The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

Having dealt with asceticism and the interdicts meant to guard against contagion and crossover between the sacred and profane (the negative cult), Durkheim now turns his attention to those features of religion which constitute intentionally sacred acts (the positive cult). Based on a survey of practices in Aboriginal Australian religions, Durkheim undertakes an analysis of the idea of sacrifice, which usually includes the notion of a meal in which the worshipers themselves share, thus becoming participants in the sacrifice. This insight is crucial to Durkheim’s view of sacrifice, regarding it not as offering worship to a deity, but as reaffirming the social bonds which lie at the base of totemic sacredness: “Sacrifice was not founded to create a bond of artificial kinship between a man and his gods, but to maintain and renew the natural kinship which primitively united them” (381).

Sacrifice is characterized by both communion and oblation, consuming sacred food and presenting it as an offering at the same time, and this double nature of giving and receiving also characterizes the nature of religious ritual as a social event. People give their time, presence, and resources for such rituals, and receive as participants not only material substances like food, but a renewal of the vital spiritual dynamic which underlies the social nature of religion: “The real reason for the existence of the cults, even of those which are the most materialistic in appearance, is not to be sought in the acts which they prescribe, but in the internal and moral regeneration which these acts aid in bringing about” (388). The “god” of such rituals—which Durkheim contends is society itself—depends on its worshipers as much its worshipers depend on it, because its existence derives from them, and their morality, language, and art derive from it. This cyclic refreshment of both the worshipers and their god (that is, society itself) is necessarily undertaken in rituals that recur periodically, so that the system can continue operating for the good of all.

Beyond the sacrifice, another positive-cult ritual which is common in Aboriginal Australian societies is the imitative rite, in which people act out the features, attitudes, or life cycle of a totemic animal. The apparent meaning of the rite is to promote fertility in that species and ensure its ongoing existence, following principles of contact and imitation which allow the performers to believe they are directly affecting the animal’s life. Since these rituals are aimed at promoting the continuation of natural cycles which tend to recur on their own, the participants often feel rewarded at seeing the hoped-for results come to pass. When the rituals fail, the participants still have the social benefits of the religious gathering, which have encouraged and refreshed them to such a degree that they cannot conceive of ever abandoning the ritual, regardless of its efficacy. Such rituals promote a conception of the laws of causality which, even if misdirected, allows human thought to develop a philosophy of logic. Durkheim notes that the Aboriginal Australian’s attitude toward his beliefs and their potential falsification is not radically different from those of other religious traditions, nor even of the attitude of a scientist toward their favorite hypothesis. It is the logic of causality inherent in these sympathetic rites which also undergirds the traditional practice of magic in many Indigenous societies, and thus Durkheim believes that magic is derived from religion, not vice versa.

Such rituals and their inherent observation of the laws of causality also inclined the human mind to consider the possibility of force, another key philosophical idea. Durkheim sees in the original notion of force both a moral and personal aspect, and so asserts that it shows its inherently social genesis. Force is also bound up with the idea of power and grades of hierarchy and subordination, which again reveals a social context: “So everything tends to prove that the first powers of which the human mind had any idea were those which societies have established in organizing themselves: it is in their image that the powers of the physical world have been conceived” (409). The simple and categorical nature of these causal conceptions, Durkheim believes, could only have arisen as the product of collective thought and imposed thence on the individual mind.

Durkheim begins his analysis of the next set of positive rites by restating one of his premises regarding Aboriginal Australian ritual: namely, that its meaning is not the one assigned to it by its practitioners, but that it actually exists “to remake individuals and groups morally” (414). He affirms this by pointing out that other rituals, such as those that commemorate long-gone heroes or events, more clearly stand for this purpose. As people are reminded of the great acts of the past, they are grounded in their confidence and inspired by a renewed sense of identity and wholeness. “So we have here a whole group of ceremonies whose sole purpose is to awaken certain ideas and sentiments […]. This is still another proof that the psychical state in which the assembled group happens to be constitutes the only solid and stable basis of what we may call the ritual mentality” (423).

