approaches to religion

I N T R O D U C T I O N

i

I propose'in this book to study the simplest and most primitive religion that is known at present, to discover its principles and attempt an explanation of it. A religious system is said to be the most primitive that is available for o b - servation when it meets the two following conditions: First, it must be found in societies the simplicity of whose organization is nowhere exceeded;1 sec- ond, it must be explainable without the introduction of any element from a predecessor religion.

I will make every effort to describe the organization of this system with all the care and precision that an ethnographer of a historian would bring to the task. But my task will not stop at description. Sociology sets itself differ- ent problems from those of history or ethnography. It dobs not seek to b e - come acquainted with bygone forms of civilization for the sole purpose of being acquainted with and reconstructing them. Instead, like any positive science,* its purpose above all is to explain a present reality that is near to us and thus capable of affecting our ideas and actions. That reality is man. More especially, it is present-day man, for there is none other that we have a greater interest in knowing well. Therefore, my study of a very archaic religion will not be for the sheer pleasure of recounting' the bizarre and the eccentric. I have made a very"archaic religion the subject of-my research because it seems better suited than any other to help us comprehend the religious nature of man, that is, to reveal a fundamental and permanent aspect of humanity.

This proposition is bound to provoke strong objections. It may be thought strange that, to arrive at an understanding of present-day humanity, we should have to turn away from it so as to travel back to the beginning of history. In the matter at hand, that procedure seems especially unorthodox. Religions are held t o b e of unequal value and standing; it is commonly said that not all contain the same measure of truth. Thus it would seem that the higher forms of religious thought cannot be compared with the lower with-

Here, knowledge (saetite) acquired by means of systematic observation. This use of the terni positive is ebted ro.Auguste Comte (1798-1857) who postulated a human evolution from the theological to meta-

P ysical to positive epochs. The complexities of the term positive in general, and in Comte's use of it, are examined by Andre Lalande, Diaionnaire technique de la philosophic, Paris, F. Alcan, 1923, pp. 595-600.

will call those societies and the men of those societies primitive in the same sense. This term cer- y lacks precision, but it is hard to avoid; if care is taken to specify its meaning, however, it can safely

be used.

1

Introduction

out bringing the higher forms down to the lower level. To grant that the crude cults of Australian tribes might help us understand Christianity, for ex- ample, is to assume—is it not?—that Christianity proceeds from the same mentality, in other words, that it is made up of the same superstitions and rests on the same errors. The theoretical importance sometimes accorded to primitive, religions could therefore be taken as evidence ofa systematic irre- ligion that invalidated the results of research by prejudging them.

I need not go into the question here whether scholars can be found who were guilty of this and who have made history and the ethnography of reli- gion a means of making war against religion. In any event, such could not pos- sibly be a sociologist's point of view. Indeed, it is a fundamental postulate of sociology that a human institution cannot rest upon error and falsehood. If it did, it could not endure. If it had not been grounded in the nature of things, in those very things it would have met resistance that it could.not-have over- come. Therefore, when I approach the study of primitive religions, it is with the certainty that they are grounded in-and express the real. In the course of the analyses and discussions that follow, we will see this principle coming up again and again. What I criticize in the schools I.part company with is pre- cisely .that they have failed to recognize it. N o doubt, when all we do is con- sider, the formulas literally, these religious beliefs and practices appear disconcerting, and our inclination might be to write them off to some sort of inborn aberration. But we must know how to reach beneath the symbol to grasp the reality it represents and that gives the symbol its true meaning. The most bizarre or barbarous rites and the strangest myths translate some human need and some aspect of life, whether social or individual. The reasons the faithful settle for in justifying those rites and myths may be mistaken, and most often are; but the true reasons exist nonetheless, and it is the business of sci- ence to uncover them.

Fundamentally, then, there are no religions that are false. All are true af-r ter their own fashion: All fulfill given conditions of human,existence, though in different ways. Granted, it is not impossible to rank them hierarchically. Some can be said to be superior to others, in the sense that they bring higher mental faculties into play, that they are richer in ideas and feelings, that they contain proportionately more concepts than sensations and images, and that they are more elaborately systematized. But the greater complexity and higher ideal content, however real, are not sufficient'to place the corre- sponding religions into separate genera. All are equally religious, just as all living beings are equally living beings, from the humblest plastid to man. If I address myself to primitive religions, then, it is not with any ulterior motive of disparaging religion in general: These religions are to be respected no less

Introduction

than the others. They fulfill the same needs, play the same role, and proceed from the same causes; therefore, they can serve just as well to elucidate the nature of religious life and, it follows, to solve the problem I wish to treat.

Still, why give them a kind of priority? Why choose them in preference to others as the subject of my study? This choice is solely for reasons of method.

First of all, we cannot arrive, at an understanding of the most modern re- ligions without tracing historically the-manner in which they have gradually taken shape. Indeed, history is the only method of explanatory analysis that can be applied to them. History alone enables us to break down an institu- tion into its component parts, because it shows those parts to us as they are born in time,'one: after the other. Second, by situating each part of the insti- tution within the totality of circumstances in which it was born, history puts into our hands the only tools we have for identifying' the causes that have brought it into being. Thus, whenever we set out to explain something h u 7 man at a specific moment in time—be it a religious belief, a moral rule, a legal principle, an aesthetic technique, or an economic system—we must be- gin by going back to its simplest and most primitive form. We must seek to account for the features that define it-at .that period of its existence and then show how it has gradually developed, gained in complexity, and become what it; is at the moment under consideration.

It is easy to see how important the determination of the initial starting point is for this series of progressive explanations. A cartesian principle had it that the first link takes precedence in the chain of scientific truths. To be sure, it is out of the question to base the science of religions on a notion elaborated in-the cartesian manner—that is, a logical concept, pure possibility con- structed solely by force of intellect. What we must find is a concrete reality that historical and ethnographic observation alone can reveal to us. But if that primary conception must be arrived at by other methods, the fact remains that it is destined to have an important influence on all the subsequent propo- sitions that science establishes. Biological evolution was conceived altogether differently from the moment the existence of unicellular organisms was dis- covered. Likewise, the particulars of religious facts are explained differently if naturism is placed at the beginning of religious evolution than if animism, or some other form, is placed there. Indeed, even the most specialized scholars must choose a hypothesis and take their inspiration from it if they want to try to account for the facts they analyze—unless they mean to confine them- selves to a task of pure erudition. Willy-nilly, the questions they ask take the following form: What has caused naturism or animism to take on such and such a particular aspect here or there, and to be enriched or impoverished in such and such a way? Since taking a position on the initial problem is un-

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Introduction

avoidable, and since the solution given will affect the science as a whole, the problem is best confronted at the outset. This is what I'propose to do.

Besides, apart from those indirect consequences, the study of primitive religions in itself has immediate interest of the first importance.

If it is useful to know what a given religion consists of; it is far more im- portant to examine what religion is in general. This is a problem that has al- ways intrigued philosophers, and not without reason: It is of interest to all humanity. Unfortunately, the method philosophers ordinarily use to solve it is purely one of dialectic: All they do is analyze the ideathey have of religion, even if they have to illustrate the results of that mental analysis with examples borrowed from those religions that best suit' their model. But while this method must be abandoned, the problem, of definition remains; and philos- ophy's great service has been to prevent it from being settled once and for all* by the disdain of the savants. The problem can in fact be'approached in another way. Since all religions may be compared, all being species within the same genus, some elements are of necessity common to them all. By that I mean not only the outward and visible features that they all equally exhibit and that make it possible to define religion in a provisional way at the begin- ning of research. T h e discovery of these* apparent signs is relatively easy, for the observation required does not go beyond the surface of things. But these external resemblances presuppose deeper ones. At the foundation of all sys- tems of belief and all cults, there must necessarily be a certain number of fun- damental representations and modes of ritual conduct''" that, despite the diversity of forms that the one and the other may have taken on, have the same objective meaning everywhere and everywhere fulfill the same func- tions. It is these enduring elements that constitute what is eternal and human in religion. They are the whole objective content of the idea that is expressed when religion in general is spoken of.

How, then, can those elements be uncovered?

Surely it is not by observing the complex religions that have arisen in the course of history. Each of those religions is formed from such a'variety of el- ements that it is very hard to distinguish what is secondary to them from what is primary, and what is essential from what is accessory. Simply consider religions like those of Egypt; India, or classical antiquity! Each is a dense tan- gle of many cults that can vary according to localities, temples, generations, dynasties, invasions, and so on. Popular superstitions intermingle •• in them with the most sophisticated dogmas. Neither religious thinking nor religious

*Swain rendered Durkheim s prescrit as "suppressed," as if he had written proscrit.

^Attitudes rituelles. On this phrase, see below, p. 301n,

Introduction

practice is shared equally among the mass-of the faithful. T h e beliefs as well as the rites are-taken in different ways, depending on men, milieux, and cir- cumstances. Here it is priests, there monks, elsewhere the laity; here, mystics and rationalists, theologians and prophets, and so on. Under such conditions, it is difficult.tb perceive what might be common to all. It is indeed possible to find ways of studying some particular phenomenon, fruitfully—such as prophetism, monasticisrh, or the mysteries—through one or another of those systems in which it is especially well developed. But how can one find the common basis of religious life under the luxuriant vegetation that grows over it? How can one'find the fundamental states characteristic of the religious mentality in general through the. clash of theologies, the variations of ritual, the multiplicity of groupings, and the diversity of individuals?

T h e case is altogether different iiv.the lower societies. The, lesser devel- opment of individuality, the smaller scale of the group, and the homogeneity of external circumstances all contribute to reducing the differences and vari- ations to a minimum. The group regularly produces an intellectual and moral uniformity of which., we. find only rare examples in the.more advanced soci- eties. Everything is common to everyone. T h e movements are stereotyped; everyone executes the same ones in the same circumstances; and this confor- mity of conduct merely translates that of thought. Since,all the conscious- nesses are pulled along in the same current, the individual type virtually confounds itself with the generic type. At t h e s a m e time that all is uniform, all is simple. What could be.more basic than those myths composed of a sinr gle theme, repeated endlessly, or than those rites composed of a small n u m - ber of movements, repeated until the participants can do no more. Neither the.popular nor the priesdy imagination has yet had the time or the means to refine and transform the basic material of ideas and religious practices; re- duced to essentials, that material spontaneously presents itself to examina- tion, and discovering it calls for only a minimal effort. Inessential, secondary, and luxurious developments have not yet come to hide what is primary.2

Everything is boiled down to what is.absolutely indispensable, to that with- out which there would be no religion. But the indispensable is also the fun- damental, in other words, that which it.is above all important for us to know.

Thus, primitive civilizations are prime cases because they are simple cases. This is why, among all the orders of facts, the observations of ethnog-

2This is not to say, of course, that primitive cults do not go beyond bare essentials. Quite the contrary, as we will see, religious beliefs and practices that do not have narrowly utilitarian aims are found in every religion (13k.Ill, chap.4, §2). This nonutilitarian richness is indispensable to religious life, and of its very essence. But it is by far less well developed in the lower religions than in the others, and this fact will put us in a better position to determine its raison d'etre.

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Introduction Introduction

raphers have often been veritable revelations that have breathed new life into the study of human institutions. Before the middle of the nineteenth century, for example, it was generally believed that the father was the essential ele- ment of the family; it was not even imaginable that there could be a family organization of which paternal power was not the keystone. Bachofen's dis- covery toppled that old notion. Until quite recent times, it was thought ob- vious that the moral and legal relations that constitute kinship were only another aspect of the physiological relations that result from shared descent. Bachofen and his successors, McLennan, Morgan, and many others, were still operating under the influence of that preconception. But, quite the con- trary, we have known ever since we became acquainted with the nature of the primitive clan that kinship cannot be defined by common blood.* To re- turn to religions: Exclusive consideration of the religious forms that are the most familiar to us long led us to believe that-the idea of god was character- istic of all that is religious. The religion I will study below is largely a stranger to any notion of divinity. In it, the forces to which the rites are addressed dif- fer greatly from those that are of paramount importance in our modern reli- gions, and yet they will help us to understand our modern religions better. Nothing is more unjust, therefore, than the disdain with which too many historians still regard ethnographers' work. In point of fact, ethnography has often brought about the most fertile revolutions in the- various branches of sociology. For the same reason, moreover, the discovery of unicellular crea- tures, which I noted earlier, transformed the idea of life that was widely held. Since life is down to its fundamental features among very simple beings, those features may be less easily misread.

But primitive religions do not merely allow us to isolate the constituent elements of religion; their great advantage is also that they aid in its explana- tion. Because the facts are simpler, the relations between them are more ap- parent. The reasons men invoke to explain their actions to themselves have not yet been refined and revamped by sophisticated thought: They are closer and more akin to the motives that caused those actions. To understand a delusion properly and to be able to apply the most appropriate treatment, the doctor needs to know what its point of departure was. That event is the more easily detected the nearer to its beginnings the delusion can be observed.

"Jacob Johann Bachofen (1815-1887) postulated the existence of matriliny (reckoning descent through the female line) and matriarchy or mother right, a stage he envisaged as standing between prim- itive promiscuity and patriarchy. Ethnographic study worldwide has borne out the first and discredited the second. Like Bachofen, John Ferguson McLennan (1827-1881) and Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) were lawyers interested in the rules that govern family and property.- Among other achievements, Morgan pioneered the study of kin statuses distinct from blood relationship; McLennan is credited with having drawn attention to totemism. See below, Bk.l. chap.4, p. 85.

Conversely, the longer a sickness is left to develop, the more that original point of departure slips out of view.- This is so because all sorts of interpreta- tions have intervened along the way, and the tendency of those interpreta- tions is to repress the original state i n t o the unconscious and to replace it with other states through which the original one is sometimes not'easy to detect. The distance between a systematized delusion and the first impres- sions that gave birth to it is often considerable. The same applies to religious thought. As it progresses historically, the causes that called it into existence, though still at work, are seen no more except through a vast system of dis- torting interpretations. T h e popular mythologies and.the.subtle theologies have done their work: They have.overlaid the original feelings with very dif- ferent ones that, although stemming from primitive feelings of which they are the elaborated form, nevertheless allow their true nature to show only in part. The psychological distance between the cause and the effect, and be- tween the apparent cause and the effective cause, has become wider and more difficult for the mind to overcome. T h e remainder of this work will be an illustration and a test of this methodological point. We will see how, in the primitive religions, the religious phenomenon still carries the visible imprint of its origins. It would have been much more difficult for us to infer ,"those origins by considering more developed"religions alone.

Thus, the study I undertake is a way of taking up again the old problem of the origin of religions but wider new conditions. Granted, if by origin one means an absolute first beginning, there is nothing scientific about the ques- tion, and it must be resolutely set aside. There is no radical instant when religion began to exist, and the point is not to find a roundabout way of con- veying ourselves there in thought. Like every other human institution, reli- gion begins nowhere. So all speculations in this genre are rightly discredited; they can consist of only subjective and arbitrary constructions without checks of any sort. T h e problem I pose is altogether different. I would like to find a means of discerning the ever-present causes on which the most basic forms of religious thought and practice depend. For the reasons just set forth, the causes are more easily observable if the societies in which they are ob- served are less complex. That is why I seek to get closer to the origins.3 The reason is not that I ascribe special virtues to the lower religions. Quite the contrary, they are crude and rudimentary; so there can be no question of t a k i n g them out to be models of some sort, which the later religions would

It will be seen that I give the word "origins," like the word "primitive," an entirely relative sense. I o not mean by it an absolute beginning but the simplest social state known at present—the state beyond n,ch it is at present impossible for us to go. When 1 speak about origins and the beginnings of history

r rehgious thought, this is die sense in which those phrases must be understood.

Introduction Introduction

only have had to reproduce. But their very lack of elaboration makes them instructive, for in this way they become useful experiments in which the facts and the relations among facts are easier to detect. To uncover the laws of the phenomena he studies, the physicist seeks-to simplify those phenomena and to rid them of their secondary characteristics. In the case of institutions, na- ture spontaneously makes simplifications of the same kind at the beginning of history. I wish only to put those simplifications to good use. Doubtless, I will be able to obtain only very elementary facts by this method. W h e n I have accounted for them, to the. extent this will be possible, the novelties of all kinds that have been produced in the course of evolution will still not be explained. But although I would not dream of denying the importance of the problems such novelties pose, I think those problems benefit by being treated at the proper time, and there is good reason not to tackle them until after those whose study I have undertaken.

II'

My research is not solely of interest to the science of religions. There is an as- pect of every religion that transcends the realm ofspecifically religious ideas. Through it, the study of religious phenomena provides a means of revisiting problems that until now have been debated only among philosophers.

It has long been known that the first systems of representations that man made of the world and himself were of religious origin. There is mo religion that is not both a cosmology and a speculation about the divine. If philosophy and the sciences were born in religion, it is because religion itself began by serving as science and philosophy. Further, and less often noted, religion has not merely enriched a human intellect already formed but in fact has helped to form it. Men owe to religion not only the content of their knowledge, in significant part, but also the form in which that knowledge, is elaborated.

At the root of our judgments, there are certain fundamental notions that dominate our entire intellectual life. It is these ideas that philosophers, be- ginning with Aristotle, have called the categories of understanding: notions of time, space,4 number, cause, substance, personality.* They correspond to

*Usually referred to in Kantian circles as the "categories of understanding" or the "categories of the understanding," technically these are called "pure concepts of understanding"—that is, concepts, or rules for organizing the variety of sense perceptions, that He ready in the mind and are brought into play by our efforts to make sense of our sensations. For clarifying correspondence on these points, I thank Professor Robert Paul Wolff.

