This chapter brings together three images of religion—a speech given by Benjamin Disraeli to the Oxford Diocesan Society in 1864, Jonathan Z. Smith’s account of a farmer covering his hands in the earth at his farm, and Jane Goodall’s description of chimpanzees dancing at the base of a waterfall—and identifies them all as iterations of animal religion, determined not exclusively by language or cognition, but by affective forces. Affects, it is argued, are not private, apolitical, or ahistorical—as earlier phenomenological accounts of religion held—but, in keeping with Smith’s call to address the relationships between religion and history, entirely invested in and shaped by systems of power. At the same time, the introduction argues that there is a need to move past a certain strand of Smith’s own work—the neo-Kantian emphasis on religion as a form of thought that reduces religion to a language-like system.