Religion

Religion (Latin religio, most plausibly from religare, "to bind, to tie, to link") is, in ordinary usage, the domain of belief, ritual, and institution through which human communities relate to what they hold sacred. In the Wheel of Heaven framework it is read more specifically — and more literally — as that which binds humanity to the Elohim, the advanced civilization that produced terrestrial life and humanity through deliberate scientific work. On this reading religion is not, at root, a symbolic or psychological phenomenon but a cultivated relationship with real creators: a bond first established through direct contact and since maintained, across generations, through ritual, instruction, textual preservation, and the orientation of sacred architecture. The world's religions are read as the distributed record of that contact — stored in the pre-scientific vocabularies of the cultures that received it, and so garbled to varying degrees, but decodable by the euhemerist method the framework works from.

Etymology

The English religion comes from Latin religio — "religious obligation, scrupulous observance, sanctity" — whose own derivation has been debated since antiquity. Two candidates dominate. Cicero (De Natura Deorum II.72) derived it from relegere, "to go over again, to re-read," making religion a matter of careful, repeated observance. Lactantius (Divinae Institutiones IV.28) derived it instead from religare, "to bind fast": "hoc vinculo pietatis obstricti Deo et religati sumus" — "by this bond of piety we are tied and bound to God, whence religion itself takes its name." The religare etymology, favored across medieval and early modern Christian thought, is the one the framework works from — both because it aligns with the framework's own reading and because it is the derivation that shaped the Western sense of what religion is.

Religare sits in a wide Latin family descended from ligare, "to bind": ligament, ligature, liaison, alliance (from alligare, "to bind to"), oblige (from obligare), and rely itself. The semantic field is consistently one of active binding — a relationship maintained by cultivated connection rather than a passive state of belief. Cognate concepts recur across traditions without being identical to it: Sanskrit dharma, Chinese dao, Arabic dīn, and Greek eusebeia and threskeia each name a religious-ethical order that overlaps with religio while carrying its own irreducible content. The framework works principally with the Latin term while engaging these through comparison.

Defining religion

Defining religion has been one of the standing problems of the academic study of religion, and no definition commands consensus. E. B. Tylor (Primitive Culture, 1871) offered the minimal "belief in spiritual beings." Émile Durkheim (The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 1912) proposed a social-functional account: "a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things ... which unite into one single moral community ... all those who adhere to them." Clifford Geertz ("Religion as a Cultural System," 1966) read religion as a system of symbols that establishes pervasive moods and motivations; Mircea Eliade organised it around the distinction between sacred and profane; Ninian Smart mapped it across seven dimensions (doctrinal, mythological, ethical, ritual, experiential, institutional, material); and Talal Asad (Genealogies of Religion, 1993) argued that "religion" as a universal category is itself a modern Western construct, cautioning against treating any single definition as neutral. These accounts differ over whether religion is essentially belief, practice, feeling, symbol, or social function — a disagreement the framework reads as a symptom of asking what religion resembles rather than what, historically, it is about.

The Wheel of Heaven reading

The framework reads religion as the cultivated bond between humanity and its makers. Where the biblical elohim are taken not as a supernatural singular God but as a plurality of embodied creators (see Elohim and Plurality of Gods), religion becomes the institution that maintains the link to them. Vorilhon states the etymological reading plainly:

"Religion from the Latin religio means 'that which links' or 'the tie', which unites the creators to their creation."

Read this way, the world's scriptures, rituals, and priesthoods are the preserved record of contact with a real civilization — stored in the mythological and supernatural vocabularies available to the cultures that received it, and so distorted in transmission, but recoverable by a reader who recognises the historical reality behind the theological framing. This is the euhemerist method applied to religion as a whole: the gods of myth are read as garbled memory of a technologically advanced civilization mistaken for the divine. The framework holds a majority of established traditions to preserve, in varying states of clarity and corruption, authentic testimony of such contact — a claim worked out tradition by tradition in the list of prophets and religions. These are foundational premises of the framework, not conclusions mainstream scholarship shares, and the corpus states them as such.

The reading does not require dismissing the naturalistic accounts of religion. Religion plainly has social, symbolic, and experiential dimensions, and has been put to ideological use. What the framework adds is a referent: something specific the traditions are about. The academic definitions describe how religion operates; the framework's claim concerns what, on its reading, religion originally cultivated a link to.

Religion as an "atheist religion." The clearest modern statement of the framework's position is the Raëlian self-description as an "atheist religion" — religion in the religare sense of a cultivated bond between creators and created, atheist in the sense of denying any supernatural divinity, since the Elohim are biological beings rather than gods:

"the Raelian Movement is a religion; it ties the creators of Humanity with their creation, even if it is in fact an atheist religion, in the sense that it does not believe in the existence of a God — atheist from the Greek atheos which means 'denying the existence of any form of divinity'."

The formulation sits deliberately athwart the standard religious-studies typology, occupying the religious and the atheist categories at once.

