ABSTRACT
The historical review1 carried out in this book makes it clear that there are two great themes of religious history. The first theme is the ever-present continuity of current religious thinking and earlier concepts and doctrines. Despite the repeated allusion to a “new divine revelation,” older ideas serve as precedents for later ones in religion as well as science. The Toltec theologies percolated down throughout the religions of Central America for 1,000 years or more. The Sumerian religious principles can be discerned in many of the cultures that followed in the Middle East. Greece and, subsequently, Rome had almost identical theological doctrines, both of which were heavily influenced by their Middle Eastern antecedents. For example, the River Styx, a mythological entity that plays a major role in both of these relatively advanced cultures’ eschatologies is very likely to have been a vestige of Egyptian and even Mesopotamian ideas. It is well known that many of the pharaohs of ancient Egypt were physically transported across the Nile River for burial in the Valley of the Kings. Perhaps this historical reality became the root of the mythological River Styx. Similarly, the modern Christian religion seems to have roots in the ancient mythology of the mar-
tyred and resurrected demigod Osiris and current Muslim beliefs are, in part, derivative of early Jewish and Christian ideas.
