Paper

The Elementary Forms of

~LIGIOUS UFE

EMILE DURKHEIM Translated and with an Introduction by

Karen E. Fields

l[!EI THE FREE PRESS

NEWYORK LONDON TORONTO SYDNEY TOKYO SINGAPORE

CHAPTER ONE

DEFINITION OF RELIGIOUS PHENOMENA AND OF

RELIGION1

In order to identify the simplest and most primitive religion that observa-tion can make known to us, we must first define what is properly under- stood as a religion. If we do not, we run the risk of either calling a system of ideas and practices religion that are in no way religious, or of passing by reli- gious phenomena without detecting their true nature. A good indication that this danger is not imaginary, and the point by no means a concession to empty methodological formalism, is this: Having failed to take that precau- tion, M. Frazer,* a scholar to whom the comparative science of religions is nevertheless greatly indebted, failed to recognize the profoundly religious character of the beliefs and rites that will be studied below-beliefs and rites in which, I submit, the original seed of religious life in humanity is visible. In the matter of definition, then, there is a prejudicial question that must be treated before any other. It is not that I hope to arrive straightaway at the deep and truly explanatory features of religion, for these can be determined only at the end of the research. But what is both necessary and possible is to point out a certain number of readily visible outward features that allow us to recognize religious phenomena wherever they are encountered, and that prevent their being confused with others. I turn to this preliminary step.

If taking this step is to yield the results it should, we must begin by free- ing our minds of all preconceived ideas. Well before the science of religions instituted its methodical comparisons, men had to create their own idea of what religion is. The necessities of existence require all of us, believers and unbelievers, to conceive in some fashion those things in the midst of which

*Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941).

1 I have already tried to define the phenomenon of religion, in a work published by AS, vol. II (1899), pp. lff. ("De la Definition des phenomenes religieux"). As will be seen, the definition given there differs from the one I now propose. At the end of this chapter (p. 44, n. 68), I will give the reasons for these mod- ifications. They do not, however, involve any fundamental change in the conceptualization of the facts.

21

22 PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS

we live, about which we continually make judgments, and of which our con- duct must take account. But since these notions are formed unmethodically, in the comings and goings oflife, they cannot be relied on and must be rig- orously kept to one side in the examination that follows. It is not our pre- conceptions, passions, or habits that must be consulted for the elements of the definition we need; definition is to be sought from reality itself.

Let us set ourselves before this reality. Putting aside all ideas about reli- gion in general, let us consider religions in their concrete reality and try to see what features they may have in common: Religion can be defined only in terms of features that are found wherever religion is found. In this com- parison, then, we will incorporate all the religious systems we can know, past as well as present, the most primitive and simple as well as the most modern and refined, for we have no right to exclude some so as to keep only certain others, and no logical method of doing so. To anyone who sees religion as nothing other than a natural manifestation of human activity, all religions are instructive, without exception of any kind: Each in its own way expresses man, and thus each can help us understand better that aspect of our nature. Besides, we have seen that the preference for studying religion among the most civilized peoples is far from being the best method. 2

Before taking up the question and in order to help the mind free itself of commonsense notions whose influence can prevent us from seeing things as they are, it is advisable to examine how those prejudices have entered into some of the commonest definitions.

I

One notion that is generally taken to be characteristic of all that is religious is the notion of the supernatural. By that is meant any order of things that goes beyond our understanding; the supernatural is the world of mystery, the unknowable, or the incomprehensible. Religion would then be a kind of speculation upon all that escapes science, and clear thinking generally. Ac- cording to Spencer, "Religions that are diametrically opposite in their dog- mas agree in tacitly recognizing that the world, with all it contains and all that surrounds it, is a mystery seeking an explanation"; he makes them out basically to consist of "the belief in the omnipresence of something that goes

2See above, p. 3. I do not push the necessity of these definitions further or the method to be followed. The exposition is to be found in my Reg/es de la methode sociologique [Paris, Akan, 1895], pp. 43ff. Cf. Le Suicide; [etude de sociologie] (Paris, F. Akan [1897]), pp. lff.

Definition of Religious Phenomena and of Religion 23

beyond the intellect." 3 Similiarly, Max Miiller saw all religion as "an effort to conceive the inconceivable and to express the inexpressible, an aspiration to- ward the infinite." 4

Certainly the role played by the feeling of mystery has not been unim- portant in certain religions, including Christianity. Even so, the importance of this role has shown marked variation at different moments of Christian history. There have been periods when the notion of mystery has become secondary _and even faded altogether. To men of the seventeenth century, for example, dogma contained nothing that unsettled reason. Faith effortlessly reconciled itself with science and philosophy; and thinkers like Pascal, who felt strongly that there is something profoundly obscure in things, were so lit- tle in harmony with their epochs that it was their fate to be misunderstood by their contemporaries. 5 Therefore, it would seem rash to make an idea that has been subject to periodic eclipse the essential element even of Christian- ity.

What is certain, in any case, is that this idea appears very late in the his- tory of religions. It is totally alien not only to the peoples called primitive but also to those who have not attained a certain level of intellectual. culture. Of course, when we see men imputing extraordinary virtues to insignificant ob- jects, or populating the universe with extraordinary principles made up of the most disparate elements and possessing a sort of ubiquity that is hard to conceptualize, it is easy for us to find an air of mystery in these ideas. It seems to us that these men have resigned themselves to ideas so problematic for our modern reason only because they have been unable to find more rational ones. In reality, however, the explanations that amaze us seem to the primi- tive the simplest in the world. He sees them not as a kind of ultima ratio* to which the intellect resigns itself in despair but as the most direct way of con- ceiving and understanding what he observes around him. For him, there is nothing strange in being able, by voice or gesture, to command the elements, hold up or accelerate the course of the stars, make the rain fall or stop it, and so on. The rites he uses to ensure the fertility of the soil or of the animal species that nourish him are no more irrational in his eyes than are, in our

"Last resort.

3[Herbert Spencer, First Principles, New York, D. Appleton, 1862, French translation based on the sixth English edition], Paris, F. Akan [1902], pp. 38-39, [p. 37 in the English edition. Trans.].

4Max Miiller, Introduction to the Science of Religions [London, Longmans, 1873], p. 18. Cf. [Lectures on] the Origin and [Growth] of Religion [as fllustrated by the Religions of India, London, Longmans, 1878], p. 23.

5The same turn of mind is also to be found in the period of scholasticism, as is shown in the formula according to which the philosophy of that period was defined, Fides quaerens intellectum [Faith in search of intellect. Trans.].

24 PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS

own eyes, the technical processes that our agronomists use for the same pur- pose. The forces he brings into play by these various means do not seem to him particularly mysterious. Certainly, these forces differ from those the modern scientist conceives of and teaches us to use; they behave differently and cannot be controlled in the same way; but to the one who believes in them, they are no more unintelligible than gravitation or electricity is to physicists today.

