The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

In order to assess a religion’s features, it is important to begin with an understanding of what religion is. Durkheim begins by surveying other scholars’ definitions of religion. One of those is to define religion as a system of ideas about the supernatural. If this definition holds, however, it becomes almost impossible to subject religion to a scientific examination, because religion itself would be concerned with features of human experience that lie beyond the realms that science can analyze. Durkheim rejects this definition on other grounds, namely that he believes an interest in the supernatural to be a later development in human religion, while “primitive” religion is focused on explaining humanity’s experience of the observable world. Even in religions that concern themselves with the supernatural, Durkheim observes that their systems of thought mostly involve explaining the natural, recurrent, and ordered part of reality (like the Greek pantheon’s relationship to the observable realities of the sun, the sea, the fertility of crops, and so on), not with rare or inexplicable events. Another related definition assesses religion in terms of its beliefs about divinities, but Durkheim notes that not all religions have divinities.

Durkheim constructs his own definition of religion, asserting that its fundamental feature is a belief in the division between the sacred and profane; that is, that all things can be classified either in one group or the other. This division is absolute: “[...] the sacred and the profane have always and everywhere been conceived by the human mind as two distinct classes, as two worlds between which there is nothing in common” (54). Thus one of religion’s fundamental features is a series of rules and interdicts that manages the relationship between these two mutually exclusive worlds. While the practice of magic exists in many cultures as a subversive means of transgressing those interdicts, its very subversiveness attests to the radical division between the sacred and profane. Further, the fact that magic does not produce communities in the same way that religion does suggests that the social context is an essential feature of religion. Thus he comes to his final definition: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things [...] which unite into a single moral community” (62).

With Chapter 2, Durkheim begins an analysis of several proposals concerning which form of “primitive” religion likely constitutes the foundational layer of human religious development. The first he examines is animism, which he sees as a constituent element, along with naturism, of all religious systems. Animism is a religious perspective focused on spiritual beings rather than on the observable phenomena of the physical world. In order to qualify as the original form of religious development, animism would have to satisfy several qualifications, such as an indication that its own development does not rest on any earlier system, and that other systems (such as naturism) derive from it.

On assessing the evidence, Durkheim does not view animism as a compelling candidate for the foundational religious system. The explanations offered by other scholars as to how the idea of a human soul might lead to a conception of spirits, either through the experience of dreams or of death, appears to Durkheim unpersuasive and incomplete—“too inadequate for the facts” (71). In regard to rituals of death in particular, Durkheim notes that Aboriginal Australian societies put no great emphasis on the continued spiritual existence of departed souls, but rather on the social practices that the occasion of a death requires. Since the rituals of death appear to pale in importance compared to other spirit-focused rituals in Australian societies, it strikes Durkheim as unlikely that the former could be the foundational source of the latter, but that something other than the experience of death led to the concept of spirits. He also examines the contention that naturism might have developed out of animism and finds this likewise uncompelling. Durkheim’s ultimate criticism of the animist theory, however, is that it necessarily posits that religion is based on an illusion, and that this conception of it appears unable to explain its fruitfulness in producing many of the most foundational expressions of human social existence: “To-day we are beginning to realize that law, morals and even scientific thought itself were born of religion, were for a long time confounded with it, and have remained penetrated with its spirit. How could a vain fantasy have been able to fashion the human consciousness so strongly and so durably?” (87). Durkheim thus resolves to prove that religion must have something real, not illusory, as its foundation.

Durkheim notes that while anthropologists tend to favor the animist theory of religious development, other scholars—those focused on history and the humanities—often give precedence to the naturist theory, which holds that the experience of the natural world inspired the initial spark of religious sentiments in humanity. Durkheim initially treats naturism favorably, as being based in an experience of the real world rather than merely a confusion of illusory or ephemeral experiences. Ultimately, however, he finds the naturist theory as unpersuasive as the animist one. Max Müller’s theory of linguistic pressures on early religion—that the names for natural phenomena gradually became personified as religious powers associated with those phenomena—strikes Durkheim as unlikely, especially since more recent linguistic research has not produced evidence aligning with Müller’s postulates.

Durkheim also observes that the majority of natural experience is uniform, not surprising or awe-inducing to those who have had years of watching natural cycles in effect. “Normally, the course of nature is uniform, and uniformity could never produce strong emotions […]. [The Indigenous person] is much too accustomed to it to be greatly surprised by it” (103). A religion based on explaining that uniformity, Durkheim contends, would look more like modern science than like a religious system. Most of the Indigenous religions which Durkheim surveys in his research do not appear to stand in awe of natural forces, but rather to exert a sense of human dominance and control over them, which suggests that the genesis of human religion lies not in the experience of the natural world, but in the social and cultural world of humanity itself.

Since neither the individual human experience (of dreams or death) nor the experience of nature appears to have an intrinsic sacred element to it, Durkheim rejects both animism and naturism as potential candidates for the foundational layer of human religion. He then turns his attention to totemism, at that time still a relatively recent identification in the world of religious studies. It had first been noted by ethnologists in the late eighteenth century, but its importance as potentially representing an early level of human religious development had only recently been postulated. At first glance, totemism appears to be a cult devoted to certain animals and plants which occur in one’s locale, but which is also deeply interwoven into the social structures of the cultures in which it occurs.

Durkheim lays out a proposal to study totemism as exemplified in Aboriginal Australian societies, both because a recent and voluminous scholarly corpus had become available on the subject and because it appeared to fit the necessary conditions of homogeneity and “primitiveness.” While totemism as a system is also observed in certain Indigenous American societies, Durkheim intends to use evidence from those cultures only in a secondary and supportive manner.