Fragments from E. Lang's work "The Origin of Religion", published in the anthology "Classics of Religious Studies". E. Lang is one of the first representatives of the theory of proto-monotheism (W. Schmidt, M. Eliade, F. Scheling, V. Solovyov, A. Men, A. Zubov), which asserts that the primary form of religion is faith in the One God. Already from this form “paganism” appears. In this work, Lang builds his theory in opposition to Taylor's animism, the dominant theory of the origin of religion at that time. Original pdf - Classics of World Religious Studies Vol.2 (History philosophy in monuments) - 1998 (this e-book contains only the text by E. Lang).The text of the book was translated from the original language using an artificial intelligence program. For the most part, the translation of the text is of very high quality, but in some cases, due to the imperfection of the technology, there may be incorrect phrase translations in the text, as well as single words and expressions may not be translated.