Furthermore, as we will see in the course of this work, the idea of nat- ural forces is very likely derived from that of religious forces, so between the one and the other there cannot be the chasm that separates the rational from the irrational. Not even the fact that religious forces are often conceived of as spiritual entities and conscious wills is any proof of their irrationality. Rea- son does not resist a priori the idea that inanimate bodies might be moved by intelligences, as human bodies are, even though present-day science does not easily accommodate this hypothesis. When Leibniz proposed to conceive the external world as an immense society of intelligences, between which there were not and could not be any but spiritual relations, he meant to be work- ing as a rationalist. He did not see this universal animism as anything that might offend the intellect.

Besides, the idea of the supernatural, as we understand it, is recent. It presupposes an idea that is its negation, and that is in no way primitive. To be able to call certain facts supernatural, one must already have an awareness that there is a natural order ef things, in other words, that the phenomena of the universe are internally linked according to necessary relationships called laws. Once this principle is established, anything that departs from those laws nec- essarily appears as beyond nature and, thus, beyond reason: For what is in this sense natural is also rational, those relations expressing only the manner in which things are logically connected. Now, the idea of universal determin- ism is of recent origin; even the greatest thinkers of classical antiquity did not achieve full awareness of it._ That idea is territory won by the empirical sci- ences; it is the postulate on which they rest and which their advancement has proved. So long as this postulate wa.5 lacking or not well established, there was nothing about the most extraordinary events that did not appear per- fectly conceivable. So long as what is immovable and inflexible about the or- der of things was unknown, and so long as it was seen as the work of contingent wills, it was of course thought natural that these wills or others could modify the order of things arbitrarily. For this reason, the miraculous interventions that the ancients ascribed to their gods were not in their eyes miracles, in the modern sense of the word. To them, these interventions were beautiful, rare, or terrible spectacles, and objects of surprise and won-

Definition of Religious Phenomena and of Religion 25

der (0auµ1na, mirabilia, miracula); but they were not regarded as glimpses into a mysterious world where reason could not penetrate.

That mind-set is all the more readily understandable to us because it has not completely disappeared. Although the principle of determinism is firmly established in the physical and natural sciences, its introduction into the so- cial sciences began only a century ago, and its authority there is still con- tested. The idea that societies are subject to necessary laws and constitute a realm of nature has deeply penetrated only a few minds. It follows that true miracles are thought possible in society. There is, for example, the accepted notion that a legislator can create an institution out of nothing and transform one social system into another, by fiat-just as the believers of so many reli- gions accept that the divine will made the world out of nothing or can arbi- trarily mutate some beings into others. As regards social things, we still have the mind-set of primitives. But if, in matters sociological, so many people to- day linger over this old-fashioned idea, it is not because social life seems ob- scure and mysterious to them. Quite the opposite: If they are so easily contented with such explanations, if they cling to these illusions that are re- peatedly contradicted by experience, it is because social facts seem to them the most transparent things in the world. This is so because they have not yet appreciated the real obscurity, and because they have not yet grasped the need to turn to the painstaking methods of the natural sciences in order pro- gressively to sweep away the darkness. The same cast of mind is to be found at the root of many religious beliefs that startle us in their oversimplification. Science, not religion, has taught men that things are complex and difficult to understand. But, Jevons replies, 6 the human mind has no need of properly scientific education to notice that there are definite sequences and a constant order of succession between phenomena or to notice that this order is often disturbed. At times the sun is suddenly e-clipsed; the rain does not come in the season when it is expected; the moon is slow to reappear after its peri- odic disappearance, and the like. Because these occurrences are outside the ordinary course of events, people have imputed to them extraordinary, ex- ceptional-in a word, extranatural-causes. It is in this form, Jevons claims, that the idea of the supernatural was born at the beginning of history; and it is in this way and at this moment that religion acquired its characteristic ob- ject.

The supernatural, however, is not reducible to the unforeseen. The new is just as much part of nature as the opposite. If we notice that, in general, phenomena occur one after the other in a definite order, we also notice that

6 [Frank Byron] Jevons, Introduction to the History of Religions [London, Methuen, 1896], p.15.

26 PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS

the order is never more than approximate, that it is not exactly the same at different times, and that it has all kinds of exceptions. With even very little experience, we become accustomed to having our expectations unmet; and these setbacks occur too often to seem extraordinary to us. Given a certain element of chance, as well as a certain uniformity in experience, we have no reason to attribute the one to causes and forces different from those to which the other is subject. To have the idea of the supernatural, then, it is not enough for us to witness unexpected events; these events must be conceived of as impossible besides-that is, impossible to reconcile with an order that rightly or wrongly seems to be a necessary part of the order of things. It is the positive scienc~s that have gradually constructed this notion of a neces- sary order. It follows that the contrary notion cannot have predated those sci- ences.

Furthermore, no matter how men have conceived their experience of novelties and chance occurrences, these conceptions can in no way be used to characterize religion. Religious conceptions aim above all to express and explain not what is exceptional and abnormal but what is constant and reg- ular. As a general rule, the gods are used far less to account for monstrosity, oddity, and anomaly than for the normal march of the universe, the move- ment of the stars, the rhythm of the seasons, the annual growth of vegetation, the perpetuation of species, and so forth. Hence, any notion that equates re- ligion with the unexpected is wide of the mark. Jevons's reply is that this way of conceiving religious forces is not primitive. According to him, people conceived of them first in order to account for disorder and accident, and only later used them to explain the uniformities of nature. 7 But it is unclear what could have made men impute such obviously contradictory functions to them, one after the other. Moreover, the supposition that sacred beings were at first confined to the negative role of disturbers is completely arbi- trary. As indeed we will see, starting with the simplest religions we know, the fundamental task of sacred beings has been to maintain the normal course of life by positive action. 8

Thus the idea of mystery is not at all original. It does not come to man as a given; man himself has forged this idea as well as its contrary. For this rea- son, it is only in a small number of advanced religions that the idea of mys- tery has any place at all. Therefore it cannot be made the defining characteristic of religious phenomena without excluding from the definition most of the facts to be defined.

7Ibid., p. 23.

8See below Bk. III. chap. 2.

Definition ef Religious Phenomena and ef Religion 27

II

Another idea by which many have tried to define religion is that of divinity. According to M. Reville, 9 "Religion is the determination of human life by the sense of a bond joining the human mind with the mysterious mind whose domination of the world and of itself it recognizes, and with which it takes pleasure in feeling joined." It is a fact that if the word "divinity" is taken in a precise and narrow sense, this definition leaves aside a multitude of ob- viously religious facts. The souls of the dead and spirits of all kinds and ranks, with which the religious imaginations of so many diverse peoples have pop- ulated the world, are always the objects of rites and sometimes even of regu- lar cults. Strictly speaking, however, they are not gods. Still, all that is necessary to make the definition include them is to replace the word "god" with the more inclusive term "spiritual being."

