or nonbiblical – should be taken at face value.

Müller and others held that comparative religion is to any one religion as comparative philology is to the study of any particular language, and as comparative anatomy is to the anatomy of any one species. As the life sciences made progress through application of this method, so too would religious inquiry. The study of one religion would throw light on the study of another. Müller liked to apply to religion what the poet Goethe said of language: ‘he who knows one … knows none.’ In addition, Müller also outlined a broad program and methodology of comparative study. This included principles like gaining knowledge of others through their own writings, grouping religions according to their regional, linguistic contexts, and avoiding the common distortion of comparing the positive aspects of one religion with the Ânegative aspects of another (Müller 1872).

Toward an academic comparativism

In principle, though not always in practice, academic comparativism does not presuppose the value or truth of any one religion, but sets out to investigate religion as a patterned phenomenon of human culture and behavior. The rise of comparativism as a concern of the human sciences required in the first place that all religion would be studied by the same criteria. No religion would be privileged. No religious version of history would be used as normative. While all religions professed their own ancestral accounts of the past, the new, panhuman, naturalistic worldview now showed quite a different story of origins – a long, complex evolution of culture that did not coincide with the self-interested accounts of the various world scriptures. Religion

– once the norm in terms of which all history and culture was perceived – now itself became an object to be interpreted in terms of wider patterns of human history.

Again, one source of this new knowledge was so-called primitive cultures, and anthropologists looked to these to find the origin of the fundamental structures of religious

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belief and practice and to identify universal laws about their evolution. The English scholar Edward B. Tylor (1832–1917) found ‘belief in spiritual beings’ (which he worked into a theory he called ‘animism’) to originate in the experience of dreams and of deceased relatives, and thence to evolve into forms of polytheism and monotheism. Others focused on the universal role of ‘power’ or mana (Melanesian term for supernatural force) in religions. The influential French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) advocated that the source and structuring principle of religious life was ‘the totemic principle.’ In this theory, sacred objects were maintained as sacred because they symbolized each group’s own social identity and tradition. Arnold van Gennep’s classic, Rites of Passage (original French edition, 1908), showed the universality of ritual patterns by which social and life-cycle transitions were performed, and became part of the currency of comparative thinking. An influential application of comparativism to biblical religion was W. Robertson Smith’s The Religion of the Semites (1889). Smith located ancient Hebrew practices in terms of common ‘primitive’ categories of totemic communion, sacrificial rites, sacred places, and taboos. The suggestion that biblical religion could be seen in such contexts was a scandal to many in his day.

The best known of these pre-modern comparativists was James G. Frazer (1854–1941), particularly through his book, The Golden Bough, first published in two volumes in 1890, and later to grow to twelve volumes. The Golden Bough was a vast compendium of examples of ritual, myth, and religion, organized by patterns and themes, and presented as an instance of comparative method. Frazer made extensive use of sources from primitive and folk cultures. The work began by citing an obscure Roman rite about the practice of succession to the priesthood of the goddess Diana, an institution that appeared to involve a ritual killing of the old priest by a new priest who would then assume the office. As a way of throwing comparative light on this, Frazer marshaled extensive illustrations from around the world that addressed the theme and subthemes of the ritual renewal of life, thus providing a universal context to the original Roman example. The Golden Bough became a study of the transcultural themes of sacred kingship, rites of succession, seasonal renewal festivals, mythologies of dying and rising gods, rites of scapegoating and expulsion, various forms of sympathetic and ‘contagious’ magic, and substitutionary ritual deaths, among other topics. Frazer thought that these showed the patterned way that the premodern human mind worked – a kind of archaeology of mentality. He held that once these universal patternings were understood, then many otherwise obscure or unusual cultural practices and beliefs – including many of those found in the Bible – would become more intelligible.

Psychologists Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and C.G. Jung (1875–1961) also began to interpret religious patternings as expressions of the way the human psyche works. In particular, Jung correlated stages of the development of the human ego/self with what he took to be the equivalence of those stages expressed in the projection and history of mythological symbols. Hence certain psychological patterns or ‘archetypes’ could be found in religion – expressed, for example, in images of a primal paradise, a Great Mother, the journey of the ‘hero,’ or the reconciling ‘union of opposites.’ ‘God-images’ were understood to represent various features of the ‘archetype of the self,’ in all its stages. The writings of Joseph Campbell (1904–1987)

– including the classic, The Hero with a Thousand Faces – would bring much of this approach into the public domain.