While Durkheim at first denies any useful purpose to these rituals beyond the creation of this mental state, he nonetheless notes that one of the features of religion is to give scope to art, creativity, leisure, and play by the reinvigoration of these moral forces, and this fruitfulness is readily seen in such rituals. Many religious rituals in other traditions have a similar ambiguity—while aimed at a particular function, they also include scope for many other positive effects and can even be adapted for a wide range of different functions (Durkheim notes, for example, that the Catholic mass serves both for weddings and funerals, in addition to its place in weekly worship). Imitative and commemorative rites, Durkheim posits, might be the original forms of religious ritual, as they seem so adaptable and so fruitful for the attainment of many different social goods.

A final category of rituals is what Durkheim calls piacular rites—using a term usually associated with the expiation of sin to denote religious gatherings which respond to sorrow or tragedy. After a survey of Aboriginal Australian rituals for mourning and funerary rites, Durkheim observes that while the rituals include outward shows of sorrow like wailing and weeping, in many cases these are performed as duties of the ritual, not necessarily as an authentic display of the participants’ own emotions. Even though the emotions are different in mourning than in other rites, their social effect remains: “[Mourning], too, is made up out of collective ceremonies which produce a state of effervescence among those who take part in them. The sentiments aroused are different; but the arousal is the same” (445). The social context of mourning helps meet the need for which it occurs; the sense of loss is met with a reminder of social solidarity among those who remain. Other piacular rites, such as ceremonies to respond to a natural disaster or an insufficient harvest, serve the same positive social ends.

The presence of piacular rites also serves to highlight a duality in the idea of sacredness as it appears in many Indigenous societies. While there are beneficent religious forces, such as the totemic principle itself, there are also evil and impure powers, believed to bring death and suffering. These two forces are in opposition to each other, but each retains a sense of the power of its sacred identity, as distinct from the profane. These evil or impure forces are, like the others, representations of social forces, such that when society suffers, it imposes the duty of suffering on its members through their participation in piacular rites. “These beings are nothing other than collective states objectified; they are society itself seen under one of its aspects” (459). The variations in social life, both good and bad, lead to the duality observed in religious thought, with some spiritual forces portrayed as beneficent and others as evil.

Having completed his assessment of Aboriginal Australian religion, Durkheim makes the case that the elemental features of that religion should be considered instructive for our understanding of all human religion. “If among certain peoples the ideas of sacredness, the soul and God are to be explained sociologically, it should be presumed scientifically that, in principle, the same explanation is valid for all the peoples among whom these same ideas are found with the same essential characteristics” (463). Religions recur across all human societies because they are effective vehicles of social identity and social goods; a religious participant feels an infusion of inner strength through the rituals and finds new empowerment for facing the trials of life. Not only is religion an effective vehicle of social good for the individual, but it is, in Durkheim’s view, the root cause of many of the most important developments in human civilization. “In summing up, then, it may be said that nearly all the great social institutions have been born in religion. […] If religion has given birth to all that is essential in society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion” (466). Religion is a reflection of society itself, transmuted into an active form in which it can shape and inspire its members.

Durkheim views his own historical moment as representing the withering of existing religious traditions (such as the decline of traditional Christian attachments in early 20th-century Europe), but he does not view an age of irreligion as a likely future for humanity. Rather, because of its nature as an essential expression of social values and social force, some form of religion will continue to arise as a dominant feature of human experience. Science will not eclipse religion, since religion is a feature of human reality itself; science and religion serve different functions and both should be expected to continue their course. Religion is one of the main vehicles by which society has developed the concepts which lead to further philosophical and logical avenues of thought. Durkheim goes so far as to put society’s effect on the individual in quasi-religious terms himself: “[…] we must say that society is not at all the illogical or a-logical, incoherent and fantastic being which it has too often been considered. On the contrary, the collective consciousness is the highest form of the psychic life, since it is the consciousness of the consciousnesses” (492). Society is not simply a structure put in place by humans, but an active set of forces which operates independently of any individual control; an epiphenomenon of human consciousness which exists above the individual and in which the individual comes to perceive and conceptualize the features of their own life.