This is what Tylor has done. "In studying the religions of lower races," he says, "the first point is to define and specify what m~e means by religion. If one insists that the term means belief in a supreme being ... , a certain number of tribes will be excluded from the world of religion. But that too-narrow definition has the flaw of identifying religion with certain of its particular developments .... It seems better to set 'spiritual beings' as a minimum definition." 10 "Spiritual beings" must be understood to mean con- scious subjects that have capacities superior to those of ordinary men, which therefore rightly includes the souls of the dead, genies, and demons as well as deities, properly so-called. It is important to notice immediately the particu- lar idea of religion that this definition entails. The only relations we can have with beings of this sort are determined by the nature ascribed to them. They are conscious beings, and we can only influence them as we influence con- sciousnesses generally, that is, by psychological means, by trying to convince or rouse them either with words (invocations and prayers) or with offerings and sacrifices. And since the object of religion would then be to order our relations with these special beings, there could be religion only where there are prayers, sacrifices, propitiatory rites, and the like. In this way, we would have a very simple criterion for distinguishing what is religious from what is not. Frazer 11 systematically applies this criterion, as do several ethnographers. 12

9 (Albert Reville], Prolegomenes de l'histoire des religions [Paris, Fischbacher, 1881], p. 34.

10Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. I [London, John Murray, 1873, p. 491].

nstarting with the first edition of The Golden Bough, vol. I, pp. 30-32. Dames Frazer, The Golden Bough, 2 vols., London and New York, Macmillan, 1890.]

12Including (Sir Baldwin] Spencer and [Francis James] Gillen and even [Konrad Theodor] Preuss, who calls all nonindividualized religious forces magic.

28 PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS

But however obvious this definition may seem, given habits of mind that we owe to our own religious upbringing, there are many facts to which it is not applicable but that nevertheless belong to the domain of religion.

In the first place, there are great religions from which the idea of gods and spirits is absent, or plays only a secondary and inconspicuous role. This is the case in Buddhism. Buddhism, says Burnouf, "takes its place in opposi- tion to Brahmanism as a morality without god and an atheism without Na- ture."13 "It recognizes no god on whom man depends," says M. Barth; "its doctrine is absolutely atheist." 14 And M. Oldenberg, for his part, calls it "a religion without god." 15 The entire essence of Buddhism is contained in four propositions that the faithful call the Four Noble Truths. 16 The first states that the existence of suffering is tied to the perpetual change of things; the second finds the cause of suffering in desire; the third makes the suppression of desire the only way to end suffering; the fourth lists the three stages that must be passed through to end suffering-uprightness, meditation, and fi- nally wisdom, full knowledge of the doctrine. The end of the road-deliv- erance, salvation by Nirvana-is reached after these stages have been passed through.

In none of these principles is there any question of divinity. The Bud- dhist is not preoccupied with knowing where this world of becoming in which he lives and suffers came from; he accepts it as a fact, 17 and all his striv- ing is to escape it. On the other hand, for this work of salvation he counts only on himself; he "has no god to thank, just as in his struggle he calls upon none to help." 18 Instead of praying-in the usual sense of the word, turning to a superior being to beg for help--he withdraws into himself and medi- tates. This is not to say "that he denies outright the existence of beings

13[Eugene] Burnouf, Introduction a l'histoire du bouddhisme indien, 2d. ed. [Paris, Maisonneuve, 1876], p. 464. The last word of the text means that Buddhism does not even accept the existence of an eternal Na- ture.

14Auguste Barth, The Religions of India [translated from French by Rev. J. Wood, London, Houghton Mifflin, 1882], p. 110.

15 [Hermann] Oldenberg, Le Bouddha [Sa vie, sa doctrine, sa communaute, translated from the German by A. Foucher, Paris, F. Akan, 1894, p. 51. I could not find an edition Durkheim lists as translated by "Hoey" and giving the page as 53. Trans.].

16Ibid. [pp. 214, 318]. Cf. Hendrick Kern, Histoire du bouddhisme dans l'Inde, vol. I [Paris, Ernest Ler- oux, 1901], pp. 389ff.

17Oldenberg, Bouddha, p. 259 [this passage actually examines the denial of the existence of the soul. Trans.]; Barth, Religions of India, p. 110.

18Oldenberg, Bouddha, p. 314.

Definition of Religious Phenomena and of Religion 29

named Indra, Agni, or Varuna; 19 but he feels that he owes them nothing and has nothing to do with them," because their power is effective only over the things of this world-and those things, for him, are without value. He is thus atheist in the sense that he is uninterested in whether gods exist. Moreover, even if they exist and no matter what power they may have, the saint, or he who is unfettered by the world, regards himself as superior to them. The stature of beings lies not in the extent of their power over things but in the extent of their progress along the way to salvation. 20

It is true that, in at least some divisions of the Buddhist church,* the Buddha has come to be regarded as a kind of god. He has his temples and has become the object of a cult. But the cult is very simple, essentially limited to offerings of a few flowers and the veneration of relics or sacred images. It is little more than a commemorative cult. But further, assuming the term to be apposite, this divinization of the Buddha is peculiar to what has been called Northern Bud~sm. "The Buddhists of the South;' says Kern, "and the least advanced among the Buddhists of the North can be said, according to presently available evidence, to speak of the founder of their doctrine as if he were a man." 21 They probably do ascribe to the Buddha extraordinary pow- ers, superior to those ordinary mortals possess; but it is a very old belief in India (and a belief widespread in many different religions) that a great saint is gifted with exceptional virtues. 22 Still, a saint is not a god, any more than a priest or a magician is, despite the superhuman faculties that are often as- cribed to them. Besides, according to the best scholarly authority, this sort of theism and the complex mythology that ordinarily goes with it are no more than a derivative and deviant form ofBuddhism. At first, the Buddha was not regarded as anything other than "the wisest of men." 23 "The conception of a Buddha who is other than a man who has reached the highest degree of ho- liness is," says Burnouf, "outside the circle of ideas that are the very founda-

*Here, as in the definition of religion (p. 44), Durkheim capiralizes the word "church."

1"Barth [Religions of India], p. 109. "I am deeply convinced," says Burnouf as well, "that if <;:akya had not found around him a Pantheon full of the gods whose names I gave, he would have seen no need what- ever to invent it" ([Eugene Bournouf], Bouddhisme indien, p. 119).

2°Burnouf, Bouddhisme indien, p. 117.

21 Kern, Histoire du bouddhisme, vol. I, p. 289.

22 "The belief universally accepted in India that great holiness is necessarily accompanied by supernat- ural faculties, is the sole support that he (<;:akya) had to find in spirits" (Burnouf, Bouddhisme indien, p. 119).

23Ibid., p. 120.

