What Happened
Religious Institutionalisation · Chinese Folk Religion · Syncretism · Japan · Research Briefc. 800 BCE to 2023 · record to 13 Sep 2026
The ban is the record
Not a Ladder, a Palimpsest
For a century and a half, the standard story was a ladder: folk belief was the bottom rung, and religion — canon, priesthood, orthodoxy — was what a society climbed toward. Tylor and Frazer built that ladder in the 1870s and 1890s and it has been dismantled since, rung by rung, by fieldwork the two of them never did. What the record actually shows, across Meiji Japan, Qing China, republican Rome, Iron Age Israel, and a live scientific dispute over “moralising gods” that has been retracted once and reanalysed twice, is not a ladder. It is closer to what one historian of a Chinese war god called a palimpsest: institutions write new meaning over folk practice, and the practice is still there underneath.
- 1868the year Japan legislated apart a fused Shinto–Buddhist system that had stood for over a millennium
- 3 of 13authors of the retracted 2019 “moralising gods” paper who are on record disagreeing with its own retraction
- 2separate 2023 papers, same journal issue, testing the same hypothesis and answering two different questions
- c. 800 BCEthe oldest dated evidence on this page — and it already shows a household blessing and a state cult side by side, not in sequence
Graded by how well each item stands up Sorted by standing, not by which civilisation it belongs to.
| Standing | What is recorded | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Confirmed | Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871) states the “minimum definition of Religion” as “the belief in Spiritual Beings,” in the chapter on Animism | Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. 1 |
| Confirmed | Rome’s senate did not ban the Bacchanalia in 186 BC; its surviving bronze decree licensed and capped them — mixed gatherings limited to two men per three women, the priesthood closed to men | Senatus consultum de Bacchanalibus, CIL I² 581 |
| Confirmed | A storage-jar inscription at Kuntillet ʿAjrud, excavated 1975–76 in the northeast Sinai, reads: “... I bless you by Yahweh of Samaria and his Asherah” | Excavation directed by Ze’ev Meshel, Tel Aviv University |
| Confirmed | Japan’s Meiji government issued the Kami and Buddhas Separation Order in 1868, ending the centuries-old fusion known as shinbutsu-shūgō and triggering the violent anti-Buddhist movement haibutsu kishaku | 神仏判然令 (Shinbutsu Hanzenrei), 1868 |
| Confirmed | M. N. Srinivas coined “Sanskritisation” in 1952: a lower or middle caste adopting the customs of a higher caste to claim higher status within the same hierarchy | Srinivas, Religion and Society Among the Coorgs of South India, 1952 |
| Confirmed | Redfield’s Peasant Society and Culture (1956) frames village “little tradition” and civilisational “great tradition” as interdependent, mediated by cultural specialists, never isolated from each other | Redfield, Peasant Society and Culture, 1956 |
| Confirmed | Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328) was repeatedly imprisoned over his writing against Sufi tomb-visitation and saint veneration, and is a named influence on modern Salafi and Salafi-jihadist movements | Ibn Taymiyya, al-Radd ʿalā ’l-Ikhnā’ī, and later biography |
| Confirmed | Duara’s 1988 concept of “superscription”: successive groups write new meaning onto a shared myth without erasing what is already there, leaving a palimpsest rather than a single fixed meaning | Duara, Journal of Asian Studies 47.4, 1988 |
| Confirmed | Peter Brown’s Cult of the Saints (1981) rejects the “two-tier” model that treated saint veneration as elite condescension to a superstitious popular residue | Brown, The Cult of the Saints, University of Chicago Press, 1981 |
| Confirmed | Meiji Japan, from 1853 under treaty pressure, granted freedom of shinkyō (interior belief) but not of shūkyō (the general category later exported to China and Korea as the standard translation of “religion”), which the state went on policing | Josephson, The Invention of Religion in Japan, 2012 |
| Confirmed | A 2019 Nature paper coding 414 societies over 10,000 years found moralising gods follow, not precede, large increases in social complexity; it was retracted in 2021 over a data-coding critique, and a 2023 reanalysis by the same team reaffirmed the finding — while three of its thirteen authors are on record disagreeing with the retraction itself | Nature 568 (2019); 595 (2021); Religion, Brain & Behavior 13.2 (2023) |
| Confirmed, not verifiable here | Livy’s figure of seven thousand arrested in the Bacchanalia affair, most of them executed, is his own account, written roughly two centuries after the event; modern scholarship calls his narrative “tendentious to say the least” | Livy, Ab Urbe Condita 39.8–19 |
| Confirmed, not verifiable here | C. K. Yang’s institutional/diffused distinction — no separate church, membership by belonging rather than converting — is, per a tertiary summary, still the framework most scholars use for Chinese religion; his 1961 book itself was not read for this record | Yang, Religion in Chinese Society, 1961 — via tertiary summary |
| Superseded | An early reading of painted figures on the Kuntillet ʿAjrud jar as depictions of Yahweh and his Asherah has been largely abandoned by specialists, who now read the same figures as unrelated Bes-images | Gilula’s reading, superseded per Beck, Keel & Uehlinger, Hadley, Schmidt, Ornan, Lewis |
Timeline
c. 800 BCE to 2023 Two threads run through it: dated religious practice, and the dated scholarship arguing about it. They rarely meet at a single hinge point — which is itself part of the finding.