4I call time and space categories because there is no difference between the role these notions play in intellectual life and that which falls to notions of kind and cause. (See on this point [Octave] Hamelin, Es- sai sur les elementsprindpaux de la representation, Paris, Alcan [1907], pp. 63, 76.)

the most universal properties of things. They are like-solid frames that con- fine thought. Thought does not seem to be able to break out of them with- out destroying itself, since it seems we cannot think of objects that are not in time or space, that cannot be counted, and so forth. T h e other ideas are con- tingent and changing, and we can conceive of a man, a society, or an. epoch that lacks them; but these fundamental notions seem'to us as almost-insepa- rable from the normal functioning of the intellect. They are, as it were, the skeleton of thought. Now, when one analyzes primitive religious beliefs me- thodically, one naturally finds the principal categories among them. They are born in and from religion; they are a product of religious thought. This* is a point that I will make: again-and again in the course of this book.

Even n o w that point has a certain interest of its own, but here is what

gives it its true significance. T h e general conclusion of the chapters to follow is that religion is an

eminently social, thing. Religious representations are collective representa- tions that express collective realities; rites are ways of acting'that are, born only in the midst of assembled groups and whose purpose is to evoke, main- tain,, or recreate certain mental states of those groups. But if the categories are of religious origin, then they must participate in* what is common to all re- ligion: They, too, must be. social things, products of collective thought. At the very least—since with .our present understanding of these matters, radi- cal and exclusive theses are to be guarded against—it is legitimate to say that they are rich in social elements.

This, it must be added, is something one can begin to see even now for certain of the categories. For example, what if one tried to imagine what the notion of time would be in the absence of the methods we use to divide, measure, and express it with objective signs, a time that was not a succession of years, months, weeks, days, and hours? It would be nearly impossible to conceive of. We can conceive of time only if we differentiate between m o - ments. Now, what is the origin of that differentiation? Undoubtedly, states of consciousness that we have already experienced can- be reproduced in us in the same order in which they originally occurred; and, in this way, bits of our past become immediate again, even while spontaneously distinguishing themselves from the present. But however important this distinction might

'The phrase "participate in," which occurs frequently, has usually not been replaced with simpler pos- sibilities such as "partakes of" or "shares in" because the notion of participation that can be seen in the sentence "Jesus participated in divine and human nature" must be borne in mind, together with an argu- ment in which Durkheim was engaged. Lucien Levy-Bruhl, whose book Les Fonctions mentaks dans les societes infirieures Durkheim criticizes, considered "participations" to exemplify the inherent illogic of "primitive" thought. Durkheim held just the opposite.

10 Introduction

be for our private experience, it is far from sufficient to constitute the notion or category of time. The category of time is not simply a partial or complete commemoration of our lived life. It is an abstract and impersonal framework that contains not only our individual existence but also.that of humanity. It is like an endless canvas on which all duration is spread.out before the mind's eye and on which all possible events are located in relation to points of refer- ence that are fixed and specified. It is not my time that is organized in this way; it is time that is conceived of objectively by all men of the same civi- lization. This by itself is enough to make us begin, to see that any such orga- nization would have to be collective. And indeed, observation establishes that these indispensable points, in reference to which all things are arranged tem- porally, are taken from social life. The. division into days, weeks, months, years, etc., corresponds to the recurrence of rites, festivals, and public cere- monies at regular intervals.? A calendar expresses the rhythm of collective ac- tivity while ensuring that regularity.6

The same applies to space. As Hamelin7 has shown, space is not the vague and indeterminate medium that Kant imagined. If purely and ab- solutely homogeneous, it would be of no use and would offer nothing for thought to hold on to. Spatial representation essentially consists in a primary coordination of given sense experience. But this coordination would be im- possible if the parts of space were qualitatively equivalent, if they really were mutually interchangeable. To have a spatial ordering of things is to be able to situate them differently: to place some on the right, others omthe left, these above, those below, north or south, east or west, and so forth, just as, to arrange states of consciousness temporally, it must be possible to locate them at definite dates. That is, space would not be itself if, like time, it was not di- vided and differentiated. But where do these divisions that are essential to

Introduction 11

space come from? In itself it has no right, no left, no high or low, no north or south, etc. All these distinctions evidently arise from the fact that different affective colorings have been assigned to regions. And since all men of the same civilization conceive of space in the same manner, it is evidendy neces- sary that these affective colorings and the distinctions that arise from them also be held in common—which implies almost necessarily that they are of social origin.8

Besides, in some instances this social character is ,made manifest. There are societies in Australia and North America in which space is conceived in the. form of an immense circle, because the camp itself is circular;9 and the spatial circle is divided in exactly the same way as the tribal circle and in its image. As many regions are distinguished as there;are.clans in the tribe, and it is the place the clans occupy in the encampment that determines the ori- entation of the regions. Each region is defined by the totem of the clan to which it is assigned. Among the Zuni, for example, the pueblo is made up of seven sections; each of these sections is a group of clans that has acquired its own unity. In all likelihood, it was originally a single clan that later subdi- vided. Space similarly contains seven regions, and each of these seven sec- tions of the world is in intimate relationship with a section of the pueblo, that is, with a group of clans.10 "Thus," says Cushing, " o n e division is considered to be in relation with the north; another represents the west, another the south,11 etc." Each section of the pueblo has its distinctive color, which sym- bolizes it; each region has its own color, which is that of the corresponding section. Over the course of history, the number of basic clans has varied, and the number.of regions has varied in the same way. Thus, spatial organization was modeled on social organization and replicates it. Far from being built into human nature, no idea exists, up to and including the distinction be-

sIn support of this assertion, see Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Melanges d'histoire des religions, the chapter on "La Representation du temps dans Ia religion," Paris, Alcan [ 1909].

6Through this we see how completely different are the complexus of sensations and images that serves to orient us in duration, and the category of time. The first are the summary of individual experiences, which hold only for the individual who has had them. By contrast, the category of rime expresses a time common to the group—social time", so to speak. This category itself is a true social institution. Thus it is peculiar to man; animals have no representation of this kind.

This distinction between the category of time and the corresponding individual sensations could easily be made in regard to space and cause. This may perhaps help clear up certain confusions, which have fed controversies on these questions. I will return to this point at the Conclusion of the present work.

7Hamelin, Essai sur les ilements principaux de la representation, pp. 75ff

"Otherwise, in order to explain this agreement, one would have to accept the idea that all individu- als, by virtue of their organico-psychic constitution, are affected in the same manner by the different parts of space—which is all the more improbable since the different regions have no affective coloring. More- over, the divisions of space vary among societies—proof that they are not based exclusively on the inborn nature of man.

9See Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, "De Quelques formes primitives de la classification," AS, vol. VI, 1903, pp. 47ff.

'"Ibid., pp. 34ff.

"[Frank Hamilton] Cushing, "Outlines of Zuni Creation Myths," Tfiirteenth Report, BAE, Washing- ton, DC, Government Printing Office, 1896, pp. 367fT. [Throughout, quoted material is translated into English from Durkheim's French renderings.)

12 Introduction

tween right and left, that is not, in all probability, the product of religious, hence collective, representations.12

Analogous demonstrations concerning the notions of genus, force, per- sonality, and efficacy will be found below. O n e might even ask whether the notion of contradiction does not also arise, from social conditions. What tends to make this plausible is the fact that the hold the notion of contradic- tion has had over thought has varied with times and societies. Today the principle of identity governs scientific thought; but there are vast systems of representation that have played a major role in the history of ideas, in which it is commonly ignored: These systems are the mythologies, from the crud- est to the most sophisticated.13 Mythologies deal with beings that have the most contradictory attributes at the same time, that are one-and many, mate- rial and spiritual,.and capable of subdividing themselves indefinitely without losing that which makes them what they are. These historical variations of the rule that seems to govern our present logic show that, far from being en- coded from eternity in the mental constitution of man, the ruledepends at least in part upon historical, hence social, factors. We do not know exactly what these factors are, but we can presume, that they exist.14

Once this hypothesis is accepted, the problem of knowledge can be framed in new terms.

Up to the present, only two doctrines have opposed one another. For some, the categories cannot be derived from experience; They are logically prior to experience and condition it. They are thought of as so many simple data that are irreducible and immanent in the human intellect by virtue of its natural makeup. They are thus called a priori. For others, by contrast, the cat- egories are constructed, made out of bits and pieces, and it is the. individual who is the artisan of that construction.15

lzSee Robert Hertz, "La Preeminence de la main droite: Etude de polarite religieuse," RP, Decem- ber, 1909. On this question of the relations between the representation of space and the form of the group, see the chapter in [Friednch] Ratzel, Politische Geographit [Leipzig, R. Oldenbourg, 1897], tided "Der Raum im Geiste der Volker" [pp. 261-262].

I3I do not mean to say that it is unknown to mythological thinking but that mythological thinking de- parts from this principle more often and more overtly than scientific thought. Conversely, 1 will show that science cannot help but violate it, even while following it more scrupulously than religion does. In this respect and many others, there are only differences of degree between science and religion; but if these should not be overstated, it is important to notice them, for they are significant.

l4This hypothesis has already been advanced by the founders of Volkcrpsychologie. It is referred to, for example, in 3 short article by WiJhcIni Windelband titled, "Die Erkenntnisslehre unter dem Volkerpsy- chologischen Geschichtspunkte," in ZV [Lichtenstein, Kraus Reprints, Ltd., 1968], VIM, pp. 166ff. Cf. a note by JHeymann] Steinthal on the same- subject, ibid., pp. 178ff.

l5Even in the theory of [Herbert] Spencer, the categories are constructed from experience. The only difference in this respect between ordinary and evolutionary empiricism is chat, according to the latter,

Introduction 13

Both solutions give rise to grave difficulties. Is the empiricist thesis adopted? Then the categories must be stripped of

their characteristic properties. In fact, they are distinguished from all.other knowledge by their universality and their necessity. They are the most gen- eral concepts that'exist, because they are applied to all that is real; and just as they are not attached to any particular object, they are independent of any individual subject. They are the common ground where all minds meet. What is more; minds meet there of necessity: Reason, which is none other than the fundamental categories taken together, is vested with an authority that we can- not escape at will. When we try to resist it, to free ourselves from some of these fundamental notions, we meet sharp resistance. Hence, far from merely de- pending u p o n u s , they impose themselves uponrus. But the characteristics of empirical data are diametrically opposite. A sensation or an image is always linked to a definite object or collection of definitcobjects, and it expresses the momentary state of a particular consciousness. It is fundamentally individual and subjective. Moreover, we can do as we wish with representations that are of this origin. Of course, when sensations are present to us, they impose them- selves on us in fact. By right, however, we remain free to conceive them other- wise than they are and to picture them as. occurring in an order different from the one in which they occurred. In regard to them, nothing is binding on us un- less considerations of a different sort intervene. Here, then, are two sorts of knowledge that are like opposite poles of the intellect. Under these conditions, to reduce reason to experience, is to make reason disappear—because it is to reduce the universality and necessity that characterize reason to mere appear- ances, illusions that might be practically convenient but that correspond to nothing in things. Consequently, it is to deny all objective reality to that log- ical life which the function of the categories is to regulate and organize. Clas- sical empiricism leads to irrationalism; perhaps it should be called by that name.

Notwithstanding the sense we ordinarily attach to the labels, it is the apriorists who are more attentive to the facts. Since they do not take it as self- evident truth that the categories are made of the same elements as our sense representations, they are not committed to impoverishing the categories sys- tematically, emptying them of all real content and reducing them to mere verbal artifices. Quite the contrary, apriorists leave the categories with all their distinctive characteristics. The apriorists are rationalists; they believe

the results of individual experience are consolidated by heredity. But that consolidation adds nothing es- sential; no element enters into their composition that does not originate in the experience of the indi- vidual. Also, according to that theory, the necessity with which the categories impose themselves upon us in the present is itself the product of an illusion, a superstitious prejudice that is deeply rooted in the or- ganism but without foundation in the nature of things.

H Introduction Introduction

that the world has a logical aspect that reason eminently expresses. To do this, however, they have to ascribe to the intellect a certain power to transcend experience and add to what is immediately given. But for this singular power, they offer neither explanation nor warrant. Merely to say it is inher- ent in the nature of human intellect is not to explain that power. It would still be necessary to see where we acquire this astounding prerogative and how we are able to see relationships in things that mere spectating cannot reveal to us. To confine oneself to saying that experience itself is possible only on that condition is to shift the problem, perhaps, but not to solve it. The point is to know how it happens that experience is not enough, but presupposes condi- tions that are external and prior to experience, and how it happens that these conditions are met at the time and in the manner needed. To answer these questions, it has sometimes been imagined that, beyond the reason of indi- viduals, there is a superior and perfect reason from which that of individuals emanated and, by a sort of mystic participation, presumably acquired its mar- velous faculty: That superior and perfect reason is divine reason. But, at best, this hypothesis has the grave disadvantage of being shielded from all experi- mental control, so it does-not meet the requirements of a scientific-hypo the- sis. More than that', the categories of human thought are never fixed in a definite form; they are ceaselessly made, unmade, and remade; they vary ac- cording to time and'place. By contrast, divine reason is immutable. How could this invariance account for such constant variability?

Such are the two conceptions that have-competed for centuries. And if the debate has gone o n and on, it is because the arguments back and forth are in fact more or less equivalent. If reason is but a>form of individual experi- ence, then reason is no more. O n the other hand, if the capacities with which it is credited are recognized but left unaccounted for, then reason apparently is placed outside nature and science. Faced with'these opposite objections, the intellect remains uncertain. But if the social origin of the categories is ac- cepted, a new stance becomes possible, one that should 'enable us, I believe, to avoid these opposite difficulties.

T h e fundamental thesis of apriorism is that knowledge is formed from two sorts of elements that are irreducible one to the other—two distinct, su- perimposed layers, so to speak.16 My hypothesis keeps this principle intact. T h e knowledge that people speak of as empirical—all that theorists of em- piricism have ever used to construct reason—is the knowledge that the direct

lftIt is perhaps surprising that I should not define apriorism by the hypothesis of inn ate n ess. But that idea actually has only a secondary role in the doctrine, it is a simplistic way of portraying the irreducibil- ity of rational cognition to empirical data. To call it innate is no more than a positive way of saying that it is not a product of experience as usually conceived.

15

action of objects calls forth in our minds. Thus they are individual states that are wholly17 explained by the psychic nature of the individual. But if the cat- egories are essentially collective representations; as 1 think they are, they translate states of the collectivity, first and foremost. They depend upon the way in which the collectivity is organized, upon its morphology, its religious, moral, and economic institutions, and so on. Between these two kinds of representations, then, is all.the distance th3t separates the.individual from the social; one.can no more derive the second from the first than one can deduce the society from the individual, the whole from the part, or .the complex from the simple.18 Society is a reality sui generis; it has its own characteristics that are either not .found in the rest of the universe or are not found.there in the same form. T h e representations that express society therefore have, an al- together different content from the purely individual representations, and one can be, certain in advance that the former add, something to the latter.

The. manner, in which'both kinds of representations are formed brings about,their differentiation. Collective representations are the product of an immense cooperation that extends not only through, space'but also through time; to make them, a multitude, of different minds have associated, inter- mixed, and combined their ideas and feelings; long generations have accu- mulated their experience and knowledge. A very special intellectuality that is infinitely richer and .more complex than that of the individual is distilled in them. That being the case, we understand h o w reason has gained the power to go beyond the range of empirical cognition. It owes this power not to some mysterious virtue b u t sirriply to the fact that, as the well-known for- mula has it,.man is double. In.him are two beings: an individual being that has its basis in the body and whose sphere of action is strictly limited by this fact, and a social being that represents within us the highest reality in the in- tellectual and moral* realm that is knowable through observation: I mean so-

*On Durkheim's characteristic uses of the term "moral," see above, p. lv—Ivi. ,7At least to the extent that there are individual, and thus fully empirical, representations. But in fact

there probably is no case in which those two sorts of elements arc not found closely bound up together.

'"Furthermore, this irreducibility should not be understood in an absolute sense. I do not mean that there is nothing in the empirical representations that announces the rational ones, or that there is nothing in the individual that can be considered the harbinger of social life. If experience was completely foreign to all that is rational, reason would not be applicable to it. Likewise, if the psychic nature of the individ- ual was absolutely resistant to social life, society would be impossible. Therefore a full analysis of the cat- egories would look for the seeds of rationality in individual consciousness. I shall have occasion to return to this point in my Conclusion. All I wish to establish here is that there is a distance between the indis- tinct seeds of reason and reason properly so-called that is comparable to the distance between the proper- ties of mineral elements, from which the living being is made, and the. characteristic properties of life, once constituted.

^ ^ r

16 Introduction Introduction

; J

ciety [J'etUends la sodete]. In the realm of practice, the consequence of this duality in our nature is the irreducibility of the moral ideal to the utilitarian motive; in the realm of thought, it is the irreducibility of reason to individ- ual experience. As part of society,, the individual naturally transcends himself, both when he thinks and when he. acts.