30 PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS

tion of even the simple Sutras"; 24 and as the same author adds elsewhere, "his humanity has remained a fact so uncontestably acknowledged by all that it did not occur to the myth makers, to whom miracles come very easily, to make a god out of him after his death." 25 Hence, one may ask whether he has ever reached the point of being completely stripped of human character and thus whether it would be proper to liken him to a god; 26 whatever the case is, it would be to a god of a very special nature, and whose role in no way re- sembles that of other divine personalities. A god is first of all a living being on whom man must count and on whom he can count; now, the Buddha has died, he has entered Nirvana, and he can do nothing more in the course of human events. 27

Finally, and whatever else one may conclude about the divinity of the Buddha, the fact remains that this conception is wholly extraneous to what is truly fundamental in Buddhism. Buddhism consists first and foremost in the idea of salvation, and salvation only requires one to know and practice the right doctrine. Of course, that doctrine would not have been knowable if the Buddha had not come to reveal it; but once that revelation was made, the Buddha's work was done. From then on, he ceased to be a necessary fac- tor in religious life. The practice of the Four Holy Truths would be possible even if the memory of the one who made them known was erased from memory. 28 Very different from this is Christianity, which is inconceivable without the idea of Christ ever present and his cult ever practiced; for it is through the ever-living Christ, daily sacrificed, that the community of the faithful goes on communicating with the supreme source of its spiritual life.29

24 Ibid., p. 107.

25 Ibid., p. 302.

26Kern makes this point in the following terms: "In certain respects, he is a man; in certain respects, he is not a man; in certain respects, he is neither one nor the other" (His to ire du bouddhisme vol. I, p. 290).

27"The idea that the divine head of the Community is not absent from among his people, but in real- ity remains among them as their master and king, in such a way that the cult is nothing other than the ex- pression of the permanence of that common life-this idea is entirely foreign to Buddhists. Their own master is in Nirvana; if his faithful cried out to him he could not hear them" (Oldenberg, Le Bouddha [p. 368]).

28 "In all its basic traits, the Buddhist doctrine could exist, just as it does in reality, even if the idea of Buddha remained wholly foreign to it" (Oldenberg, Le Bouddha, p. 322). And what is said of the histq;- ical Buddha also applies to all the mythological ones.

29See in this connection Max Muller, Natural Religion [London, Longmans, Green & Co., 1889), pp. 103ff., 190.

Definition of Religious Phenomena and of Religion 31

All the preceding applies equally to another great religion of India, Jain- ism. Additionally, the two doctrines hold practically the same conception of the world and of life. "Like the Buddhists," says M. Barth, "the Jainists are atheists. They reject the idea of a creator; for them, the world is eternal and they explicitly deny that there could exist a being perfect from all eternity." Like the Northern Buddhists, the Jainists, or at least certain of them, have nevertheless reverted to a sort of deism; in the inscriptions of the Deccan, one ]inapati* is spoken of, a kind of supreme Jina who is called the first cre- ator; but such language, says the same author, "conflicts with the most ex- plicit statements of their most authoritative authors." 30

Furthermore, this indifference to the divine is so developed in Buddhism and Jainism because the seed existed in the Brahmanism from which both re- ligions derive. In at least certain of its forms, Brahmanic speculation led to "a frankly materialist and atheist explanation of the universe." 31 With the pas- sage of time, the multiple deities that the peoples of India had learned to worship were more or less amalgamated into a kind of abstract and imper- sonal principal deity, the essence of all that exists. Man contains within him- self this supreme reality, in which nothing of divine personhood remains; or rather, he is one with it, since nothing exists apart from it. Thus to find and unite with this reality, he does not have to search for support outside himself; all it takes is for him to focus on himself and meditate. Oldenburg says, "When Buddhism takes up the grand endeavor of imagining a world of sal- vation in which man saves himself, and of creating a religion without a god, Brahmanic speculation has already prepared the ground. The notion of di- vinity has gradually receded; the figures of the ancient gods dim, and slowly disappear. Far above the terrestrial world, Brahma sits enthroned in his eter- nal quiet, and only one person remains to take an active part in the great work of salvation: Man." 32 Note, then, that a considerable part of religious evolution has consisted of a gradual movement away from the ideas of spiri- tual being and divinity. Here are great religions in which invocations, propi- tiations, sacrifices, and prayers properly so-called are far from dominant, and therefore do not exhibit the distinguishing mark by which, it is claimed, specifically religious phenomena are to be recognized.

*This term means "conquering lord" and, according to current scholarship, refers to a spiritual ideal, not to a creator. I am indebted to my colleague Douglas Brooks on this point.

30Barth, Religions of India, p. 146.

31Barth, ["Religions de l'Inde"] in Encyclopedie des sciences religieuses [Paris, Sandoz et Fischbacher, 1877-1882], vol. VI, p. 548.

32 Oldenberg, Le Bouddha [p. 51].

32 PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS

But many rites that are wholly independent of any idea of gods or spiri- tual beings are found even in deistic religions. First of all, there are a multi- tude of prohibitions. For example, the Bible commands the woman to live in isolation for a definite period each month, 33 imposes similar isolation at the time of childbirth, 34 and forbids hitching a donkey and a horse together or wearing a garment in which hemp is mixed with linen. 35 It is impossible to see what role belief in Yahweh could have played in these prohibitions, for he is absent from all the relations thus prohibited and could hardly be inter- ested in them. The same can be said for most of the dietary restrictions. Such restrictions are not peculiar to the Hebrews; in various forms, they are found in innumerable religions.

It is true that these rites are purely negative, but they are nonetheless re- ligious. Furthermore, there are other rites that impose active and positive obligations upon the faithful and yet are of the same nature. They act on their own, and their efficacy does not depend upon any divine power; they me- chanically bring about the effects that are their reason for being. They con- sist neither of prayers nor of offerings to a being on whose goodwill the anticipated result depends; instead, the result is achieved through the auto- matic operation of the ritual. Such is the case, for example, of sacrifice in Vedic religion. "Sacrifice," says M. Bergaigne, "exerts direct influence upon celestial phenomena"; 36 it is all powerful by itself and without any divine in- fluence. For instance, it is sacrifice that broke the doors of the cave where the auroras were imprisoned, and thus did daylight erupt into the world. 37 Like- wise, it was appropriate hymns that acted directly to make the waters of the sky flow on earth-and this despite the gods. 38 Certain ascetic practices are equally efficacious. Consider this: "Sacrifice is so much the principle, par ex-

33 1 Sam. 21, 6. [This is in fact about the sexual purity of men. Trans.]

34Lev. 12.

35Deut. 12, 10-11. (These verses are in fact about establishing a place for God's name to dwell in. They go on to discuss sacrifices. Trans.]

36 Abel Bergaigne, La Religion vedique [ d' apres /es hymnes du Rig Veda, 4 vols. Paris, F. Vieweg, 1878-1897], vol. I, p. 22.

37Ibid., p. 133.

38 M. Bergaigne writes, "No text better reveals the inner meaning of magical action by man upon the waters of the sky than Verse X, 32, 7, in which that belief is expressed in general terms as applicable to the man of today as to his real or mythological ancestors. The ignorant man queried the savant; taught by the savant, he acts, and therein lies the benefit of his teaching, he conquers the rush of the rapids." Ibid. (p. 137).