- c. 800 BCEA traveller at Kuntillet ʿAjrud, on a caravan route in the northeast Sinai, has a blessing written on a storage jar invoking “Yahweh of Samaria and his Asherah” — household piety, at a site with no known temple
- 186 BCRome’s senate issues its decree on the Bacchanalia: not a ban, but a licence with a headcount limit and a ban on male priests
- 1263–1328Ibn Taymiyya’s life: a Hanbali jurist repeatedly imprisoned for his writing against Sufi tomb-visitation and saint veneration
- 1615The Ming court raises the war hero Guan Yu to the imperial title di, the start of Guandi’s career as a state-promoted god that Duara would later analyse
- 1868Japan’s Meiji government issues the Kami and Buddhas Separation Order, ending shinbutsu-shūgō and triggering haibutsu kishaku
- 1871Tylor publishes Primitive Culture, proposing the animism-to-monotheism ladder this page argues against
- 1949Karl Jaspers coins “Axial Age” for a claimed mid-first-millennium-BCE breakthrough across Eurasia
- 1952M. N. Srinivas publishes the book that coins “Sanskritisation”
- 1956Redfield publishes Peasant Society and Culture, the great/little tradition pairing
- 1961C. K. Yang publishes Religion in Chinese Society, the institutional/diffused distinction
- 1981Peter Brown publishes The Cult of the Saints, rejecting the two-tier model of popular and elite religion
- 1985James Watson publishes “Standardizing the Gods,” arguing the Qing state’s promotion of Tianhou papered over real local differences
- 1988Prasenjit Duara publishes “Superscribing Symbols,” proposing that state promotion of a myth (Guandi) layers over earlier meanings rather than erasing them
- 1997Michael Szonyi publishes “The Illusion of Standardizing the Gods,” arguing standardisation of the Five Emperors cult was substantially illusory
- 2007Modern China publishes a special issue reconsidering Watson’s ideas, with contributions from Szonyi, Katz, Pomeranz and Melissa Brown — and a reply from Watson himself
- 2012Jan Assmann publishes his critique of the Axial Age frame; Jason Ānanda Josephson publishes The Invention of Religion in Japan
- 2019Nature publishes “Complex societies precede moralizing gods throughout world history,” coding 414 societies across 10,000 years
- 7 Jul 2021The paper is retracted over a data-coding critique by Beheim and colleagues; three of the thirteen authors record disagreement with the retraction itself
- 2023Religion, Brain & Behavior publishes two reanalyses in the same issue: a “Retake” reaffirming the original sequencing claim, and a companion paper finding the complexity–religion correlation reflects a shared driver (warfare) rather than either causing the other
The Argument
Three live disagreements, named on both sides None of these is settled. Naming a winner would be the overstatement this page is built to avoid.
