The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912)
The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912)
[Excerpt from Robert Alun Jones. Emile Durkheim: An Introduction to Four Major Works. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, Inc., 1986. Pp. 115-155.]
Outline of Topics
Durkheim's Two Problems
Durkheim's primary purpose in The Elementary Forms was to describe and explain the most primitive religion known to man. But if his interests thus bore some external
similarity to those of the ethnographer or historian, his ultimate
purpose went well beyond the reconstruction of an archaic culture
on the contrary, as in The Division of Labor and Suicide, Durkheim's concern was ultimately both present and practical:
&If we have taken primitive religion as the subject of our research,&
he insisted, &it is because it has seemed to us better adapted
than any other to lead to an understanding of the religious nature
of man, that is to say, to show us an essential and permanent
aspect of humanity.&
But if Durkheim's goal was thus to understand modern man, why
did he go to the very beginning of history? How can the crude
cults of the Australian aborigines tell us anything about religions
far more advanced in value, dignity, and truth? And if he insisted
that they can, wasn't he suggesting that Christianity, for example,
proceeds from the same primitive mentality as the Australian cults?
These questions were important, for Durkheim recognized that scholars
frequently focused on primitive religions in order to discredit
their modern counterparts, and he rejected this &Voltairean& hostility
to religion for two reasons. First, alluding to the second chapter
of The Rules, Durkheim insisted that such hostil it prejudges
the results of the investigation, and renders its outcome suspect.
Second, and more important, he consider for
it is an essential postulate of sociology that no human institution
can rest on an error or a lie. If an institution is not based
on &the nature of things,& Durkheim insisted, it encounters a
resistance in natu the very existence of
primitive religions, therefore, assures us that they &hold to
reality and express it.& The symbols through which this reality
is expressed, of course, but we must know how
to go beneath the symbol, to uncover the reality which it represents,
and which gives it its meaning: &The most barbarous and the most
fantastic rites and the strangest myths translate some human need,
some aspect of life, either individual or social. The reasons
with which the faithful justify them may be, and generally are,
but the true reasons,& Durkheim concluded, &do not
cease to exist& and it is the duty of science to discover them.&
In this sense, all religions are &true&; but if all religions are thus equal with
respect to the reality they express, why did Durkheim focus on
primitive religions in particular? Briefly, he did so for three &methodological&
reasons. First, Durkheim argued that we cannot understand more
advanced religions except by analyzing the way they have been
progressively constitute for only by placing
each of the constituent elements of modern religions in the context
within which it emerged can we hope to discover the cause which
gave rise to it. In this analysis, as in Cartesian logic, the first link of the
chain wa but for Durkheim, this link at the
foundation of the science of religions was not a &conceptual possibility&
but a concrete reality based on historical and ethnographic observations.
Just as biological evolution has been differently conceived since
the empirical discovery of monocellular beings, therefore, religious
evolution is differently conceived depending upon what concrete
system of belief and action is placed at its origin.
Second, Durkheim suggested that the scientific study of religion
itself presupposed that the various religions we compare are all
species of the same class, and thus possess certain elements in
common: &At the foundation of all systems of belief and all cults,&
Durkheim thus argued,
there ought necessarily to be a certain number of fundamental
representations or conceptions and of ritual attitudes which,
in spite of the diversity of forms which they have taken, have
the same objective significance and fulfill the same functions
everywhere. These are the permanent elements which constitute
that which is permanent a they form all the
objective contents of the idea which is expressed when one speaks
of religion in general.
Again, therefore, Durkheim was trying to answer a time-honored
philosophical question (the &essential nature& of religion) by
new, sociological means (the ethnography of primitive societies);
and the special value of such ethnographies was that they captured
religious ideas and practices before priests, prophets, theologians,
or the popular imagination had had the opportunity to refine and
transform them:
That which is accessory or secondary... has not yet come to hide
the principal elements. All is reduced to that which is indispensable
to that without which there could be no religion. But that which
is indispensable is also that which is essential, that is to say,
that which we must know before all else.
Primitive religions are privileged cases, Durkheim thus argued, because they are simple cases.
But if this simplicity of primitive religions helps us to understand
its nature, it also helps us to understand its causes. In fact,
as religious thought evolved through history, its initial causes
became overlaid with a vast scheme of methodological and theological
interpretation which made those origins virtually imperceptible.
The study of primitive religion, Durkheim thus suggested, is a
new way of taking up the old problem of the &origin of religion&
itself -- not in the sense of some specific point in time and
space when religion began to exist (no such point exists), but
in the sense of discovering &the ever-present causes upon which
the most essential forms of religious thought and practice depend.&
This description and explanation of the most primitive religion,
however, was only the primary purpose of The Elementary Forms; and its secondary purpose was by far the most ambitious of Durkheim's
attempts to provide sociological answers to philosophical questions.
At the base of all our judgments, Durkheim began, there are a
certain number of ideas which philosophers since Aristotle have
called &the categories of the understanding& -- time, space, class,
number, cause, substance, personality, and so on. Such ideas &correspond to the most universal properties of things.
They are like the solid frame which
does not seem to be able to liberate itself from them without
destroying itself, for it seems that we cannot think of objects
that are not in time and space, which have no number, etc.&
How are these ideas related to religion? When primitive religious
beliefs are analyzed, Durkheim observed, these &categories& are
found, suggesting that they are the product
but religious thought itself is composed of collective representations,
the products of real social groups. These observations suggested
to Durkheim that the &problem of knowledge& might be posed in
new, sociological terms. Previous efforts to solve this problem,
he began, represent one of two philosophical doctrines: the empiricist doctrine that the categories are constructed out of human experience,
and that the individual is the artisan of this construction, and
the a priorist doctrine that the categories are logically prior to experience,
and are inherent in the nature of the human intellect itself.
The difficulty for the empirical thesis, Durkheim then observed, is that it deprives the categories
of their most distinctive properties -- universality (they are
the most general concepts we have, are applicable to all that
is real, and are independent of every particular object) and necessity
(we literally cannot think without them); for it is in the very
nature of empirical data that they be both particular and contingent.
