Retrodictive Structural Hermeneutics (RSH): A Controllable Heuristic Methodology for Analyzing the Relationship Between Fragmentary Early Data and Systematic Late Data

Classical history of religions and mythology analyses have long adopted a linear evolutionary schema based on the assumptions that "early period = pure/primitive data" and "late period = complex/corrupted data." This article presents "Retrodictive Structural Hermeneutics (RSH)," a methodology that rejects this linear schema and proposes using late-period systematic structures as an "analytical lens" to interpret early-period fragmentary data. Based on six fundamental axioms, this method aims to diagnose the ideological motivations of texts, make structural gaps visible, and model mythological multiplication. Unlike traditional "retrojection" and "retrodiction" methods, RSH includes a control mechanism called "Stage 0: Diagnosis and Purification of Ideological Motivation," which provides an epistemological safeguard against the risks of circularity and confirmation bias. Drawing on Charles Sanders Peirce's abductive reasoning, Carlo Ginzburg's evidential paradigm, and contemporary comparative religion methodology literature, the article establishes RSH's position through methodological dialogue with theorists such as Jonathan Z. Smith, Bruce Lincoln, Jan Assmann, Michel Foucault, and Paul Ricoeur. It defines the method's success criteria (heuristic value, parsimony, replicability, falsifiability), presents its operational protocol, formal logic, validation strategy, and comparative performance analysis, and demonstrates its universal applicability through case studies across Sumerian, Egyptian, Vedic, Chinese, Iranian, Hittite, Ugaritic, Israelite, Christian, Islamic, and Mesoamerican traditions. The article concludes with a call for independent validation by researchers not involved in the model's development.