ABSTRACT
That superhuman beings, recipients of worship, bear a resemblance to those who worship them, is an old perception: ‘The Ethiopians say that their Gods are snub-nosed and black, the Thracians that theirs are blue-eyed and redhaired’ was Xenophanes’ way of putting it in the sixth or early fifth century BCE, 1 and with many modifications the idea has continued to be influential in more modern studies of religion, notably in the Durkheimian tradition. Even after it has been formulated, Xenophanes’ own preferred model of ‘one God who is greatest among Gods and men, not like mortals in form or in thought’ 2 is not an easy one to work with. The mind tends to slip back to images and concepts more clearly within its grasp, to patterns of thought which derive largely from its own direct experience, social and psychological. And yet such patterns are not always and not only a simple projection of day-to-day experience onto a more than human plane. If the divine has always been perceived in at least partly anthropomorphic terms, it has also and simultaneously been constructed as ‘the other’.
