ABSTRACT
Edward Burnett Tylor is considered the "founding father" of cultural anthropology. He was a Quaker and the first scholar who attempted an anthropological analysis of religion. He maintained that religion originated with animism, by which all elements of nature are considered to possess an independent life and should be thus considered "spiritual beings." In describing Semitic religions, William Robertson Smith dwelt on the ambivalence of the sacred. He was perhaps the first clearly to insist on the sociological context in all discussions which refer not merely to organization of groups but also to belief, to ritual, and to myth. Marcel Mauss disagreed with E. Durkheim on the idea of the sacred as the basis of religious phenomena. Mauss viewed in the notion of mana a much more ancient and comprehensive concept that allowed a more flexible classification of various religious, magic, divinatory, and folkloric phenomena pertaining to different historical moments and parts of the world.
