The Making of Religion

The work examines how human belief systems about spirits and a supreme power may have arisen, dividing its inquiry into two parts. The first critiques standard anthropological explanations for spirit beliefs and reinterprets trances, visions, possession, and related phenomena through recent psychological studies of hallucination, hypnotic trance, and secondary personality. The second challenges accounts that derive notions of a supreme being from ghosts, proposing instead that recognition of human artifact-making can prompt conjecture about a magnified maker whose power and moral attributes are then projected onto a higher being. Throughout the text the author advocates closer interplay between anthropology and experimental psychology to illuminate religious origins.