Frachetti describes various theories concerning the origins or motivations for a people to develop mobility instead of settlement: “Ethnographers have long recognized that mobile pastoralism is largely an ecologically strategic way of life...”¹ He acknowledges various considerations which may factor into the construction of such a society beyond the natural environment, but concludes: “Regardless of the other significant motivations that contribute to their social and economic practices, pastoralists attentively monitor environmental conditions such as seasonal rainfall and pasture and water resources and adjust their schedules of mobility, settlement, and socialization to accommodate these rhythms.”² If social and economic practices are characteristically responsive to the ecological context, why not culture, specifically religion?

In explanation of his 'religio-ecological' method, Hultkrantz suggests that "...by establishing types of religion instead of tracing religious complexes and historically delimited religions, we may arrive at both a fuller understanding of religious facts in their interactions with Nature and a more comprehensive knowledge of the religious past of pre-literate societies.”³. His approach considers the idea that religions, like economic and social constructs, might be influenced by the ecological context of development.⁴ Hultkrantz compares his approach to others, in his time, which borrowed the concept of ecology from the natural sciences.⁵ Hultkrantz suggests that this approach "...leads to the recognition of fixed types and regularities in the process of cultural development, regularities which should not be considered as laws but as natural recurrences in similar situations.”⁶ This is an important consideration in framing the potential for connections between the natural environment and religion. If we approach the subject with too strict a suggestion of environmental determinism, Hultkrantz' 'regularities as law', we fail to consider the differences between communities of human beings and their effect, in turn, on an environmental context which cannot be described as completely inert.⁷ Similarly, it is beyond reason to deny that humans, as biological beings, would be molded by the natural environments in which they develop, live, and continue to interact. It would be even more irrational to assert that the development of all major areas of society except religion might be affected by the specific ecological context of a group of people.

Another scholar has suggested, though less directly, a theory of religion which is in line with Hultkrantz.  Writing on conceptions of the 'sacred' across human history, historian of religion Mircea Eliade theorizes that 'hierophanies' (revelatory epiphanies) of the sacred/transcendent natural world give rise religious experience.⁸ Eliade interpreted the results of his comparative work as suggesting correlations between natural phenomena and religious experience.⁹ Cogent to our discussion are his observations regarding environmental contexts, not unlike the ecological 'backyards' of the ancient Iranians and Israelites, which are dominated by the skyscape. He writes: “Simple contemplation of the celestial vault already provokes a religious experience. The sky shows itself to be infinite, transcendent”¹⁰ and “For the sky, by its own mode of being, reveals transcendence, force, eternity. It exists absolutely because it is high, eternal, powerful.”¹¹ Eliade's suggestion of the hierophanic interaction between humans and the natural world seems to go deeper than the simple inspiration of religious concepts by natural phenomena.  He specifically argues: “There is no question of naturism here. The celestial god is not identified with the sky, for he is the same god who, creating the entire cosmos, created the sky too. This is why he is called Creator, All-powerful, Lord, Chief, Father, and the like.”¹² To Eliade it is clear that human beings find, in (natural) environmental contexts, experiences of both the mundane and transcendent world.¹³ What is unclear, however, is whether or not Eliade views the latter as a human construct.

A major criticism of Mircea Eliade's work is his apparent vacillation between theological and secular academic perspectives.  Comparative religion scholar William E. Paden describes the result of this back-and-forth in Eliade's work:

...two matrices [can be] distinguished in Eliade's writings, both of them linked with the concept of the sacred. The first is one most commonly associated with Eliade, where 'the sacred' refers to hierophanies of the transcendent, manifest through some part of the ordinary...In this model, religion begins with the revelation of the sacred....there is a second Eliade, a second voice, employing another model...about the human capacity to constitute multiple worlds, where the concept 'world' is clearly pluralistic and relativistic...Here Eliade is not theological at all, but postfoundationalist and to some extent postmodern. Here sacrality is a human value, not an epithet for divinity.¹⁴

Paden's interpretation finds this "second Eliade" incorporating notes from Durkheim in his conception of the world-building power of human experiences of the natural world.  Given this plurality of voices in Eliade's work, and the well established history of criticism it has since fueled¹⁵, Paden questions the position of such a theoretical framework as Eliade's in more recent comparative efforts. Paden writes:  “I do think that the relevant Eliadean discourse for our present secular, comparativist generation is not Eliade-the-monist for whom a monolithic religious reality termed 'the sacred' grounds all and manifests through all, but rather Eliade-the-pluralist interested in the myriad ways religious worlds are formed as cultural creations.”¹⁶  To Paden, the effects of the natural world on the religious experiences of human individuals and communities functions within the innate conceptual world-building activities which are also responsible for producing, among others, economic, social, and cultural constructs.  He writes:

