ABSTRACT
In the study of religion, the word “essence” has often been associated with a style of essentialist definition, which aims to define by identifying the sine qua non or indispensable element of something, e.g., that feature without which something would not be religious. It is also connected to the term “manifestation,” a word generally meaning to take a tangible form that exhibits or demonstrates something to the senses, i.e., to make something manifest. Most famously for the student of religion, perhaps, the two terms occur in the translated title of an early classic of the field by the Dutch Egyptologist Gerardus van der Leeuw (1890–1950): Religion in Essence and Manifestation: A Study in Phenomenology (German: Phänomenologie der Religion), which was published in 1933 and first appeared in English in 1938.