This same social characteristic enables us to understand where the ne- cessity of the categories comes from. An.idea is said to be necessary* when, d u e t o somesort of internal property, it enjoys credence without the support of any proof. It thus contains in itself something that compels the:intellect and wins over intellectual adherence without prior examination. Apriorism postulates that remarkable capacity without accounting for it. To say that the categories are necessary because they are'indispensable to thought is simply to repeat that they are necessary. But if they have the origin that I am at- tributing to them, nothing about their ascendancy should surprise'us any longer. They do indeed express the most general relationships that exist be- tween things; having broader scope than all our ideas, they govern all the particulars of our intellectual life. If, at every moment, men did not agree on these fundamental ideas, if they did not have a homogeneous conception of time, space, cause, number, and so on. All consensus among minds, and thus all common life, would become impossible;

Hence society cannot leave the categories up to the free choice of indi- viduals without abandoning itself. To live, it requires not only a minimum moral consensus but also a minimum logical consensus that it cannot do without either. Thus, in order to prevent dissidence, society weighs on its members with all its authority. Does a mind seek to free itself from these norms of all thought? Society no longer considers this a human mind in the full sense, and treats it accordingly. This is why-it: is .that when we try, even deep down inside, to get away from these fundamental notions, we feel that we are not fully free; something resists us, from inside and outside ourselves. Outside us, it is opinion that judges us; more than that, because society is represented inside us as well, it resists these revolutionary impulses from within. We feel that we cannot abandon ourselves to them without our thought's ceasing to be truly human. Such appears to be the origin of the very special authority that is inherent in reason and that makes us trustingly accept its promptings. This is none other than the authority of society19 pass- i n g i n t o certain ways of thinking that are the indispensable conditions of all

*Note here that the sense of the word "necessary" is distinct from the everyday concept of need. See also the next paragraph.

"It has often been noticed that social disturbances multiply mental disturbances. This is further evi- dence that logical discipline is an aspect of social discipline. The former relaxes when the latter weakens.

17

common action. Thus the necessity with which the categories press them-r selves upon us is not merely the effect of habits whose yoke we could slip with Iitde effort; nor is that necessity a habit or a physical or metaphysical need, since the categories change with place and time; it is a special sort of moral necessity that is to intellectual life what obligation.is to the will.20

But if the categories at first do no more than translate social states, does it not follow that they can be applied to the rest of nature only as metaphors? If their, purpose is merely to express social things, it would seem that they could be. extended to other realms only by convention. Thus, insofar as they serve us in conceiving the physical or biological world, they can only have the value of artificial symbols—useful perhaps, but with no connection to re^ ality. We would thus return to nominalism and empiricism by another route.

To interpret a sociological theory of knowledge in that way is to forget that even if society is a specific reality, it is not an empire within an empire: It is part of nature and nature's highest expression. T h e social realm is a natural realm that differs from others only in its greater complexity. It is impossible that na- ture, in that which is most fundamental in itself, should be radically different between one part and another of itself. It is impossible that the fundamental relations that exist between.things—precisely those relations that the categor- ies serve to express—should be fundamentally dissimilar in one realm and an- other. If, for reasons that we shall have to discover,21 they stand out more clearly in the social world, it is impossible that they should not be found elsewhere, though in more shrouded forms. Society makes them more manifest but has no monopoly on them. This is why notions worked out on the model of so- cial things can help us think about other sorts of things. At the very least, if, when they deviate from their initial meaning, those notions play in a sense the role of symbols, it is the role of well-founded symbols. If artifice enters in, through the very fact that these are constructed concepts, it is an artifice that closely follows nature and strives to come ever closer to nature.22 The fact

^There is an analogy between this logical necessity and moral obligation but hot identity—at least not at present. Today, society treats criminals differently from people who are mentally handicapped. This is evidence that, despite significant similarities, the authority attached to logical norms and that inherent in moral norms are not of the same nature. They are two different species of one genus. It would be inter- esting to research what that difference {probably not primitive) consists of and where it comes from, since for a long time public consciousness barely distinguished the delinquent from the mentally ill. From this example, we can see the numerous problems raised by the analysis of these notions, which are generally thought elementary and simple but actually are extremely complex.

21This question is treated in the Conclusion of this book. 2-Hence the rationalism that is immanent in a sociological theory of knowledge stands between em-

piricism and classical apriorism. For the first, the categories are purely artificial constructs; for the second, on the.other hand, they are naturally given; for us, they arc works of art, in a sense, but an art that imi- tates nature ever more perfectly.

Introduction

that the ideas of time, space, genus, cause, and personality are constructed from social-elements should not lead us to conclude that they are stripped of all objective value. Quite the contrary, their social origin leads one indeed to suppose that they are not without foundation in the nature of things.23

In this fresh formulation, the theory of knowledge seems destined to join the opposite advantages of the two rival "theories, without their disadvan- tages. It preserves all the essential principles of apriorism but at the same time takes inspiration from the positive turn of mind that empiricism,sought to satisfy. It leaves reason with its specific power, but accounts for that power, and does so without leaving the observable world.-It affirms as real the dual- ity of ourintellectual life, but explains that duality, and does so with natural causes. T h e categories cease to be regarded as primary and unanalyzable facts; and yet they remain of such complexity that analyses as simplistic as those with which empiricism contented itself cannot possibly be right. N o longer do they appear as very' simple notions that anyone can sift from his personal observations, and that popular imagination unfortunately complicated; quite the contrary, they appear as ingenious instruments of thought, which human groups have painstakingly forged over centuries, and in which they have amassed the best of their intellectual capital.24 A whole aspect of human his- tory is, in a way, summed up in them. This amounts to saying that to succeed in understanding and evaluating them, it is necessary to turn to new proce- dures. To know what the conceptions that we ourselves have not made are made of, it cannot be enough to consult our own consciousness. We must loolc outside ourselves, observe history, and institute a whole science, a com- plex one at that, which can advance only slowly and by collective labor. T h e present work is an attempt to make certain fragmentary contributions to that science. Without making these questions the direct subject of my study, I will take advantage of all the opportunities that present themselves to capture at birth at least some of those ideas that, while religious in origin, were bound nevertheless to remain at the basis of human mentality.

23For example, the category of time has its basis in the rhythm of social life; but if there is a rhythm of collective life, one can be certain that there is another in the life of the individual and, more generally, that of the universe. The first is only more marked and apparent than the others. Likewise, we will see that the notion of kind was formed from that of the human group. But if men form natural groups, one can sup- pose that there exist among things groups that are at once similar to them and different. These natural groups of things are genera and species.

24This is why it is legitimate to compare the categories with tools: Tools, for their part, are accumu- lated material capital. Moreover, there is close kinship between the three ideas of tool, category, and in- stitution.

B O O K O N E

P R E L I M I N A R Y

Q U E S T I O N S

CHAPTER ONE

D E F I N I T I O N O F R E L I G I O U S

P H E N O M E N A A N D O F

R E L I G I O N 1

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 w h o m 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).

'I have already tried to define the phenomenon of religion, in a work published by AS, vol. II [1899], pp. Iff. ["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 of life, they cannot be relied on and must be rig- orously kept to one side in the examination-that follows. It is riot-6ur 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 w h o 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 amystery seeking an explanation,,; he makes them out basically to consist of "the belief in the omnipresence of something that goes

:See above, p. 3. I do not push the necessity of these definitions further or the method to be followe • The exposition is to be found in my Regies de la methode sociologique |Paris, Alcan, 18951, pp. 43ff. C'- Suicide; [etude de sociology] (Paris, F. Alcan [1897)), pp. Iff.

Definition of Religious Phenomena and of Religion 23

beyond the intellect."3 Simiharly,.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 fash 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. ;lt 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.

'iHerbert Spencer, First Principles, New York, D. Appleton, 1862, French translation based on the S1*th English edition], Paris, F. Alcan [1902], pp. 38-39, [p. 37 in the English edition. Trans.].

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

The same turn of mind is also to be found in the period of scholasticism, as is shown in the formula cording to which the philosophy of that period was defined, Fides quaerens intetleaum [Faith in search of

'"tetlect. 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 w h o 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. N o t 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. W h e n 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, ss 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 of 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 was 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 ( e a u u m a , mirabiUa, miracuk); 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. T h e 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 o u t o f 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 becausethey 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. T h e 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.th3t 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 eclipsed; 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 i s 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

IFrank 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 sciences 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.

1md„ p. 23.

"See below Bk. III. chap. 2.

Definition of Religious Phenomena and of 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 feelingjoined." 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 one 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. Frazer11 systematically applies this criterion, as do several ethnographers.12

[̂Albert Reville], Prolegomenes de I'histoire des religions [Paris, Fischbacher, 1881], p. 34. 1 "Edward Burnett Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. I [London, John Murray, 1873, p. 491].

"Starting with the first edition of The Golden Bough, vol. I, pp. 30-32. [James Frazer, Tlie Golden Bough, 2'vols., London and New York, Macmillan, 1890.]

Încluding [Sir Baldwin] Spencer and [Francis James] Gill en and even [Konrad Theodor] Preuss, who calls all nonindividualized religious forces magic.

28 PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS Definition of Religious Phenomena and of Religion 29

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 N a - ture."13 "It recognizes no god on w h o m 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 call1 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. T h e 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. O n 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

l3[Eugene] Burnouf, Introduction d i'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 ah eternal Na- ture.

,4Auguste Barth, The Religions of India [translated from French by Rev. J. Wood, London, Houghton Mifflin, 1882], p. 110.

l5[Hermann] Oldenberg, Le Bouddha [Sa vie, sa doctrhte, sa communaute, translated from the German by A. Foucher, Pans, F Alcan, 1894, p. 51. I could not find an edition Durkheim lists as translated by "Hoey" and giving the page as 53. Trans.].

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

I701denberg, Bouddha, p. 259 [this passage actually examines the denial of the existence of the soul. Trans.]; Barth, Religions of India, p. 110.

'"Oldenberg, Bouddha, p. 314.

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. T h e 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,5''' 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 Buddhism. " T h e 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 hot 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 of Buddhism. At first, the Buddha was not regarded as anything other than "the wisest of men."23 " T h e conception of a Buddha who is other than a man who has reached the highest degree of h o - liness is," says Burnouf, "outside the circle of ideas that are the very founda-

*Here, as in the definition of religion (p. 44), Durkheim capitalizes the word "church." |yBarth [Religions of India], p. 109. "I am deeply convinced," says Burnouf as well, "that if Qakya 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).

21,Burnouf, Bouddhisme indien, p. 117. 2,Kern, Histoire du bouddhisme, vol. I, p. 289.

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

Îbid., 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, andsalvation only requires one to know and practice the right doctrine. O f 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

24Ibid., p. 107. 25Ibid., 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" {Histoire du bouddhisme vol. [, p. 290).

^"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]).

2M"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 histor- ical Buddha also applies to all the mythological ones.

^See in this connection Max Miiller, 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 Jinapati* is spoken of, a kind of supreme Jina w h o 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 andjainism 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 oh himself and meditate. Oldenburg says, " W h e n 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. T h e 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.

•"'Barth, Religions of India, p. 146. 3lBarth, ["Religions de l'lnde"] in Encyclopidie des sciences religieuses [Pans, Sandoz et Fischbacher,

1877-1882], vol. VI, p. 548. KOIdenberg, 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 r 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 iŝ 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}* Certain ascetic practices are equally efficacious. Consider this: "Sacrifice is so much the principle, par ex-

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

^Abel Bergaigne, La Religion vidique [d'apres les hymnes du Rig VUa, 4 vols. Paris, F. Vieweg, 1878-1897], vol. I, p. 22.

37Ibid., p. 133. 38M. 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. W h e n 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 desired1 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 exacdy the same as those that had already proved successful.

Thus there are rites without gods, and indeed rites from which gods de- rive. N o t 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.

Ill

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

39Ibid.,p. 139. •"'Other examples are to be found in [Henri] Hubert, "Magia." in Dictionnaire des anttqu'ues, 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 t h e 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. T h e 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 profane 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

*WilheIm 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 of 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 varyinfi- 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

O n 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

sarily.

'Not to mention the sage or the saint who practices these truths, and who is for this reason sacred. 2This is not to say that the relations cannot take on a religious character, but that they do not neces-

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 "heterogeneity 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. T h e 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 differendy 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 theseworlds 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] Feticlnsmus [Ein Beitrag zur Anthropologic und Religionsgeschichte, Leipzig, C. Wilfferodt, 1871], p. 129.

44ExampIes of these customs will be found in Qames George] Frazer, Golden Bough, 2d ed., vol. I [New York, Macmillan, 1894], pp. 8lff.

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 constiruted, 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 substandae.* At that moment, the young man.is said to die; and the existence of t h e p a r - 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 monasticism, which artificially organizes a milieu'that is apart from, outside of, and closed 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.

T h e 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. T h e 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. •"•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 fla nature et fonction du] sacrifice," AS, vol. II [1897], p. 101.)

I f

3H PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS Definition of Religious Phenomena and of Religion 39

one another. T h e 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. T h e two genera 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. N o 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 arid 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 1 say about initiation on p. 37, above. '"'Later 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.Ill. chap.5, §4).

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 constitutedreligion can exist: because they are nokor are no longer integrated into a religious system. If, for specific reasons, one of those cultsjust. mentioned should manage to survive, while the-whole to which i t belonged has disappeared, it willrsurvive only in fragments. This is what has happened to so many agrarian cults that live o n 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 triedrto 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 r perience. seems likely to have suggested the idea of such a radical duality.

I V

Even so, this definition is not yet complete, for it fits equally well two orders o{ 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,

'This 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 Australia50 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 hell of which he is the keeper is an indispensable part in the-machinery of the Christian religion? T h e 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. T h e 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—r-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-

'̂See [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.

''See [Robert Henry] Codrington, Tlte Melanestans [Studies in Tiieir Anthropology and Folklore, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1891], chap. 12.

,2See Hubert, "Magia," in Dictionttaire des antiquites.

-i3For example, in Melanesia the tindalo is a spirit that is sometimes religious and sometimes magical (Codrington, Tlte Melanesians, pp. 125ff., 194ff.).

S4See 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.

^ee Hubert, "Magia," in Dictionnaire des antiquites.

Definition of Religious Phenomena and of 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. N o t 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 united because they imagineithe sacred world and its relations-with 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, theTlebrews); 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. 5RCertainIy 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.

S9In Athens, the gods addressed by the domestic cult are only specialized forms of the gods of the City (Zeis KTTjCiog, Zev$ €pK€ioq). [Zeus, protector of property, Zeus, the household god. Trans.] Similarly, in the Middle Ages, the patrons of brotherhoods are saints of the calendar.

wFor the name of Church ordinarily applies only to a group whose common beliefs refer to a sphere of less 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. Tltere 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.

filHubert and Mauss, "Esquisse," p. 18.

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

Definition of Religious Phenomena and of 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 Bank's Islands has his tamaniu;6* the R o m a n 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 recognize'd 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 R o m a n religion (to cite only these two example's). 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. W h e n 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.

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

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

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

f

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 l o o k i n t o t h e 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

''''Among 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.

h!tIt is there that my definition picks up the one I proposed some time ago in the Annee sociologique. In that work, I defined religious beliefs exclusively by their obligatory character; but that obligation evidently arises, as 1 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 representations. In trie 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 bene , it has infinite gradations; consequendy, it is not easily perceptible in some cases. There arise difficulties an troublesome questions that are avoided if this criterion is replaced by the one I have used above.

i

CHAPTER TWO

T H E L E A D I N G C O N C E P T I O N S

O F T H E E L E M E N T A R Y

R E L I G I O N

/ . Animism

With this definition in hand, we can set out in search of the elementary religion, our intended goal. Even the crudest religions that history and ethnography make known to

us are already so complex that they do not fit the notion people sometimes have of primitive mentality. They display not only a luxuriant system of beliefs but also such variety in principles and wealth in basic ideas that it has seemed impossible to regard them as anything but a late product of a rather long evo- lution. From this scholars have concluded that in order to uncover the truly original form of religious life, they had to delve beneath these observable re- ligions, analyze them to identify the basic elements they share, and find out whether there is one such element from which the others are derived.

Set'in those terms, the problem has received two contrary solutions. It can be said that there is no religious system, old or new, in which we

do not find what amounts to two religions existing side by side and in vari- ous forms. Although closely allied and even interpenetrating, yet they remain distinct. O n e is addressed to phenomena in nature—whether great cosmic forces, such as the winds, the rivers, the stars, the sky, etc., or the objects of all sorts that populate the earth's surface, such as plants, animals, rocks, etc. For this reason, it is given the name "naturism." The other is addressed to spiritual beings—spirits, souls, genies, demons, deities proper. These beings are animate and conscious agents, like man, but differ from man in the na- ture of the powers ascribed to them, in particular the special characteristic that they do not affect the senses in the same way; they are not usually per- ceptible to human eyes. This religion of spirits is called "animism." Two in- compatible theories have been put forward to explain the more or less

45

INTRODUCTION

The extraordinary interest aroused all over the

world by Rudolf Otto's Das Heilige (The Sacred), pub-

lished in 1917, still persists. Its success was certainly

due to the author's new and original point of view. In-

stead of studying the ideas of God and religion, Otto

undertook to analyze the modalities of the religious

experience. Gifted with great psychological subtlety, and

thoroughly prepared by his twofold training as theo-

logian and historian of religions, he succeeded in de-

termining the content and specific characteristics of

religious experience. Passing over the rational and

speculative side of religion, he concentrated chiefly on

its irrational aspect. For Otto had read Luther and had

understood what the "living God" meant to a believer.

It was not the God of the philosophers—of Erasmus, 8

for example; it was not an idea, an abstract notion, a

mere moral allegory. It was a terrible power, manifested

in the divine wrath.

In Das Heilige Otto sets himself to discover the char-

acteristics of this frightening and irrational experience.

