The Origin of All Religious Worship, or Universal Religion is a book by Charles-François Dupuis, first published in 1795.
Comparing traditions, primarily those of the Hellenistic world, Dupuis sought to demonstrate that all ancient religions were fundamentally based on the worship of nature and its cycles. He argued that the gods and mythological heroes symbolized the succession of the seasons, the opposition between light and darkness, and the movements of the Sun, the Moon, and the planets through the constellations.
He examines the myths of Osiris and Isis, Hercules, Bacchus, and the Argonauts, before applying the same interpretative framework to Christianity. The life of Jesus, whose historical existence Dupuis questioned – making him one of the earliest proponents of the Christ myth theory –, is presented as a "solar fable": the Lamb of God was born of the Virgo on the feast of Sol Invictus, was followed by the Twelve Apostles, and rose again after the spring equinox.
This monumental work of scholarship – three volumes totalling some two thousand pages, accompanied by an illustrated atlas intended to guide the reader – was followed in 1798 by an abridged edition.
Both the original work and its abridgement were placed on the Index of Forbidden Books by the Catholic Church in 1818.Jesús Martínez de Bujanda, Index Librorum Prohibitorum (1600–1966), Geneva, 2002, p. 313.
Context The Enlightenment In his posthumously published work The Chronology of Ancient Kingdoms Amended (1728), Isaac Newton employed the precession of the equinoxes to date the expedition of the Argonauts, which he placed in the tenth century BC.
During the eighteenth century, two principal interpretations of mythology coexisted. The first was euhemerism, according to which the gods had originally been historical figures who were later deified. In France, this approach was notably developed by Étienne Fourmont and Abbé Banier. The second was the allegorical interpretation, which held that the heavenly bodies and natural phenomena had originally been personified and worshipped as deities. Among the principal advocates of allegorical interpretation in eighteenth-century Britain were the Anglican bishop William Warburton (The Divine Legation of Moses, 1739–1761) and Thomas Blackwell (Letters Concerning Mythology, 1748).
In his Histoire du ciel (1739), Abbé Pluche argued that "it was astronomy that invented the names, attributes, and figures which greed and ignorance transformed into so many powers worthy of reverence or fear." Pluche traced the invention of the zodiac back to the time of the Tower of Babel, before the dispersion of the descendants of Noah. Nicolas Antoine Boulanger, in L'Antiquité dévoilée (1766), likewise advanced the idea that the worship of the heavenly bodies was common to all peoples and dated back to the Flood.
Between 1773 and 1782, the Protestant pastor and physiocrat Antoine Court de Gébelin published Le Monde primitif, an influential work that sought to reconstruct the history of humanity through a comparative study of langages – he was searching for the Adamic language – mythologies, and symbolic systems. His method relied on allegorical interpretation: myths, devoid of any historical foundation, had served primarily to illustrate the agricultural calendar.
Charles-François Dupuis, then professor of rhetoric in Paris, attended the astronomy lectures of Jérôme Lalande at the Collège Royal when he conceived an interpretation comparable to that of Court de Gébelin: myths, understood as vehicles for transmitting an archaic natural science, expressed correspondences between celestial and terrestrial phenomena.
With the support of Jérôme Lalande – the founder of the Masonic lodge of the Nine Sisters, of which Court de Gébelin was also a member – Dupuis published four letters in the Journal des savants between June 1779 and February 1780. His Memoir on the Origin of the Constellations and the Explanation of Myth through Astronomy was incorporated by Lalande into the fourth volume of his Treatise on Astronomy in 1781. Dupuis announced that he was preparing "a considerable work."
Under the Ancien Régime, in order to avoid censorship, Dupuis carefully refrained from attacking Christianity directly. His third letter to the Journal des savants (February 1780), devoted to Hercules, concluded with an allusive passage:
Referring to this cryptic passage fifteen years later, Dupuis wrote:
Despite his caution, these articles earned Dupuis a reputation as an unbeliever. After several unsuccessful candidacies for the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, he considered settling in Berlin, where Frederick the Great had invited him on the recommendation of the Marquis de Condorcet. On the eve of the French Revolution, however, Dupuis was appointed professor at the Collège Royal and elected to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres.
In 1788, Lalande published in the Journal des savants an interpretation by Dupuis of the Portal of the Virgin at Notre-Dame de Paris. The Virgin, depicted at the centre of the zodiac, was identified with Isis, while Christ was implicitly equated with Horus:
A Delayed Publication
In March 1792, the publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke acquired the rights to Dupuis's "great work", then still in preparation. Dupuis was elected to the National Convention in September and took part in the creation of the French Republican calendar. Printing of The Origin of All Religious Worship began in the spring of 1793 but was interrupted during the Reign of Terror, as the publisher gave priority to the Encyclopédie méthodique because of shortages of paper and labour.. In January 1794, Panckoucke transferred his publishing house to his son-in-law, Henri Agasse.
