Laudator Temporis Acti

Arthur Darby Nock, "The Study of the History of Religion," Essays on Religion and the Ancient World, Vol. I (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 331-340 (at 333):

A fact is a holy thing, and its life should never be laid down on the altar of a generalization. We have had these generalizations in plenty, and they have worked havoc. The key to all religions and to all mythologies has been sought in various theories—in an emphasis on the worship of ancestors, or on the worship of the heavenly bodies, or on the worship of inanimate and even artificial objects charged with power, or on the kinship of certain social units with animals or plants called totems, or again in the interpretation of all phenomena in terms of mana, the obscure magical force present in various objects, or again in the henotheistic ideas reported as held among quite undeveloped tribes. Each time the key has opened certain doors, but no amount of filing has enabled it to open all doors. Each time the attempt has shown a naïf assumption, characteristic of the ancients and excusable in them, that the universe and the facts of life are ultimately susceptible of a simple explanation. But the universe and the facts of life are stubborn and recalcitrant and the quest for simple explanations is doomed to failure. No big thing is so to be explained. There is no single and simple origin of tragedy or of sacrifice or of funerary ritual. Life does not happen like that. If any domain of the history of man and of his thought seems to us quite straightforward, we may be fairly certain that we are ill-informed about it or view it from a partisan standpoint.