He finds the feeling of terror before the sacred, before

the awe-inspiring mystery (mysterium tremendum) , the

majesty (majestas) that emanates an overwhelming

superiority of power; he finds religious fear before the

fascinating mystery (mysterium fascinans) in which

perfect fullness of being flowers. Otto characterizes all

these experiences as numinous (from Latin numen, god),

for they are induced by the revelation of an aspect of

divine power. The numinous presents itself as something

"wholly other" (ganz andere), something basically and

9>

10 The Sacred and the Profane

totally different. It is like nothing human or cosmic;

confronted with it, man senses his profound nothing-

ness, feels that he is only a creature, or, in the words in

which Abraham addressed the Lord, is "but dust and

ashes" (Genesis, 18, 27).

The sacred always manifests itself as a reality of a

wholly different order from "natural" realities. It is

true that language naively expresses the tremendum, or

the majestas, or the mysterium fascinans by terms bor-

rowed from the world of nature or from man's secular

mental life. But we know that this analogical terminol-

ogy is due precisely to human inability to express the

ganz andere; all that goes beyond man's natural expe-

rience, language is reduced to suggesting by terms taken

from that experience.

After forty years, Otto's analyses have not lost their

value; readers of this book will profit by reading and

reflecting on them. But in the following pages we adopt

a different perspective. We propose to present the phe- nomenon of the sacred in all its complexity, and not only

in so far as it is irrational. What will concern us is not

the relation between the rational and nonrational ele-

ments of religion but the sacred in its entirety. The first

possible definition of the sacred is that it is the opposite

of the profane. The aim of the following pages is to illus-

trate and define this opposition between sacred and

profane.

Introduction 11

WHEN THE SACRED MANIFESTS ITSELF

Man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself, as something wholly differ-

ent from the profane. To designate the act of manifes-

tation of the sacred, we have proposed the term hiero-

phony. It is a fitting term, because it does not imply

anything further; it expresses no more than is implicit

in its etymological content, i.e., that something sacred

shows itself to us. 1

It could be said that the history of

religions—from the most primitive to the most highly developed—is constituted by a great number of hiero- phanies, by manifestations of sacred realities. From the

most elementary hierophany

—

e.g., manifestation of the

sacred in some ordinary object, a stone or a tree—to the supreme hierophany (which, for a Christian, is the

incarnation of God in Jesus Christ) there is no solution

of continuity. In each case we are confronted by the same

mysterious act—the manifestation of something of a wholly different order, a reality that does not belong to

our world, in objects that are an integral part of our

natural "profane" world.

The modern Occidental experiences a certain uneasi-

ness before many manifestations of the sacred. He finds

it difficult to accept the fact that, for many human beings,

the sacred can be manifested in stones or trees, for

1 Cf. Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, New York, Sheed

& Ward, 1958, pp. 7 ff. Cited hereafter as Patterns.

v

12 The Sacred and the Profane

example. But as we shall soon see, what is involved is

not a veneration of the stone in itself, a cult of the tree

in itself. The sacred tree, the sacred stone are not

adored as stone or tree; they are worshipped precisely

because they are hierophanies, because they show some-

thing that is no longer stone or tree but the sacred, the

ganz andere.

It is impossible to overemphasize the paradox repre-

sented by every hierophany, even the most elementary.

By manifesting the sacred, any object becomes something

else, yet it continues to remain itself, for it continues to

participate in its surrounding cosmic milieu. A sacred stone remains a stone ; apparently (or, more precisely,

from the profane point of view), nothing distinguishes it

from all other stones. But for those to whom a stone

reveals itself as sacred, its immediate reality is trans-

muted into a supernatural reality. In other words, for

those who have a religious experience all nature is

capable of revealing itself as cosmic sacrality. The

cosmos in its entirety can become a hierophany.

The man of the archaic societies tends to live as much

as possible in the sacred or in close proximity to con-

secrated objects. The tendency is perfectly understand-

able, because, for primitives as for the man of all pre-

modern societies, the sacred is equivalent to a power,

and, in the last analysis, to reality. The sacred is saturated

with being. Sacred power means reality and at the same

time enduringness and efficacity. The polarity sacred-

Introduction 13

profane is often expressed as an opposition between real

and unreal or pseudoreal. (Naturally, we must not expect

to find the archaic languages in possession of this philo-

sophical terminology, real-unreal, etc.; but we find the

thing.) Thus it is easy to understand that religious man

deeply desires to 6e, to participate in reality, to be satu-

rated with power.

Our chief concern in the following pages will be to

elucidate this subject—to show in what ways religious man attempts to remain as long as possible in a sacred

universe, and hence what his total experience of life

proves to be in comparison with the experience of the

man without religious feeling, of the man who lives, or

wishes to live, in a desacralized world. It should be said

at once that the completely profane world, the wholly

desacralized cosmos, is a recent discovery in the history

of the human spirit. It does not devolve upon us to show

by what historical processes and as the result of what

changes in spiritual attitudes and behavior modern man

has desacralized his world and assumed a profane exist-

ence. For our purpose it is enough to observe that

desacralization pervades the entire experience of the

nonreligious man of modern societies and that, in con-

sequence, he finds it increasingly difficult to rediscover

the existential dimensions of religious man in the archaic

societies.

14 The Sacred and the Profane

TWO MODES OF BEING IN THE WORLD

The abyss that divides the two modalities of expe-

rience^—sacred and profane—will be apparent when we come to describe sacred space and the ritual building of

the human habitation, or the varieties of the religious

experience of time, or the relations of religious man to

nature and the world of tools, or the consecration of

human life itself, the sacrality with which man's vital

functions (food, sex, work and so on) can be charged.

Simply calling to mind what the city or the house, nature,

tools, or work have become for modern and nonreligious

man will show with the utmost vividness all that dis-

tinguishes such a man from a man belonging to any

archaic society, or even from a peasant of Christian

Europe. For modern consciousness, a physiological act

—eating, sex, and so on—is in sum only an organic phenomenon, however much it may still be encumbered

by tabus (imposing, for example, particular rules for

"eating properly" or forbidding some sexual behavior

disapproved by social morality). But for the primitive,

such an act is never simply physiological; it is, or can

become, a sacrament, that is, a communion with the

sacred.

The reader will very soon realize that sacred and pro-

fane are two modes of being in the world, two existential

situations assumed by man in the course of his history.

These modes of being in the world are not of concern

Introduction 15

only to the history of religions or to sociology; they are

not the object only of historical, sociological, or ethno-

logical study. In the last analysis, the sacred and profane

modes of being depend upon the different positions that

man has conquered in the cosmos; hence they are of

concern both to the philosopher and to anyone seeking

to discover the possible dimensions of human existence.

It is for this reason that, though he is a historian of

religions, the author of this book proposes not to confine

himself only to the perspective of his particular science.

The man of the traditional societies is admittedly a homo

religiosus, but his behavior forms part of the general

behavior of mankind and hence is of concern to philo-

sophical anthropology, to phenomenology, to psychol-

ogy.

The better to bring out the specific characteristics of

life in a world capable of becoming sacred, I shall not

hesitate to cite examples from many religions belonging

to different periods and cultures. Nothing can take the

place of the example, the concrete fact. It would be use-

less to discuss the structure of sacred space without

showing, by particular examples, how such a space is

constructed and why it becomes qualitatively different

from the profane space by which it is surrounded. I

shall select such examples from among the Mesopo-

tamians, the Indians, the Chinese, the Kwakiutl and other

primitive peoples. From the historico-cultural point of

view, such a juxtaposition of religious data pertaining

16 The Sacred and the Profane

to peoples so far removed in time and space is not with-

out some danger. For there is always the risk of falling

hack into the errors of the nineteenth century and, par-

ticularly, of believing with Tylor or Frazer that the

reaction of the human mind to natural phenomena is

uniform. But the progress accomplished in cultural eth-

nology and in the history of religions has shown that

this is not always true, that man's reactions to nature

are often conditioned by his culture and hence, finally,

by history.

But the important thing for our purpose is to bring

out the specific characteristics of the religious expe-

rience, rather than to show its numerous variations and

the differences caused by history. It is somewhat as if,

in order to obtain a better grasp of the poetic phenome-

non, we should have recourse to a mass of heterogeneous

examples, and, side by side with Homer and Dante, quote

Hindu, Chinese, and Mexican poems ; that is, should take

into consideration not only poetics possessing a histori-

cal common denominator (Homer, Vergil, Dante) but

also creations that are dependent upon other esthetics.

From the point of view of literary history, such juxta-

positions are to be viewed with suspicion; but they are

valid if our object is to describe the poetic phenomenon

as such, if we propose to show the essential difference

between poetic language and the utilitarian language

of everyday life.

Introduction 17

THE SACRED AND HISTORY

Our primary concern is to present the specific

dimensions of religious experience, to bring out the

differences between it and profane experience of the

world. I shall not dwell on the variations that religious

experience of the world has undergone in the course of

time. It is obvious, for example, that the symbolisms

and cults of Mother Earth, of human and agricultural

fertility, of the sacrality of woman, and the like, could

not develop and constitute a complex religious system

except through the discovery of agriculture; it is equally

obvious that a preagricultural society, devoted to hunt-

ing, could not feel the sacrality of Mother Earth in the

same way or with the same intensity. Hence there are

differences in religious experience explained by differ-

ences in economy, culture, and social organization—in short, by history. Nevertheless, between the nomadic

hunters and the sedentary cultivators there is a similarity

in behavior that seems to us infinitely more important

than their differences: both live in a sacralized cosmos,

both share in a cosmic sacrality manifested equally in

the animal world and in the vegetable world. We need only compare their existential situations with that of a

man of the modern societies, living in a desacralized

cosmos, and we shall immediately be aware of all that

separates him from them. At the same time we realize

the validity of comparisons between religious facts per-

18 The Sacred and the Profane

taining to different cultures; all these facts arise from a

single type of behavior, that of homo religiosus.

This little book, then, may serve as a general intro-

duction to the history of religions, since it describes the

modalities of the sacred and the situation of man in a

world charged with religious values. But it is not a study

in the history of religions in the strict sense, for the

writer, in citing examples, has not undertaken to indi-

cate their historico-cultural contexts. To do so would

have required a work in several volumes. The reader

will find all requisite information in the books listed in

the Bibliography.

MlRCEA ELIADE Saint-Cloud

April, 1956

CHAPTER 1

Sacred Space

and Making

the World Sacred

HOMOGENEITY OF SPACE AND HIEROPHANY

For religious man, space is not homogeneous;

he experiences interruptions, breaks in it; some parts of

space are qualitatively different from others. "Draw not

nigh hither," says the Lord to Moses; "put off thy shoes

from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is

holy ground" (Exodus, 3, 5). There is, then, a sacred

space, and hence a strong, significant space; there are

other spaces that are not sacred and so are without struc-

ture or consistency, amorphous. Nor is this all. For re-

ligious man, this spatial nonhomogeneity finds expres-

sion in the experience of an opposition between space

that is sacred—the only real and real-ly existing space

—

and all other space, the formless expanse surrounding it.

It must be said at once that the religious experience of

the nonhomogeneity of space is a primordial experience,

20

homologizable to a founding of the world. It is not a mat-

ter of theoretical speculation, but of a primary religious

experience that precedes all reflection on the world.

For it is the break effected in space that allows the world

to be constituted, because it reveals the fixed point, the

central axis for all future orientation. When the sacred manifests itself in any hierophany, there is not only a

break in the homogeneity of space; there is also revela-

tion of an absolute reality, opposed to the nonreality of

the vast surrounding expanse. The manifestation of the

sacred ontologically founds the world. In the homo-

geneous and infinite expanse, in which no point of refer-

ence is possible and hence no orientation can be estab-

lished, the hierophany reveals an absolute fixed point,

a center.

21

22 The Sacred and the Profane

So it is clear to what a degree the discovery—that is, the revelation—of a sacred space possesses existential value for religious man; for nothing can begin, nothing

can be done, without a previous orientation—and any orientation implies acquiring a fixed point. It is for this

reason that religious man has always sought to fix his

abode at the "center of the world." // the world is to be

lived in, it must be founded—and no world can come to birth in the chaos of the homogeneity and relativity of

profane space. The discovery or projection of a fixed

point—the center—is equivalent to the creation of the world; and we shall soon give some examples that will

unmistakably show the cosmogonic value of the ritual

orientation and construction of sacred space.

For profane experience, on the contrary, space is

homogeneous and neutral; no break qualitatively differ-

entiates the various parts of its mass. Geometrical space

can be cut and delimited in any direction; but no quali-

tative differentiation and, hence, no orientation are given

by virtue of its inherent structure. We need only remem- ber how a classical geometrician defines space. Natu-

rally, we must not confuse the concept of homogeneous

and neutral geometrical space with the experience of

profane space, which is in direct contrast to the expe-

rience of sacred space and which alone concerns our

investigation. The concept of homogeneous space and the

history of the concept (for it has been part of the com-

mon stock of philosophical and scientific thought since

Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred 23

antiquity) are a wholly different problem, upon which

we shall not enter here. What matters for our purpose

is the experience of space known to nonreligious man

—

that is, to a man who rejects the sacrality of the world, who accepts only a profane existence, divested of all

religious presuppositions.

It must be added at once that such a profane existence

is never found in the pure state. To whatever degree

he may have desacralized the world, the man who has made his choice in favor of a profane life never succeeds

in completely doing away with religious behavior. This

will become clearer as we proceed; it will appear that

even the most desacralized existence still preserves traces

of a religious valorization of the world.

But for the moment we will set aside this aspect of the

problem and confine ourselves to comparing the two

experiences in question—that of sacred space and that of profane space. The implications of the former expe-

rience have already been pointed out. Revelation of a

sacred space makes it possible to obtain a fixed point

and hence to acquire orientation in the chaos of homo-

geneity, to "found the world" and to live in a real sense.

The profane experience, on the contrary, maintains the

homogeneity and hence the relativity of space. No true

orientation is now possible, for the fixed point no longer

enjoys a unique ontological status; it appears and dis-

appears in accordance with the needs of the day. Prop-

erly speaking, there is no longer any world, there are

24 The Sacred and the Profane

only fragments of a shattered universe, an amorphous

mass consisting of an infinite number of more or less

neutral places in which man moves, governed and driven

by the obligations of an existence incorporated into an

industrial society.

Yet this experience of profane space still includes

values that to some extent recall the nonhomogeneity

peculiar to the religious experience of space. There are,

for example, privileged places, qualitatively different

from all others—a man's birthplace, or the scenes of his first love, or certain places in the first foreign city he

visited in youth. Even for the most frankly nonreligious

man, all these places still retain an exceptional, a unique

quality; they are the "holy places" of his private uni-

verse, as if it were in such spots that he had received

the revelation of a reality other than that in which he

participates through his ordinary daily life.

This example of crypto-religious behavior on profane

man's part is worth noting. In the course of this book we

shall encounter other examples of this sort of degrada-

tion and desacralization of religious values and forms of

behavior. Their deeper significance will become appar-

ent later.

THEOPHANIES AND SIGNS

To exemplify the nonhomogeneity of space as

experienced by nonreligious man, we may turn to any

religion. We will choose an example that is accessible to

Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred 25

everyone—a church in a modern city. For a believer, the church shares in a different space from the street in

which it stands. The door that opens on the interior of

the church actually signifies a solution of continuity.

The threshold that separates the two spaces also indi-

cates the distance between two modes of being, the pro-

fane and the religious. The threshold is the limit, the

boundary, the frontier that distinguishes and opposes

two worlds—and at the same time the paradoxical place where those worlds communicate, where passage from

the profane to the sacred world becomes possible.

A similar ritual function falls to the threshold of the human habitation, and it is for this reason that the thresh-

old is an object of great importance. Numerous rites

accompany passing the domestic threshold—a bow, a prostration, a pious touch of the hand, and so on. The

threshold has its guardians—gods and spirits who for- bid entrance both to human enemies and to demons and

the powers of pestilence. It is on the threshold that sacri-

fices to the guardian divinities are offered. Here too cer-

tain palaeo-oriental cultures (Babylon, Egypt, Israel)

situated the judgment place. The threshold, the door

show the solution of continuity in space immediately

and concretely; hence their great religious importance,

for they are symbols and at the same time vehicles of

passage from the one space to the other.

What has been said will make it clear why the church

shares in an entirely different space from the buildings

that surround it. Within the sacred precincts the profane

26 The Sacred and the Profane

world is transcended. On the most archaic levels of cul-

ture this possibility of transcendence is expressed by

various images of an opening; here, in the sacred en-

closure, communication with the gods is made possible;

hence there must be a door to the world above, by which

the gods can descend to earth and man can symbolically

ascend to heaven. We shall soon see that this was the case in many religions; properly speaking, the temple

constitutes an opening in the upward direction and

ensures communication with the world of the gods.

Every sacred space implies a hierophany, an irruption

of the sacred that results in detaching a territory from

the surrounding cosmic milieu and making it qualita-

tively different. When Jacob in his dream at Haran saw

a ladder reaching to heaven, with angels ascending and

descending on it, and heard the Lord speaking from

above it, saying: "I am the Lord God of Abraham," he

awoke and was afraid and cried out: "How dreadful is

this place: this is none other but the house of God, and

this is the gate of heaven." And he took the stone that

had been his pillow, and set it up as a monument, and

poured oil on the top of it. He called the place Beth-el,

that is, house of God (Genesis, 28, 12-19). The symbol-

ism implicit in the expression "gate of heaven" is rich

and complex; the theophany that occurs in a place con-

secrates it by the very fact that it makes it open above

—

that is, in communication with heaven, the paradoxical

point of passage from one mode of being to another. We

Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred 27

shall soon see even clearer examples—sanctuaries that are "doors of the gods" and hence places of passage

between heaven and earth.

