The Ultimate Religious Reality A Reflection on the Opinions of Robert Ranulph Marret According to ‘the Threshold of Religion’

Marret in The threshold of Religion try to represent the “ultimate religious reality”. According to him, despite being intuitive and emotional, this reality is veiled in religious thoughts and rituals. He considers the ultimate reality of religion to be "the feeling of awe" that actualized by immediate encounter with the awesome natural phenomena; a pure feeling and a fundamental reality that religious knowledge and behaviors are merely its external manifestations. The findings of the present research, which is carried out in an analytical way, show that criticizing the views of those like Taylor and Frazer, who consider the origin of religion to be theoretical knowledge and its starting point to be rational beliefs, Marret proposes an innovative evolutionary pattern in the field of the precognitive and emotional origins of religion: a). Encountering the mysterious and surprising phenomena of nature; b). A feeling of sudden surprise and a feeling of awe; c). The emergence of supernaturalism or the desire to the realm beyond of the visible; d). Personalizing the mysterious in order to disambiguate it (Animatism); e). The assumption of the harmlessness of the mysterious thing; f). The sanctification of the mysterious phenomenon and taking the path of religious appeasement and magical empathy with it.