Definition of Religious Phenomena and of Religion 33

cellence, that not only the origin of men but even that of the gods has been ascribed to it. Such an idea may very well seem strange. It is explicable, how- ever, as one ultimate consequence, among others, of the idea that sacrifice is all powerful." 39 Thus, the whole first part of M. Bergaigne's work deals only with those sacrifices in which the deities play no role.

This fact is not peculiar to Vedic religion; to the contrary, it is quite widespread. In any cult, there are practices that act by themselves, by a virtue that is their own, and without any god's stepping in between the individual who performs the rite and the object sought. When the Jew stirred the air at the Feast of the Tabernacles by shaking willow branches in a certain rhythm, it was to make the wind blow and the rain fall; the belief was that the rite produced the desired result automatically, provided it was correctly per- formed. 40 It is this, by the way, that explains the primary importance that nearly all cults give to the physical aspect of ceremonies. This religious for- malism (probably the earliest form of legal formalism) arises from the fact that, having in and of themselves the source of their efficacy, the formulas to be pronounced and the movements to be executed would lose efficacy if they were not exactly the same as those that had already proved successful.

Thus there are rites without gods, and indeed rites from which gods de- rive. Not all religious virtues emanate from divine personalities, and there are cult ties other than those that unite man with a deity. Thus, religion is broader than the idea of gods or spirits and so cannot be defined exclusively in those terms.

III

With these definitions set aside, let us now see how we can approach the problem.

First, let us note that, in all these formulas, scholars have been trying to express the nature of religion as a whole. Although religion is a whole com- posed of parts-a more or less complex system of myths, dogmas, rites, and ceremonies-they operate as if it formed a kind of indivisible entity. Since a whole can be defined only in relationship to the parts that comprise it, a bet- ter method is to try to characterize the elementary phenomena from which any religion results, and then characterize the system produced by their

39lbid., p. 139.

40Other examples are to be found in [Henri] Hubert, "Magia," in Dictionnaire des antiquites, vol. VI, p. 1509 [Paris, Hachette, 1877-1918].

34 PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS

union. This method is all the more indispensable in view of the fact that there are religious phenomena that do not fall under the jurisdiction of any particular religion. Those that form the subject matter of folklore do not. In general, these phenomena are jumbled survivals, the remnants of extinct re- ligions; but there are some as well that are formed spontaneously under the influence of local causes. In Europe, Christianity undertook to absorb and assimilate them; it imprinted them with Christian coloration. Nonetheless, there are many that have persisted until recently or that still persist more or less autonomously-festivals of the maypole, the summer solstice, carnival, assorted beliefs about genies and local demons, and so on. Although the re- ligious character of these phenomena is receding more and more, their reli- gious importance is still such that they have permitted Mannhardt* and his school to rejuvenate the science of religions. A definition of religion that did not take them into account would not encompass all that is religious. .

Religious phenomena fall into two basic categories: beliefs and rites. The first are states of opinion and consist of representations; the second are particular modes of action. Between these two categories of phenomena lies all that separates thinking from doing.

The rites can be distinguished from other human practices-for exam- ple, moral practices-only by the special nature of their object. Like a rite, a moral rule prescribes ways of behaving to us, but those ways of behaving ad- dress objects of a different kind. It is the object of the rite that must be char- acterized, in order to characterize the rite itself. The special nature of that object is expressed in the belief. Therefore, only after having defined the be- lief can we define the rite.

Whether simple or complex, all known religious beliefs display a com- mon feature: They presuppose a classification of the real or ideal things that men conceive of into two classes-two opposite genera-that are widely designated by two distinct terms, which the words prefane and sacred translate fairly well. The division of the world into two domains, one containing all that is sacred and the other all that is profane-such is the distinctive trait of religious thought. Beliefs, myths, dogmas, and legends are either representa- tions or systems of representations that express the nature of sacred things, the virtues and powers attributed to them, their history, and their relation- ships with one another as well as with profane things. Sacred things are not

*Wilhelm Mannhardt (1831-1880). Influenced by Jakob Grimm. and borrowing methods from the new disciplines of geology and archaeology, he pioneered the scientific study of oral tradition in Germany. James G. Frazer's The Golden Bough drew on Mannhardt's European material.

• Definition ef Religious Phenomena and of Religion 35

simply those personal beings that are called gods or spirits. A rock, a tree, a spring, a pebble, a piece of wood, a house, in a word anything, can be sacred. A rite can have sacredness; indeed there is no rite that does not have it to some degree. There are words, phrases, and formulas that can be said only by consecrated personages; there are gestures and movements that cannot be ex- ecuted by just anyone. If Vedic sacrifice has had such great efficacy-if, in- deed, sacrifice was far from being a method of gaining the gods' favor but, according to mythology, actually generated the gods-that is because the virtue it possessed was comparable to that of the most sacred beings. The cir- cle of sacred objects cannot be fixed once and for all; its scope can vary infi- nitely from one religion to another. What makes Buddhism a religion is that, in the absence of gods, it accepts the existence of sacred things, namely, the Four Noble Truths and the practices that are derived from them. 41

But I have confined myself thus far to enumerating various sacred things as examples: I must now indicate the general characteristics by which they are distinguished from profane things.

One might be tempted to define sacred things by the rank that is ordi- narily assigned to them in the hierarchy of beings. They tend to be regarded as superior in dignity and power to profane things, and particularly to man, in no way sacred when he is only a man. Indeed, he is portrayed as occupy- ing a rank inferior to and dependent upon them. While that portrayal is cer- tainly not without truth, nothing about it is truly characteristic of the sacred. Subordination of one thing to another is not enough to make one sacred and the other not. Slaves are subordinate to their masters; subjects to their king, soldiers to their leaders, lower classes to ruling classes, the miser to his gold, and the power seeker to the power holders. If a man is sometimes said to have the religion of beings or ·things in which he recognizes an eminent value and a kind of superiority to him, it is obvious that, in all such cases, the word is taken in a metaphorical sense, and there is nothing in those relations that is religious in a strict sense. 42

On the other hand, we should bear in mind that there are things with which man feels relatively at ease, even though they are sacred to the highest degree. An amulet has sacredness, and yet there is nothing extraordinary about the respect it inspires. Even face to face with his gods, man is not al- ways in such a marked state of inferiority, for he very often uses physical co'... ercion on them to get what he wants. He beats the fetish when he is

41Not to mention the sage or the saint who practices these truths, and who is for this reason sacred.

42This is not to say that the relations cannot take on a religious character, but that they do ft neces- sarily.

36 PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS

displeased, only to be reconciled with it if, in the end, it becomes more amenable to the wishes of its worshipper. 43 To get rain, stones are thrown into the spring or the sacred lake where the god of the rain is presumed to reside; it is believed that he is forced by this means to come out and show himself. 44 Furthermore, while it is true that man is a dependent of his gods, this dependence is mutual. The gods also need man; without offerings and sacrifices, they would die. I will have occasion to show that this dependence of gods on their faithful is found even in the most idealistic* religions.

