GOBLET D'ALVIELLA, EUGÈNE (1846–1925), was a Belgian historian of religions, jurist, politician, and grand master of Freemasonry (which means, in Belgium, that one is anticlerical). Count Goblet d'Alviella was the first professor of history of religions at the Université Libre (i.e., "free thinking") of Brussels, of which he was rector from 1896 to 1898. He was militant as a freethinker in trying to have the teaching of religion in schools replaced by that of the science of religion.

Goblet d'Alviella divided the study of religions into three disciplines: "hierography," "hierology," and "hierosophy." Hierography describes the development of each of the known religions. Hierology, by comparing religions, tries to formulate laws of evolution of religious phenomena; it thus "makes up for the paucity of information, in any given race or society, about the history of a...