The a priorist thesis, by contrast, has more respect for these properties of
univer but by asserting that the categories
simply &inhere& in the nature of the intellect, it begs what is
surely the most interesting and important question of all: &It
is necessary,& Durkheim insisted, &to show whence we hold this
surprising prerogative and how it comes that we can see certain
relations in things which the examination of these things cannot
reveal to us.& In sum, if reason is simply a variety of individual experience,
but if its distinctive properties are recognized
but not explained, it is set beyond the bounds of nature and thus
of scientific investigation. Having planted these (allegedly)
formidable obstacles in the paths of his philosophical adversaries,
Durkheim then offered his frustrated reader an attractive via media: &... if the social origin of the categories is admitted,& he
suggested, &a new attitude becomes possible which we believe will
enable us to escape bath of the opposed difficulties.&
How, then, does the hypothesis of the social origin of the categories
overcome these obstacles? First, the basic proposition of the
a priorist thesis is that knowledge is composed of two elements -- perceptions
mediated by our senses, and the categories of the understanding
-- neither of which can be reduced to the other. By viewing the
first as individual representations and the second as their collective
counterparts, Durkheim insisted, this proposition is left intact:
for &between these two sorts of representations there is all the
difference which exists between the individual and the social,
and one can no more derive the second from the first than he can
deduce society from the individual, the whole from the part, the
complex from the simple.& Second, this hypothesis is equally consistent with the duality
of human nature -- just as our moral ideals are irreducible to
our utilitarian motives, so our reason is irreducible to our experience.
In so far as we belong to society, therefore, we transcend our
individual nature both when we act and when we think. Finally,
this distinction explains both the universality and the necessity
of the categories -- they are universal because man has always
and everywhere lived in society, w and they
are necessary because, without them, all contact between individual
minds would be impossible, and social life would be destroyed
altogether: &... society could not abandon the categories to the
free choice of the individual without abandoning itself. If it
is to live,& Durkheim concluded, &there is not merely need of
a satisfactory moral conformity, but also there is a minimum of
logical conformity beyond which it cannot safely go.&
But one might still object that, since the categories are mere
representations of social realities, there is no guarantee of
their correspondence to any of the thus we
would return, by a different route, to a more skeptical nominalism
and empiricism. Durkheim's rationalist and rather metaphysical answer is that
society itself is a part of nature, and &it is impossible that
nature should differ radically from itself... in regard to that
which is most essential. The fundamental relations between things
-- just that which it is the function of the categories to express
cannot be essentially dissimilar in the different realms.&
Defining Religion
In order to describe and explain the most primitive religion known
to man, Durkheim observed, we must first define the term &religion&
itself: otherwise we risk drawing inferences from beliefs and
practices which have nothing &religious& about them, or (and this
was the greater danger to Durkheim) of leaving many religious
facts to one side without understanding their true nature. In fact, Durkheim had already made such an attempt in &Concerning
the Definition of Religious Phenomena& (1899), where he argued
that religion consists of obligatory beliefs united with definite
practices which relate to the objects given in the beliefs.& While this definition achieved a number of aims, however, Durkheim soon became displeased with its overriding
emphasis on &obligation&; and, as he later acknowledged, the definition offered in 1912 is significantly different.
Following The Rules and Suicide, Durkheim's 1912 definition is reached by a two-step process.
First, he insisted, we must free the mind of all preconceived
ideas of religion, a liberation achieved in The Elementary Forms through a characteristic &argument by elimination&: &it is fitting,&
Durkheim suggested, &to examine some of the most current of the
definitions in which these prejudices are commonly expressed,
before taking up the question on our own account.& Second, Durkheim proposed to examine the various religious systems
we know in their concrete reality, in order to determine those
elements which for &religion cannot be defined
except by the characteristics which are found wherever religion
itself is found.&
The first of the prejudicial definitions of religion to be eliminated
by this procedure was that governed by our ideas of those things
which surpass the limits of our knowledge -- the &mysterious,&
the &unknowable,& the &supernatural& -- whereby religion would
be &a sort of speculation upon all that which evades science or
distinct thought in general.& Durkheim saw at least four discernible difficulties in such a
definition. First, while he admitted that the sense of mystery
has played a considerable role in the history of some religions,
and especially Christianity, he added that, even in Christianity,
there have been periods -- e.g., the scholastic period (tenth
to fifteenth centuries), the seventeenth century, etc. -- in which
this sense was virtually non-existent. Second, while Durkheim
agreed that the forces put in operation by some primitive rite
designed to assure the fertility of the soil or the fecundity
of an animal species appear &different& from those of modern science,
he denied that this distinction between religious and physical
forces is perceived by those the abyss which
separates the rational from the irrational, Durkheim emphasized,
belongs to a much later period in history. Third, and more specifically,
the very idea of the &supernatural& logically presupposes its
contrary -- the idea of a &natural order of things& or &natural
law& -- to which the supernatural event or entity is presumably
but the idea of natural law, Durkheim again
suggested, is a still more recent conception than that of the
distinction between religious and physical forces. Finally, Durkheim simply denied that the object of religious
conceptions is that which is &exceptional& or &abnormal&; on the
contrary, the gods frequently serve to account for that which
is constant and ordinary -- &for the regular march of the universe,
for the movement of the stars, the rhythm of the seasons, the
annual growth of vegetation, the perpetuation of species, etc.
It is far from being true,& Durkheim concluded, &that the notion
of the religious coincides with that of the extraordinary or the
unforeseen.&
The second prejudicial definition rejected by Durkheim was that
based upon the idea of &gods& or, more broadly, &spiritual beings.& The relations we can have with such beings, Durkheim observed,
are determined by the nature attributed to them -- they are conscious beings, and thus we can act upon them only through conscious processes (invocations, prayers, offerings, sacrifices); and
since the object of religion is to govern our relations with such
beings, there can be no religion except where such conscious processes
are at work. The difficulty for this definition, Durkheim insisted,
is that it fails to acknowledge two categories of undeniably religious
facts. First, there are great religions (e.g., Buddhism, Jainism,
Brahminism, etc.) from which the idea of gods or spirits is almost
absent, and in which the &conscious processes& indicated above
play a minor role at best. Second, even within those religions
which do acknowledge such beings, there are many rites which are
completely independent of that idea, and in some cases the idea
is itself derived from the rite rather than the reverse. &All religious powers,& Durkheim concludes, &do not emanate from
divine personalities, and there are relations of cult which have
other objects when uniting man to a deity. Religion is more than
the idea of gods or spirits, and consequently cannot be defined
exclusively in relation to these latter.&
Definition by the ideas of &spiritual beings& and &the supernatural&
thus eliminated, Durkheim turned to the construction of his own
definition. Emphasizing that religion is less an indivisible whole
than a complex system of parts, he began by dividing these parts
into rites (determined modes of action) and beliefs (collective representations); and since rites can be distinguished
from other actions only by their object, and the nature of that
object is determined by the beliefs, Durkheim insisted on defining
the latter first. &All known religious beliefs,& he observed,
&present one common characteristic: they presuppose a classification
of all the things, real and ideal, of which men think, into two
classes or opposed groups, generally designated by two distinct
terms which are translated well enough by the words profane and sacred. The characteristic by which the latter is distinguished from
the former, moreover, is simply that it is distinguished absolutely: &In all the history of human thought,& Durkheim emphasized, &there
exists no other example of two categories of things so profoundly
differentiated or so radically opposed to one another.& Durkheim thus arrived at his preliminary definition of the essential
parts of any religious system: sacred things are those isolated and protected by po profane things are those which, according to those interdictions, must remain
at a distance from their religious beliefs are representations which express the nature of sacred things
and their relations, either with one another or
religious rites are rules of conduct which prescribe how one should behave in
the prese and finally, where &a certain number
of sacred things sustain relations of co-ordination or subordination
with each other in such a way as to form a system having a certain
unity,& the beliefs and rites thus united constitute a religion.
