Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom

Edward Burnett Tylor was a founding figure of academic anthropology, and this 1871 book, specifically its second volume on Religion in Primitive Culture, is his own foundational statement proposing animism, belief in spiritual beings, as the earliest stage from which polytheism and then monotheism were held to develop. Its influence is real and lasting: the term animism itself remains in active use across the study of religion because of this book. Its limit is the reason later anthropology set the theory itself aside: the unilinear evolutionary scheme, that all religions climb the same ladder from animism to monotheism, has been abandoned as ethnocentric and empirically unsupported, so a claim resting on Tylor's staged sequence needs to be checked against modern anthropology rather than read as settled.