Humans create their worlds, inhabit them, and assume responsibility for them...Sacrality is therefore not just something that manifests or shines through worlds or through the symbolic structures...but also the factor that gives a world its standing against the forces of chaos. In the basic sense Eliade is linking religious worldmaking with the process of human worldmaking itself.¹⁷ 

This is important to our discussion, for among the variables which influence the "process of human worldmaking" surely the ecological environment must be acknowledged as having been a dominant factor for the majority of human history.  

Paden provides an interesting excavation of Eliade's theoretical framework. His interpretation of “Eliade-the-pluralist” as a theorist of religious worldmaking requires some clearing away of the theological language which has driven so much criticism. But it is important to note that Paden's efforts do not seem aimed at redeeming Eliade's complex interweaving of perspectives, but appear, rather, to be revealing a secular framework of which Eliade himself may not have been cognizant:

I am not grounding this chapter on the analytic force of proving different historical or linguistic levels of Eliadean thought, and then maintaining that one of them is the 'real' Eliade. Nor am I even certain that Eliade himself would have understood these distinctions. But I do find a constructivist, humanistic strain in his work that coexists with and often underlies his rhetoric about 'the manifestations of the sacred.'¹⁸

Paden's efforts allow for the inclusion of Eliade in the development of the theory which lies at the core of my argument. It is Paden's neo-Durkheimian Eliade who can offer support for a powerful and relevant theory of religion which has yet to be explored in any depth.¹⁹ When read with Åke Hultkrantz we can begin to see the foundation for a framework of understanding the influence of natural ecological contexts on religious development.

To be sure, the theory for which I argue, that the development of monotheism ultimately correlates to agriculturally marginal landscapes, does not resolve the tension between Eliade's two perspectives. This argument does not (and should not) seek to alleviate Hultkrantz and Eliade of the burdens of their methodologies or conclusions, entrenched so in Eurocentric elitism. Each of these theorists does not distance their work enough from the colonialist ancestry of religious scholarship by the likes of Tylor and Frazer to be taken without a grain (or bowl) of salt. A student of Mircea Eliade, scholar of Indo-European religion, Bruce Lincoln approaches his work in Priests, Warriors, and Cattle: A Study in the Ecology of Religions differently than either Hultkrantz or Eliade, stating at the end of his introduction: “At all costs, reasoning such as 'In East Africa..,therefore among the Indo-Iranians...' will be avoided. Such a statement proves nothing and only serves to confuse the issue. Similarity between the two religious systems is that which is to be proven, and to do this we must first study each system in its own right.”²⁰ Lincoln's statement serves, here, as an example of what Eliade and Hultkrantz failed to consider in their conclusions “on the religious history of primitive peoples.”²¹

If we are to apply the theory presented in this argument beyond the agriculturally marginal landscapes which contextualized the development of the earliest ancient Iranians and Israelites, then it is vital to situate its genesis and applicability against the support provided by these theorists. Rather than picking up where they might have left off, it is important to consider the quality of the contexts from which we are plucking the germ of the theoretical framework functioning within our present discussion. Anthropologist Alice B. Kehoe offers a critique of Eliade and Hultkrantz which fits our purpose and clarifies the problematic nature of blindly theorizing in their vein:

Two Europeans, Mircea Eliade and Ake Hultkrantz, have inspired a generation of academics and the public fascinated by the field of comparative religions. Intellectual brilliance, passion, vision-in short, charisma-mark these savants. So, too, does an arrogant cultural imperialism that denies full humanity to the first nations of the Americas. Eliade, and to a much lesser extent Hultkrantz, have fed the romantic demiurge presenting American Indians as primal survivals husbanding an archaic ecstasy that may yet save the White millions who suffer, in Hultkrantz's words, an 'inability to lead authentic lives'.²²

Kehoe's comments recall the long-established history of Western comparativism which privileges and normalizes Christianity as the benchmark against which all other religions are 'compared'. Having argued for the importance of ecological context to the development of religions, we next must examine three cases in which this theory might be applied. With Kehoe's critique in mind, it is vital that the application of this concept be aimed at further broadening our knowledge of monotheism and mobile (often pastoralist) societies, rather than, as so many have done before, attempting to (re-)define other religions to fit a biblical framework.