History of Religion

A genuine work of scholarship, and a single-handed comparative survey of the whole field: the tribal cults of Australia, Oceania, Africa, Siberia and the Americas; the national religions of China, India, Egypt, Iran, Greece, Rome and the Jews; and the three world religions, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam.

Sergei Tokarev (1899-1985) was among the Soviet Union's most eminent ethnographers, and his larger study of religion in the history of the peoples of the world remained a standard reference for decades. This reads as the teaching distillation of that lifework, carrying the same architecture - tribal, national, world - with a specialist's control of the detail.

The comparative range is handled without padding. He moves from the initiation rites of the Australians to the ancestor cult of China, from the pantheon of the Yakuts to the theology of Philo of Alexandria, and he is at home in each.

Issued in the Student's Library, a teaching series, which is the right frame for it: this is a textbook by someone who had done the primary ethnography himself.

A note on dating. The author died in 1985, so nothing in the book can postdate that year, and nothing does - the latest datum is a population figure given for 1985. There is no glasnost here, no mention of the millennium of Russian Christianity celebrated with official blessing in 1988, and none of the visible return of religion to Soviet public life then under way.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.