ABSTRACT
We do not immediately think of Grant Allen as belonging in the company of the
great turn-of-the-century thinkers such as J.G. Frazer and Sigmund Freud who could
claim to have discovered a key to all mythologies. But Edward Clodd’s memoir tells
the sad story of Allen’s ‘cherished “magnum”’on the origin of all religions, which at
one time was projected in three volumes, of which only one was actually written and
published. This was The Evolution of the Idea of God (1897), initially titled The Evolution of God, but toned down on the advice of Allen’s mentor Herbert Spencer.1
The book opens with a preface in which Allen claims to have spent more than twenty
years in collecting and comparing materials, and ten years in writing them up.
Portions of the text had previously appeared in a series of articles for the Fortnightly Review, ‘Sacred Stones’(January 1890), ‘Immortality and Resurrection’(September 1893) and ‘The Origin of Cultivation’ (May 1894). Moreover, Allen had published a
verse translation of Catullus’ Attis (1892), to which he appended a hundred-page essay ‘On the Origin of Tree-Worship’setting out his basic theory and offering it as a
‘universal master-key’ to the problem of the origin of religions.2
