‘Primordial Religion in the Light of Ethnography’ is a collection of works by an outstanding ethnographer and historian of religion Lev Yakovlevich Shternberg (1861-1927), published after his death. It contains his main works, including a course of lectures ‘The Evolution of Religious Beliefs’, made in 1925-1927 at the Ethnographical Department of the Geographical Faculty of the Leningrad University. He was the first to teach ‘religious studies’ in Russia – since 1907. He called the comparative religious studies ‘a positive discipline’, noting that from positivism ‘researchers of religion assimilated a basic principle that facts should replace a priori ideas, and objective study should lead to the only possible philosophy of religion – the discovery of regularities and general trends of religious phenomena’. He supported the comparative anthropological school: Spencer, Taylor, Labbock, Morgan, MacLenan, Mangardt, Lang, Frazer, and others. The reliance on Darwin, Haeckel and Spencer's evolutionary theory created an opportunity to build a discipline of religious studies dealing with the history of the evolution of religious phenomena in relation to other factors of mental and social life. That research school used data of the history of religion, history of culture, ethnography, anthropology, and sociology. Scholars were longing to adapt scientific methods in the humanitarian field of research. The author argues that studying of early forms of religion is of special importance, because religious phenomena manifest themselves according certain general law of evolution – that is why a researcher should trace beliefs back to their ancient roots. He notes that there has not been a nation without religious beliefs, and the most ancient views were based on the veneration of the nature, which was called Animism by Taylor. The author describes three stages of the evolution of religious beliefs: from Animism to the cults of certain animals, Fetishism, the cult of ancestors, Totemism – to the shaping of the conception of gods. The further knowledge accumulation and cultural development led to the situation when ancient gods were transferred into simple symbols of natural or moral forces – and later into pantheistic systems or into spiritual and ethical systems – and, finally, to Monotheism. The shaping of gods led also to the changes in the position of the clergymen: from Shamans they became mighty priests.