The author believed that religion arose along with the first glimpses of the human mind, that it accompanied human beings through all their historical path, therefore, the modern type of humans – Homo sapiens – could be called a religious human, Homo religiosus, and the concept of the sacred is the basis of religious consciousness.
The first part of the book is an attempt of retrospective analysis of ethnographic materials related to hunter-gatherer societies, the most representative for the purposes of reconstruction of the oldest forms of religion. The universal forms of religion of archaic hunters is considered to be shaping rituals and initiation rites, belief in higher beings, Totemism, Shamanism, and Fetishism.
The second part is centered at the era of formation of the most ancient religious beliefs. The author analyses archaeological sites of the Paleolithic period. Materials of ethnography and archeology, complementing each other, make it possible to judge the earliest stages of formation of religion as complete as possible.
The third part is devoted to the connections of primordial religion with other forms of spiritual life, which religion was originally closely intertwined with; later, in the process of social and cultural development, it was more and more alienated from them.
According to the author, his work ‘The Origin of Religion: The History of the Problem’ (2002) can be regarded as a historiographic introduction to this book. There he examined the leading trends and concepts of the origin of religion, considering them in the context of the development of religious studies and socio-philosophical thought in general.