ABSTRACT
Tales of origins, far from an idle narration of where something came from, are thus socially formative devices that therefore require more from the critical scholar than just their repetition and paraphrasing. Based on the ancient Latin origo for source or beginning, the modern word “origin” continues to imply ancestry or lineage and thus even the provenance and legitimacy of something. Applied to the study of religion, notably in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the term is most often associated with early theories of religion’s cause. The early twentieth century instead saw a move toward functionalist approaches, which were more concerned with studying religion’s observable social, political, psychological, economic purpose or role. Simply put, discourses on origins are what Braun has characterized as “a prominent point of preoccupation, even devotion” for scholars, given “the possibility that origins are retrospective constructions”.