However, if the criterion of a purely hierarchical distinction is at once too general and too imprecise, nothing but their heteroget1.eity is left to de- fine the relation between the sacred and the profane. But what makes this

' heterogeneity sufficient to characterize that classification of things and to dis- tinguish it from any other is that it has a very particular feature: It is absolute. In the history of human thought, there is no other example of two categories of things as profoundly differentiated or as radically opposed to one another. The traditional opposition between good and evil is nothing beside this one: Good and evil are two opposed species of the same genus, namely morals, just as health and illness are nothing more than two different aspects of the same order of facts, life; by contrast, the sacred and the profane are always and everywhere conceived by the human intellect as separate genera, as two worlds with nothing in common. The energies at play in one are not merely those encountered in the other, but raised to a higher degree; they are dif- ferent in kind. This opposition has been conceived differently in different re- ligions. Here, localizing the two kinds of things in different regions of the physical universe has appeared sufficient to separate them; there, the sacred is thrown into an ideal and transcendent milieu, while the residuum is aban- doned as the property of the material world. But while the forms of the con- trast are variable, 45 the fact of it is universal.

This is not to say that a being can never pass from one of these worlds to the other. But when this passage occurs, the manner in which it occurs

• For the meaning of "idealistic," bear in mind Durkheim's contrast (above, p. 2) between religions that contain more concepts and fewer sensations and images.

43 [Fritz] Schultze, [Der] Fetichismus [Bin Beitrag zur Anthropologie und Religionsgeschichte, Leipzig, C. Wilfferodt, 1871], p. 129.

44Examples of these customs will be found in [James George] Frazer, Golden &ugh, 2d ed., vol. I [New York, Macmillan, 1894], pp. 81ff.

45The conception according to which the profane is opposed to the sacred as the rational is to the ir- rational; the intelligible to the mysterious, is only one of the forms in which this opposition is expressed. Science, once constituted, has taken on a profane character, especially in the eyes of the Christian reli- gions; in consequence, it has seemed that science could not be applied to sacred things.

Definition of Religious Phenomena and of Religion 37

demonstrates the fundamental duality of the two realms, for it implies a true metamorphosis. Rites of initiation, which are practiced by a great many peo- ples, demonstrate this especially well. Initiation is a long series of rites to in- troduce the young man into religious life. For the first time, he comes out of the purely profane world, where he has passed his childhood, and enters into the circle of sacred things. This change of status is conceived not as a mere development of preexisting seeds but as a transformation totius substantiae. * At that moment, the young man is said to die, and the existence of the par- ticular person he was, to cease-instantaneously to be replaced by another. He is born again in a new form. Appropriate ceremonies are held to bring about the death and the rebirth, which are taken not merely in a symbolic sense but literally. 46 Is this not proof that there is a rupture between the pro- fane being that he was and the religious being that he becomes?

Indeed, this heterogeneity is such that it degenerates into real antago- nism. The two worlds are conceived of not only as separate but also as hos- tile and jealous rivals. Since the condition of belonging fully to one is fully to have left the other, man is exhorted to retire completely from the profane in order to live an exclusively religious life. From thence comes monasti.cism, which artificially organizes a milieu that is apart from, outside of, and dosed ' to the natural milieu where ordinary men live a secular life, and that tends al- most to be its antagonist. From thence as well comes mystic asceticism, which seeks to uproot all that may remain of man's attachment to the world. Finally, from thence come all forms of religious suicide, the crowning logical step of this asceticism, since the only means of escaping profane life fully and finally is escaping life altogether.

The opposition of these two genera is expressed outwardly by a visible sign that permits ready recognition of this very special classification, wher- ever it exists. The mind experiences deep repugnance about mingling, even simple contact, between the corresponding things, because the notion of the sacred is always and everywhere separate from the notion of the profane in man's mind, and because we imagine a kind of logical void between them. The state of dissociation in which the ideas are found in consciousness is too strongly contradicted by such mingling, or even by their being too close to

•of the whole essence.

46 See James George Frazer, "On Some Ceremonies of the Central Australian Tribes," in AAAS [Mel- bourne, Victoria, published by the association]. 1901 [vols. VIII-IX]. pp. 313ff. The concept is, more- over, very common. In India, mere participation in the sacrificial act has the same effects; the sacrificer, by the very fact of entering into the circle of sacred things, changes personality. (See Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, "Essai sur (la nature et fonction du] sacrifice," AS, vol. II (1897], p. 101.)

38 PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS

one another. The sacred thing is, par excellence, that which the profane must not and cannot touch with impunity. To be sure, this prohibition cannot go so far as to make all communication between the two worlds impossible, for if the profane could in no way enter into relations with the sacred, the sacred would be of no use. This placing in relationship in itself is always a delicate operation that requires precautions and a more or less complex initiation. 47

Yet such an operation is impossible if the profane does not lose its specific traits, and if it does not become sacred itself in some measure and to some degree. The two gener~ cannot, at the same time, both come close to one another and remain what they were.

Now we have a first criterion of religious beliefs. No doubt, within these two fundamental genera, there are secondary species that are themselves more or less incompatible with each other. 48 But characteristically, the reli- gious phenomenon is such that it always assumes a bipartite division of the universe, known and knowable, into two genera that include all that exists but radically exclude one another. Sacred things are things protected and iso- lated by prohibitions; profane things are those things to which the prohibi- tions are applied and that must keep at a distance from what is sacred. Religious beliefs are those representations that express the nature of sacred things and the relations they have with other sacred things or with profane things. Finally, rites are rules of conduct that prescribe how man must con- duct himself with sacred things. ·

When a certain number of sacred things have relations of coordination and subordination with one another, so as to form a system that has a certain coherence and does not belong to any other system of the same sort, then the beliefs and rites, taken together, constitute a religion. By this definition, a re- ligion is not necessarily contained within a single idea and does not derive from a single principle that may vary with the circumstances it deals with, while remaining basically the same everywhere. Instead, it is a whole formed of separate and relatively distinct parts. Each homogeneous group of sacred things, or indeed each sacred thing of any importance, constitutes an organi- zational center around which gravitates a set of beliefs and rites, a cult of its own. There is no religion, however unified it may be, that does not acknowl- edge a plurality of sacred things. Even Christianity, at least in its Catholic form, accepts the Virgin, the angels, the saints, the souls of the dead, etc.-

47See what I say about initiation on p. 37, above.

48Later I will show how, for example, certain species of sacred things between which there is incom- patibility exclude one another as the sacred excludes the profane (Bk.III, chap.5, §4).