Sendy and the priesthood as link-keepers. The framework's religare reading was anticipated by Jean Sendy, whose L'ère du Verseau (1970) treats the etymology as recovering the original purpose of religion against its later ideological reputation:

"« Religion » vient du latin religare, qui veut dire « relier ». Or depuis que Lénine a dit que la religion est l'opium du peuple, l'usage s'est établi d'oublier que l'étymologie définit parfaitement l'objet initial des religions : maintenir le lien entre « les cieux » et la Terre."

("'Religion' comes from the Latin religare, 'to link.' Yet since Lenin said that religion is the opium of the people, it has become customary to forget that the etymology perfectly defines the original object of religions: to maintain the link between 'the heavens' and the Earth.")

Sendy's supporting observation is that the priesthoods of the earliest civilizations were not merely instruments of social control but working mathematicians, astronomers, and architects who spent their lives preserving precise astronomical and calendrical knowledge — labour, he argues, that a mere "spiritual opium" would never have required. In a characteristic inversion he casts modern scientific research as the functional heir of that ancient priestly work: both are disciplined efforts to maintain the link between Earth and the wider cosmos. The framework reads the cross-cultural recurrence of priesthood-architecture-ritual complexes — Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Vedic, Greco-Roman, Chinese, Mesoamerican, and the shamanic traditions — as the same link-keeping function surfacing under many cultural framings, carried (on the framework's reading) by the astronomical inheritance of the pre-flood Eden lineage rather than arising independently in each place.

The first religious community. The corpus places the origin of religion-as-institution earlier than the temple cults of the first cities. On its reading of the flood, Noah's pre-flood community — the small group who knew a catastrophe was coming and worked to bring life through it — was the first religious community in the strict religare sense: bound to the exiled Lucifer faction, the Serpent of the Eden disclosure and the creators who had sided with their creation, by shared work on a preservation project. That faction is distinct from the abolitionist party led by Satan, which held the human creation a mistake and argued for its destruction; the two are opposite positions, not the same fallen figure. The religious meaning later tradition attached to Noah is, on this reading, the cultural memory of that operational alliance.

Religion and revelation. The framework distinguishes religion — the ongoing cultivated relationship — from revelation, the contact-events that supply its content. That content is delivered through the prophetic institution — roughly forty messengers across human history, from Adam through Noah, Abraham, Moses, Buddha, Zoroaster, Jesus, and Muhammad, concluding in transformed form with Raël — while religion is the institutional practice by which each revelation is preserved and transmitted across the generations. A recurring corollary concerns the categories monotheism and polytheism: the framework reads the ancient contests remembered as "one God against many" less as arithmetic than as struggles over memory and allegiance, with a confession of "one" true as a matter of one authorised command and one direction of loyalty without being a discovery that the makers were only ever one (see Monotheism Is the Wrong Question).

Comparative and critical perspectives

The academic study of religion offers a range of naturalistic accounts of what religion is and why it recurs, and the framework's reading sits alongside them as a minority position rather than in place of them.

• Sociology of religion. From Max Weber and Durkheim through Peter Berger, Robert Bellah, and José Casanova, the sociological tradition treats religion through its social functions and historical development, including the long secularization debate over religion's changing place in modern societies. It documents, in detail, the social work religion does; the framework takes that description as real without treating it as the whole story.
• Cognitive science of religion. Pascal Boyer, Scott Atran, Justin Barrett, and Harvey Whitehouse explain religious belief as a by-product of ordinary cognitive machinery — hyperactive agency detection, theory of mind, and the memory dynamics of ritual — on which account religion needs no external referent to arise. The framework grants the mechanisms while holding that they describe how contact-memory would be received and transmitted, not that there was nothing to receive.
• Religion as ideology. The Marx–Lenin tradition reads religion as "the opium of the people," a consolation that masks and reproduces social domination. Sendy engages this tradition directly as the foil for his religare reconstruction: religion can be turned to ideological use, he grants, without that exhausting what it originally was.
• The New Atheist critique. Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett treat religion principally as cognitive error and social harm. The framework shares their rejection of supernatural divinity — hence "atheist religion" — while parting company on whether the traditions preserve anything real beneath the theology.
• Perennialism. René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon, and Huston Smith read the religions as many expressions of a single transcendent truth. The framework's disagreement is specific: its unifying referent is not a transcendent Absolute but a particular embodied civilization, and it preserves the irreducible differences between traditions rather than resolving them into one.

Two judgments should be kept apart, as with the euhemerist method generally. The academic description of religion — its social forms, its cognitive substrate, its histories — is largely compatible with the framework and is drawn on throughout the corpus. The framework's interpretive claim — that a real civilization stands behind the traditions — is not endorsed by mainstream scholarship, which classes the wider ancient-astronaut reading as pseudoscience. The corpus holds that claim openly as a minority position, anchored in specific texts and labelled by claim type, and treats the naturalistic accounts as fair descriptions of the phenomenon rather than as adversaries to be dismissed.