If recurring religious representations and practices appear independently in different cultures, with no explanation for their resemblances in terms of historical influence, then that might suggest that the parallels express something common to the human condition. But what? What is it that the patternings of religious life ultimately express? What are they

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patterns of? The human psyche? Social bonding? Political power? Gender empowerments? Varying environments? Social class? Are there stages of development that religious history goes through, and do the stages of the development of society and consciousness explain the varieties of religion? All of these trajectories of explanation utilized, indeed, required, comparative data. All have served as frameworks for pursuing and organizing the crosscultural study of religion. Here, then, comparison ultimately involves more than description. It is guided by issues of explanation, too, and becomes a testing ground for theories of human behavior.

Inventories, taxonomies, phenomenologies

In late nineteenth-century Europe, the general ‘science of religion’ included two principal components: historical and phenomenological. The latter referred mainly to a description of types and forms of religious experience. Its task was to collate and organize all the data of religious history into groupings or classes of religious expressions – that is, to identify an overall taxonomy or anatomy of religious life. This was an inventorial enterprise that resulted in encyclopedic catalogues illustrating all the common forms of religion. An example was the influential work of P.D. Chantepie de la Saussaye published in 1887 (in German) and translated as Manual of the Science of Religion. Chantepie classed kinds of religious ‘phenomena’ together, along with subclasses. For example, the class, ‘objects of veneration,’ included stones, trees, animals, sky, earth, sun, moon, fire, ancestors, saints, heroes, and gods. He grouped together ‘practices’ under rubrics like divination, sacrifice, prayer, sacred dance and music, processions, rites of purification, sacred times and places, and described categories such as priests (and other religious specialists), scriptures, types of religious communities, myths, and theologies. Chantepie illustrated each category with examples from different cultures, and summarized the research that had been done on it. What naturalists like Linnaeus had done for the botanical world was now to be done for religion. The religious world had to be mapped, and its many species, here its ‘classes of phenomena,’ named and typed.

The phenomenology of religion tradition also went beyond just mapping. It began to look for an understanding of how religious forms function in the worlds of the adherents. Two major figures that developed this were Gerardus van der Leeuw in his Religion in Essence and Manifestation (German original, 1933), and Mircea Eliade. Van der Leeuw’s book, which described religion as a relationship to an ‘other power,’ focused on some 106 patterns of religious life. For each one he tried to bring out the essential religious values, structure, and meanings connected with it.

Mircea Eliade’s comparative patterns

The best-known comparative religion scholar of the last generation was the Rumanianborn Mircea Eliade (1907–1986), who came to the University of Chicago in 1956. Eliade’s interest was in the recurring patterns and symbolisms by which religious cultures construct and inhabit their particular kinds of ‘worlds,’ through the language of myth and ritual. Such systems are structured, for the insider, by the belief in a sacred dimension to life, which makes them different from the nonreligious worlds which lack that factor. Eliade used the term hierophany, which literally means ‘a manifestation of the sacred,’ to refer to any object or form believed to convey spiritual power and value. Examples include trees, places, hunting,

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eating, one’s country, personal gods, cosmic gods, or yogic techniques that aim at liberation from the human condition. Moreover, ‘To many a mystic,’ Eliade writes, ‘the integrated quality of the cosmos is itself a hierophany’ (Eliade 1958: 459). Some particularly distinctive comparative ‘modalities of the sacred’ as interpreted by Eliade include the following:

Sacred space

All humans have the experience of space, but religious cultures endow special places as gateways or connectors to the world of the sacred. Religious systems orient life around certain fixed points that form a site of communication with the gods. The sites may be natural, provided by the environment, like certain rivers or mountains, or they may be human constructions like shrines and temples. Sometimes these linkages are explicitly understood to connect heaven and earth, the above and the below. Around such an axis, or ‘Centre of the World,’ the rest of the world, the ordinary world, rises up and receives its value. A grandscale example would be the great shrine at Mecca, the Ka’ba, the spiritual point on earth that Muslims believe God ordained as a bond with humanity. But local altars may also comprise an axis mundi (world axis), too.

The history of religion will show innumerable ‘centers of the world,’ each of which is absolute for the respective believers. Eliade’s point is that this kind of language should not be judged literally or geographically, but as illustrative of a common religious way of structuring one’s world through concentrative, centripetal points of focus (objects, places, mountains, shrines). That is, because a ‘world’ is relative to a people, these centers are not superstitious beliefs, but examples of a way the mind orients itself in space. Traditional Christian beliefs that placed Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher (the traditional site of the tomb of Christ) at the center of the world and world maps, or the equivalent claims in other traditions, may be then understood in this wider comparative context. In Eliadean usage, such comparative perspective on sacred space gives context, dimensionality and universal humanity to any particular version of religious places and orientations.

Mythic time

A related religious pattern featured in Eliade’s work is ‘sacred time.’ These are ritual or festival occasions when believers step into the revered ‘Great Time’ of the founders and gods. Religious cultures see themselves in terms of their own foundational sacred histories

– accounts of primal, originary times when the world was created by the actions of the great beings of the past. However, it is not just past, chronological time. It is time that always underlies present time, and can be accessed periodically and reenacted through ritual ‘openings’. In this way, one’s world is renewed and re-empowered.

