ABSTRACT
This chapter represents an initial meditation on the processes through which intrusive religious concepts, paraphernalia or practices are absorbed into indigenous religious systems. It has grown out of my research into the non-industrial peasant cultures of the pre-Christian Near East. These cultures are characterized by numerous small agricultural communities standing in a dependent relationship to cities, where power is concentrated in the form of divinely ordained kingships, economically powerful priesthoods and the merchant classes (Sjoberg 1960).
