To the modern mind, the past often appears as a simpler, more primitive version of the present. We look back upon the grand procession of history and see societies that were less technologically advanced, less scientifically enlightened, and less politically sophisticated than our own. We tend to view our ancestors through a mirror, seeing in their lives and beliefs a distorted reflection of ourselves—our own concepts of law, family, politics, and faith, merely in an embryonic or unenlightened state. This perspective, however, is a great consistent illusion. The past is not a mirror; it is a window onto a landscape so foreign, a zeitgeist so fundamentally different, that we have largely lost the imaginative capacity to picture it.1 Our historical vision is not merely incomplete; it is actively distorted by the very concepts we use to understand it.
The most powerful and distorting of these concepts is the word "religion." It seems a simple, universal category, a natural component of human experience across all cultures and times. Yet this is a modern fiction. The concept of "religion" as a discrete sphere of private belief or public ritual, separable from other domains like politics, science, or family life, was largely formed in the 17th and 18th centuries.1 The sacred texts of antiquity had no equivalent word in their original languages, nor did the cultures that produced them possess such a concept.
What we now call religion was, in pre-modern times, more akin to our concepts of a 'way of life,' 'culture,' or just 'the law'—an all-encompassing framework that held society together. And, for the most part, there weren’t really many spheres of life that could be conceptually separated from it. While the ancients believed in and worshipped gods—usually in the form of physical statues—that reality was similar to how we in modern times believe in the constitution or the rule of law. It cannot be captured just by the modern notion of intellectual belief or practical worship. Rather, it is about the variety of internal and external concepts that fundamentally organize society and behavior of people.
This report is therefore an exercise in intellectual archaeology. It seeks to excavate the layers of modern assumption that obscure our view of the pre-modern world. The methodology will proceed backward in time, first deconstructing the modern lens that forms the bars of our conceptual limitation, then exploring the integrated worlds of antiquity and then focusing on a major shift of the Axial Age - a multi-regional phenomenon well underway by the Hellenistic period, an origin of conversion-based frameworks, creating the very conditions for the later rise of current world religions.
The notion of "religion" as a distinct, universal, and cross-cultural category of human activity was not a theological project so much as an analytical one. Thinkers of the 17th and 18th centuries, faced with the bloody aftermath of the wars of religion and the discovery of vastly different cultures across the globe, needed a new way to organize their understanding of the world. They sought to create "religion" as an analytical category that would allow them to compare different belief systems systematically, study human societies scientifically, and, most critically, to separate the "religious" sphere from the "political" sphere.1
Key figures of the Enlightenment treated belief as a natural phenomenon to be explained, not a revealed truth to be accepted. The Scottish philosopher David Hume, in his The Natural History of Religion, offered a psychological and historical account, arguing that belief does not originate from rational contemplation of nature's design, but from the emotional turmoil of human life. For Hume, uncertain events spark passions like hope and fear, and the human imagination, prone to anthropomorphism, conceives of invisible, human-like powers operating in the world. This, he argued, was the origin of polytheism, the "primitive" state of human belief. Monotheism arose later, not from superior reason, but from a tendency toward flattery, as devotees sought to elevate their chosen deity above all others.1 By framing belief as a product of human nature, Hume transformed it from a matter of divine revelation into an object of scientific inquiry.
Similarly, the French philosopher Voltaire championed religious tolerance not from a place of deep piety, but from a pragmatic concern for social peace and economic prosperity. Having observed the relative harmony and commercial dynamism of England, with its multiplicity of religious sects, he contrasted it with the monolithic and intolerant Catholicism of France. For Voltaire, the problem was not belief in God—he was a deist—but the fanaticism and superstition that organized belief systems fostered. His call to "crush the infamous" (écrasez l'infâme) was a direct assault on the abuses of the Church and its power to enforce dogma through violence. He argued that a society with one religion would suffer tyranny, one with two would cut each other's throats, but a society with thirty, like the bustling London Stock Exchange where men of different faiths traded peacefully, would live in harmony.1 This made tolerance a requirement for a modern, free, commercial society, and necessitated cordoning off belief into a private sphere where it could not disrupt public order.
