Folk religion

Sometimes also termed popular belief, it consists of ethnic or regional religious customs under the umbrella of a religion; but outside official doctrine and practices.

The second refers to the study of religious syncretism between two cultures with different stages of formal expression, such as the melange of African folk beliefs and Roman Catholicism that led to the development of Vodun and Santería, and similar mixtures of formal religions with folk cultures.

[4] The first was a perspective rooted in a cultural evolutionary framework which understood folk religion as representing the survivals of older forms of religion; in this, it would constitute "the survivals, in an official religious context, of beliefs and behaviour inherited from earlier stages of the culture's development".

[5] Yoder's third definition was that often employed within folkloristics, which held that folk religion was "the interaction of belief, ritual, custom, and mythology in traditional societies", representing that which was often pejoratively characterised as superstition.

[16] He argued that using such terminology implies that there is "a pure element" to religion "which is in some way transformed, even contaminated, by its exposure to human communities".

[20] He cautioned that both terms carried an "ideological and semantic load" and warned scholars to pay attention to the associations that each word had.

[22] This term was first employed by a German Lutheran preacher, Paul Drews, in a 1901 article that he published which was titled "Religiöse Volkskunde, eine Aufgabe der praktischen Theologie".

[24] During the 1920s and 1930s, theoretical studies of religiöse Volkskunde had been produced by the folklorists Josef Weigert, Werner Boette, and Max Rumpf, all of whom had focused on religiosity within German peasant communities.

[25] Throughout the 20th century, many studies were made of folk religion in Europe, paying particular attention to such subjects as pilgrimage and the use of shrines.

[26] Yoder later noted that although the earliest known usage of the term "folk religion" in the English language was unknown, it probably developed as a translation of the German Volksreligion.

[26] One of the earliest prominent usages of the term was in the title of Joshua Trachtenberg's 1939 work Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion.

[27] He also lamented that many U.S.-based folklorists also neglected the subject of religion because it did not fit within the standard genre-based system for cataloguing folklore.

The devotion includes the veneration of the dead (ancestor worship) and of forces of nature, exorcism of demonic forces, and a belief in the rational order of nature, balance in the universe and reality that can be influenced by human beings and their rulers, as well as spirits and gods.

Worship is devoted to a hierarchy of gods and immortals (Chinese: 神; pinyin: shén), who can be deities of phenomena, of human behaviour, or progenitors of lineages.

By the 11th century (Song period), these practices had been blended with Buddhist ideas of karma (one's own doing) and rebirth, and Taoist teachings about hierarchies of deities, to form the popular religious system which has lasted in many ways until the present day.

[31] Despite being heavily suppressed during the last two centuries, from the Taiping Rebellion to the Cultural Revolution, it is currently experiencing a modern revival in both Mainland China and Taiwan.

[40] The term Shenism was first published by AJA Elliot in 1955 to describe Chinese folk religion in Southeast Asia.

According to Asko Parpola (2015), the folk village Hinduism is surviving from pre-rig vedic Indo-Aryan times and Indus valley culture.

Later studies have emphasized the significance of the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem to the many Jewish folk customs linked to mourning and, in particular, to the belief in hibbut ha-qever (torture of the grave): a belief that the dead are tortured in their grave for three days after burial by demons until they remember their names.

[51] Raphael Patai is recognized as an early adopter of anthropology in studying Jewish folk religion.

Beginning in the 16th century and gaining prominence alongside Practical Kabbalah in the 18th century, Ba'alei Shem utilized their knowledge of the names of God and angels, along with various practices such as exorcism, chiromancy, and herbal medicine to assist individuals in achieving success in social areas like marriage and childbirth, and to bring harm to adversaries.