The seemingly insuperable obstacle to the immediate acceptance
of this definition was its subsumption of a body of facts ordinarily
distinguished from religion -- i.e., magic. Indeed, magic is also composed of beliefs and rites, myths,
dogmas, sacrifices, lustrations, prayers, chants, and dances as
and the beings and forces invoked by the magician are not
only similar to those addressed by religion, but are frequently
the same. Yet historically, magic and religion have frequently
exhibited a marked repugnance for one another, suggesting that any definition of the latter should find some
means of excluding the former. For Durkheim, this means was Robertson
Smith's insistence, in his Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, that religion was a public, social, beneficent institution, while
magic was private, selfish, and at least potentially maleficent.
&The really religious beliefs,& Durkheim could thus argue, &are
always common to a determined group or `Church,' which makes a
profession of adhering to them and of practicing the rites connected
with them.... The individuals which compose it feel themselves
united to each other by the simple fact that they have a common
faith.& The belief in magic, by contrast,
does not result in binding together those who adhere to it, nor
in uniting them into a group leading a common life.... Between
the magician and the individuals who consult him, as between these
individuals themselves, there are no lasting bonds which make
them members of the same moral community, comparable to that formed
by the believers in the same god or the observers of the same
Hence Durkheim's definition: & A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative
to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden
-- beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community
called a Church, all those who adhere to them.&
The Most Primitive Religion
Armed with his &preliminary definition& of religion, Durkheim
set out in search of its most primitive, elementary form. Almost
immediately, however, another difficulty arose -- even the crudest
religions of which we have any historical or ethnographic knowledge
appear to be the products of a long, rather complicated evolution,
and thus exhibit a profusion of beliefs and rites based upon a
variety of &essential& principles. To discover the &truly original&
form of the religious life, Durkheim observed, it is thus necessary
&to descend by analysis beyond these observable religions, to
resolve them into their common and fundamental elements, and then
to seek among these latter some one from which the others were
derived.& The problem, in short, was less one of describing and explaining
a system of observable beliefs and practices than of constructing
the hypothetical, essential origin from which these later religions
presumably derived.
This was a problem for which two contrary solutions had been proposed,
based upon the two common elements found universally among the
observable religions. One set of beliefs and practices, for example,
is addressed to the phenomena of nature, and is thus characterized
as naturism; while a second body of religious thought and action appeals
to conscious spiritual beings, and is called animism. The problem of accounting for the confusing properties of the
observable religions thus resolved itself into two mutually contradictory
evolutionary hypotheses: either animism was the most primitive
religion, and naturism its secondary, or the
cult of nature stood at the origin of religion, and the cult of
spirits was but a peculiar, subsequent development. It was through the critical examination of these traditional
theories -- another argument by elimination -- that Durkheim hoped
to reveal the need for a new theory altogether.
According to the animistic theory, the idea of the human soul
was first suggested by the contrast between the mental representations
experienced while asleep (dreams) and those of normal experience.
The primitive man grants equal status to both, and is thus led
to postulate a &second self& within himself, one resembling the
first, but made of an ethereal matter and capable of traveling
great distances in short periods of time. The transformation of
this soul into a spirit is achieved with death, which, to the
primitive mind, is not unli and with the
destruction of the body comes the idea of spirits detached from
any organism and wandering about freely in space. Henceforth,
spirits are assumed to involve themselves, for good or ill, in
the affairs of men, and all human events varying slightly from
the ordinary are attributed to their influence. As their power
grows, men increasingly consider it wise to conciliate their favor
or appease them when they are irritated, whence come prayers,
offerings, sacrifices -- in short, the entire apparatus of religious
worship. Reasoning wholly by analogy, the primitive mind also
attributes &second selves& to all non-human objects -- plants,
animals, rivers, trees, stars, etc. -- which thus account for
the phenomena o and in this way, the ancestor
cult gives rise to the cult of nature. In the end, Durkheim concluded,
&men find themselves the prisoners of this imaginary world of
which they are, however, the authors and models.&
If this animistic hypothesis is to be accepted as an account of
the most primitive religion, Durkheim observed, three parts of
the argument are of critical significance: its demonstration that
the idea of the soul was formed without borrowing elements from
its account of how souls become spirits, and
thus t and its derivation of the cult of
nature from ancestor worship. Doubts concerning the first were
already raised by the observation, to be discussed later, that the soul, though independent of the body under certain conditions,
is in fact considerably more intimately bound to the organism
than the animistic hypothesis would suggest. Even if these doubts
were overcome, moreover, the animistic theory presumes that dreams
are liable to but one primitive interpretation -- that of a &second-self&
-- when the interpretive possibilities are
and even were this objection removed, defenders of the hypothesis
must still explain why primitive men, otherwise so unreflective,
were presumably driven to &explain& their dreams in the first
The &very heart of the animist doctrine,& however, was its second
part -- the explanation of how souls become spirits and objects
but here again Durkheim had serious doubts. Even if
the analogy between sleep and death were sufficient to suggest
that the soul survives the body, for example, this still fails
to explain why the soul would thus become a &sacred& spirit, particularly
in light of the tremendous gap which separates the sacred from
the profane, and the fact that the approach of death is ordinarily
assumed to weaken rather than strengthen the vital energies of
the soul. Most important, however, if the first sacred spirits
were souls of the dead, then the lower the society under investigation,
the greater should be the place given
on the contrary, the ancestor cult is clearly developed only in
relatively advanced societies (e.g., China, Egypt, Greece and
Rome) while it is completely lacking among the most primitive
Australian tribes.
