The Science of Religion, Folklore Studies, and the Occult Field in Great Britain (1870–1914): Some Observations on Competition and Cain-Abel Conflicts

The emergence of Religious Studies, or “the science of religion”, as it used to be called in Great Britain, in the late 19th century is accompanied by a competition with other discourses interpreting religion. The present article (abridgment of a longer study) analyses the social and cultural place of Victorian and Edwardian Religious Studies as a project only partially existing in a University context, but mainly in learned societies, as the Folklore Society, and promulgated by scholars with a predominantly non-theological background. As such Religious Studies were both influenced by and competing with occult and esoteric groups interpreting religion and searching for a basic unity of religions as first of all the Theosophical Society, but also by and with other groups. 1 The Emergence of a New Science of Religion in Great Britain: Introductory Remarks How do new sciences come into being? “We are all, we who work at these topics, engaged in science, the science of man, or rather we are painfully labouring to lay the foundations of that science“, Andrew Lang says in the same year that Queen Victoria died. Now the Scottish writer Andrew Lang (1844–1912) during his lifetime had been a perhaps even more well-known scholar of folklore, folktales, magic, religion and tradition in a more general way than even Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941) who today is most often seen as the acme of late Victorian and Edwardian scholarship on these subjects, both being Scotsmen and late descendants of Scottish Enlichtenment, as it happens. Both had also been (in a respectful way) opponents, and both embody the different poles of scholarship on religion in late Victorian England. 1 This is a very much abridged version of a study which for space constraints could not be published in this volume, with most documentation left out, which should appear at some other occasion. 2 Andrew Lang, Magic and Religion (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1901), 9. Open Access. ©2021 Marco Frenschkowski, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110664270-003 The Victorian and Edwardian Ages in Great Britain have seen the birth of quite a number of new scientific approaches, culminating of course in Darwinism that quickly changed so many outlooks and created a new profile of the whole age. Edward Clodd (1840–1930), a scholar on the anthropological lines of E. B. Tylor, biographer of Charles Darwin, Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer, wrote in 1891: Thus, the study of myth is nothing less than the study of the mental and spiritual history of mankind. It is a branch of that larger, vaster science of evolution which so occupies our thoughts to-day [. . .]. The evidence which it brings from the living and dead mythologies of every race is in accord with that furnished by their more tangible relics, that the history of mankind is a history of slow but sure advance from a lower to a higher; of ascent, although with oft backslidings. It confirms a momentous canon of modern science, that the laws of evolution in the spiritual world are as determinable as they are in the physical. [. . .] With the theory of evolution in our hands as the master-key, the immense array of facts that seemed to lie unrelated and discrete are seen to be interrelated and in necessary dependence. This is a telling passage, expressed by a scholar both deeply sceptical about religion and deeply interested in it, as might also be said about Frazer. Evolution became a basic paradigm: for biology as for cultural anthropology, for history and philosophy, for religion as well as – we may add – for occultism and other forms of rejected knowledge (to use the term of James Webb). During the second half of the nineteenth century the colonial age had reached a critical stage. British society realized that at least some of the countries which were part of the Empire did not simply exhibit inferior cultures, and especially India had as much to give as it had to take from Europe. The drive to re-organize the world according to British standards also allowed for a new fascination with the sheer otherness of the cultures encountered. This colonial experience coincided with a new look at oneʼs own cultural background. Traditional agrarian society perceived from an industrial and urban setting suddenly seemed as strange as a far-away foreign country. What soldiers, merchants, administrators and missionaries encountered in the colonial situation somehow gave a new meaning to their own folktales and folklore at home. This complex development contributed to the science of religion, defining its ideological background, and its deep connectedness to ethnology and folklore studies. A new science always will cover aspects of discovery as well as of conquest, of curiosity and of fascination, but also of taking possession, even of invading a 3 Edward Clodd,Myths and Dreams (London: Chatto & Windus, 1891), 139. 4 James Webb, Die Flucht vor der Vernunft. Politik, Kultur und Okkultismus im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Marco Frenschkowski and Michael Siefener, trans. Michael Siefener (Wiesbaden: Marixverlag, 2009). The Science of Religion, Folklore Studies, and the Occult Field in Great Britain 45