The origin and early forms of religion

Scholarship has two main approaches to the origin of religion. According to the theological (religious) approach, in Judaism, Christianity and Islam God created the first human being and later people moved away from the original teaching and turned to various idols; this is the view within those religions’ teaching. The materialist approach explains religion as a product of human thought and social life: Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) saw ancestor worship, and Max Müller (1823–1900) the awe of natural phenomena, as the main source; Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” (1859) also gave an impulse to these views. Among early forms of belief, animism holds that everything has a soul or spirit; totemism sees a clan as tied by kinship to an animal or plant; fetishism attributes special power to particular objects; and shamanism rests on the idea of a person (shaman) who communicates with spirits. In Central Asia the wolf, the horse, birds and trees such as the plane tree (chinor) were revered from ancient times; the grave of a Neanderthal child found in the Teshiktosh cave in 1938 is cited as one of the oldest finds linked to totemism (researchers present this reading as a hypothesis).