Definition if Religious Phenomena and of Religion 39

above and beyond the divine personality (who, besides, is both three and one). As a rule, furthermore, religion is not merely a single cult either but is made up of a system of cults that possess a certain autonomy. This autonomy is also variable. Sometimes the cults are ranked and subordinated to some dominant cult into which they are eventually absorbed; but sometimes as well they sim- ply exist side by side in confederation. The religion to be studied in this book will provide an example of this confederate organization.

At the same time, we can explain why groups of religious phenomena that belong to no constituted religion can exist: because they are not or are no longer integrated into a religious system. If, for specific reasons, one of those cults just mentioned should manage to survive while the whole to which it belonged has disappeared, it will survive only in fragments. This is what has happened to so many agrarian cults that live on in folklore. In cer- tain cases, what persists in that form is not even a cult, but a mere ceremony or a particular rite. 49

Although this definition is merely preliminary, it indicates the terms in which the problem that dominates the science of religions must be posed. If sacred beings are believed to be distinguished from the others solely by the greater intensity of the powers attributed to them, the question of how men could have imagined them is rather simple: Nothing more is needed than to identify those forces that, through their exceptional energy, have managed to impress the human mind forcefully enough to inspire religious feelings. But if, as I have tried to establish, sacred things are different in nature from pro- fane things, if they are different in their essence, the problem is far more complex. In that case, one must ask what led man to see the world as two heterogeneous and incomparable worlds, even though nothing in sense ex- perience seems likely to have suggested the idea of such a radical duality.

IV

Even so, this definition is not yet complete, for it fits equally well two orders of things that must be distinguished even though they are akin: magic and religion.

Magic, too, is made up of beliefs and rites. Like religion, it has its own myths and dogmas, but these are less well developed, probably because, given its pursuit of technical and utilitarian ends, magic does not waste time in pure speculation. Magic also has its ceremonies, sacrifices, purifications, prayers,

49This is the case, for example, of certain marriage and funeral rites.

40 PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS

songs, and dances. Those beings whom the magician invokes and the forces he puts to work are not only of the same nature as the forces addressed by re- ligion but very often are the same forces. In the most primitive societies, the souls of the dead are in essence sacred things and objects of religious rites, but at the same time, they have played a major role in magic. In Australia 50 as well as in Melanesia, 51 in ancient Greece as well as among Christian peoples, 52 the souls, bones, and hair of the dead figure among the tools most often used by the magician. Demons are also a common instrument of magical influence. Now, demons are also surrounded by prohibitions; they too are separated and live in a world apart. Indeed, it is often difficult to distinguish them from gods proper. 53 Besides, even in Christianity, is not the devil a fallen god? And apart from his origins, does he not have a religious character, simply because the ~ell of which he is the keeper is an indispensable part in the machinery of the Christian religion? The magician can invoke regular and official deities. Sometimes these are gods of a foreign people: For example, the Greek magicians called upon Egyptian, Assyrian, or Jewish gods. Sometimes they are even national gods: Hecate and Diana were objects of a magic cult. The Virgin, the Christ, and the saints were used in the same manner by Christian magicians. 54

Must we therefore say that magic cannot be rigorously differentiated from religion-that magic is full of religion and religion full of magic and, consequently, that it is impossible to separate them and define the one with- out the other? What makes that thesis hard to sustain is the marked repug- nance of religion for magic and the hostility of magic to religion in return. Magic takes a kind of professional pleasure in profaning holy things, 55 in- verting religious ceremonies in its rites. 56 On the other hand, while religion has not always condemned and prohibited magic rites, it has generally re-

50See [Sir Baldwin] Spencer and [Francis James] Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia [Lon- don, Macmillan, 1889], pp. 534ff., and Northern Tribes of Central Australia [London, Macmillan, 1904], p. 463; [Alfred William] Howitt, Native Tribes of South East Australia [London, Macmillan, 1904], pp. 359-361.

51See [Robert Henry] Codrington, The Melanesians [Studies in Their Anthropology and Folklore, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1891], chap. 12.

52See Hubert, "Magia," in Dictionnaire des antiquites.

53For example, in Melanesia the tindalo is a spirit that is sometimes religious and sometimes magical (Codrington, The Melanesians, pp. 125ff., 194ff.).

54See Hubert and Mauss, "Esquisse d'une theorie generale de la magie;' AS, vol. VII [1904], pp. 83-84.

55For example, the Host is profaned in the Black Mass.

56S ee Hubert, "Magia," in Dictionnaire des antiquites.

Definition ef Religious Phenomena and ef Religion 41

garded them with disfavor. As messieurs Hubert and Mauss point out, there is something inherently antireligious about the maneuvers of the magician. 57

So it is difficult for these two institutions not to oppose one another at some point, whatever the relations between them. Since my intention is to limit my research to religion and stop where magic begins, discovering what dis- tinguishes them is all the more important.

Here is how a line of demarcation can be drawn between these two domains.

Religious beliefs proper are always shared by a definite group that pro- fesses them and that practices the corresponding rites. Not only are they in- dividually accepted by all members of that group, but they also belong to the group and unify it. The individuals who comprise the group feel joined to one another by the fact of common faith. A society whose members are un[ted because they imagine the sacred world and its relations wtth the pro- fane world in the same way, and because they translate this common repre- sentation into identical practices, is what is called a Church.* In history we do not find religion without Church. Sometimes the Church is narrowly na- tional; sometimes it extends beyond frontiers; sometimes it encompasses an entire people (Rome, Athens, the Hebrews); sometimes it encompasses only a fraction (Christian denominations since the coming of Protestantism); sometimes it is led by a body of priests; sometimes it is more or less without any official directing body. 58 But wherever we observe religious life, it has a definite group as its basis. Even so-called private cults, like the domestic cult or a corporate cult, satisfy this condition: They are always celebrated by a group, the family or the corporation. And, furthermore, even these private religions often are merely special forms of a broader religion that embraces the totality of life. 59 These small Churches are in reality only chapels in a larger Church and, because of this very scope, deserve all the more to be called by that name. 60

*Durkheim capitalizes this term.

57Hubert and Mauss, "Esquisse," p. 19.

58Certainly it is rare for each ceremony not to have its director at the moment it is conducted; even in the most crudely organized societies, there generally are men designated, due to the importance of their social role, to exercise a directive influence upon religious life (for example, the heads of local groups in certain Australian societies). But this attribution of functions is nevertheless very loose.

591n Athens, the gods addressed by the domestic cult are only specialized forms of the gods of the City (ZEv; KTlJOW<;, Z~ epKE£o<;). [Zeus, protector of property, Zeus, the household god. Trans.] Similarly, in the Middle Ages, the patrons of brotherhoods are saints of the calendar.

60For the name of Church ordinarily applies only to a group whose common beliefs refer to a sphere ofless specialized things.