Often there is no need for a theophany or hierophany

properly speaking; some sign suffices to indicate the

sacredness of a place. "According to the legend, the

marabout who founded El-Hamel at the end of the six-

teenth century stopped to spend the night near a spring

and planted his stick in the ground. The next morning,

when he went for it to resume his journey, he found that

it had taken root and that buds had sprouted on it. He

considered this a sign of God's will and settled in that

place." 1 In such cases the sign, fraught with religious

meaning, introduces an absolute element and puts an

end to relativity and confusion. Something that does not

belong to this world has manifested itself apodictically

and in so doing has indicated an orientation or deter-

mined a course of conduct.

When no sign manifests itself, it is provoked. For

example, a sort of evocation is performed with the help

of animals; it is they who show what place is fit to re-

ceive the sanctuary or the village. This amounts to an

evocation of sacred forms or figures for the immediate

purpose of establishing an orientation in the homoge-

neity of space. A sign is asked, to put an end to the

tension and anxiety caused by relativity and disorienta-

1 Ren6 Basset, in Revue des Traditions Populaires, XXII, 1907, p. 287.

28 The Sacred and the Profane

tion—in short, to reveal an absolute point of support. For example, a wild animal is hunted, and the sanctuary

is built at the place where it is killed. Or a domestic

animal—such as a bull—is turned loose; some days later it is searched for and sacrificed at the place where

it is found. Later the altar will be raised there and the

village will be built around the altar. In all these cases,

the sacrality of a place is revealed by animals. This is

as much as to say that men are not free to choose the

sacred site, that they only seek for it and find it by the

help of mysterious signs.

These few examples have shown the different means

by which religious man receives the revelation of a

sacred place. In each case the hierophany has annulled

the homogeneity of space and revealed a fixed point. But

since religious man cannot live except in an atmosphere

impregnated with the sacred, we must expect to find a

large number of techniques for consecrating space. As

we saw, the sacred is pre-eminently the real, at once

power, efficacity, the source of life and fecundity. Re-

ligious man's desire to live in the sacred is in fact equiva-

lent to his desire to take up his abode in objective reality,

not to let himself be paralyzed by the never-ceasing

relativity of purely subjective experiences, to live in a

real and effective world, and not in an illusion. This

behavior is documented on every plane of religious

man's existence, but it is particularly evident in his

desire to move about only in a sanctified world, that is,

Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred 29

in a sacred space. This is the reason for the elaboration

of techniques of orientation which, properly speaking,

are techniques for the construction of sacred space. But

we must not suppose that human work is in question here,

that it is through his own efforts that man can consecrate

a space. In reality the ritual by which he constructs a

sacred space is efficacious in the measure in which it

reproduces the work of the gods. But the better to under-

stand the need for ritual construction of a sacred space,

we must dwell a little on the traditional concept of the

"world" ; it will then be apparent that for religious man

every world is a sacred world.

CHAOS AND COSMOS

One of the outstanding characteristics of tradi-

tional societies is the opposition that they assume be-

tween their inhabited territory and the unknown and

indeterminate space that surrounds it. The former is the

world (more precisely, our world), the cosmos; every-

thing outside it is no longer a cosmos but a sort of

"other world," a foreign, chaotic space, peopled by

ghosts, demons, "foreigners" (who are assimilated to

demons and the souls of the dead). At first sight this

cleavage in space appears to be due to the opposition

between an inhabited and organized—hence cosmicized —territory and the unknown space that extends beyond its frontiers; on one side there is a cosmos, on the other

30 The Sacred and the Profane

a chaos. But we shall see that if every inhabited terri-

tory is a cosmos, this is precisely because it was first

consecrated, because, in one way or another, it is the

work of the gods or is in communication with the world

of the gods. The world (that is, our world) is a universe

within which the sacred has already manifested itself, in

which, consequently, the break-through from plane to

plane has become possible and repeatable. It is not

difficult to see why the religious moment implies the

cosmogonic moment. The sacred reveals absolute reality

and at the same time makes orientation possible; hence

it founds the world in the sense that it fixes the limits and

establishes the order of the world.

All this appears very clearly from the Vedic ritual for

taking possession of a territory; possession becomes

legally valid through the erection of a fire altar conse-

crated to Agni. "One says that one is installed when one

has built a fire altar [gdrhapatya] and all those who

build the fire altar are legally established" (Shatapatha

Brahmana, VII, 1, 1, 1-4) . By the erection of a fire altar

Agni is made present, and communication with the

world of the gods is ensured; the space of the altar be-

comes a sacred space. But the meaning of the ritual is far

more complex, and if we consider all of its ramifications

we shall understand why consecrating a territory is

equivalent to making it a cosmos, to cosmicizing it. For,

in fact, the erection of an altar to Agni is nothing but the

reproduction—on the microcosmic scale—of the Crea- tion. The water in which the clay is mixed is assimilated

Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred 31

to the primordial water; the clay that forms the base of

the altar symbolizes the earth ; the lateral walls represent

the atmosphere, and so on. And the building of the altar

is accompanied by songs that proclaim which cosmic

region has just been created (Shatapatha Brdhmana I,

9, 2, 29, etc.). Hence the erection of a fire altar—which alone validates taking possession of a new territory—is equivalent to a cosmogony.

An unknown, foreign, and unoccupied territory

(which often means, "unoccupied by our people") still

shares in the fluid and larval modality of chaos. By

occupying it and, above all, by settling in it, man sym-

bolically transforms it into a cosmos through a ritual

repetition of the cosmogony. What is to become "our

world" must first be "created," and every creation has a

paradigmatic model—the creation of the universe by the gods. When the Scandinavian colonists took possession

of Iceland (land-ndma) and cleared it, they regarded

the enterprise neither as an original undertaking nor as

human and profane work. For them, their labor was

only repetition of a primordial act, the transformation

of chaos into cosmos by the divine act of creation. When

they tilled the desert soil, they were in fact repeating the

act of the gods who had organized chaos by giving it a

structure, forms, and norms. 2

Whether it is a case of clearing uncultivated ground

2 Cf. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, New York, Pan-

theon Books, Bollingen Series XLVI, 1954, pp. 11 ff. Cited hereafter as

Myth.

32 The Sacred and the Profane

or of conquering and occupying a territory already in-

habited by "other" human beings, ritual taking posses-

sion must always repeat the cosmogony. For in the view

of archaic societies everything that is not "our world" is

not yet a world. A territory can be made ours only by creating it anew, that is, by consecrating it. This religious

behavior in respect to unknown lands continued, even in.

the West, down to the dawn of modern times. The Span-

ish and Portuguese conquistadores, discovering and con-

quering territories, took possession of them in the name

of Jesus Christ. The raising of the Cross was equivalent

to consecrating the country, hence in some sort to a "new

birth." For through Christ "old things are passed away;

behold, all things are become new" (II Corinthians, 5,

17). The newly discovered country was "renewed," "re-

created" by the Cross.

CONSECRATION OF A PLACE= REPETITION OF THE COSMOGONY

It must be understood that the cosmicization of

unknown territories is always a consecration; to organize

a space is to repeat the paradigmatic work of the gods.

The close connection between cosmicization and conse-

cration is already documented on the elementary levels

of culture—for example, among the nomadic Australians whose economy is still at the stage of gathering and

small-game hunting. According to the traditions of an

Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred 33

Arunta tribe, the Achilpa, in mythical times the divine

being Numbakula cosmicized their future territory,

created their Ancestor, and established their institutions.

From the trunk of a gum tree Numbakula fashioned the

sacred pole (kauwa-auwa) and, after anointing it with

blood, climbed it and disappeared into the sky. This pole

represents a cosmic axis, for it is around the sacred pole

that territory becomes habitable, hence is transformed

into a world. The sacred pole consequently plays an

important role ritually. During their wanderings the

Achilpa always carry it with them and choose the direc-

tion they are to take by the direction toward which it

bends. This allows them, while being continually on the

move, to be always in "their world" and, at the same

time, in communication with the sky into which Numba-

kula vanished.

For the pole to be broken denotes catastrophe; it is

like "the end of the world," reversion to chaos. Spencer

and Gillen report that once, when the pole was broken,

the entire clan were in consternation; they wandered

about aimlessly for a time, and finally lay down on the

ground together and waited for death to overtake them. 3

This example admirably illustrates both the cosmo-

logical function of the sacred pole and its soteriological

role. For on the one hand the kauwa-auwa reproduces

the pole that Numbakula used to cosmicize the world,

3 B. Spencer and F. J. Gillen, The Arunta, London, 1926, I, p. 388.

34 The Sacred and the Profane

and on the other the Achilpa believe it to be the means

by which they can communicate with the sky realm. Now,

human existence is possible only by virtue of this perma-

nent communication with the sky. The world of the

Achilpa really becomes their world only in proportion as

it reproduces the cosmos organized and sanctified by

Numbakula. Life is not possible without an opening

toward the transcendent; in other words, human beings

cannot live in chaos. Once contact with the transcendent

is lost, existence in the world ceases to be possible—and the Achilpa let themselves die.

To settle in a territory is, in the last analysis, equiva-

lent to consecrating it. When settlement is not temporary,

as among the nomads, but permanent, as among seden-

tary peoples, it implies a vital decision that involves the

existence of the entire community. Establishment in a

particular place, organizing it, inhabiting it, are acts that

presuppose an existential choice—the choice of the uni- verse that one is prepared to assume by "creating" it.

Now, this universe is always the replica of the paradig-

matic universe created and inhabited by the gods; hence

it shares in the sanctity of the gods' work.

The sacred pole of the Achilpa supports their world

and ensures communication with the sky. Here we have

the prototype of a cosmological image that has been very

widely disseminated—the cosmic pillars that support heaven and at the same time open the road to the world

Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred 35

of the gods. Until their conversion to" Chfi&fahity, the

Celts and Germans still maintained their worship of

such sacred pillars. The Chronicum Laurissense breve,

written about 800, reports that in the course of one of

his wars against the Saxons (772), Charlemagne de-

stroyed the temple and the sacred wood of their "famous

Irminsul" in the town of Eresburg. Rudolf of Fulda

(c. 860) adds that this famous pillar is the "pillar of

the universe which, as it were, supports all things"

(universalis columna quasi sustinens omnia). The same

cosmological image is found not only among the Romans

(Horace, Odes, III, 3) and in ancient India, where we

hear of the skambha, the cosmic pillar (Rig Veda, I,

105; X, 89, 4; etc.), but also among the Canary Island-

ers and in such distant cultures as those of the Kwakiutl

(British Columbia) and of the Nad'a of Flores Island

(Indonesia). The Kwakiutl believe that a copper pole

passes through the three cosmic levels (underworld,

earth, sky) ; the point at which it enters the sky is the

"door to the world above." The visible image of this

cosmic pillar in the sky is the Milky Way. But the work

of the gods, the universe, is repeated and imitated by

men on their own scale. The axis mundi, seen in the sky

in the form of the Milky Way, appears in the ceremonial

house in the form of a sacred pole. It is the trunk of a

cedar tree, thirty to thirty-five feet high, over half of

which projects through the roof. This pillar plays a

36 The Sacred and the Profane

primary part in the ceremonies; it confers a cosmic

structure on the house. In the ritual songs the house is

called "our world" and the candidates for initiation,

who live in it, proclaim: "I am at the Center of the World. ... I am at the Post of the World," and so on.4

The same assimilation of the cosmic pillar to the sacred

pole and of the ceremonial house to the universe is

found among the Nad'a of Flores Island. The sacrificial

pole is called the "Pole of Heaven" and is believed to

support the sky. 5

THE CENTER OF THE WORLD

The cry of the Kwakiutl neophyte, "I am at the

Center of the World!" at once reveals one of the deepest

meanings of sacred space. Where the break-through

from plane to plane has been effected by a hierophany,

there too an opening has been made, either upward (the

divine world) or downward (the underworld, the world

of the dead). The three cosmic levels—earth, heaven, underworld—have been put in communication. As we just saw, this communication is sometimes expressed

through the image of a universal pillar, axis mundi,

which at once connects and supports heaven and earth

and whose base is fixed in the world below (the infernal

4 Werner Miiller, Weltbild und Kult der Kwakiutl-Indianer, Wiesbaden,

1955, pp. 17-20.

5 P. Arndt, "Die Megalithenkultur des Nad'a" (Anthropos 27, 1932) , pp

61-62.

Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred 37

regions). Such a cosmic pillar can be only at the very

center of the universe, for the whole of the habitable

world extends around it. Here, then, we have a sequence

of religious conceptions and cosmological images that

are inseparably connected and form a system that may

be called the "system of the world" prevalent in tradi-

tional societies: (a) a sacred place constitutes a break in

the homogeneity of space; (b) this break is symbolized

by an opening by which passage from one cosmic region

to another is made possible (from heaven to earth and

vice versa; from earth to the underworld); (c) com-

munication with heaven is expressed by one or another

of certain images, all of which refer to the axis mundi:

pillar (cf. the universalis columna), ladder (cf. Jacob's

ladder), mountain, tree, vine, etc.; (d) around this cos-

mic axis lies the world (= our world), hence the axis is

located "in the middle," at the "navel of the earth"; it

is the Center of the World.

Many different myths, rites, and beliefs are derived

from this traditional "system of the world." They cannot

all be mentioned here. Rather, we shall confine our-

selves to a few examples, taken from various civiliza-

tions and particularly suited to demonstrate the role of

sacred space in the life of traditional societies. Whether

that space appears in the form of a sacred precinct, a

ceremonial house, a city, a world, we everywhere find the

symbolism of the Center of the World; and it is this

symbolism which, in the majority of cases, explains re-

38 The Sacred and the Profane

ligious behavior in respect to the space in which one

lives.

We shall begin with an example that has the advan- tage of immediately showing not only the consistency

but also the complexity of this type of symbolism—the cosmic mountain. We have just seen that the mountain occurs among the images that express the connection

between heaven and earth; hence it is believed to be at

the center of the world. And in a number of cultures we

do in fact hear of such mountains, real or mythical, situ-

ated at the center of the world; examples are Meru in

India, Haraberezaiti in Iran, the mythical "Mount of the

Lands" in Mesopotamia, Gerizim in Palestine—which, moreover, was called the "navel of the earth."

6 Since the

sacred mountain is an axis mundi connecting earth with

heaven, it in a sense touches heaven and hence marks

the highest point in the world ; consequently the territory

that surrounds it, and that constitutes "our world," is

held to be the highest among countries. This is stated in

Hebrew tradition: Palestine, being the highest land, was

not submerged by the Flood. 7 According to Islamic tra-

dition, the highest place on earth is the kaaba, because

"the Pole Star bears witness that it faces the center of

Heaven." 8 For Christians, it is Golgotha that is on the

summit of the cosmic mountain. All these beliefs express

6 See the bibliographical references in Eliade, Myth, pp. 10 ff.

7 A. E. Wensinck and E. Burrows, cited in ibid., p. 10.

8 Wensinck, cited in ibid., p. 15.

Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred 39

the same feeling, which is profoundly religious: "our

world" is holy ground because it is the place nearest to

heaven, because from here, from our abode, it is possible

to reach heaven; hence our world is a high place. In cos-

mological terms, this religious conception is expressed

by the projection of the favored territory which is "ours"

onto the summit of the cosmic mountain. Later specula-

tion drew all sorts of conclusions—for example, the one just cited for Palestine, that the Holy Land was not sub-

merged by the Flood.

This same symbolism of the center explains other

series of cosmological images and religious beliefs.

Among these the most important are: (a) holy sites and

sanctuaries are believed to be situated at the center of

the world; (b) temples are replicas of the cosmic moun-

tain and hence constitute the pre-eminent "link" between

earth and heaven; (c) the foundations of temples de-

scend deep into the lower regions. A few examples will suffice. After citing them, we shall attempt to integrate

all these various aspects of the same symbolism; the

remarkable consistency of these traditional conceptions

of the world will then appear with greater clarity.

The capital of the perfect Chinese sovereign is located

at the center of the world; there, on the day of the

summer solstice, the gnomon must cast no shadow. 9 It is

striking that the same symbolism is found in regard to

9 M. Granet, in Eliade, Patterns, p. 376.

40 The Sacred and the Profane

the Temple of Jerusalem ; the rock on which it was built

was the navel of the earth. The Icelandic pilgrim, Nicho-

las of Thverva, who visited Jerusalem in the twelfth cen-

tury, wrote of the Holy Sepulcher: "The Center of the

World is there; there, on the day of the summer solstice,

the light of the Sun falls perpendicularly from Heaven." 10

The same conception occurs in Iran; the Iranian land

(Airyanam Vaejah) is the center and heart of the world.

Just as the heart lies at the center of the body, "the land

of Iran is more precious than all other countries because

it is set at the middle of the world." 11

This is why Shiz,

the "Jerusalem" of the Iranians (for it lay at the center

of the world) was held to be the original site of the

royal power and, at the same time, the birthplace of

Zarathustra. 12

As for the assimilation of temples to cosmic mountains

and their function as links between earth and heaven,

the names given to Babylonian sanctuaries themselves

bear witness; they are called "Mountain of the House,"

"House of the Mountain of all Lands," "Mountain of

Storms," "Link between Heaven and Earth," and the

like. The ziggurat was literally a cosmic mountain; the

seven stories represented the seven planetary heavens;

by ascending them, the priest reached the summit of the

10 L. I. Ringbom, Graltempel und Parodies, Stockholm, 1951, p. 255.

11 Sad-dar, 84, 4-5, cited in Ringbom, p. 327.

12 See the material assembled and discussed in Ringbom, pp. 294 ff. and

passim.

Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred 41

universe. A like symbolism explains the immense temple of Borobudur, in Java; it is built as an artificial moun-

tain. Ascending it is equivalent to an ecstatic journey to

the center of the world; reaching the highest terrace, the

pilgrim experiences a break-through from plane to

plane; he enters a "pure region" transcending the pro-

fane world.

Dur-an-ki, "Link between Heaven and Earth," was a

name applied to a number of Babylonian sanctuaries (it

occurs at Nippur, Larsa, Sippara, and elsewhere).

Babylon had many names, among them "House of the

Base of Heaven and Earth," "Link between Heaven and

Earth." But it was also in Babylon that the connection

between earth and the lower regions was made, for the

city had been built on bob apsi, "the Gate of Apsu,"

apsu being the name for the waters of chaos before Crea-

tion. The same tradition is found among the Hebrews;

the rock of the Temple in Jerusalem reached deep into

the tehom, the Hebrew equivalent of apsu. And, just as

Babylon had its Gate of Apsu, the rock of the temple in

Jerusalem contained the "mouth of the tehom" 1

The apsu, the tehom symbolize the chaos of waters,

the preformal modality of cosmic matter, and, at the

same time, the world of death, of all that precedes and

follows life. The Gate of Apsu and the rock containing

the "mouth of the tehom" designate not only the point of

13 Cf. the references in Eliade, Myth, pp. 15 ff.

42 The Sacred and the Profane

intersection—and hence of communication—between the lower world and earth, but also the difference in onto-

logical status between these two cosmic planes. There is

a break of plane between the tehom and the rock of the

Temple that blocks its mouth, passage from the virtual to

the formal, from death to life. The watery chaos that

preceded Creation at the same time symbolizes the retro-

gression to the formless that follows on death, return to

the larval modality of existence. From one point of view,

the lower regions can be homologized to the unknown

and desert regions that surround the inhabited territory;

the underworld, over which our cosmos is firmly estab-

lished, corresponds to the chaos that extends to its

frontiers.

"our world" is always situated at the center

From all that has been said, it follows that the

true world is always in the middle, at the Center, for it

is here that there is a break in plane and hence com-

munication among the three cosmic zones. Whatever the

extent of the territory involved, the cosmos that it repre-

sents is always perfect. An entire country {e.g., Pales-

tine), a city (Jerusalem), a sanctuary (the Temple in

Jerusalem), all equally well present an imago mundi.

Treating of the symbolism of the Temple, Flavius Jose-

phus wrote that the court represented the sea (i.e., the

Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred 43

lower regions), the Holy Place represented earth, and

the Holy of Holies heaven (Ant. Jud., Ill, 7, 7). It is

clear, then, that both the imago mundi and the Center are

repeated in the inhabited world. Palestine, Jerusalem,

and the Temple severally and concurrently represent the

image of the universe and the Center of the World. This

multiplicity of centers and this reiteration of the image

of the world on smaller and smaller scales constitute one

of the specific characteristics of traditional societies.

To us, it seems an inescapable conclusion that the re-

ligious man sought to live as near as possible to the

Center of the World. He knew that his country lay at the

midpoint of the earth; he knew too that his city consti-

tuted the navel of the universe, and, above all, that the

temple or the palace were veritably Centers of the World.

But he also wanted his own house to be at the Center

and to be an imago mundi. And, in fact, as we shall see,

houses are held to be at the Center of the World and, on

the microcosmic scale, to reproduce the universe. In

other words, the man of traditional societies could only

live in a space opening upward, where the break in plane

was symbolically assured and hence communication with

the other world, the transcendental world, was ritually

possible. Of course the sanctuary—the Center par excel- lence—was there, close to him, in the city, and he could be sure of communicating with the world of the gods

simply by entering the temple. But he felt the need to

live at the Center always—like the Achilpa, who, as we

44 The Sacred and the Profane

saw, always carried the sacred pole, the axis mundi,

with them, so that they should never be far from the

Center and should remain in communication with the

supraterrestrial world. In short, whatever the dimensions

of the space with which he is familiar and in which he

regards himself as situated—his country, his city, his village, his house—religious man feels the need always to exist in a total and organized world, in a cosmos.

A universe comes to birth from its center; it spreads out from a central point that is, as it were, its navel. It is

in this way that, according to the Rig Veda (X, 149),

the universe was born and developed—from a core, a central point. Hebrew tradition is still more explicit:

"The Most Holy One created the world like an embryo.

As the embryo grows from the navel, so God began to

create the world by the navel and from there it spread

out in all directions." And since the "navel of the earth,"

the Center of the World, is the Holy Land, the Yoma

affirms that "the world was created beginning with

Zion." 14 Rabbi ben Gorion said of the rock of Jerusalem:

"it is called the Foundation Stone of the Earth, that is,

the navel of the Earth, because it is from there that the

whole Earth unfolded." 15 Then too, because the creation

of man is a replica of the cosmogony, it follows that the

first man was fashioned at the "navel of the earth" or in

14 References in ibid., p. 16.

15 Cited in W. W. Roscher, "Neue Omphalosstudien" (Abh. der Konigl.

Sachs. Ges. d. Wiss., Phil.-hist. Klasse, 31, 1, 1915), p. 16.

Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred 45

Jerusalem (Judaeo-Christian traditions). It could not

be otherwise, if we remember that the Center is precisely

the place where a break in plane occurs, where space

becomes sacred, hence pre-eminently real. A creation im- plies a superabundance of reality, in other words an

irruption of the sacred into the world.

It follows that every construction or fabrication has

the cosmogony as paradigmatic model. The creation of

the world becomes the archetype of every creative human

gesture, whatever its plane of reference may be. We have already seen that settling in a territory reiterates the

cosmogony. Now that the cosmogonic value of the Center has become clear, we can still better understand why

every human establishment repeats the creation of the

world from a central point (the navel). Just as the uni-

verse unfolds from a center and stretches out toward the

four cardinal points, the village comes into existence

around an intersection. In Bali, as in some parts of Asia,

when a new village is to be built the people look for a

natural intersection, where two roads cross at right

angles. A square constructed from a central point is an imago mundi. The division of the village into four

sections—which incidentally implies a similar division of the community—corresponds to the division of the universe into four horizons. A space is often left empty in the middle of the village; there the ceremonial house

will later be built, with its roof symbolically represent-

ing heaven (in some cases, heaven is indicated by the

46 The Sacred and the Profane

top of a tree or by the image of a mountain). At the

other end of the same perpendicular axis lies the world

of the dead, symbolized by certain animals (snake,

crocodile, etc.) or by ideograms expressing darkness. 16

The cosmic symbolism of the village is repeated in the

structure of the sanctuary or the ceremonial house. At

Waropen, in New Guinea, the "men's house" stands at

the center of the village ; its roof represents the celestial

vault, the four walls correspond to the four directions of

space. In Ceram, the sacred stone of the village sym-

bolizes heaven and the four stone columns that support it

incarnate the four pillars that support heaven. 17

Similar

conceptions are found among the Algonquins and the

Sioux. Their sacred lodge, where initiations are per-

formed, represents the universe. The roof symbolizes the

dome of the sky, the floor represents earth, the four walls

the four directions of cosmic space. The ritual construc-

tion of the space is emphasized by a threefold symbol-

ism: the four doors, the four windows, and the four

colors signify the four cardinal points. The construction

of the sacred lodge thus repeats the cosmogony, for the

lodge represents the world. 18

We are not surprised to find a similar concept in an-

16 Cf. C. T. Bertling, Vierzahl, Kreuz und Mandala in Asien, Amster-

dam, 1954, pp. 8 ff.

17 See the references in Bertling, op. cit., pp. 4-5.

18 See the material and interpretations in Werner Miiller, Die blaue

Hiitte, Wiesbaden, 1954, pp. 60 ff.

Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred 47

cient Italy and among the ancient Germans. In short,

the underlying idea is both archaic and widely dissemi-

nated: from a center, the four horizons are projected in

the four cardinal directions. The Roman mundus was a circular trench divided into four parts; it was at once

the image of the cosmos and the paradigmatic model for

the human habitation. It has been rightly proposed that

Roma quadrata is to be understood not as being square

in shape but as being divided into four parts. 19 The mun-

dus was clearly assimilated to the omphalos, to the navel

of the earth; the city (urbs) was situated in the middle

of the orbis terrarum. Similar ideas have been shown to

explain the structure of Germanic villages and towns. 20

In extremely varied cultural contexts, we constantly find

the same cosmological schema and the same ritual

scenario : settling in a territory is equivalent to founding

a world.

CITY-COSMOS

Since "our world" is a cosmos, any attack from

without threatens to turn it into chaos. And as "our

world" was founded by imitating the paradigmatic work

of the gods, the cosmogony, so the enemies who attack it

are assimilated to the enemies of the gods, the demons,

and especially to the archdemon, the primordial dragon

19 F. Altheim, in Werner Miiller, Kreis und Kreuz, Berlin, 1938, pp. 60 ff.

20 W. Miiller, op. cit., pp. 65 ff.

48 The Sacred and the Profane

conquered by the gods at the beginning of time. An at- tack on "our world" is equivalent to an act of revenge

by the mythical dragon, who rebels against the work of

the gods, the cosmos, and struggles to annihilate it.

"Our" enemies belong to the powers of chaos. Any de-

struction of a city is equivalent to a retrogression to

chaos. Any victory over the attackers reiterates the para-

digmatic victory of the gods over the dragon (that is,

over chaos) .

This is the reason the Pharaoh was assimilated to the

God Re, conqueror of the dragon Apophis, while his

enemies were assimilated to the mythical dragon. Darius

regarded himself as a new Thraetaona, the mythical

Iranian hero who was said to have slain a three-headed

dragon. In Judaic tradition the pagan kings were repre-

sented in the likeness of the dragon; such is the Nebu-

chadnezzar described by Jeremiah (51, 34) and the

Pompey presented in the Psalms of Solomon (9, 29).

As we shall see later, the dragon is the paradigmatic

figure of the marine monster, of the primordial snake,

symbol of the cosmic waters, of darkness, night, and

death—in short, of the amorphous and virtual, of every- thing that has not yet acquired a "form." The dragon

must be conquered and cut to pieces by the gods so that

the cosmos may come to birth. It was from the body of

the marine monster Tiamat that Marduk fashioned the

world. Yahweh created the universe after his victory over

the primordial monster Rahab. But, as we shall see, this

Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred 49

victory of the gods over the dragon must be symbolically

repeated each year, for each year the world must be

created anew. Similarly the victory of the gods over the

forces of darkness, death, and chaos is repeated with

every victory of the city over its invaders.

It is highly probable that the fortifications of inhabited

places and cities began by being magical defenses; for

fortifications—trenches, labyrinths, ramparts, etc.

—

were designed rather to repel invasion by demons and

the souls of the dead than attacks by human beings. In

North India, during epidemics, a circle is drawn around

the village to keep the demons of sickness from entering

the enclosure. 21

In Europe, during the Middle Ages, the

walls of cities were ritually consecrated as a defense

against the devil, sickness, and death. Then, too, sym-

bolic thinking finds no difficulty in assimilating the

human enemy to the devil and death. In the last analysis

the result of attacks, whether demonic or military, is

always the same—ruin, disintegration, death. It is worth observing that the same images are still

used in our own day to formulate the dangers that

threaten a certain type of civilization; we speak of the

chaos, the disorder, the darkness that will overwhelm

"our world." All these terms express the abolition of an

order, a cosmos, an organic structure, and reimmersion

in the state of fluidity, of formlessness—in short, of 21 Eliade, Patterns, p. 371.

50 The Sacred and the Profane

chaos. This, in our opinion, shows that the paradigmatic

images live on in the language and cliches of nonreli-

gious man. Something of the religious conception of the

world still persists in the behavior of profane man,

although he is not always conscious of this immemorial

heritage.

UNDERTAKING THE CREATION OF THE WORLD

Let us consider the basic difference observable

between these two types of behavior—traditional re- ligious and profane—in respect to the human habitation. There is no need to dwell on the value and function of

the habitation in industrial societies; they are well

known. According to the formula of a famous contem-

porary architect, Le Corbusier, the house is "a machine

to live in." Hence it takes its place among the countless

machines mass-produced in industrial societies. The

ideal house of the modern world must first of all be

functional; that is, it must allow men to work and to

rest in order that they may work. You can change your

"machine to live in" as often as you change your bicycle,

your refrigerator, your automobile. You can also change

cities or provinces, without encountering any difficulties

aside from those that arise from a difference in climate.

It does not lie within our province to write the history

of the gradual desacralization of the human dwelling.

Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred 51

The process is an integral part of the gigantic transfor-

mation of the world undertaken by the industrial socie-

ties, a transformation made possible by the desacraliza-

tion of the cosmos accomplished by scientific thought

and above all by the sensational discoveries of physics

and chemistry. We shall later have occasion to inquire whether this secularization of nature is really final, if no

possibility remains for nonreligious man to rediscover

the sacred dimension of existence in the world. As we

just saw, and as we shall see still more clearly later,

certain traditional images, certain vestiges of the be-

havior of archaic man still persist, in the condition of

"survivals," even in the most highly industrialized socie-

ties. But for the moment our concern is to describe, in its

pure state, religious behavior in respect to the habitation,

and to discover the Weltanschauung that it implies.

As we saw, to settle in a territory, to build a dwelling,

demand a vital decision for both the whole community and

the individual. For what is involved is undertaking the

creation of the world that one has chosen to inhabit.

Hence it is necessary to imitate the work of the gods,

the cosmogony. But this is not always easy, for there are

also tragic, blood-drenched cosmogonies; as imitator of

the divine gestures, man must reiterate them. Since the

gods had to slay and dismember a marine monster or a

primordial being in order to create the world from it,

man in his turn must imitate them when he builds his

own world, his city or his house. Hence the necessity for

52 The Sacred and the Profane

bloody or symbolic sacrifices on the occasion of con-

structions, the countless forms of the Bauopfer (build-

ing sacrifice), concerning which we shall have to say a

few words further on.

Whatever the structure of a traditional society—be it a society of hunters, herdsmen, or cultivators, or already

at the stage of urban civilization—the habitation always undergoes a process of sanctification, because it consti-

tutes an imago mundi and the world is a divine creation.

But there are various ways of homologizing the dwell-

ing place to the cosmos, because there are various types

of cosmogonies. For our purpose, it will suffice to dis-

tinguish two methods of ritually transforming the dwell-

ing place (whether the territory or the house) into cos-

mos, that is, of giving it the value of an imago mundi:

(a) assimilating it to the cosmos by the projection of the

four horizons from a central point (in the case of a

village) or by the symbolic installation of the axis mundi

(in the case of a house) ; (b) repeating, through a ritual

of construction, the paradigmatic acts of the gods by

virtue of which the world came to birth from the body of

a marine dragon or of a primordial giant. We need not here dwell on the basic differences in Weltanschauung

underlying these two methods of sanctifying the dwell-

ing place, nor on their historical and cultural presup-

positions. Suffice it to say that the first method

—

cosmicizing a space by projection of the horizons or by

installation of the axis mundi—is already documented

Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred 53

in the most archaic stages of culture (cf. the kauwa-auwa

pole of the Australian Achilpa) , while the second method

seems to have been developed in the culture of the

earliest cultivators. What is important for our investiga- tion is the fact that, in all traditional cultures, the

habitation possesses a sacred aspect by the simple fact

that it reflects the world.

Thus, in the habitation of the primitive peoples of the

North American and North Asian Arctics we find a cen-

tral post that is assimilated to the axis mundi, i.e., to the

cosmic pillar or the world tree, which, as we saw, con-

nect earth with heaven. In other words, cosmic symbol-

ism is found in the very structure of the habitation. The

house is an imago mundi. The sky is conceived as a vast

tent supported by a central pillar; the tent pole or the

central post of the house is assimilated to the Pillars of

the World and is so named. This central pole or post has

an important ritual role; the sacrifices in honor of the

celestial Supreme Being are performed at the foot of it.

The same symbolism has been preserved among the

herdsmen-breeders of Central Asia, but since here the

conical-roofed habitation with central pillar is replaced

by the yurt, the mythico-ritual function of the pillar is

transferred to the upper opening for the escape of smoke.

Like the pole (= axis mundi), the stripped tree trunk

whose top emerges through the upper opening of the

yurt (and which symbolizes the cosmic tree) is con-

ceived as a ladder leading to heaven; the shamans climb

54 The Sacred and the Profane

it on their celestial journeys. And it is through the upper

opening that the shamans set out on their flights. 22 The

sacred pillar, set in the middle of the habitation, is found

again in Africa among the Hamitic and Hamitoid pas-

toral peoples. 23

COSMOGONY AND BUILDING SACRIFICE

A similar conception is found in such a highly evolved culture as that of India ; but here there is also an

exemplification of the other method of homologizing the

house to the cosmos, to which we referred briefly above.

