The evolution of religion — Key Ideas to Explore

Diction of Purity: From Miasma to Moral Stain

Farnell’s vocabulary for impurity shifts markedly as he traces Greek thought from ceremonial defilement to ethical guilt. Early passages speak of miasma contracted by contact with death, and of tapu—a Polynesian loanword that signals his comparative frame. The mourners at Argos eat sacrifice to Apollo to “destroy the miasma within and around them.” Here purity is physical, contagious, removable by ritual ingestion.

Later, the lexicon changes. A saying attributed to Charondas calls “foul speech a defilement of the soul.” Epicharmos declares: “If thou art pure of soul, thou art pure of all thy body.” The word soul now carries the moral weight. Farnell juxtaposes these registers without comment, letting the diction itself argue for a conceptual evolution. The shift from miasma to stain of evil is not merely semantic; it reflects a redefinition of what religion must cleanse.

The Voice of the Inscription: Blending Codes

Farnell’s most telling evidence is an inscription from Rhodes, dated to the time of Hadrian. He quotes its preamble: “The first and greatest rule is to be pure and unblemished in hand and heart and to be free from an evil conscience.” Then follows a list of traditional ceremonial rules—impurities of food, funerals, bodily affections. The final clause permits entry “on the same day after lawful married intercourse,” which Farnell interprets as excluding adulteresses.

The inscription thus preserves two voices: an ethical ideal of inward purity and a detailed code of external observance. Farnell does not resolve the tension; he presents the blend as characteristic of advanced Greek ritual. The document is not a philosophical treatise but a regulatory text, and its coexistence of high principle and petty rule is, for Farnell, precisely the point. The Rhodian code shows how slowly moral abstraction penetrates institutional religion.

Structure as Argument: The Comparative Frame

Farnell organizes his lectures by moving from general methodological questions to specific case studies. The first two lectures defend comparative religion against charges of superficiality; the later ones examine purification and prayer. This structure itself makes an argument: that method must precede evidence, and that the anthropologist must define terms like religion and evolution before applying them.

Within the purification section, Farnell proceeds geographically and chronologically: from Greek evidence to Egyptian (regretted as incomplete), then to Roman and Jewish parallels. Each step is introduced with a transitional phrase such as “It remains to trace its action in…” The effect is cumulative, not narrative. Farnell does not tell a story of progress; he assembles a mosaic of practices and texts, letting the reader see both continuity and change. The structure mirrors his claim that evolution is not linear but uneven.

Recurring Detail: The Lustral Water and the Ocean

A single image recurs across Farnell’s excerpts: the contrast between a small amount of lustral water and the vastness of the sea. In an epigram he quotes, the oracle says: “lustration is an easy matter for the good, but all ocean with its streams cannot cleanse the evil man.” Another oracle declares: “no stain can ever cleave to virtue.” The image is paradoxical—water, the universal cleanser, is powerless against moral impurity.

Farnell does not belabor the motif, but its repetition suggests a deliberate choice. The lustral water is a concrete ritual object; the ocean is a natural sublime. By setting them against each other, the epigrams make a theological point: ritual is finite, virtue infinite. Farnell’s own prose remains dry and scholarly, but the quoted verses introduce a poetic counterpoint. The detail of water—measured, poured, sprinkled—runs through the Greek evidence, from the mourner’s bath to the temple inscription, anchoring abstract ethics in physical practice.

Farnell’s study resists easy summary. He offers no grand theory of religious evolution, only a careful examination of two strands—purification and prayer—as they appear in Greek and comparative sources. Readers should attend to his footnotes and citations, which often carry the weight of his argument. The book is best read as a series of connected essays, each testing a hypothesis against specific evidence. Farnell’s caution is a strength: he knows when the evidence is incomplete, and he says so.