James Watson argued in 1985 that the Qing state’s promotion of a single cult name — Tianhou, “Empress of Heaven” — standardised Chinese religious culture along the south China coast, whatever different communities privately believed about her. Prasenjit Duara, in 1988, agreed there was a shared name but not a shared meaning: the state’s version of the war god Guandi was “superscribed” onto earlier Buddhist and popular versions, layering over them rather than replacing them, which is why a Qing-approved Guandi and a Buddhist-guardian Guandi could both be true at once. Michael Szonyi went further in 1997: studying the Five Emperors cult around Fuzhou, he argued that apparent standardisation was substantially an illusion — local variation persisted underneath a performance of conformity, what he called pseudo-orthopraxy. The debate did not end there. A 2007 special issue of Modern China reassessed all three positions, with Watson replying to his critics in the same volume.
- 1985 → 1988 → 1997standardised → superscribed → illusory: the same cult, argued three ways
- 2007Watson answers his critics in the same special issue that reassesses him
Karl Jaspers proposed in 1949 that Greek philosophy, Hebrew prophecy, Indian and Buddhist thought, and Chinese philosophy all underwent a comparable ethical and reflective breakthrough within the same few centuries either side of 500 BCE — an “Axial Age.” Shmuel Eisenstadt and Robert Bellah extended the idea into comparative civilisational sociology. Jan Assmann’s 2012 critique, per its confirmed citation and the standing objections independently recorded on the subject, argues no demonstrable common feature has actually been shown across the claimed cases, and that the frame’s own dates arbitrarily exclude Akhenaten’s monotheistic reform in Egypt, which by other measures would qualify as exactly this kind of breakthrough. Both readings are stated here; which one is correct is not this page’s to decide.
- 1figure the frame’s own dates exclude by definition: Akhenaten
The clearest case on this page of an argument that is still moving is the “Big Gods” hypothesis: the proposal that belief in moralising, punishing deities helped make large-scale cooperation possible. In 2019 a team led by Harvey Whitehouse and Peter Turchin coded 414 societies across 10,000 years and found the opposite sequence to what the hypothesis predicted — moralising gods follow large increases in social complexity, not the reverse. In 2021 the paper was retracted, after a critique argued the team had mishandled missing data by treating unknown periods as “absent” rather than “unknown.” The authors’ own retraction note states their revised analysis “still strongly supports” the original conclusion, and three of the thirteen authors are recorded as disagreeing with the retraction itself. In 2023, the same journal issue carried two answers. One, a direct “retake” by the original team, reran the corrected analysis and reaffirmed the sequencing finding. The other, testing a different question — not when moralising gods appear, but what actually causes social complexity to rise — found intergroup warfare, not belief in moralising gods, drives both, and that the correlation between complexity and religion reflects that shared cause rather than either one producing the other. Both papers stand; they answer different questions, and reporting one as though it answered the other’s is a mistake worth naming explicitly, because it is an easy one to make.
- 414societies coded across 10,000 years in the original 2019 study
- 2questions (sequence, and cause) answered by two different 2023 papers, not one
| Question | One position | The other | Left open |
|---|---|---|---|
| Did the Qing state standardise its gods? | Watson: yes, in effect, whatever people privately believed | Duara: a shared name, superscribed over unerased older meanings; Szonyi: largely illusory, local variation persists | Whether either reading generalises beyond the specific cults each scholar studied |
| Was there a genuine, simultaneous “Axial Age” breakthrough? | Jaspers, Eisenstadt, Bellah: yes, a recognisable pivot across Eurasia | Assmann and others: no demonstrated common feature, and the frame’s own dates arbitrarily exclude Akhenaten’s reform | Whether a real pattern is being described, or a retrospective label applied to unrelated developments |
| Does social complexity produce moralising gods, or the reverse? | The 2019/2023 “Retake” line: complexity precedes gods, reaffirmed after correction | The companion 2023 paper: the correlation itself reflects a shared cause (warfare), not either driving the other | Both are the same team’s own findings, on the same database, answering different questions |
What Others Add
Six traditions, one recurring shape Each card names its own mechanism. None of them needed the others to reach a structurally similar conclusion.
