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Émile DurkheimThe Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
Nonfiction | Reference/Text Book | Adult | Published in 1912A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Social Origins of Religious Belief
One of the book’s major themes is also its core thesis: The origins of religious belief stem from society itself. Durkheim posits that group identity, especially as experienced during communal events of an emotional or inspiring nature (such as clan meetings), which impress upon the individual an intuition that there is some spiritual or psychical force above them. In a sense, Durkheim writes, that intuition is correct—the communal action of individual consciousnesses working together as part of a group produces a collective consciousness whose influence is felt by the whole: “In fact, we can say that the believer is not deceived when he believes in the existence of a moral power upon which he depends and from which he receives all that is best in himself: this power exists, it is society” (257).
While this is not a spirit or god in classical religious terms, it is a real phenomenon that affects human thought and emotion. This religious intuition, which responds to the collective reflection of society, takes the collective consciousness and treats its object (society) as something sacred. Thus society itself becomes, in a certain sense, the god of the religious system. The religion then reinforces and propagates itself when members of the community come together in other events to recapture the heightened sense of spiritual power that they initially encountered together; these renewed attempts eventually become recurrent rituals and ceremonies.
Once the feeling of a spiritual or psychical force has given birth to a communal system based around that force, a new religion has been born. It meets the two requirements in Durkheim’s definition of a religion: first, an awareness of the divided categories of the sacred and the profane, which emerges as people begin to treat the places, objects, and symbols associated with their communal identity as being worthy of special respect; and second, the formation of a community (which Durkheim calls a “Church”) in which this spiritual force is felt to be active. He insists that this second dimension of the definition is as important as the first, because it underscores the social nature of religion: “[…] by showing that the idea of religions is inseparable from that of the Church, it makes it clear that religion should be an eminently collective thing” (62-63).
Since religion emerges naturally from the experience of human society, Durkheim views it as being an inextricable part of human life. Far from being a delusion or fantasy, religion is a primary way in which human beings conceive of and interact with the social systems of which they are a part. Religion not only exists in answer to the emotional patterns of human life but introduces in the human consciousness habits of thought that enable the development of new conceptual understandings, including the rudimentary ideas of time, space, and class, which form the foundation-stones upon which philosophy and science can be built.
Totemism as a Foundational Religious Form
Totemism is a cultural-religious system, evident in many Indigenous cultures around the world, in which group identity and sacred ideas are represented emblematically through a totem, which is usually an animal, plant, or other natural object. While individual forms of totemic practice may occur, the mainstream practice of totemism appears to have an essentially communal dimension, in which clans or phratries are each associated with their own totem. Those totems then become the central symbols in the communal life of the group and are treated with reverence that suggests religious devotion: “The totem is not merely a name and an emblem. […] while the totem is a collective label, it also has a religious character. In fact, it is in connection with it that things are classified as sacred or profane. It is the very type of sacred thing” (140). In Durkheim’s view, totemism is a form of religious development in which the early movements of human religion are still discernible, since the communal aspect remains primary and as yet unclouded by further possible developments of dogma or practice.
While not all the scholars with whom Durkheim interacts in his book agree that totemism constitutes a religion, it satisfies the definition that Durkheim proposes: It creates a system of sacred things associated with the totem (which are thus differentiated from profane things), and it is manifested in a communal group of members who undertake its rituals. Durkheim speculates that once the religious sentiment in a group is first aroused, that sentiment becomes associated with a physical organism or object that is common in the locale where the communal gathering takes place. Thus a person who experiences psychological arousal to a state of emotional effervescence in the context of their clan meeting might observe that a certain type of animal—say, a kangaroo—is commonly seen at that location. By this association of place and experience, the kangaroo then becomes symbolic of the religious sentiment that the person had developed there, and if enough of the clan members recognize the same association, the kangaroo might be adopted as a clan-wide emblem of their communal life. It expresses “[their] social unity in a material form” (262). As a totem, it represents the experience and influence of the clan society as exercised over its members in those moments of collective action, and it is treated with the deference and awe that people bear toward the social experience itself. Thus the kangaroo, and other features of the natural world associated with it, become classed as sacred, together with other features of the clan’s communal life. In this way, Durkheim suggests, totemism encapsulates the foundational features of human religion, namely a recognition of the sacred in the context of a community.
The Function of Religious Rituals in Society
Once religious sentiments have been awakened by the communal experience of society’s influence on the individual, rituals play an important role in consolidating and perpetuating those sentiments. At the most basic level, rituals provide the opportunity for individuals to recapture the experience of the all-pervasive social force in a way that reaffirms and strengthens one’s convictions and uplifts one’s emotions. Since the experience that first engenders religious sentiments is not a constant one—it fades in power when the ordinary, quotidian duties of life resume—a re-enactment is periodically necessary, and rituals serve this function: “The real reason for the existence of the cults […] [is] in the internal and moral regeneration which these acts aid in bringing about” (388).
As religions develop, their rituals become more specialized to fit various needs of the community. Negative rituals, such as periods of fasting, can serve to remind believers of the separation between the sacred world and the profane (in this case, by interdicting a normal action of the profane world, that of eating) and to offer a period of initiation into the sacred world, in which further rituals can be undertaken. Positive rituals—like sacrifice, which includes acts both of oblation (giving an offering) and participation (eating the offering)—allow the believer to harness the intentionality of their own will toward serving the sacred, and at the same time to feel themselves brought in as a part of that sacred world. Other rituals common to totemic cultures include those concerned with imitative or commemorative rites, in which members will act out the attributes or life cycle of totemic species in order to attain a desired end (such as the continued fertility of the species), or to reenact the mythological events in the lives of ancestral heroes. Such rituals tend to reaffirm communal identities and to underscore the religious sensibility that certain actions have power to administer blessings in the world at large, similar to the invigorating blessings members themselves feel when under the influence of social forces in communal gatherings: “So everything leads us back to this same idea: before all, rites are means by which the social group reaffirms itself periodically” (432). Further rituals, like those that Durkheim refers to as piacular rites, allow the religious community to respond to its emotional needs and to form its religious pattern to match the lived experience of the community itself—yet another indication that the society is itself the explanatory locus of the religion.
