Both cultural anthropology and religious studies held that the key to understanding thought and action depended upon fathoming the meanings of the cultural and the religious. They concurred that culture and religion are symbolic, and, thus, the inquirer’s principal task is to ascertain symbols’ meanings. Resonant developments within the humanities generally, and in religious studies particularly, involved a decisive turn toward the primacy of texts. This position not only holds that texts are the most prominent, plentiful, and lasting evidence about religious thought, especially the religious thought of the past, but that the methods for interpreting texts’ meanings are the principal means for approaching anything that humans find meaningful, including nonlinguistic symbolism.