The recurrence of similar gods and sacred stories did not determine what their common beginning had been. Charles-François Dupuis (1742–1809) looked to the sun, stars, and seasons for an explanation. His Origine de tous les cultes (1795) interpreted religion as the personification of the natural world. The events later told as the lives of gods had begun, he argued, in the visible movements on which human life depended.
The interpretation gave the calendar a central place. Changes in light, the passing of the seasons, and the figures assigned to the constellations supplied a history beneath the apparent history. A sacred narrative could describe the heavens while presenting its actors as beings who suffered, struggled, and returned. The task of comparison was to recover that astronomical meaning across different names and traditions.
Dupuis included Christianity in the inquiry. Its narratives did not receive an exemption from the explanation applied to other religions. This made his work a direct challenge to the use of pagan parallels as confirmation of revelation. What Christian mythographers treated as distorted memories of biblical events could instead become evidence that biblical stories belonged to the same human history as other sacred accounts.
Published before the mature synthesis of George Stanley Faber (1773–1854), the work belongs to the competing arguments from which that later defence emerged. Both approaches could assemble impressive collections of likenesses, yet their conclusions depended on different decisions about what came first. Dupuis’s astronomical readings also required proof of the connections he proposed. The fact that the heavens could be found in a story did not establish that its tellers had put them there, any more than a sacred vessel by itself established a memory of Noah’s ark.