Before the masons lay the first stone the astronomer

shows them the spot where it is to be placed, and this

spot is supposed to lie above the snake that supports the

world. The master mason sharpens a stake and drives it

into the ground, exactly at the indicated spot, in order to

fix the snake's head. A foundation stone is then laid above the stake. Thus the cornerstone is at the exact

center of the world. 2* But, in addition, the act of founda-

tion repeats the cosmogonic act; for to drive the stake

into the snake's head to "fix" it is to imitate the primor-

dial gesture of Soma or Indra, when the latter, as the Rig

Veda expresses it, "struck the Snake in his lair" (IV, 17,

22 M. Eliade, Le Chamanisme et les techniques archdiques de I'extase,

Paris, 1951, pp. 238 ff. Cited hereafter as Le Chamanisme.

23 Wilhelm Schmidt, "Der heilige Mittelpfahl des Hauses," Anthropos,

35-36, 1940-1941, p. 967.

24 S. Stevenson, The Rites of the Twice-Born, Oxford, 1920, p. 354.

Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred 55

9), when his lightning bolt "cut off its head" (I, 52, 10). As we said, the snake symbolizes chaos, the formless, the unmanifested. To behead it is equivalent to an act of creation, passage from the virtual and the amorphous to

that which has form. Again, it was from the body of a

primordial marine monster, Tiamat, that the god Mar-

duk fashioned the world. This victory was symbolically

repeated each year, since each year the cosmos was re-

newed. But the paradigmatic act of the divine victory was

likewise repeated on the occasion of every construction,

for every new construction reproduced the creation of

the world.

This second type of cosmogony is much more complex,

and it will only be outlined here. But it was necessary to

cite it, for, in the last analysis, it is with such a cos-

mogony that the countless forms of the building sacrifice

are bound up; the latter, in short, is only an imitation,

often a symbolic imitation, of the primordial sacrifice

that gave birth to the world. For, beginning with a cer-

tain stage of culture, the cosmogonic myth explains the

Creation through the slaying of a giant (Ymir in Ger-

manic mythology, Purusha in Indian mythology, P'an-ku

in China) ; his organs give birth to the various cosmic

regions. According to other groups of myths, it is not

only the cosmos that comes to birth in consequence of the

immolation of a primordial being and from his own sub-

stance, but also food plants, the races of man, or different

social classes. It is on this type of cosmogonic myth that

56 The Sacred and the Profane

building sacrifices depend. If a "construction" is to en-

dure (be it house, temple, tool, etc.), it must be ani-

mated, that is, it must receive life and a soul. The trans-

fer of the soul is possible only through a blood sacrifice.

The history of religions, ethnology, folklore record

countless forms of building sacrifices—that is, of sym- bolic or blood sacrifices for the benefit of a structure.

25

In southeastern Europe, these beliefs have inspired ad-

mirable popular ballads describing the sacrifice of the

wife of the master mason in order that a structure may

be completed (cf. the ballads on the Arta Bridge in

Greece, on the Monastery of Argesh in Romania, on the

city of Scutari in Yugoslavia, etc.).

We have said enough about the religious significance of the human dwelling place for certain conclusions to

have become self-evident. Exactly like the city or the

sanctuary, the house is sanctified, in whole or part, by a

cosmological symbolism or ritual. This is why settling

somewhere—building a village or merely a house

—

represents a serious decision, for the very existence of

man is involved; he must, in short, create his own world

and assume the responsibility of maintaining and renew-

ing it. Habitations are not lightly changed, for it is not

easy to abandon one's world. The house is not an object,

a "machine to live in"; it is the universe that man con-

structs for himself by imitating the paradigmatic crea-

25 Cf. Paul Sartori, "Ober das Bauopfer," Zeitschrift fur Ethnologie, 30,

1938, pp. 1-54.

Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred 57

tion of the gods, the cosmogony. Every construction and

every inauguration of a new dwelling are in some

measure equivalent to a new beginning, a new life. And

every beginning repeats the primordial beginning, when

the universe first saw the light of day. Even in modern

societies, with their high degree of desacralization, the

festivity and rejoicing that accompany settling in a new

house still preserve the memory of the festival exuber-

ance that, long ago, marked the incipit vita nova.

Since the habitation constitutes an imago mundi, it is

symbolically situated at the Center of the World. The

multiplicity, or even the infinity, of centers of the world

raises no difficulty for religious thought. For it is not a

matter of geometrical space, but of an existential and

sacred space that has an entirely different structure, that

admits of an infinite number of breaks and hence is

capable of an infinite number of communications with

the transcendent. We have seen the cosmological mean- ing and the ritual role of the upper opening in various

forms of habitations. In other cultures these cosmologi-

cal meanings and ritual functions are transferred to the

chimney (= smoke hole) and to the part of the roof that

lies above the "sacred area" and that is removed or even

broken in cases of prolonged death-agony. When we

come to the homologation cosmos-house-human body,

we shall have occasion to show the deeper meaning of

"breaking the roof." For the moment, we will mention

that the most ancient sanctuaries were hypaethral or

58 The Sacred and the Profane

built with an aperture in the roof—the "eye of the dome," symbolizing break-through from plane to plane,

communication with the transcendent.

Thus religious architecture simply took over and de-

veloped the cosmological symbolism already present in

the structure of primitive habitations. In its turn, the

human habitation had been chronologically preceded by

the provisional "holy place," by a space provisionally

consecrated and cosmicized (cf. the Australian Achilpa).

This is as much as to say that all symbols and rituals

having to do with temples, cities, and houses are finally

derived from the primary experience of sacred space.

TEMPLE, BASILICA, CATHEDRAL

In the great oriental civilizations—from Mesopo- tamia and Egypt to China and India—the temple re- ceived a new and important valorization. It is not only an

imago mundi; it is also interpreted as the earthly repro-

duction of a transcendent model. Judaism inherited this

ancient oriental conception of the temple as the copy of

a celestial work of architecture. In this idea we probably

have one of the last interpretations that religious man has

given to the primary experience of sacred space in con-

trast to profane space. Hence we must dwell a little on

the perspectives opened by this new religious concep-

tion.

To summarize the essential data of the problem: If

Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred 59

the temple constitutes an imago mundi, this is because

the world, as the work of the gods, is sacred. But the

cosmological structure of the temple gives room for a

new religious valorization; as house of the gods, hence

holy place above all others, the temple continually

resanctifies the world, because it at once represents and

contains it. In the last analysis, it is by virtue of the

temple that the world is resanctified in every part. How-

ever impure it may have become, the world is continually

purified by the sanctity of sanctuaries.

Another idea derives from this increasingly accepted

ontological difference between the cosmos and its sancti-

fied image, the temple. This is the idea that the sanctity

of the temple is proof against all earthly corruption, by

virtue of the fact that the architectural plan of the temple

is the work of the gods and hence exists in heaven, near

to the gods. The transcendent models of temples enjoy a

spiritual, incorruptible celestial existence. Through the

grace of the gods, man attains to the dazzling vision of

these models, which he then attempts to reproduce on

earth. The Babylonian king Gudea saw in a dream the

goddess Nidaba showing him a tablet on which were

written the names of the beneficent stars, and a god re-

vealed the plan of the temple to him. 26

Sennacherib built

Nineveh according to "the plan established from most

distant times in the configuration of the Heavens." This

26 Cf. Eliade, Myth, pp. 7-8.

60 The Sacred and the Profane

means not only that celestial geometry made the first

constructions possible, but above all that since the archi-

tectonic models were in heaven, they shared in the sacral-

ity of the sky.

For the people of Israel, the models of the tabernacle,

of all the sacred utensils, and of the temple itself had

been created by Yahweh who revealed them to his

chosen, to be reproduced on earth. Thus Yahweh says

to Moses: "And let them make me a sanctuary; that I

may dwell among them. According to all that I shew

thee, after the pattern of the tabernacle, and the pattern

of all the instruments thereof, even so shall ye make it"

(Exodus, 25, 8-9). "And look that thou make them after

their pattern, which was shewed thee in the mount"

(ibid., 25, 40). When David gives his son Solomon the

plans for the Temple buildings, the tabernacle, and all

the utensils, he assures him that "all this . . . the Lord

made me understand in writing by his hand upon me"

(II Chronicles, 28, 19). He must, then, have seen the

celestial model created by Yahweh from the beginning

of time. This is what Solomon affirms: "Thou hast com-

manded me to build a temple upon thy holy mount,

and an altar in the city wherein thou dwellest, a resem-

blance of the holy tabernacle which thou hast prepared

from the beginning" (Wisdom of Solomon, 9, 8).

The Heavenly Jerusalem was created by God at the

same time as Paradise, hence in aeternum. The city of

Jerusalem was only an approximate reproduction of the

Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred 61

transcendent model; it could be polluted by man, but

the model was incorruptible, for it was not involved

in time. "This building now built in your midst is not

that which is revealed with Me, that which was prepared

beforehand here from the time when I took counsel to

make Paradise, and showed it to Adam before he sinned"

(II Baruch, 4, 3-7; trans. R. H. Charles 27

).

The Christian basilica and, later, the cathedral take

over and continue all these symbolisms. On the one hand,

the church is conceived as imitating the Heavenly Jeru-

salem, even from patristic times; on the other, it also

reproduces Paradise or the celestial world. But the cos-

mological structure of the sacred edifice still persists in

the thought of Christendom; for example, it is obvious

in the Byzantine church. "The four parts of the interior

of the church symbolize the four cardinal directions.

The interior of the church is the universe. The altar is

paradise, which lay in the East. The imperial door to

the altar was also called the Door of Paradise. During

Easter week, the great door to the altar remains open

during the entire service; the meaning of this custom is

clearly expressed in the Easter Canon: 'Christ rose from

the grave and opened the doors of Paradise unto us.'

The West, on the contrary, is the realm of darkness, of

grief, of death, the realm of the eternal mansions of

the dead, who await the resurrection of the flesh and the

27 R. H. Charles, ed., The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old

Testament in English, Oxford, 1913, Vol. II, p. 482.

62 The Sacred and the Profane

Last Judgment. The middle of the building is the earth.

According to the views of Kosmas Indikopleustes, the

earth is rectangular and is bounded by four walls, which

are surmounted by a dome. The four parts of the interior

of the church symbolize the four cardinal directions." 28

As "copy of the cosmos," the Byzantine church incar-

nates and at the same time sanctifies the world.

SOME CONCLUSIONS

From the thousands of examples available to the

historian of religions, we have cited only a small num-

ber but enough to show the varieties of the religious

experience of space. We have taken our examples from different cultures and periods, in order to present at

least the most important mythological constructions and

ritual scenarios that are based on the experience of

sacred space. For in the course of history, religious man

has given differing valorizations to the same fundamental

experience. We need only compare the conception of the sacred space (and hence of the cosmos) discernible

among the Australian Achilpa with the corresponding

conceptions of the Kwakiutl, the Altaic peoples, or the

Mesopotamians, to realize the differences among them.

There is no need to dwell on the truism that, since the

religious life of humanity is realized in history, its

expressions are inevitably conditioned by the variety of

28 Hans Sedlmayr, Die Entstehung der Kathedrale, Zurich, 1950, p. 119.

Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred 63

historical moments and cultural styles. But for our pur-

pose it is not the infinite variety of the religious expe-

riences of space that concerns us but, on the contrary,

their elements of unity. Pointing out the contrast between

the behavior of nonreligious man with respect to the

space in which he lives and the behavior of religious

man in respect to sacred space is enough to make the

difference in structure between the two attitudes clearly

apparent.

If we should attempt to summarize the result of the

descriptions that have been presented in this chapter, we

could say that the experience of sacred space makes

possible the "founding of the world": where the sacred

manifests itself in space, the real unveils itself, the world

comes into existence. But the irruption of the sacred does

not only project a fixed point into the formless fluidity

of profane space, a center into chaos; it also effects a

break in plane, that is, it opens communication between

the cosmic planes (between earth and heaven) and

makes possible ontological passage from one mode of

being to another. It is such a break in the heterogeneity

of profane space that creates the center through which

communication with the transmundane is established,

that, consequently, founds the world, for the center

renders orientation possible. Hence the manifestation of

the sacred in space has a cosmological valence; every

spatial hierophany or consecration of a space is equiva-

lent to a cosmogony. The first conclusion we might draw

64 The Sacred and the Profane

would be : the world becomes apprehensible as world, as

cosmos, in the measure in which it reveals itself as a

sacred world.

Every world is the work of the gods, for it was either

created directly by the gods or was consecrated, hence

cosmicized, by men ritually reactualizing the paradig-

matic act of Creation. This is as much as to say that

religious man can live only in a sacred world, because

it is only in such a world that he participates in being,

that he has a real existence. This religious need expresses

an unquenchable ontological thirst. Religious man thirsts

for being. His terror of the chaos that surrounds his in-

habited world corresponds to his terror of nothingness.

The unknown space that extends beyond his world—an uncosmicized because unconsecrated space, a mere amor-

phous extent into which no orientation has yet been pro-

jected, and hence in which no structure has yet arisen

—for religious man, this profane space represents abso- lute nonbeing. If, by some evil chance, he strays into it,

he feels emptied of his ontic substance, as if he were

dissolving in Chaos, and he finally dies.

This ontological thirst is manifested in many ways.

In the realm of sacred space which we are now consider-

ing, its most striking manifestation is religious man's

will to take his stand at the very heart of the real, at the

Center of the World—that is, exactly where the cosmos came into existence and began to spread out toward the

four horizons, and where, too, there is the possibility of

communication with the gods; in short, precisely where

Sacred Space and Making the World Sacred 65

he is closest to the gods. We have seen that the symbol- ism of the center is the formative principle not only of

countries, cities, temples, and palaces but also of the

humblest human dwelling, be it the tent of a nomad

hunter, the shepherd's yurt, or the house of the sedentary

cultivator. This is as much as to say that every religious

man places himself at the Center of the World and by

the same token at the very source of absolute reality, as

close as possible to the opening that ensures him com-

munication with the gods.

But since to settle somewhere, to inhabit a space, is

equivalent to repeating the cosmogony and hence to imi-

tating the work of the gods, it follows that, for religious

man, every existential decision to situate himself in space

in fact constitutes a religious decision. By assuming the

responsibility of creating the world that he has chosen

to inhabit, he not only cosmicizes chaos but also sancti-

fies his little cosmos by making it like the world of the

gods. Religious man's profound nostalgia is to inhabit

a "divine world," is his desire that his house shall be

like the house of the gods, as it was later represented in

temples and sanctuaries. In short, this religious nostalgia

expresses the desire to live in a pure and holy cosmos,

as it was in the beginning, when it came fresh from the

Creator s hands.

The experience of sacred time will make it possible

for religious man periodically to experience the cosmos

as it was in principio, that is, at the mythical moment of

Creation.

414 EUmentary Forms of Religious Life

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painful irritation to ecstatic enthusiasm ; but, in any case, there is a communion of minds and a mutual comfort resulting from this communion. The fundamental process is always the same ; only circumstares colour it differently. So, at bottom, it is the unity and the diversity of social life which make the simultaneous unity and diversity of sacred beings and things.

This ambiguity, moreover, is not peculiar to the idea of sacred - ness alone ; something of this characteristic has been found in all the rites which we have been studying. Of course it was essential to distinguish them ; to confuse them would have been to misunderstand the multiple aspects of the religious life. But, on the other hand, howsoever different they may be, there is no break of continuity between them. Quite on the contrary, they overlap one another and may even replace each other mutually. We have already shown how the rites of oblation and com - munion, the imitative rites and the commemorative rites fre- quently fulfil the & e function. One might imagine that the negative cult, at least, would be more sharply separated from the positive cult ; yet we have seen that the former may produce positive effects, identical with those produced by the latter. The same results arc obtained by fasts, abstinences and self - mutilation as by communions, oblations and commemorations. Inversely, offerings nd sacrifices imply privations and re - nunciations of every sort. The continuity between ascetic and piacular rites is even more apparent : both are made up of suffer- ings, accepted or undergone, to which an analogous efficacy is attributed. Thus the practices, like the beliefs, are not arranged in two separate classes. ' Howsoever complex the outward manifestations of the religious life may be, at bottom it is one and simple. It responds everywhere to one and the same need, and is everywhere derived from one and tl same mental state. In all its form, its object is to raise man above himself and to make him lead a life superior to that which he would lead, if he followed enly his own individual whims: beliefs express this life in representations; rites organize it and regulate its working.

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CONCLUSION

(AT the beginning of this work we announced that the religion j whose study wc were taking up contained within it the most characteristic elements of the religious life. The exactness of this proposition may now be verified. Howsoever simple the system which we have studied may be, we have found within it all the great ideas and the principal ritual attitudes which are at the basis of even the most advanced religions : the division of things into sacred and profane, the notions of the soul, of spirits, of mythical personalities, and of a national and even" international divinity, a negative cult with ascetic practices which are its exaggerated form, rites of oblation and communion, imitative rites, commemorative rites and expiatory rites; nothing essential is lacking. Wc are thus in a position to hope that the results at which we have arrived are not peculiar to totemism alone, but can aid us in an understanding of what religion in general is.

It may be objected that one single religion, whatever its field of extension may be, is too narrow a base for such an in - duction. Wc have not dreamed for a moment of ignoring the fact that an extended verification may add to the authority of a theory, but it is equally true that when a law has been proven by one wek-made experiment, this proof is valid universally. If in one single case a scientist succeeded in finding out the secret of the life of even the most protoplasmic creature that can be imagined, the truths thus obtained would be applicable to all living beings, even the most advanced. Then if, in our studies of these very humble societies, we have really succeeded in discovering some of the elements out of which the most fundamental religious notions are made up, there is no reason for not extending the most general results of our researches to other religions. In fact, it is inconceivable that the same effect may be due now to one cause, now to another, according to the circumstances, unless the two causes arc at bottom only one. A single idea cannot express one reality here and another one there, unless the duality is only apparent. If among certain peoples the ideas of sacrcdness, the soul and God are to be 4r

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explained sociologically, it should be presumed scientifically tfiat, in principle, the amc explanation is valid for all the peoples among whom these same ideas are found with the same essential characteristics, i Therefore, supposing that we have not been deceived, certain at least of our conclusions can be legitimately generalized. The moment has come to disengage these. And an induction of this sort, having at its foundation a clearly defined experiment, is less adventu ous than many summary gencraliza tions which, while attempting to reach the essence of religion at once, without resting upon the careful analysis of any religion in particular, greatly risk losing themselves in space.

