Religion, Ideology and Society 15 'Law of Three Stages' with the theological as the 'lowest' state of development. 'Positivism', the creed of Comte, tended to regard religion as 'merely a survival from Man's primitive past, and doomed to disappear in an era of science and general enlightenment.'11 Even a synoptic survey of the growth of the science of religion in the last one hundred and fifty years is sufficient to show how wrong both these savants were. Religion is with us all even in the most scientifically advanced societies. Nor is it (not even 'primitive religion') 'grotesque and ... unintelligible' any more. It is generally accepted that the Religionswissenschaft was largely a child of the Enlightenment which is characterized as rejecting religion in the light of scientific and intellectual progress.12 It is in this background that an attempt can be made to delineate the broad course and framework of the methodology of studying religions. METHODOLOGY OF THE 'SCIENCE OF RELIGION' The major trends in the growth of the methodology of the 'science of religions' can be broadly studied under four phases:13 (a) Up to the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the pre-Durkheim-Weber phase. (b) 1910 to the 1920s when the sociology of religion took off with the thought-provoking contributions of Emile Durkheim and Max Weber. (c) The three decades between the 1920s and 1950s when the anthropological perspective with an accent on fieldwork giving birth to social anthropology was developed by the Functionalists, such as A.R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881-1955) and Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942). (d) Writings since the 1950s, where one of the most dominant influences has been that of Claude Levi-Strauss* Structuralism. Phase I: Up to c. 1910 In the sphere of Religionswissenschaft the nineteenth century was essentially dominated by philologists and ethnologists, focusing largely on myths. The scientific study of myths did not begin until Karl 0. Muller's Introduction to a Scientific Mythology published in 1825.u Needless to mention, however, the peer in the field of studies on myths is Max Muller, for whom the 'key* to comprehend the essence of religion was 'Comparative Mythology,' and this in turn could only be understood by a method of philological analysis.15 More specifically, he was an exponent of the 'nature-myth school* for which the 'key* was solar mythology.16 For him the whole supernatural world arose from the limitations, ambiguity and 'illusion of language'.17 Shortly after the birth of language-based comparative mythology, ethnologists came to the scene and laid the foundations of the anthropological approach to the study of religion. Apparently