But even if ancestor worship were primitive, Durkheim continued, the third part of the animist
theory -- the transformation of the ancestor cult into the cult
of nature -- is indefensible in itself. Not only is there little
evidence among primitives of the complicated analogical reasoning
upon which the animis neither is there evidence
among those practicing any form of nature worship of those characteristics
-- anthropomorphic spirits, or spirits exhibiting at least some
of the attributes of a human soul -- which their derivation from
the ancestor cult would logically suggest.
For Durkheim, however, the clearest refutation of the animistic
hypothesis lay in one of its unstated, but implied,
for, if it were true, not only would it mean (as Durkheim himself
believed) that religious symbols provide only an inexact expression
of the realities on
far more than this,
it would imply that religious symbols are products of the vague,
ill-conceived hallucinations of our dream-experience, and thus
(as Durkheim most certainly did not believe) have no foundation in reality at all. Law, morals, even
scientific thought itself, Durkheim observed, were born of religion,
long remained confounded with it, and are still somewhat imbued
it is simply inconceivable, therefore, that &religions,
which have held so considerable a place in history, and to which,
in all times, men have to receive the energy which they must have
to live, should be made up of a tissue of illusions.& Indeed, the animistic hypothesis is inconsistent with the scientific
stud for a science is always a discipline
applied to the study of some real phenomenon of nature, while
animism reduces religion to a mere hallucination. What sort of
science is it, Durkheim asked, whose principle discovery is that
the subject of which it treats does not exist?
In sharp contrast to animism, the naturistic theory insisted that religion ultimately rests upon a real experience
-- that of the principal phenomena of nature (the infinity of
time, space, force, etc.) -- which is sufficient to directly arouse
religious ideas in the mind. But religion itself begins only when
these natural forces cease being represented in the mind in an
abstract form, and are transformed into personal, conscious spirits
or gods, to whom the cult of nat and this
transformation is (allegedly) achieved by language. Before the
ancient Indo-European peoples began to reflect upon and classify
the phenomena of nature, Durkheim explained, the roots of their
language consisted of very general types of human action (pushing,
walking, climbing, running, etc.). When men turned from the naming
and classifying of actions to that of natural objects, the very
generality and elasticity of these concepts permitted their application
to forces for which they were not originally designed. The earliest
classes of natural phenomena were thus metaphors for human action
-- a river was &something that moves steadily,& the wind was &something
that sighs or whistles,& etc. -- and as these metaphors came to
be taken literally, natural forces were quite naturally conceived
as the product of powerful, personal agents. Once these agents
had received names, the names themselves raised questions of interpretation
for succeeding generations, producing the efflorescence of fables,
genealogies, and myths characteristic of ancient religions. Finally,
the ancestor cult, according to this theory, is purely a secondary
development -- unable to face the fact of death, men postulated
their possession of an immortal soul which, upon separation from
the body, was gradually drawn into the circle of divine beings,
and eventually deified.
Despite the contrast mentioned above, Durkheim's objections to
this naturistic hypothesis followed much the same line as those
objections to its animistic counterpart. Leaving aside the numerous
criticisms of the philological premises of the naturistic theory,
Durkheim insisted that nature is characterized not by phenomena
so extraordinary as to produce a religious awe, but by a regularity
which borders on monotony. Moreover, even if natural phenomena
were sufficient to produce a certain degree of admiration, this
still would not be equivalent to those features which characterize
the &sacred&, and least of all to that &absolute duality& which
typifies its relations with the &profane.& The primitive, in any
case, does not regard such forces as on the
contrary, he thinks he can manipulate them to his own advantage
by the exercise of certain religious rites. And in fact, the earliest
objects of such rites were not the principal forms of nature at
all, but rather humble animals and vegetables with whom even the
primitive man could feel himself at least an equal.
Durkheim's major objection, however, was that the naturistic theory,
like animism, would reduce religion to little more than a system
of hallucinations. It is true, he admitted, that primitive peoples
reflect upon the forces of nature from an early period, for they
depend on these forces for their very survival. For precisely
this reason, however, these forces and the reflections upon them
could hardly be the sourc for such ideas
provide a palpably misleading conception of the nature of such
forces, so that any course of practical activity based upon them
would surely be unsuccessful, and this in turn would undermine
one's faith in the ideas themselves. Again, the important place
granted to religious ideas throughout history and in all societies
is evidence that they respond to some reality, and one other than
that of physical nature.
Whether from dreams or from physical nature, therefore, animism
and naturism both attempt to construct the idea of the sacred
out of the facts of our common, i and for
Durkheim, whose argument again parallels Kant's attack on empiricist
ethics, such an enterprise is simply impossible: &A fact of common
experience,& he insisted, &cannot give us the idea of something
whose characteristic is to be outside the world of common experience.& Durkheim's largely negative assessment of rival theories of religious
origins thus led to his first positive conclusion: &Since neither
man nor nature have of themselves a sacred character,& he argued,
they must get it from another source. Aside from the human individual
and the physical world, there should be some other reality, in
relation to which this variety of delirium which all religion
is in a sense, has a significance and an objective value. In other
words, beyond those which we have called animistic and naturistic,
there should be another sort of cult, more fundamental and more
primitive, of which the first are only derived forms or particular
This more fundamental and primitive cult is totemism.
The peculiar set of beliefs and practices known as totemism had
been discovered among American Indians as early as 1791; and though
repeated observations for the next eighty years increasingly suggested
that the institution enjoyed a certain generality, it continued
to be seen as a largely American, and rather archaic, phenomenon.
J. F. McLennan's articles on &The Worship of Animals and Plants&
(1870-71) showed that totemism was not only a religion, but one
from which considerably more advanced r and
L.H. Morgan's Ancient Society (1877) revealed that this religion was intimately connected to
that specific form of social organization that Durkheim had discussed
in The Division of Labor -- the division of the social group into clans. As the same religion
and social organization were increasingly observed and reported
among the Australian aborigines, the documents accumulated until
James Frazer brought them together in Totemism (1887). But Frazer's work was purely descriptive, making no effort
to understand or explain the most fundamental aspects of totemism.