42 PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS

Magic is an entirely different matter. Granted, magic beliefs are never without a certain currency. They are often widespread among broad strata of the population, and there are even peoples where they count no fewer active followers than religion proper. But they do not bind men who believe in them to one another and unite them into the same group, living the same life. There is no Church of magic. Between the magician and the individuals who

· consult him, there are no durable ties that make them members of a single moral body, comparable to the ties that join the faithful of the same god or the adherents of the same cult. The magician has a clientele, not a Church, and his clients may have no mutual relations, and may even be unknown to one another. Indeed, the relations they have with him are generally acciden- tal and transient, analogous to those of a sick man with his doctor. The offi- cial and public character with which the magician is sometimes invested makes no difference. That he functions in broad daylight does not join him in a more regular and lasting manner with those who make use of his services.

It is true that, in certain cases, magicians form a society among themselves. They meet more or less periodically to celebrate certain rites in common in some instances; the place held by witches' meetings in European folklore is well known. But these associations are not at all indispensable for the func- tioning of magic. Indeed, they are rare and rather exceptional. To practice his art, the magician has no need whatever to congregate with his peers. He is more often a loner. In general, far from seeking company, he flees it. "He stands aloof, even from his colleagues."61 By contrast, religion is inseparable from the idea of Church. In this first regard, there is already a fundamental dif- ference between magic and religion. Furthermore, and above all, when magic societies of this sort are formed, they never encompass all the adherents of magic. Far from it. They encompass only the magicians. Excluded from them are the laity, as it were--that is, those for whose benefit the rites are conducted, which is to say those who are the adherents of regular cults. Now, the magi- cian is to magic what the priest is to religion. But a college of priests is no more a religion than a religious congregation that worships a certain saint in the shadows of the cloister is a private cult. A Church is not simply a priestly broth- erhood; it is a moral community* made up of all the faithful, both laity and priests. Magic ordinarily has no community of this sort. 62

*Note the first use in this book of this fundamentally important Durkheimian concept which can also be thought of as "imagined community." See pp. xxii-xxxiii, xiv.

61Hubert and Mauss, "Esquisse," p. 18.

62 [William] Robertson Smith had already shown that magic is opposed to religion as the individual is to the social ([Lectures on] the Religion of the Semites, 2d ed. [London, A. & C. Black, 1894], pp. 264-265).

Definition ef Religious Phenomena and ef Religion 43

But if one includes the notion of Church in the definition of religion, does one not by the same stroke exclude the individual religions that the in- dividual institutes for himself and celebrates for himself alone? There is scarcely any society in which this is not to be found. As will be seen below, every Ojibway has his personal manitou that he chooses himself and to which he bears specific religious obligations; the Melanesian of the Banks Islands has his tamaniu;63 the Roman has his genius;64 the Christian has his patron saint and his guardian angel, and so forth. All these cults seem, by definition, to be independent of the group. And not only are these individual religions very common throughout history, but some people today pose the question whether such religions are not destined to become the dominant form of re- ligious life-whether a day will not come when the only cult will be the one that each person freely practices in his innermost self. 65

But, let us put aside these speculations about the future for a moment. If we confine our discussion to religions as they are in the present and as they have been in the past, it becomes obvious that these individual cults are not distinct and autonomous religious systems but simply aspects of the religion common to the whole Church of which the individuals are part. The patron saint of the Christian is chosen from the official list of saints recognized by the Catholic Church, and there are canonical laws that prescribe how each believer must conduct this private cult. In the same way, the idea that every man necessarily has a protective genie is, in different forms, at the basis of a large number of American religions, as well as of Roman religion (to cite only these two examples). As will be seen below, that idea is tightly bound up with the idea of soul, and the idea of soul is not among those things that can be left entirely to individual choice. In a word, it is the Church of which he is a member that teaches the individual what these personal gods are, what their role is, how he must enter into relations with them, and how he must honor them. When one analyzes the doctrines of that Church systematically, sooner or later one comes across the doctrines that concern these special cults. Thus there are not two religions of different types, turned in opposite

Further, in thus differentiating magic from religion, I do not mean to set up a radical discontinuity be- tween them. The frontiers between these two domains are often blurred.

63 [Robert Henry] Codrington, "Notes on the Customs of Mota, Bank Islands in RSV, vol. XVI [1880], p. 136.

64(Augusto] Negrioli, Dei Genii presso i Romani, [Bologna, Ditto Nicola Zanichelli, 1900].

65This is the conclusion at which [Herbert] Spencer arrives in his Ealesiastical Institutions [Part VI of The Principles ef Sociology, New York, D. Appleton, 1886], chap. 16. It is also the conclusion of [Auguste] Sabatier, in his Esquisse d'une philosophie de la religion d'apres la Psychologie et l'Histoire, [Paris, Fischbacher, 1897], and that of the entire school to which he belongs.

44 PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS

directions, but the same ideas and principles applied in both cases-here, to circumstances that concern the group as a whole, and there, to the life of the · individual. Indeed, this unity is so close that, among certain peoples, 66 the ceremonies during which the believer first enters into communication with his protective genie are combined with rites whose public character is in- contestable, namely, rites of initiation. 67

What remains are the present-day aspirations toward a religion that would consist entirely of interior and subjective states and be freely con- structed by each one of us. But no matter how real those aspirations, they cannot affect our definition: This definition can be applied only to real, ac- complished facts, not to uncertain possibilities. Religions can be defined as they are now or as they have been, not as they may be tending more or less vaguely to become. It is possible that this religious individualism is destined to become fact; but to be able to say in what measure, we must first know what religion is, of what elements it is made, from what causes it results, and what function it performs-all questions whose answers cannot be preor- dained, for we have not crossed the threshold of research. Only at the end of this study will I try to look into the future.

We arrive thus at the following definition: A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbid- den-beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them. The second element thus holds a place in my definition that is no less essential than the first: In showing that the idea of religion is inseparable from the idea of a Church, it conveys the notion that religion must be an eminently collective thing. 68

66Among numerous Indian peoples of North America, in particular.

67However, that factual point does not settle the question of whether external and public religion is anything other than the development of an interior and personal religion that would be the primitive phe- nomenon, or whether, on the other hand, the personal religion is the extension, inside individual con- sciousnesses, of the exterior one. The problem will be taken up directly below (Bk. II, chap. 5, §2. Cf. Bk. II, chap. 6 and Bk. II, chap. 7, § 1). For now I merely note that the individual cult presents itself to the observer as an element and an appendage of the collective cult.

68It is there that my definition picks up the one I proposed some time ago in the Annee sodologique. In that work, I defined religious beliefs exclusively by their obligatory character; but that obligation evidently arises, as I showed, from the fact that those beliefs belong to a group that imposes them on its members. Thus the two definitions partly overlap. If I have thought it necessary to propose a new one, it is because the first was too formal and went too far in downplaying the content of religious representatiops. In the discussions that follow, we will see the point of having placed in evidence immediately what is characteris- tic of this content. In addition, if the imperative character is indeed a distinctive feature of religious beliefs, it has infinite gradations; consequently, it is not easily perceptible in some cases. There arise difficulties and troublesome questions that are avoided if this criterion is replaced by the one I have used above.