China
A name promoted, not a belief replaced
- Guandi rose from a Three Kingdoms war hero to an imperial title in 1615; the Qing state’s version never displaced the Buddhist-guardian or popular-oracle versions underneath it
- C. K. Yang’s framework explains why: Chinese religion is largely “diffused” into family, village and state life rather than organised as a separate church membership can be counted
Japan
Separating what a millennium had fused
- Before 1868, kami and buddhas shared buildings and worshippers under shinbutsu-shūgō; the same shrine could serve both without contradiction
- The 1868 order did not describe an evolution already under way; it forced a separation, and the violent haibutsu kishaku that followed is the clearest evidence that the fusion had been holding, not fading
Rome
Licensed because it could not be erased
- Long before Rome, Greek cities ran the same split as a matter of course: Athens’ compulsory civic sacrifices stood alongside the voluntary Eleusinian Mysteries, open to any Greek speaker and promising initiates a benefit in the afterlife, for centuries, with neither displacing the other
- The senate’s decree survives as a bronze inscription precisely because it had to specify, in writing, what it was regulating — the cult’s own organisation, its funds, its gatherings
- Alongside the state cult, ordinary Roman households kept their own Lares and Penates at a private shrine, a religious life the senate’s decree never touches at all
Israel
A household blessing beside a state cult, not before it
- A traveller pairs Yahweh with an Asherah in an ordinary blessing, at the same time Jerusalem’s own state cult of Yahweh was already established — monolatry (worshipping one god without denying others exist) and a state cult coexisted, they did not succeed one another
- Strict monotheism (denying other gods exist at all) is a later development, generally placed after the Babylonian exile — centuries after this inscription, not before it
Islam
A ruling repeated for seven centuries, against a practice it never ended
- Ibn Taymiyya condemned tomb-visitation and the belief that a saint (wali) retains barakah after death as innovation (bidʿah) and, in its strongest form, as associating a created being with God (shirk)
- The same tension — an institutional orthodoxy against a popular saint cult it says corrupts the tradition — recurs in Latin Christianity, argued the opposite way by Peter Brown, below
Latin Christendom
Not paganism surviving, but Christianity developing
- The long-standing “two-tier” model held that sophisticated elites tolerated saint veneration as a concession to a superstitious peasantry that had never really given up its old gods
- Brown argued instead that the cult grew from within Christian thought itself, across elite and popular practice alike, turning late-Roman patronage into a heavenly network of protectors reached through relics and pilgrimage
What these six cases share is not a shared cause but a shared shape. Redfield’s “great” and “little” traditions, and Yang’s “institutional” and “diffused” religion, both describe two levels that are mediated, not ranked: a specialist class — a court, a priesthood, a jurist, a bishop — stands between them and keeps translating one into the other, in both directions. None of the sources reviewed here describes a folk practice that simply stopped once an institution arrived to formalise it. What they describe, case after case, is an institution that had to keep restating its claim on the practice, decade after decade or century after century, because the practice kept being there to restate a claim about.
Conclusion
Two things, not two stages
The unilinear ladder — folk belief as a rung a society climbs past on the way to religion proper — does not survive contact with the record. Not one case gathered here shows folk practice ending where an institution began. Kuntillet ʿAjrud shows a household blessing beside a state cult, seven centuries before strict monotheism is generally dated. Japan’s 1868 order shows a fusion that had to be legislated apart, not one that had already faded. Rome licensed rather than erased. The Chinese case is a three-decade argument over how much a promoted name actually overwrites, never a claim that it fully does. Ibn Taymiyya’s fatwas against Sufi practice, repeated over centuries, are themselves evidence the practice they targeted did not go away. And the one dataset built specifically to test a causal claim about religion and social complexity — coded, published, retracted, and reanalysed twice by the same team — produced two different, equally careful answers to two different questions in the same year. What recurs, case after case, is not a stage being passed but an institution's paperwork sitting permanently alongside a practice it never fully absorbs.
What holds
Every case reviewed here, from four independent bodies of scholarship covering six civilisations, describes coexistence and layering rather than replacement. That convergence, across evidence bases that do not cite one another, is the strongest thing on this page.
What to hold loosely
Whether the “Axial Age” names a real, simultaneous pattern is genuinely contested, and this page states the critique without adjudicating it. The ancient chronology of Israelite religion (when monolatry gave way to strict monotheism) is a matter of scholarly reconstruction, not direct record. And the Big Gods dispute is not over: a live research programme, not a settled result either way.