Sacrality of nature

Eliade held that for homo religiosus (‘religious man’) sacrality is often revealed through the very structures of nature. These include patterns connected with the infinity and transcendence of the sky, the fecundity of the earth, the power of the sun, the waxing and waning cycle of the moon and of life and death, the durability of stones, and the solubility and creativity of water. As such, these ‘systems of symbolism’ form connections with various religious motifs. Examples are the association of creator deities with the sky, goddesses with earth and moon,

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and baptismal rebirth with water. These and other complexes are described at length in Eliade’s Patterns in Comparative Religion (first French edition 1949).

Eliade’s approach, which he referred to as the ‘History of Religions,’ provided a set of comparative categories that cut across the particular religious traditions. At the same time, for Eliade the study of religion was a study in human creativity, on the analogy that religions are complex symbolic universes like great works of art. Studying these ‘creations,’ he thought, would have a culturally de-provincializing and rejuvenating effect.

In most respects Eliade’s work is representative of both the strengths and weaknesses of traditional academic comparative religion. Many of the contemporary critiques of comparativism are critiques of Eliadeanism, and typically include the charge that crosscultural categories illegitimately override significant cultural contexts and differences. This and other issues will be addressed next.

Issues and critiques

Comparativism is not without its problems and critics. Especially when it claims crosscultural patterns, it can indulge in superficial parallels, false analogies, misleading associations, egregious stereotyping, and wholly unscientific or imaginative projections. As well, many historians believe that the best way to study religion is to avoid the application of abstract, generic concepts, with their preestablished meanings, and to build a knowledge of a particular religious tradition on its own terms, through its own primary sources. Critics of comparativism therefore often claim that it is always the specific, not the general, that is ‘the real,’ and that religious phenomena are indelibly embedded in unique sociocultural settings and hence are incomparable. The ‘same’ theme – such as ritual ablution or sacred space – may have different meanings and functions in different historical contexts. The distinctiveness of religious cultures, in this sense, would seem to remain elusively off the comparative grid. Briefly, here is a summary of these and other critical issues.

Comparativism as suppressing difference

Perhaps the most common criticism of cross-cultural categorizations is that they suppress or conceal significant difference, giving the illusion of homogeneity by making the expressions of other cultures conform to the concepts used by the scholar. The comparativist’s concepts, the critic maintains, are themselves cultural, for example, European or Christian. Other societies are then reduced to instances of Euro-Christian classifications. Vague and dubious resemblances are abstracted from rich diversity, and the representation of others is limited to only those points which illustrate the scholar’s own vocabulary. If a Westerner sets out to compare different ideas of ‘God’ around the world, he already has a standard of what to look for and it may be inadequate to describing non-Western representations of the superhuman.

A major advocate of the need for more rigorous contextual analysis in the comparative enterprise is the University of Chicago scholar, Jonathan Z. Smith. Many of his works (Smith 1982, 1987, 1990, 2004) challenge traditional categories and methods of comparison. To take one instance, Smith critiques Eliade’s interpretation of the sacred ‘pole’ of a certain aboriginal Australian tribe. Eliade had maintained that the pole represented a kind of world axis that could nevertheless be carried from place to place. This portable link with the world above would allow the tribe to remain ‘in its universe.’ Smith’s careful examination of the evidence showed that Eliade had superimposed the notion of a ‘World Center’ onto a culture

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which had very different notions of space and no notions of ritual linkages with a world above. The world axis idea, Smith pointed out, belonged to other kinds of cultures, like those of ancient Near Eastern city states, where political power was highly centralized and manifest in temples linking the human and the gods. But the Australian notion of space and environment lacked these elements. Smith concluded that ‘The “Center” is not a secure pattern to which data may be brought as illustrative; it is a dubious notion that will have to be established anew on the basis of detailed comparative endeavors’ (Smith 1987: 17).

Comparativism not only has been accused of inaccuracy of representation, but has been charged with political arrogance: appropriating ‘others’ to one’s worldview and depriving them of their own voices. So-called cross-cultural thought can thus become a form of colonialist ideology – a means of extending one’s own values over all and at the same time suppressing the ‘subjectivity’ of those who differ. According to this criticism, comparativism amounts to a kind of conceptual imperialism exercised by one culture, class, or gender over others.

So-called postmodern thinking challenges the notion of objectivity and maintains that comparative accounts are grounded in ideologies and used for the scholar’s own theoretical purposes. Thus, what the comparativist takes as patterns ‘out there,’ should really be seen as strategies for manipulating data for subjective or cultural goals.