The pivotal work in the explanation and interpretation of this
institution, therefore, was Robertson Smith's Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (1889), which made totemism the origin of sacrifice, and thus
of the ritual apparatus of higher and in
The Golden Bough (1890), Smith's prot&g& Frazer connected the same ideas to the
gods of classical antiquity and the folklore of European peasants.
All these works, however, were constructed out of fragmentary
observations, for a true totemic religion had not yet been observed
in its complete state. This hiatus was filled, however, in Baldwin
Spencer and F.J. Gillen's Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899), a study of totemic clans almost de
and, together with the studies they stimulated, these observations
were incorporated within Frazer's four-volume compendium, Totemism and Exogamy (1910).
The initial contribution of The Elementary Forms to this rapidly growing literature was simply its methodological
approach. As a member of the &anthropological& school, for example,
Frazer had made no effort to place the various religious systems
he studied within their social an rather,
as the name of the school implies, he assumed that man has some
sort of innate, religious &nature& regardless of social conditions,
and thus &compared& the most disparate beliefs and rites with
an eye to their most superficial similarities. But for the sociologist, Durkheim emphasized, social facts vary
with the social system of which they are a part, and cannot be
understood when detached from that system. For this reason, two
facts from different societies cannot be usefully compared simply
because they seem to
in addition, the societies
themselves should resemble each other -- be varieties of the same
species. Moreover, since the number of societies with which a sociologist
can be genuinely familiar is quite limited, and since, in any
case, he regarded the alleged &universality& of totemism as a
question of only residual interest, Durkheim ultimately concentrated
on the aboriginal societies of central Australia almost exclusively. These societies, indeed, suited Durkheim's purposes admirably
-- the ethnographic reports of their totemic institutions were
easily the most complete, their structural features were all of
a single type (the &single-segment& societies of The Division of Labor and The Rules), and, since this type of societal organization was the most
rudimentary known, it seemed to Durkheim the best place to search
for that &most primitive& religion whose description and explanation
was the central purpose of The Elementary Forms.
Totemic Beliefs: Their Nature, Causes, and Consequences
But where, in such totemic societies, was one to look first? At
their rites, as had Robertson Smith and the early Frazer? Or at
their beliefs, following Tylor and Frazer's later work? The fact
that myths are frequently constructed after the rite in order
to account for it while recognition that
rites are often the sole expression of antecedent beliefs argued
for the second. On this contemporary controversy in the scientific
study of religion, Durkheim ultimately leaned heavily toward the
and on the ground that it is impossible to
understand a religion without a firm grasp of its ideas, his discussion
of Australian totemism in The Elementary Forms thus began with its beliefs.
The most fundamental of these beliefs is that the members of each
clan consider themselves bound together by a special kind of kinship,
based not on blood, but on the mere fact that they share the same
name. This name, moreover, is taken from a determined species
of material objects (an animal, less frequently a plant, and in
rare cases an inanimate object) with which the clan members are
assumed to enjoy the same relations of kinship. But this &totem&
it is also an emblem, which, like the heraldic
coats-of-arms, is carved, engraved, or designed upon the other
objects belonging to the clan, and even upon the bodies of the
clan members themselves. Indeed, it is these designs which seem
to render otherwise common objects &sacred,& and their inscription
upon the bodies of clan members indicates the approach of the
most important religious ceremonies.
The same religious sentiments aroused by these designs, of course,
are aroused by the members of the totemic species themselves.
Clan members are thus forbidden to kill or eat the totemic animal
or plant except at certain mystical feasts (see below), and the
violation of this interdiction is assumed to produce death instantaneously.
Moreover the clan members themselves are &sacred& in so far as
they belong to the totemic species, a belief which gives rise
to genealogical myths explaining how men could have had animal
and even vegetable ancestors. Durkheim thus rejected McLennan's
interpretation of totemism as a fo for man
belongs to the sacred world himself, and thus his relations with
his totem are much more like those uniting members of the same
Totemism is thus a religion in which three classes of things --
the totemic emblem, the animal or plant, and the members of the
clan -- are
but in addition, totemism constitutes
a cosmology, in which all known things are distributed among the
various clans and phratries, so that everything is classified
according to the social organization of the tribe. In short, because men themselves are organized socially, they
are able to organize things according to
thus one of the essential &categories of the understanding& --
the idea of class -- appears to be the product of certain forms
of social organization. But this is not merely a logical or cognitive classification,
it is also moral -- all things arranged in the same clan are regarded
as extensions of the totemic animal, as &of the same flesh,& and
thus as themselves &sacred& in some degree. Finally, since all of these beliefs clearly imply a division
of things between sacred and profane, we may call them &religious&;
and since they appear not only related, but inseparably connected,
to the simplest form of social organization known, Durkheim insisted
that they are surely the most elementary forms of the religious
How, then, were these beliefs to be explained? The first step toward an answer to this question, Durkheim suggested,
is to recognize that, while all the things discussed above (emblems,
animals, clan members, and all other objects) arc sacred in different
degrees (their sacredness declines in roughly that order), they
are all sa thus, their religious character
could hardly be due to the special properties of one or the other,
but rather is derived from some common principle shared (albeit,
again, in different degrees) by all. Totemism, in short, is not
a religion of emblems or animals or men at all, but rather of
an anonymous, impersonal &force,& immanent in the world and diffused among its various material
But, surely, such a conception surpasses the limits of the primitive
mind? On the contrary, Durkheim argued, whether it is described
as mana, wakan, or orenda, this belief in a diffused, impersonal force is found among the
Samoans, the Melanesians, various North American Indian tribes,
and (albeit less abstracted and generalized) among the totemic
clans of central Australia. Indeed, this explains why it has been impossible to define religion
in terms of mythical personalities, gods, for these
particular religious things are simply individualized forms of
this more impersonal religious principle, and their sacredness
is thus non-intrinsic. And quite aside from its purely religious
significance, Durkheim argued that this was the original form
under which the modern, scientific idea of force was conceived.
To explain totemism is thus to explain this belief in a diffused,
impersonal force. How might such a belief arise? Obviously, not
from sensations aroused by the totemic objects themselves, Durkheim
argued, for these objects -- the caterpillar, the ant, the frog,
etc. -- are hardly of a kind to inspire powerful religious emotions:
on the contrary, these objects appear to be the symbols or material
expressions of something else. Of what, then, are they the symbols?
