The World of Religion: A Reevaluation of Geo Widengren’s Phenomenology of Religion

The Typological Phenomenology of Religion – Resurrected: Managing a Legacy from Geo Widengren

“…The legacy of this Swedish historian of religions has recently been highlighted in the edited volume, The Legacy, Life and Work of Geo Widengren and the Study of the History of Religions after World War II (Larsson 2021). In several of the contributions, the volume touches upon a specific inheritance from the Continental European influences in the earlier phases of the history of religions as an academic field; that is, the idea of a general, comparative study of religion, in Widengren's time simply labelled "phenomenology of religion" (e.g., Cavallin 2022;Gothóni and Larsson 2021). In 1970, the scope and task of the phenomenology of religion was aptly summed up by another Swedish scholar, Åke Hultkrantz , as: "the systematic study of the forms of religion, that part of religious research which classifies and systematically investigates religious conceptions, rites and myth-traditions from comparative morphological-typological points of view" (quoted in King 1984: 100).…”