See also

• Wheel of Heaven
• Elohim
• Yahweh
• Neo-Euhemerism
• Plurality of Gods
• Prophet
• List of prophets and religions
• Hebrew Bible
• Kabbalah
• Raëlism
• Raël
• Jean Sendy
• Great Flood
• Noah
• Lucifer
• Serpent
• Satan
• Eden
• Apocalypse
• Cosmic Chain
• Cosmic Competition
• Doubled Signature
• World Age
• Zodiac
• Moses
• Jesus
• Muhammad
• Buddha
• Monotheism Is the Wrong Question

References

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Let Us Welcome the Extra-Terrestrials (1979); collected in Message from the Designers. The principal source articulation of the framework's specific position on religion.

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). The Book Which Tells the Truth (1974); collected in Message from the Designers.

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Extra-Terrestrials Took Me to Their Planet (1975); collected in Message from the Designers.

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Message from the Designers. Tagman Press, 2005.

Sendy, Jean. L'ère du Verseau. Robert Laffont, 1970. The principal pre-Raëlian articulation of the religare framework, particularly the La Religion section.

Sendy, Jean. Ces dieux qui firent le ciel et la terre. Robert Laffont, 1969.

Sendy, Jean. La Lune, clé de la Bible. Julliard, 1968.

Lactantius. Divinae Institutiones. Trans. Anthony Bowen and Peter Garnsey. Liverpool University Press, 2003. The principal Christian-tradition articulation of the religare etymology.

Cicero. De Natura Deorum. Trans. H. Rackham. Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press, 1933. The principal classical articulation of the relegere etymology.

Tylor, E. B. Primitive Culture. 2 vols. John Murray, 1871.

Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Trans. Karen E. Fields. Free Press, 1995 [originally 1912].

Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Harcourt, 1959 [originally 1957].

Eliade, Mircea. A History of Religious Ideas. 3 vols. Trans. Willard R. Trask. University of Chicago Press, 1978-1985.

Geertz, Clifford. "Religion as a Cultural System." In The Interpretation of Cultures. Basic Books, 1973.

Smart, Ninian. The Religious Experience of Mankind. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969.

Smart, Ninian. Dimensions of the Sacred: An Anatomy of the World's Beliefs. University of California Press, 1996.

Asad, Talal. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.

Weber, Max. The Sociology of Religion. Trans. Ephraim Fischoff. Beacon Press, 1963 [originally 1922].

Berger, Peter L. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. Doubleday, 1967.

Bellah, Robert N. Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age. Harvard University Press, 2011.

Casanova, José. Public Religions in the Modern World. University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Boyer, Pascal. Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. Basic Books, 2001.

Atran, Scott. In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion. Oxford University Press, 2002.

Whitehouse, Harvey. Modes of Religiosity: A Cognitive Theory of Religious Transmission. AltaMira, 2004.

Marx, Karl. "A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right." 1843. In various editions of Marx's collected works.

Lenin, V. I. "Socialism and Religion." 1905. Various editions.

Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

Hitchens, Christopher. God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Twelve, 2007.

Harris, Sam. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. W. W. Norton, 2004.

Dennett, Daniel C. Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. Viking, 2006.

Guénon, René. The Crisis of the Modern World. Trans. Marco Pallis et al. Sophia Perennis, 2001 [originally 1927].

Schuon, Frithjof. The Transcendent Unity of Religions. Trans. Peter Townsend. Quest Books, 1984 [originally 1948].

Smith, Huston. The World's Religions: Our Great Wisdom Traditions. HarperOne, 1991.

Bottéro, Jean. Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia. Trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan. University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Black, Jeremy, and Anthony Green. Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia. British Museum Press, 1992.

Hornung, Erik. Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many. Trans. John Baines. Cornell University Press, 1982.

Assmann, Jan. The Search for God in Ancient Egypt. Trans. David Lorton. Cornell University Press, 2001.

Olivelle, Patrick. The Early Upaniṣads. Oxford University Press, 1998.

Doniger, Wendy. The Hindus: An Alternative History. Penguin, 2009.

Burkert, Walter. Greek Religion. Trans. John Raffan. Harvard University Press, 1985.

Beard, Mary, John North, and Simon Price. Religions of Rome. 2 vols. Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Pankenier, David W. Astrology and Cosmology in Early China. Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Lopez, Jr., Donald S., ed. Religions of China in Practice. Princeton University Press, 1996.

Schele, Linda, and David Freidel. A Forest of Kings. William Morrow, 1990.

Aveni, Anthony F. Skywatchers of Ancient Mexico. University of Texas Press, 1980.

Brown, Joseph Epes. The Sacred Pipe: Black Elk's Account of the Seven Rites of the Oglala Sioux. University of Oklahoma Press, 1953.

Griaule, Marcel. Conversations with Ogotemmêli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas. Oxford University Press, 1965.

Richer, Jean. Géographie sacrée du monde grec. Hachette, 1967.

"Religion." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion

"Religion." Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/religion

"Religio." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religio

Religion. (2026). Wheel of Heaven. https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/religion/

"Religion." Wheel of Heaven, 2026, https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/religion/.

"Religion." Wheel of Heaven, 2026. https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/religion/.

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  title        = {Religion},
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