Durkheim's initial answer was that they symbolize both the &totemic
principle& but if this is the case, then surely
that principle and the clan are one and the same thing: &The god
of the clan, the totemic principle,& he insisted, &can therefore
be nothing else than the clan itself, personified and represented
to the imagination under the visible form of the animal or vegetable
which serves as totem.&
This hypothesis -- that god is nothing more than society apotheosized--was
supported by a number of characteristically Durkheimian arguments.
It was insisted, for example, that a society has all that is necessary
to arouse the idea of the divine, for it is to its members what
a god is to his worshippers. It is both physically and morally
superior to individuals, and thus they both fear its power and
r but society cannot exist except in and
through the individual conscience, and thus it both demands our sacrifices and periodically strengthens
and elevates the divine &principle& within each of us -- especially
during periods of collective enthusiasm, when its power is particularly
perceptible. Indeed, it is during such extremely rare gatherings of the entire
Australian clan, Durkheim suggested, that the religious idea itself
seems to have been born, a fact which explained why its most important
religious ceremonies continue to be observed only periodically,
when the elan as a whole is assembled. It is this succession of
intense periods of &collective effervescence& with much longer
periods of dispersed, individualistic economic activity, Durkheim
suggested, which gives rise to the belief that there are two worlds
-- the sacred and the profane -- both within us and within nature
But how does this belief give rise to totemism? Briefly, the individual
who is transported from his profane to a sacred existence in a
gathering of the clan seeks some explanation for his altered,
elevated state. The gathering of the clan itself is the real cause,
though one too complex for the primitiv but
all around him, the clan member sees symbols of precisely that
cause -- the carved engraved images of the totem -- and fixes
his confused social sentiments on these clear, concrete objects,
from which the physical power and moral authority of society thus
seem to emanate. Just as the soldier who dies for his flag in
fact dies for his country, so the clan member who worships his
totem in fact worships his clan.
To the classical formula Primus in orbe deos fecit timor -- the fear-theory defended in various ways by Hume, Tylor, and
Frazer -- Durkheim thus added a decisive, if not entirely original,
dissent. Following Robertson Smith -- indeed, it was probably
this idea, seized upon in his anti-Frazerian mood of 1900, that
so dramatically altered Durkheim's conception of religion itself
-- Durkheim insisted that the primitive man does not regard his
gods as hostile, malevolent, or fearful i
on the contrary, his gods are friends and relatives, who inspire
a sense of confidence and well-being. The sense thus inspired,
moreover, is not an hallucination, but for
however misunderstood, there actually is a real moral power --
society -- to which these beliefs correspond, and from which the
worshipper derives his strength.
This argument -- the very heart of The Elementary Forms -- was also intimately bound to Durkheim's important conception
of the role of symbols in society. Their utilitarian value as
expressions of social sentiments notwithstanding, Durkheim's more
ambitious claim was that such symbols serve to create the sentiments
themselves. For collective representations, as we have seen, presuppose
the mutual reaction of individual minds upon one another, reactions
inexplicable in the absence o and, once formed,
such representations would quickly dissipate in the absence of
symbols which serve to maintain them in the individual mind. Thus,
society, &in all its aspects and in every period of its history,
is made possible only by a vast symbolism.&
This explanation of totemism in turn helps us to understand a
phenomenon that had recently been discussed by Lucien L&vy-Bruhl
in Les Fonctions mentales dans les soci&t&s inf&rieures (1910) -- that &law of participation& whereby primitive peoples ignore
the distinctions between animals, vegetables, and inanimate objects,
granting rocks a sex, for example, or a star a soul, thus giving
rise to elaborate mythologies in which each being partakes of
the properties of others. Inexplicable on the basis of ordinary
experience -- nowhere do we see beings &mixing their natures&
or &metamorphizing themselves into each other& -- such participation
was explained by Durkheim as a consequence of the symbolic representations
just described: once the clan became &represented& by a species
of animal or plant, the latter were thought of as relative of
men, and both were assumed to &participate in the same nature.&
Finally, like the concept of mana, this notion of &participation& had significance for the evolution
of scientific as well as purely religious thought. To say that
one thing is the cause of another, Durkheim explained, is to establish
relations between them, to suggest that they are bound together
by some natural, internal law. Like Hume, Durkheim insisted that
sensations alone can never disclose such law-
and like Kant, therefore, he argued that the human reason must
supply them, thus enabling us to understand cause and effect as
necessary relations. The great achievement of primitive religion,
Durkheim then suggested, is that it constructed the first representation
(the &law of participation&) of what these &relations of kinship&
might be, thus rescuing man from his enslavement to mere appearance,
and rendering science and and religion could
do this, he added, only because it is a mode of collective thought, which imposes a new way of representing reality for
the old manipulation of purely individual sensations. Between
religion and science, Durkheim thus concluded, there can be no
for, while the former applies its logical mechanisms to
nature more awkwardly than the latter, both are made up of the
same collective representations.
Throughout his discussion of the nature and causes of totemic
beliefs, Durkheim insisted that no idea of the soul, spirits,
or gods plays any role. In order to complete this discussion,
therefore, it was necessary to show how such ideas -- universal
among the known religions -- could have evolved out of &the more
essential conceptions& just described. Every known society, for
example, acknowledges the existence of the human soul -- a second,
ethereal self, which dwells within a and
since the Australian aborigines provide the most primitive instance
of this belief, Durkheim's search for its origin began by asking
how the aborigines themselves explained it.
According to the Australians, Durkheim observed, the souls which
enter and animate the bodies of new-born children are not &special
and original creations&; on the contrary, they are the old souls
of dead ancestors of the clan, whose reincarnation explains the
phenomena of conception and birth. To such ancestors superhuman
powers and virtues are attributed, r and
most important, they are conceived under the form not of men,
but of animals and plants. Durkheim thus concluded that the human
soul is simply a form of &individualized mana,& the totemic principle incarnate, and the most primitive form
of that conception of the &duality of human nature& which has
perplexed the philosophers and theologians of more advanced societies
for centuries.