Comparativism as untheoretical

There is also the charge that the generalizations of comparative religion lack scientific value. Anyone, for example, can make claims about the existence of certain patterns, but it could be argued that this is just another form of mythmaking, fiction, metaphor, play. What, in contrast, is the scientific basis of comparison? Are its claims verifiable by evidence and falsification? For example, what social or historical conditions explain the differences and similarities contained in the comparison? Anthropologists, for their part, have a long scholarly tradition of comparative analysis – including statistical analysis – of cross-cultural topics (like kinship), with attention to complex variables and co-variables (cf. Naroll and Cohen 1970: 581–1008); and sociologists of religion have comparable analyses of new religious movements. But, it is charged, comparative religion scholarship has yet to incorporate and apply the canons of empirical and analytical methods (Martin 2000). A ‘strong program’ of comparative study would have ‘scientific consequentiality’ because it would advance evidence that can be falsified or tested; the act of placing a particular phenomenon as a member of a comparative ‘class’ would have to be defensible and shown to be necessary, much as particular languages could be shown to be logical instances of a certain language family (cf. Ivan Strenski, ‘The Only Kind of Comparison Worth Doing,’ in Idinopulos 2006: 271–292). Recent applications of cognitive and evolutionary models to the comparative study of religion point to more rigorous models of evidence and determination of variables (cf. Whitehouse 2004).

Regional comparison

Many would want to limit comparison to historically contiguous cultures, where there are already some common structural features and values. Exponents contrast that with what is taken to be the dubious practice of comparison between unrelated cultures or religions. The first. regional type, is based on a degree of historical genealogy in the form of continuity, diffusion, or contact.

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Some elements of contemporary comparativism

The critiques have meant that the methods and process of cross-cultural concept formation have had to be qualified and defined in more careful ways. Hence, the post-Eliadean phase of comparativism has seen emergent articulations and emphases that in some ways address and remediate the problems just listed (Smith 1982, 1987, 1990; Poole 1986; Martin et al. 1996; Doniger 1998; Martin 2000; Patton and Ray 2000; Numen 2001; Braun 2004; Idinopulos et al. 2006). The following summarizes some of the elements and affirmations found in contemporary comparativism.

First, as mentioned above and as will be shown in the next sections, is that comparison is not only a matter of describing commonality, but a tool that may be used either to find similarity or difference. Insofar as comparison can also be used to highlight particulars, it is less subject to the above criticisms. Patterns are then not simply reductions to common types, as though forcing all differences into stereotypic boxes and erasing all particularity, but also have the effect of calling attention to differences, variations or innovations relative to the common theme. Arguably, you cannot have difference or distinctive attributes without some point of commonality in relation to which something is then different or distinctive.

Second,‘common factors’ or patterns can be understood as matters to be tested rather than assumed or taken for granted. As such, a comparative pattern would be like a hypothesis to be explored or a question to be asked in relation to each of its supposed cultural examples (cf. Neville 2001, for a thorough review of this). Counter-evidence would be examined, complexity acknowledged. The cultural bias of the pattern would be taken into account. Thematic inquiry – like the use of any concept that might guide a historian’s work – would then amount to a starting point for the complexities of research, leading toward areas of unforeseen possibilities, rather than an ideological gridwork imposed on history once and for all. Certainly comparative analysis is not a substitute for historical analysis. They go together.

Third, comparison can and should be clearly based on defined aspects of that which is compared. By focusing on and controlling the exact point of analogy, the comparativist understands that the objects may be quite incomparable in other respects and for other purposes. Because two or more things do not appear ‘the same’ on the surface, or as wholes, does not mean that they are not comparable in some ways (cf. Poole 1986). There is folk wisdom to the phrase, ‘You can’t compare apples and oranges,’ because on the surface and as a whole, they are not ‘the same,’ yet they are comparable in some aspects: both belong to the class ‘fruit,’ both are edible, both are round and similar in size, and so forth. Proper comparison does not equate similarity with identity. Moreover, comparativists then must stipulate not only which feature of the data they are comparing, but also for what purpose (cf. Smith 1982, 2004; Carter 1998). Some outstanding, exemplary case studies illustrate this (Holdrege 1996, comparing Hinduism and Rabbinic Judaism, and Jones 2000, comparing sacred architectures).

Fourth, another qualifier is that ‘cross-cultural’ does not necessarily mean universal. A comparative pattern can be widespread, general, a matter of resemblance, or a ‘nearuniversal’ (a familiar anthropological concept), without being universal. A cross-cultural pattern does not need to appear in all cultures, but only needs to recur in relation to certain types or conditions of culture and religious systems. For example, not all religions have shamans, priests, savior figures, animal sacrifices, or scriptures. But the ones that do have certain recurrent social patterns in common.

Fifth, comparison may legitimately proceed by the use of clear cultural norms or prototypes, as long as the terms and purpose of comparison are understood. For example, one could take