Antoine Letellier, a friend and collaborator of Dupuis, was sentenced to death by the Revolutionary Tribunal in June 1794 because of his Girondin sympathies. Dupuis himself, aware that his correspondence was under surveillance, feared that he too might be sent to the guillotine.
Printing resumed under the Thermidorian Convention. On 7 September 1795, following the adoption of the Constitution of Year III, Dupuis presented the first copy of The Origin of All Religious Worship to the deputies. The following day, the work went on sale in a three-volume quarto edition accompanied by an illustrated atlas, priced at 600 livres (3,000 livres for the wove-paper edition). A twelve-volume octavo edition appeared shortly thereafter..
Readers could also purchase, from Citizen Loysel in the Sorbonne district, a special celestial globe constructed according to Dupuis's instructions.
Summary Book I Although the work bears the subtitle "Universal Religion", Dupuis states from the outset that he writes as a historian and does not intend to found a new religion. As a citizen, he declares himself willing to submit to any collective belief that strengthens morality and legislation. His criticism of Christianity is therefore not intended to undermine the social order but, he argues, to establish it on reason rather than superstition.
Dupuis defines God as "the universal cause and active power that organizes all beings that have a beginning and an end – that is, the principle of all things, itself without any other principle." God is therefore identified with Nature – the Deus sive Natura of Spinoza – which has always presented itself to humanity as an all-encompassing reality, concealed in its essence but manifest through its effects. The search for causes, he argues, should therefore stop at the threshold of metaphysics. Dupuis cites Ocellus and Pliny the Elder to show that divinity was conceived as inseparable from Nature.
A passage from the Pentateuch (Deuteronomy 4:19), in which Moses warns his people against worshipping images, the Sun, the Moon, and the stars, demonstrates, according to Dupuis, the original primacy of pantheism: only practices that actually exist need to be prohibited. He also cites in this connection a passage from the Book of Wisdom (13:1–9), traditionally attributed to King Solomon. Abraham, he argues, had himself been born into the religion of Nature, as maintained by Philo and Maimonides.
Originally, divinity was inseparable from the spectacle of the cosmos, and the vault of heaven served as humanity's universal sanctuary. With the advent of sedentism, religious buildings appeared. Their function was to inscribe the laws of time into space: their proportions, orientations, and internal divisions reflected the movements of the heavens.
Dupuis seeks to demonstrate that the worship of the heavenly bodies predominated throughout much of the ancient world. He marshals testimony concerning the ancient Egyptians from Diodorus Siculus, Lucian, Chaeremon of Alexandria, Porphyry, and Eusebius, before extending the same argument to the ancient Greeks, the Celts, the Germanic peoples, the Huns, and the Scandinavians.
He likewise extends this conclusion to the Persians, drawing on Herodotus, Xenophon, Quintus Curtius Rufus, Clement of Alexandria, Diogenes Laërtius, Theodoret, and Cassiodorus, as well as to the peoples of India, citing Lucian, Apollonius of Tyana, Philostratus, Solinus, Stephanus of Byzantium, Al-Shahrastani, Bar Hebraeus, and Athanasius Kircher.
For the rest of the world – including East Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, and Oceania – Dupuis relies extensively on the accounts published by european travelers. His comparative survey of the world's civilizations leads him to conclude that the historical evidence consistently supports the existence of a universal religion founded on the worship of Nature.
Book II The Supralunar and Sublunar Worlds Before Aristotle did so, Ocellus divided the universe into two regions: the supralunar world, active and immutable, and the sublunar world, passive and subject to corruption. Dupuis also cites Plutarch, Cicero, Macrobius, and Proclus in support of this conception. This division of the universe into two complementary powers – one acting, the other reacting – formed the basis of ancient astrology.
Light proceeds from the ethereal substance of the heavens, whereas darkness is associated with earthly matter. In Hesiod's theogony, Uranus and Gaia personified these two principles, while the successive generations of deities likewise translated physical observations into symbolic language.
At night, objects disappear from view, leaving human beings isolated and confined to themselves. The return of daylight recreates the world by making forms visible once again. From this sensory experience, prior to any moral speculation, arose the opposition between order and chaos, good and evil.Religious devotion was sometimes directed more toward the evil principle than the beneficent one, since the latter, being naturally benevolent, required no appeasement, whereas the former, always ready to inflict harm, had to be placated with offerings and sacrifices. Dupuis provides a long series of ethnographic examples – although the term itself did not yet exist – of peoples whose religious practices focused primarily on malevolent spirits out of fear of their destructive power.
The Sun illuminates, warms, sustains living beings, and governs the succession of days, seasons, and years. Independent of any visible cause, it naturally appeared to humanity as the sovereign of the sensible world. Dupuis cites numerous authors – notably Plato, Pliny the Elder, and Macrobius – to illustrate the pre-eminence of the Sun in ancient theology. The four cardinal points of its annual course (the solstices and equinoxes) served throughout the world as reference points for calendars and religious festivals.