The last point is important, for Durkheim claimed that this explanation
of the belief in the soul helps us to understand two more advanced
ideas: the theological conception of immortality, and the philosophical idea of personality. The first belief, Durkheim argued, cannot be accounted for by
the moral demand for a future, just, retribution, for primitive peoples neither can it be
explained by the desire to escape death, an event to which the primitive is relatively indifferent, and
from which, in any case, his particular notion of immortality
would and finally, it cannot be explained
by the appearance of dead relatives and friends in our dreams, an occurrence too infrequent to account for so powerful and prevalent
a belief. The failure of these explanations, Durkheim added, is
particularly embarrassing in that the idea of the soul itself
does not seem to imply its own survival, but rather seems to exclude
it -- since the soul is intimately connected with the body, the
death of the latter would seem to bode ill for the former. This
embarrassment is relieved, however, if one accepts Durkheim's
explanation, in which the belief in the immortality of the soul
and its subsequent reincarnations is literally required if the
phenomena of conception and birth are to be explained. And in
holding this belief, Durkheim again asserted, the primitive is
for the soul is simply the individualized representation
of the clan, and the clan does outlive its individual members.
The belief in the immortality of the soul is thus the earliest,
symbolic means whereby men represented to themselves the truth
that society continued to live while they must die.
The philosophical idea of personality would seem to have posed
greater difficulties for D for the modern notion of what
is &personal& seems to imply what is &individual& --an association
which would surely confound any sociological explanation. But
Durkheim insisted that the terms were in no way synonymous, a
distinction clearly evident in their most sophisticated philosophical
formulations. In his suggestion that all reality is composed of
&monads,& for example, Leibniz had emphasized that these psychic
entities are personal, conscious, but he had
also insisted that these consciousnesses all express the same
and since this world is itself but a system of representations,
each particular consciousness is but the reflection of the universal
consciousness, the particularity of its perspective being explained
by its special location within the whole. Similarly, for Kant, the cornerstone of the personality was the
will, that faculty responsible for acting in conformity with the
utter and to act in accordance with reason
was to transcend all that is &individual& within us (our senses,
appetites, inclinations, etc.). For both Leibniz and Kant, therefore, a &person& was less an
individual subject distinguished from all others than a being
enjoying a relative autonomy in relation to its i
but this, Durkheim concluded, is precisely the description of
the primitive idea of the soul -- that individualized form of
society within, yet independent of, the body.
The subsequent evolution of totemic beliefs is one from souls
to spirits, spirits to &civilizing heroes,& and heroes to &high
gods,& in which the focus of religious worship becomes increasingly
powerful, personal, and international. Since the idea of souls
is inexplicable without postulating original, &archetypal& souls
from which the others are derived, for example, the primitive
imagines mythical ancestors or &spirits& at the beginning of time,
who are the source of all subsequent religious efficacy. When the clans come together for the tribal initiation ceremonies,
the primitive similarly seeks an explanation for the homogeneity
and generality of the
and the natural conclusion
is that each group of identical ceremonies was founded by one
great ancestor, the &civilizing hero& of the clan, who is now
venerated by the larger tribe as well. And where the tribe as a whole, gathered at such initiation ceremonies,
acquires a particularly powerful sentiment of itself, some symbol
of this as a result, one of the heroes is
elevated into a &high god,& whose authority is recognized not
only by the tribe thus inspired, but by many of its neighbors.
The result is a truly &international& deity, whose attributes
bear a marked similarity to those of the higher religions of more
advanced civilizations. But this &great tribal god,& Durkheim emphasized, retracing his
evolutionary steps, &is only an ancestral spirit who finally won
a pre-eminent place. The ancestral spirits are only entities forged
in the image of the individual souls whose origin they are destined
to explain. The souls, in their turn, are only the form taken
by the impersonal forces which we found at the basis of totemism,
as they individualize themselves in the human body. The unity
of the system,& Durkheim concluded, &is as great as its complexity.&
Totemic Rites: Their Nature and Causes
Despite an occasional dalliance with the ritual theory of myth,
Durkheim's most consistent position was that the cult depends
but he also insisted that beliefs and rites
are inseparable not only because the rites are often the sole
manifestation of otherwise imperceptible ideas, but also because
they react upon and thus alter the nature of the ideas themselves.
Having completed his extensive analysis of the nature, causes,
and consequences of totemic beliefs, therefore, Durkheim turned
to a somewhat shorter discussion of the &principal ritual attitudes&
of totemism.
Sacred things, as we have seen, are those rather dramatically
separated from their
and a substantial group
of totemic rites has as its object the realization of this essential
state of separation. In so far as these rites merely prohibit
certain actions or impose certain abstentions, they consist entirely
of interdictions or &taboos&; and thus Durkheim described the system formed by these rites
as the &negative cult.& The interdictions characterizing these rites were in turn divided
into two classes: those separating the sacred from the profane,
and those separating sacred things from one another according
to their &degree of sacredness&; and even the first class alone assumes a variety of forms --
certain foods are forbidden to profane persons because they are
sacred, while others are forbidden to sacred persons because they
certain objects cannot be touched or even looked
certain words or soun and certain activities,
particularly those of an economic or utilitarian character, are
forbidden during periods when religious ceremonies are being performed.
For all their diversity, however, Durkheim argued that all these
forms are reducible to two fundamental interdictions: the religious
life and the profane life cannot coexist in the same place, and
they cannot coexist in the same unit of time.
Although literally defined in terms of these interdictions, however,
the negative cult also exercises a &positive& function -- it is
the condition of access to the positive cult. Precisely because
of the abyss which separates sacred things from their profane
counterparts, the individual cannot enter into relations with
the first without ridding himself of the second. In the initiation
ceremony, for example, the neophyte is submitted to a large variety
of negative rites whose net effect is to produce a radical alteration
of his moral and religious character, to &sanctify& him through
his suffering, and ultimately to admit him to the sacred life
of the clan. But here, again, religion is only the symbolic form
of society which, while augmenting our powers and enabling us
to transcend ourselves, demands our sacrifice and self-abnegation,
suppresses our instincts, and does violence to our natural inclinations.
There is a ruthless asceticism in all social life, Durkheim argued,
which is the source of all religious asceticism.
But if this is the function of the negative cult, what is its
cause? In one sense. of course, this system of interdicts is logically
implied by the very notion of &sacredness& itself, for respect
habitual but many things acquire and retain
our respect without becoming the objects of religious interdictions.
