ABSTRACT
Prayer is perhaps the most ubiquitous religious phenomenon in the history of religions. Heiler made valiant efforts to organize a typology of prayer, but the principles behind the organization are somewhat muddled. Prayer, according to de Waal Malefijt, is one of the two major forms of religious communication: verbal and nonverbal. Ritual is the major form of nonverbal communication. Prayer is the major form of verbal communication. Prayer and ritual are designed to engage the supernatural in the lives of human beings while simultaneously acknowledging human belief in the power and existence of the gods. Most of the typologies developed in prayer research are based on or relate to the semantics of prayer. The social aspects of prayer were already noted by Marcel Mauss in a little-known paper, published in 1909, which was to have been the opening chapters of his doctoral thesis.
