Stumbled on this virtuosic effort to fit all Religion (Faith, Myths & Mysticism) into a single family tree. It turned up in World Religion News, an online tabloid with outlandish religion stories, which seems indeed to have commissioned it. Much is strange about it, like the cute logos for traditions, or the way almost all of them took some sort of "religious" form in the last century and half which, presumably, superseded all that came before in its lineage... The trunk of the tree is Animism, dated 100,000 years old, but after the departure of European, San and Australian and New Guinean animisms, we find something called Proto-Nostratic, and defined
A proposed origin language from Eurasia that unites the majority of world languages. It is speculated that the people who spoke this ancient tongue were practitioners of shamanism ... This graphic illustrates how this Nostratic faith may have spread out across the continents, following the path of human migration, evolving into the multitide of religions we are familiar with today.
This is not exactly a generally accepted piece of speculation, to put it mildly, but one recognizes the appeal of such a construct. One biiiiig family! It also looks frighteningly like the evolutionary projects of 19th European century scholarship, though it seems less teleological; monotheisms get no pride of place, and religion is not replace by science. The designer, I've discovered, is busy working on a novel - indeed a series of novels - based on his reconstruction of what the Nostratic faith must have believed.
I've been studying comparative mythology as a means of reconstructing the first story ever told! This story is so old, it predates all recorded history; indeed, you have to draw upon the very fringes of science & history to reconstruct it. Many scholars, including Joseph Campbell, have studied this tale, which is referred to as the Monomyth. Sadly, this origin story was lost long ago, as our stone-age ancestors had no means of writing it down.
But don't despair. He's nearly finished a draft of the first volume.