The peculiar attribute of sacred things which renders them, in
particular, the objects of the negative cult is what Durkheim
called &the contagiousness of the sacred& -- religious forces
easily escape their original locations and flow, almost irresistibly,
to any objects within their range. In so doing, of course, they
contradict their own essential nature, which is to remain separated
and thus a whole system of restrictions is necessary
in order to keep the two worlds apart.
But how was this contagiousness itself to be explained? Observing that such contagiousness is characteristic of those
forces or properties (heat, electricity, etc.) which enter a body
from without rather than being intrinsic to it, Durkheim reminded
his reader that this is precisely what his own theory implies
-- religious forces do not inhere in physical nature, but rather
are brought to it by the collective representations of society.
Indeed, it is by an initial &act of contagion& (see above) that
ordinary objects receive their sacred characte
and it is natural that, in the absence of rigorous interdictions,
they should lose this character just as easily.
This brings us to the most crucial phase of Durkheim's treatment
of totemic rites, that based upon those materials which, in the
period, so dramatically altered his understanding of
religion. Until 1899, as Durkheim himself observed, the negative cult just
described was virtually all that was known of the religious aspect
but the negative cult, as we have seen, contains
no reason for existing in itself, and merely introduces the individual
to more positive relations with sacred things. The significance
of Spencer and Gillen's Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899), therefore, was that it described one ceremony in particular
that exhibits the essential features of the &positive cult& found
in more advanced religions -- the Arunta Intichiuma ceremony.
In central Australia, Durkheim explained, there are two sharply
divided seasons: one is long and dry, the other short and very
rainy. When the second arrives, the vegetation springs up from
the ground, the animals multiply, and what had been a sterile
desert abounds with luxur and it is at the
moment when this &good& season seems near at hand that the Intichiuma is celebrated. Every totemic clan has its own Intichiuma, and the celebration itself has two phases. The object of the
first is to assure the abundance of that animal or plant which
serves as the clan's totem, an object obtained by striking together
certain sacred stones (sometimes drenched with the blood of clan
members), thus detaching and scattering grains of dust which assure
the fertility of the animal or plant species. The second phase
begins with an intensification of the interdictions of the negative
cult -- clan members who could ordinarily eat their totemic animal
or plant if they did so in moderation now find that it cannot
be eaten or even touched -- and concludes with a solemn ceremony
in which representatives of the newly increased totemic species
are ritually slaughtered and eaten by the clan members, after
which the exceptional interdictions are lifted and the clan returns
to its normal existence.
To Durkheim, the significance of this system of rites was that
it seemed to contain the essential elements of the most fundamental
rite of the higher religions -- and equally important,
it seemed in large part to confirm the revolutionary theory of
the meaning of that rite put forward by Robertson Smith twenty-four
years earlier. The more traditional theory of sacrifice, epitomized in Tylor's
Primitive Culture (1871), was that the earliest offerings were &gifts& presented
to the go but such a theory, Durkheim observed,
failed to account for two important features of the rite: that
its substance was food, and that this food was shared by both
gods and worshippers at a common feast. Noting that in many societies
such commensality is believed to create (and re-create) a bond
of kinship, Smith had suggested that the earliest sacrifices were
less acts of renunciation and expiation than joyous feasts, in
which the bond of kinship uniting gods and worshippers was periodically
reaffirmed by participation in the common flesh.
Insisting (pace Smith) that it was participation in sacred flesh that rendered
the rite efficacious, Durkheim argued that the ceremony concluding
the second phase of the Intichiuma was p and in the Australian rite, he added,
the object of such communion was clear -- the periodic revivification
of that &totemic principle& (society) which exists within each
member of the clan and is symbolized by the sacrificial animal
or plant. This in turn explained the temporal aspect of the rite
-- the totemic principle would seem most thoroughly exhausted
after a long, dry period, and most completely renewed just after
the arrival of the &good season,& and analogous practices were
found among many, more advanced peoples: &... the Intichiuma of the Australian societies,& Durkheim concluded, &is closer
to us than one might imagine from its apparent crudeness.&
But if Durkheim shared Smith's view that the earliest sacrifices
were acts of communion, he did not share his view that this was
all they were, nor did he share Smith's reasons for holding these
views in the first place. For Smith was a devout Scottish Calvinist
who found the very idea that the gods receive physical pleasure
from the offerings of mere mortals a &revolting absurdity,& and
insisted that this conception had no part in the original meaning
of the rite, emerging only much later with the institution of
private property. In the first phase of the Intichiuma, however, Durkheim found precisely this idea -- the totemic species
requires the performance of certain rites in order to reproduce
itself -- and thus he suggested that the complete sacrifice is
both an offering and a communion.
To Durkheim, moreover, this was not a minor, antiquarian quibble,
for his subsequent explanation of this &mutual interdependence&
of gods and worshippers was a major part of his sociological theory
of religion. We have already seen, for example, how the &logic&
of the Intichiuma corresponds to the intermittent character of the physical environment
of central Australia -- long dry spells punctuated by heavy rainfall
and the reappearance of animals and vegetation. This intermittency,
Durkheim now added, is duplicated by the social life of the Australian
clans -- long periods of dispersed, individual economic activity,
punctuated by the intensive communal activity of the Intichiuma itself. Since sacred beings exist only at the sufferance of collective
representations, we should expect that their presence would be
most deeply felt precisely when men gather to worship them, when
they &partake of the same idea and the same sentiment&; in a sense,
therefore, the Australian was not mistaken -- the gods do depend upon their worshippers, even as the worshippers depend
upon their gods, for society can exist only in and through individuals,
even as the individual gets from society the best part of himself.
In addition to this primitive form of sacrifice, Durkheim discussed
three other types of positive rites -- imitative, representative,
and piacular -- which either accompany the Intichiuma or, in some tribes, replace it altogether. The first consists
of movements and cries whose function, guided by the principle
that &like produces like,& is to imitate the animal or plant whose
reproduction is desired. These rites had been interpreted by the
&anthropological school& (Tylor and Frazer) as a kind of &sympathetic
magic,& to be explained, as in Jevons's account of the contagiousness
of the sacred, by the
and as it had been
to Jevons, Durkheim's response to Tylor and Frazer was that a
specific, concrete social phenomenon cannot be explained by a
general, abstract law of psychology. Indeed, restored to their
actual context, Durkheim argued, imitative rites are fully explained
by the fact that the clan members feel that they really are the animal or plant of their totemic species, that this is their
most essentia