ABSTRACT
Modern empirical research into myth has only provided the confirmation of a thought that was first formulated in speculative universality in Hegel’s philosophy of religion. For Hegel, the cult and the particular forms of the cult are always the central point for the interpretation of the religious process. Every sacrifice encloses, according to its original sense, a negative element: it signifies a limitation of sensible desire, a renunciation that the "I" imposes on itself. For the force that is awarded to the sacrifice is rooted in the self-renunciation that sacrifice contains within itself. This interconnection can be pointed out even in elementary stages of religious development. Prayer, like sacrifice, is also intended to fill the gulf between the god and the human. In prayer, however, it is the force of the word, not merely physical but symbolic-ideal, by which the distance between the two is to be sublated.