This intellectual project was later formalized and systematized by 19th-century scholars like the German philologist Friedrich Max Müller. Müller, often called the "father of Religious Studies," coined the term "science of religion" (Religionswissenschaft) and famously declared, "He who knows one [religion], knows none." His goal was to create a comparative, scientific discipline that would study, categorize, and explain the world's belief systems, much as a botanist classifies plants. He treated the Christian Bible critically, like any other ancient book, and sought to assign Christianity "its right place among the religions of the world," an approach that scandalized many of his orthodox contemporaries. This academic endeavor essentialized features of Protestant Christianity—a reliance on sacred texts, a focus on doctrinal belief, a formal institutional structure—and set out to find their equivalents elsewhere, creating taxonomies of human thought and behavior.1
The political and intellectual project of separating church and state had a momentous and perhaps unintended consequence: it created the "secular." By carving out a sphere of life—government, law, commerce—that was to be free from religious authority, the Enlightenment simultaneously created its opposite. "Religion" became that which was not secular. It was partitioned off, relegated to the private sphere of individual belief and voluntary association. This division, so fundamental to the modern Western mind that we take it for granted, is the very structure that makes the pre-modern world incomprehensible.
As scholars like Timothy Fitzgerald, Richard King and Daniel Dubuisson have argued, this entire conceptual apparatus—the very notion of "religion" as a universal category distinct from other domains of human activity—is fundamentally a recent construct that cannot be meaningfully applied to non-Western or pre-modern societies without profound distortion.1 In most such cultures, the distinction between "secular" and "religious" is simply meaningless. The pre-modern zeitgeist assumed an enchanted, divinely ordered cosmos where all aspects of life were integrated. The modern zeitgeist is defined by its separation of reality into discrete categories like private and public, faith and reason, a framework that guarantees a misreading of the past.1
This conceptual disconnect was explored in depth by the French historian Paul Veyne, who asked the provocative question, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? Veyne's answer is that the question itself is anachronistic, built on our modern, binary notion that a proposition must be either factually true or demonstrably false. He argues that the ancients operated with what he calls a "plurality of truths" or multiple, context-dependent "regimes of truth." They did not possess a single, unified field of "belief" that applied universally across all situations, but rather moved fluidly between different, non-competing "truth programs," each appropriate to its own domain and context. A myth could be profoundly and literally true in the context of a civic ritual or religious ceremony, demonstrably false or metaphorical in a philosophical debate about the nature of the cosmos, and allegorically useful as a historical or moral lesson in a literary text—all at the same time, without inducing a sense of contradiction or cognitive dissonance. What appears to us as inconsistency was, for them, a sophisticated navigation of different modes of discourse, each with its own criteria for truth and meaning.
This modern attempt to map and contain the sacred was not without precedent, though its motivations were radically different from those of antiquity. Long before the Enlightenment sought to separate church and state for the sake of civil peace, Roman thought displayed its own sophisticated effort to delineate the sacred for the sake of civic health. This earlier partition was not an act of separation aimed at protecting the state from the divine, but an act of moderation aimed at ensuring the state's proper alignment with the divine order.1
The statesman and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero provides the clearest articulation of this project. In works like On the Nature of the Gods, he sought to "moderate religion" (moderandam religionem) by drawing a careful distinction between two concepts: religio and superstitio.
Cicero's distinction was not between belief and non-belief, but between two modes of practice: one grounded in civic duty and tradition, the other in personal fear and excess. His goal was philosophical and political: to guide Romans toward a responsible engagement with their ancestral rites, avoiding both the impiety of denying the gods' concern for Rome and the superstition of an irrational fear of them.1 In the words of Paul Veyne, the ancient "constitutive imagination" allowed people like Cicero to write deeply skeptical philosophy like On the Nature of the Gods in his study, yet as a statesman, argue passionately for the scrupulous public performance of religio (ancestral rites) as essential for the state’s survival. In his mind, these were not hypocritical positions but distinct modes of truth.