MANISM. - From Lat. manes "good," a euphemistic epithet referring to the deceased, m. is the theory that explains the origins of religions from the cult of ancestors.
Already Euhemerus had maintained that the gods had originally been illustrious men, kings, sages, priests, deified by the veneration that arose at their tomb. And N. D. Fustel de Coulanges, in a suggestive study on the institutions of the ancient city, La cité antique (Paris 1874; Ital. trans. by G. Perrotta with notes by G. Pasquali, Florence 1923), placed the cult of the dead as the beginning of the religion of the Indo-European peoples: "it seems that the religious sentiment began here. Perhaps in the presence of death man had for the first time the idea of the supernatural" (p. 18). This theory received from E. B. Tylor in his well-constructed study on primitive civilizations, Primitive culture (2 vols., London 1872), an indirect confirmation by placing in the phenomena of dreams, hallucinations and finally of death, the origin of the idea of spirit, developed around the tomb of the illustrious ancestor whether of the family or of the tribe. But it was given a more complete formulation by H. Spencer, Principles of Sociology (3 vols., London 1876-1882-1896), in the first of which he, understanding by veneration of ancestors all forms of veneration of the dead, concludes that "this is the root of every religion" (p. 503).
The manistic theory is not sufficient to explain the origin of religion because it takes into account neither the fantastic and myth-making element aroused in man by the spectacle of nature and which is reflected in the varied and sometimes very rich mythologies, nor the logical faculty that has shaped among many primitive groups the figure of the Supreme Being whose existence gives to the primitive the explanation of his provenance, of the norms that regulate the life of the tribe, of the sanctions that await those who transgress them.
For m. insofar as it refers to beliefs about the afterlife and to practices relating to the dead, v. DEFUNTI, VENERAZIONE dei.
Bibliography3 works
Nicola Turchi