If Christians had preserved the original revelation more accurately than pagans, that - for Casaubon - was nothing to do with any inherent cultural superiority, but due to the external accident of divine grace. The differences between beliefs are not to do with some false physical distinction between 'primitive' and 'civilised' races, but are the product of environment. Scientists no longer accept this, but the genius of Casaubon had perceived that all human beings enter the world with the same mental equipment. He believed that all culture spread from a single source. Putting the Christian errors aside, the Key would have been a huge achievement.
The 'tradition originally revealed' means that he saw all non-Christian mythology as distorted echoes of the Book of Genesis. For him, the similarities between myths indicated a common origin, which he assumed was God. Casaubon, working in the 1830s, could use only written, overwhelmingly Indo-European texts anthropology did not exist, and archaeology was in its infancy. But Frazer, in 1890, relied on data about primitive peoples, and for him the similarities meant that the human mind developed everywhere through the same evolutionary stages. He was preparing an encyclopaedic account of world myths which emphasised their similarities. Casaubon was intending to do something superficially similar to what James Frazer did in The Golden Bough 60 years later.
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