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416 J O U R N A L O F R E L I G I O U S H I S T O RY

volume’s title. Certainly, any broad presentation of Luther’s thought will be confronted
with managing the overlapping boundaries between content, context, and form.
Depth in content is sometimes substituted for breadth in the desire to do justice to
the scope of Luther’s writings. In the introduction to “A Sermon on the Estate of
Marriage” (1519), for example, the editors summarise Luther’s view of marriage as
a desacramentalised, faithful Christian vocation. While hints of this shift are present
in this sermon, Luther rather maintains the Catholic, sacramental meaning of marriage
(p. 389). While not a major detail, it points to the need for interested readers ultimately
to pursue more detailed volumes of Luther’s works.
Despite some minor limitations, the material selected for inclusion aptly reveals
the shape of Luther’s convictions and biases, both provocative and tender. The volume
is an essential educational sourcebook for teachers and students of Luther, Reforma-
tion theology, and church history located in all settings. Space limitations prevented
the inclusion of a biography, thus reading this volume with a brief outline of
Luther’s historical and theological positioning will ensure the greatest appreciation
of its contents.
JILL COX
Monash University

E. J. MICHAEL WITZEL: The Origins of the World’s Mythologies. Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press, 2012; pp. xx + 665.

This exhilarating study confirms what many in the academy have so far scarce dared to
hope: “big history” is back, the comparative project in Religious Studies and related
disciplines such as mythological studies has been rehabilitated, and the resurgence of
metanarratives (confirming the demise of “postmodern” approaches) is both welcome
and inevitable. Witzel’s huge, enormously learned, book constitutes an archaeology of
what it means to be human and to hold human-constructed cosmologies, moralities, and
anthropologies. His project is to trace myths “back, step by step, ultimately to the stories
told by early Homo sapiens or, to use the now popular term, to the period of the African
Eve who lived some 130,000 years ago” (p. 3). Methodological awareness characterises
the research, which Witzel (a philologist and Sanskritist) has taken care to distinguish
from Jungian-inspired works such as Christopher Booker’s best-selling The Seven Basic
Plots: Why We Tell Stories (2004). Despite this, there are synergies between The Origin
of the World’s Mythologies and Booker’s popular book (rather like the way that Martin
West’s landmark The East Face of Helicon: West Asiatic Elements in Greek Poetry
[1997] blew open the contention that Greece was the unique origin point of Europe and
definitively established that much of what we thought of as “Greek” was Near Eastern,
almost coincidentally confirming the claims of far less respectable scholars like Martin
Bernal, author of Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization [1987]).
In fact, West (along with Garry W. Trompf, author of The Idea of Historical Recurrence
in Western Thought [1979], and Robert Bellah, author of Religion in Human Evolution:
From the Palaeolithic to the Axial Age [2011]), is one of the trailblazers of this type of
macro-historical project.
Witzel draws upon two disciplines that are usually neglected by scholars of religion:
comparative linguistics and the human genome project. He contends that it is possible
to distinguish two families of myths that correspond to the two super-continents that

© 2013 The Authors

Journal of Religious History © 2013 Religious History Association
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BOOK REVIEWS 417

resulted when the original landmass Pangaea broke apart, Laurasia and Gondwana.
Chapter 3 focuses on Laurasian mythology, which is characterised by a certain type of
creation myth involving primordial waters and a floating earth, in which “the world
emerges from an undefined state of chaos, by itself; in some later versions it does so
with the help of a creator god” (p. 112). Certain important primordial figures, such as
the cosmic egg, a bovine, a first humanoid, and themes such as the separation of the
heavens and the earth, the hidden sun, the slaying of a dragon, the heavenly drink, and
the theft of fire, are analysed across divergent temporal, geographical, and cultural
contexts, to establish connections and commonalities that cannot be due to chance.
Chapter 4 chronicles a range of disciplines (comparative linguistics, archaeology,
genetics, and physical anthropology) that offer supporting evidence for Witzel’s main
argument. Genetics is vital to the argument, as “the two family trees, that of NRY and
mtDNA, can be compared in their structure, origin, and development, thus . . . leading
back to our ultimate ancestors and providing the background for the populations that
have transmitted the Gondwana and Laurasian mythologies” (p. 209). Chapter 5 is a
brief study of Gondwana mythologies, which functions as a “countercheck” (Witzel’s
term) to the Laurasian hypothesis.
The Gondwana-descended populations, including Australian Aborigines, Andaman
Islanders, Sub-Saharan Africa, and New Guinea (among others), are sketched and
major differences between the Gondwana and Laurasian mythologies are delineated.
Chapter 6 reaches yet further back than Laurasia and Gondwana, to the earliest human
mythological themes and motifs, what Witzel terms “Pan-Gaean mythology.” Themes
such as the presence of a high god, the nature of humans, creation, and the ritual ways
these have been enacted among people are explored. Chapter 7 considers Laurasian
mythology in prehistory, covering Palaeolithic trends such as shamanism and animal
sacrifice, and the changes that resulted from the Neolithic shift to urbanisation and
agriculture. A consideration of the textual records of history, which are available for
scrutiny once so-called “state societies” (the “Axial Age” cultures of Bellah) are
established, concludes this study. Chapter 8 attempts to establish a “meaning” for
Laurasian mythology, discussing its characterisation of the life-cycle, the basic struc-
tures of society and the universe, and speculating on the persistence of these stories.
The fascinating research area of Indo-European linguistics and mythology, which until
the 1980s were crucial to the discipline of Religious Studies, faded with the reputation
of the late Mircea Eliade (d. 1986), and at the turn of the twenty-first century appeared
to be an historical cul de sac. Michael Witzel’s triumphant study reveals not only that
the methods of Indo-European comparativists are continuingly relevant, but that they
yield rich and amazing results when applied to the whole canvas of religion and
mythology in human history and prehistory, and might, just possibly, be the key to the
future of the discipline. This is a book to be read with delight and increasing convic-
tion, and is highly recommended.
CAROLE M. CUSACK
University of Sydney

PHILIP MANSEL: Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean. New

Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011; pp. x + 470.
In 1975, Beirut, once touted as the “Paris” of the Levant, the city of profit and diversity,
became the city of death. In Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe, Philip Mansel tells us

© 2013 The Authors

Journal of Religious History © 2013 Religious History Association