I The theorists who have undertaken to explain religion in

rational terms have generally seen in it before all else a system of ideas, corresponding to some determined object. This object has been conceived in a multitude of ways: natur the infinite, the unknowable, the ideal, etc. ; but these differences matter but little. In any case, it was the conceptions and beliefs which were considered as the essential elements of religion. As for the rites, from this point of view they appear to be only an external translation, contingent and material, of these internal states which alone pass as having any intrinsic value. This conception is so commonly held that generally the disputes of which religion is the theme turn about the question whether it can conciliate itself with science or not, that is to say, whether or not there is a place beside our scientific knowledge for another form of thought which would be specifically religious.

But the believers, the men who lead the religious life and have a direct sensation of what it really is, object to this way of regarding it, saying that it docs not correspond to their daily experience. In fact, they feel that the real function of religion is not to make us think, to enrich our knowledge, nor, to add. to the conceptions which we owe to science others of another urigin and another character, but rather, it is to make us act, to aid us to live. The believer who has communicated with his god is not merely a man who sees new truths of which the unbeliever is ignorant ; he is a man who is stronger. He feels within him more force, cither to endure the trials of existence, or to conquer them. It is as though he were raised above the miseries of the world, because he is raised above his condition as a mere man ; he believes that he is saved from evil, under whatever form he may conceive this evil. The first article in every creed is the belief in salvation by faith. But it is hard to see how a mere

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Conclusion 417 - . . ... . r

idea could have this efficacy. An idea is in reality only a part of ourselves ; then how could it confer upon us powers superior to those which we have of our own nature ? Howsoever rich it might be in affective virtues, it could add nothing to our natural vitality ; for it could only release the motive powrrs which are within us, neither creating them nor increasing them. From the mere fact that wc consider an object worthy f being loved and sought after, it does not follow that we feel OLelvcs stronger afterwards ; it is also necessary that this objec et free energies superior to these which we ordinarily have at our command and also that we have some means of making these enter into us and unite themselves to our interior lives. Now for that, it is not enough that we thhil: of them ; it is also indispensable that we place ourselves within their sphere of action, and that we set ourselves where wc may best feel their influence ; in. a word, it is necessary that we act, and that wc repeat the acts thus necessary e'ery time wc feel the need of rcnewinr heir effects. From this point of view, it is readily seen how that group of regularly repeated acts which form the cult get their importance. In fact, whoevcrjias really practised a. religion knows very well that it is the cult which gives rise to these impressions of joy, of interior peace, of serenity, of enthusiasm which are, for the believer, an experimental proof of his beliefs. The cult is not simply a system of signs by which the faith is outwardly trans - lated ; it is a collection of the means by which this is created and recreated periodically. Whether it consists in material acts or mental operations, it isalways this which is efficacious.

Our entire study rests upon tliis postulate that the unanimous , sentiment of the believers of all times cannot be purely illusory. Together with a recent apologist of the faith wc admit that these religious beliefs rest upon a specific experience whose demonstrative value is, in one sense, not one bit inferior to that of scientific experiments, though different from them. We, too, think that " a tree is known by its fruits," and that fertility is the best proof of what the roots are worth. But from the fact that a " religious experience," if we choose to call it this, does exist and that it has a certain foundation and, by the way, is there any experience which has none? it does not follow that the reality which is its foundation conforms objectively to the idea which believers have of it. The very fact that the fashion in which it hs been conceived has varied infinitely in different times is enough to prove that none of these concep - tions express it adequately. If a scientist states it as an axiom

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that the sensations of heat and light which we feel corresponl to some objective cause, he does not conclude that this is whaf it appears to the senses to be. Likewise, even if the impressions which the faithful feel arc not imaginary, still they are in no way privileged intuitions ; there is no reason for believing that they inform us better upon the nature of their object than do ordinary sensations upon the nature of bodies and their properties. In order to discover what this object consists of, we must submit them to an examination and elaboration analogous to that which has substituted for the sensuous idea of the world another which is scientific and conceptual.

This is precisely what we have tried to do, and we have seen that this reality, which mythologies have represented under so many different forms, but which is the universal and eternal objective cause of these sensations sui generis out of which religious experience is made, is society. Wc have shown what moral forces it develops and how it awakens this sentiment of a refuge, of a shield and of a guardian support which attachss the believer to his cult. It is that which raises him outside, himself ; it is even that which made him. For that which makes a man is the totality of the intellectual property which constitutes civilization, and civilization is the work of society. Thus is explained the preponderating role of the cult in all religions, whichever they may be. This is "because society cannot make its influence felt unless it is in action, and it is not in action unless the individuals who compose it arc assembled together and act in common. It is by common action that it takes conbciousness of itself and realizes its position ; it is before all else an active co-operation. The collective ideas and sentiments arc even possible only owing to these exterior movements which symbolize them, as we have established. Then it is action which dominates the religious life, because of the mere fact that it is society which is its source.

Jn addition to all the reasons which have been given to justify this conception, a final one may be added here, which is the result of our whole work. As wc have progressed, wc have established the fact that the fundamental categories of thought, and consequently of science, are of rcligiov jrigin. We have seen that the same is true for magic and consequently for the different processes which have issued from it. On the other banc1, it has long been known that up until a relatively advanced, moment of evolution, moral and legal rules have been indis - tinguishable from ritual prescriptions. In summing up, then,

. it may be said that nearly all the great social institutions have 1 Sec above, pp. 230 F.

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Conclusion 419

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been born in religion.1 Now in order that these principal aspects of the coT)ctive life may have commenced by being only varied aspects of the religious life, it is obviously necessary that the religious life be the eminent form and, as it were, the concentrated cxprcssio- of the whole collective life. Jil religion has given birth to all that is essential, in society, if is "because the idea of ' society is the soul of religion. . -.

Religious forces ate therefore human forces, moral forces. It is true that since collective sentiments can become conscious of themselves only by fixing themselves upon external objects, they have not been able to take form without adopting some of their characteristics from other things: they have thus acquired a sort of physical nature ; in this way they ha come to mix themselves with the life of the material wor1'1 '.hen have considered themselves capable of explaining . - .sses there. But when they are considered only from tin, .nt of view and in this r61e, only their most superficial asp - seen. In reality, the essential elements of which these col' . senti - ments are made have been borrowed by the undc j. It ordinarily seems that they should have a human only when they are conceived under human forms;' . i the most impersonal and the most anonymous are r. than objectified sentiments.

It is only by regarding religion from this angle that it is possible to see its real significance. If we stick closely to appearances, rites often give the effect of purely manual operations : they arc anointings, washings, meals. To consecrate something, it is put in contact with a source of religious energy, just as to-day i body is put in contact with a source of heat or electricity to warm or electrize it; the two processes employed are not essentially different. Thus understood, religious technique seems to be a sort of mystic mechanics. But these material manoeuvres ire only the external envelope under which the mental oper-. itions are hidden. Finally, there is no question of exercising" a physical constraint upon blind and, incidentally, imaginary forces, but rather of reaching mdividr, 1 consciousnesses, of giving. , thm a directiorHmd of disciplining ther It is sometimes said

1 Only one form of social activity has not yet been expressly attached to eligion : that Is economic activity. Sometimes process that are derived from lugic have, by that fact alone, an origin that is indirectly religious. Also, tonomic value is a sort of power or efficacy, and we know the religious origins of he idea of power. Also, richness can confer mana ; therefore it bos it. Hence t is seen that the ideas of economic value and of religious value are not without ennection. But the question of the nature of these connections has not yet been tcdied.

It is or this reason that Fraier and even Prruss set impersonal religious orces outside o', or at least on the threshold of religion, to attach them to magic.

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420 Elementary Forms of Religious Life

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that inferior religions are materialistic. Such an expression is in- exact. All religions, even the crudest, are in a sense spiritualistic for the powers they put in play arc before all spiritual, and ak their principal object is to act upon the moral life. Thus it seen that whatever has been done in the name of religion canaof have been done in vain : for it is necessarily the society tot) did it, and it is humanity that has reaped the fruits.

But, it is said, what society is it that has thus made the basis of religion ? Is it the real society, such as it is and act! before our very eyes, with the legal and moral organizatkx which it has laboriously fashioned during the course of history J This is full of defects and imperfections. In it, evil goes beside the good, injustice often reigns supreme, and the truth b oftes obscured by error. How could anything so crudely organized inspire the sentiments of love, the ardent enthusiasm and the spirit of abnegation which all religions claim of their followers "i These perfect beings which are gods could not have taken theii traits from so mediocre, and sometimes even so base a reality,

But, on the other hand, does someone think of a perfect society where justice and truth would be sovereign, and from which evii in all its forms would be banished for ever ? No one would deny that this is in close relations with the religious sentiment for, they would say, it is towards the realization of this that al religions strive. But that society is not an empirical fact, dehnite and observable ; it is a fancy, a dream with which men haw lightened their sufferings, but in which they have never rcallj lived. It is merely an idea which comes to express our more 01 less obscure aspirations towards the good, the beautiful and the ideal. Now these aspirations have their roots in us ; they con from the very depths of our being ; then there is nothing outside of us which can account for them. Moreover, they are already religious in themselves ; thus it would seem that the ideal society presupposes religion, far from being able to explain it1

But, in the first place, things are arbitrarily simplified when religion is seen only on its idealistic side : in its way, it is realistic, There is no physical or moral ugliness, there arc no vices or evifa which do not have a special divinity. There are gods of theft and trickery, of lust and war, of sickness and of death. Chris- tianity itself, howsoever high the idea which it has made of the divinity may be, has been obliged give the spirit of evil a place in its mythology. Satan is an essential piece of the Christian system ; even if he is an impure being, he is not a profane one. The anti-god is a god, inferior and subordinated, it is true, bat

1 Boatnmx, Scumt tt Rmpon. pp. 106-207.

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Conclusion 421 nevertheless endowed with extended power , he is even the object of rites, at least of negative ones. Thus religion, far from ignoring the real society and making abstraction of ft, is in its image ; it reflects all its aspects, even the most vulgar and the most repulsive. All is to be found there, and if in the majority of cases we see the good victorious over evil, life over death, the powers of light over the powers of darkness, it is because reality is not otherwise. If the relation between these two contrary forces were reversed, life would be impossible ; but, as a matter of fact, it maintains itself and even tends to develop.

But if, in the midst of these mythologies and theologies we see reality clearly appearing, it is none the less true that it is found there only in an enlarged, transformed and idealized form. In this respect, the most primitive religions do not differ from the most recent and the most refined. For example, we have seen how the Arunta place at the beginning of time a mythical society whose organization exactly reproduces that which still exists to-day ; it includes the same clans and phratries, it is under the same matrimonial rules and it practises the same rites. But the personages who compose it arc ideal beings, gifted with powers and virtues to which common mortals cannot pretend. Their nature is not only higher, but it is di.fercnt, since it is at once animal and human. The evil powers there undergo a similar metamorphosis : evil itself is, as it were, made sublime and idealized. The question now raises itself of whence this idealization comes.

Some reply that men have a natural faculty for idealizing, that is to say, of substituting for the real world another different one, to which they transport themselves by thought. But that is merely changing the terms of the problem ; it is not resolving it or even advancing it. This systematic idealization is an essential characteristic of religions. Explaining them by an innate power of idealization is simply replacing one word by another which is the equivalent of the first ; it is as if they said that men have made religions because they have a religious nature. Animals know only one world, the one which they perceive by experience, internal as well as external. Men alone have the faculty of conceiving the ideal, of adding Something to the real. Now where does this singular privilege come from ? lieforc mak.'ng it an initial fact or a mysterious virtue which escapes science, we must be sure that it does not depend upon empirically determinable conditions.

The explanation of religion which we have proposed has precisely this ad antage, that it gives an answer to this nest ion.

422 Elementary Forms of Religious Life

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For our definition of the sacred is that it is something added to and above the real : now the ideal answers to this same definition; we cannot explain one without explaining the other. In fact, we have seen that if collective life awakens religious thought on reaching a certain degree of intensity, it is because it brings about a state of effervescence which changes the conditions of psychic activity. Vital energies are over -excited, passions more active, sensations stronger ; there are even some which are produced only at this moment. A man does not recognise himself ; he feels himself transformed and consequently he transforms the environment which surrounds him. In order to account for the very particular impressions which he receives, he attributes to the things with which he is in most direct contact properties which they have not, exceptional powers and virtues which the objects of every-day experience do not possess. In a word, above the rcol world hcre his profane life passes ho has placed another which, in one sense, docs not exist except in thought, but to which he attributes a higher sort of dignity than to the first. Thus, from a double point of view it is an ideal world.

The formation of the ideal world is therefore not an irreducible fact which escapes science ; it depends upon conditions which observation can touch ; it is a natural product of social life. For a society to become conscious of itself and maintain at the necessary degree of intensity the sentiments wb'ch it thus attains, it must assemble and concentrate itself. Now this concentration brings about an exaltation of the mental life which talc?s form in a group of ideal conceptions where is portrayed the new life thus awakened ; they correspond to this new set of psychical forces which is added to those which we have at our disposition for the daily tasks of existence. A society can neither create itself nor recreate itself without at the same time creating an ideal. This creation is not a sort of work of supererogation for it. by which it would complete itself, being already formed ; it is the act by which it is periodically made and remade. There - fore when some oppose the ideal society to the real society, like two antagonists which would lead us in opposite directions, they materialize and oppose abstractions. The ideJ .ociety is not outside of the real society ; it is a part of it. Far irom being divided between them as between two poles which mutually repel each other, we cannot hold to one without holding to the other. For a society is not made up merely of the mass of in - dividuals who compose it, the ground which they occupy, the things which they use and the movements which they perform, but above all is the idea which it forms of itself. It is un-

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Conclusion 423 doubtcdly true that it hesitates over the manner in which it ought to conceive itself ; it feels itself drawn in divergent directions. But these conflicts which break forth are not between the ideal and reality, but between two different ideals, that of yesterday and that of to-day, that which has the authority of tradition and that which has the hope of the future. There is surely a place for investigating whence these ideals evolve ; but what - ever solution may be given to this problem, it still remains that all passes in the world of the ideal.

Thus the collective ideal which religion expresses is far from being due to a vogue innate power of the individual, but it"i ralher at the school of collective life that the individual lias IearncTto idealize. It is in assimilating the ideals elaborated bys6ciely that he has become capable of conceiving the ideal. It is society which, by leading him within its sphere of action, has male him acquire the need of raising himself above the world of experience and has at the same time furnished him with the means of conceiving another. For society has con - structed this new world in constructing itself, since it is society which this expresses. Thus both with, the individual and in the group, the faculty of idealizing has nothing mysterious about it. It is not a sort of luxury which a man cculd get along without, but a condition of his very existence. He could not be a social being, that is to say, he could not be a man, if he had not acquired it. It is true that in incarnating themselves in individuals, collective ideals tend to individualize themselves. Each under- m stands them after his own fashion and marks them with his own stamp ; he suppresses certain elements and adds others. Thus the personal ideal disengages itself from the social ideal in pro - portion as the individual personality develops itself and becomes an autonomous source of action. But if we wish to understand this aptitude, so singular in appearance, of living outside of reality, it is enough to connect it with the social conditions upon which it depends.

Therefore it is nccc 3ary to avoid seeing in this theory of religion a simple restatement of historical materialism : that would be misunderstanding our thought to an extreme degree. In showing that religion is something essentially social, we do not mean to say that it confines itself to translating into another language the material forms of society and its immediate vital necessities. It is true that we take it as evident that social life" depends upon its material foundation and bears its mark, just as the mental life of an individual depends upon his nervous system and in fact his whole organism. But collective consciousness is something morcthan a mere opiphenomcnon oflfs

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424 Elementary Farms of Religious Life

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morphological basis, just as individual consciousness is something more than a simple efflorescence of the nervous system. In order that the former may appear, a synthesis sui generis of particular consciousnesses is required. Now this synthesis has the effect of disengaging a whole world of sentiments, ideas and images which, once born, obey laws all their own. They attract each other, repel each other, unite, divide themselves, and multiply, though these combinations are not commanded and necessitated by the condition of the underlying reality. The life thus brought! into being even enjoys so great an independence that it some - times indulges in manifestations with no purpose or utility of any sort, for the mere pleasure of affirming itself. We have shown that this is often precisely the case with ritual activity and mythological thought.1

But if religion is the product of social causes, how can we explain the individual cult and the univcrsalistic character of certain religions ? If it is born in Joro externa, h v has it been able to pass into the inner conscience of the individual and pene - trate there ever more and more profoundly ? If it is the woik of definite and individualized societies, how has it been able to detach itself from them, even to the point of being conceived as something common to all humanity ?

In the course of our studies, we have met with the germs of individual religion and of religious cosmopolitanism, and we have seen how they were formed ; thus we possess the more general elements of the reply which is to be given to this double question.

We have shown how the religious force which animates the clan particularizes itself, by incarnating itself in particular consciousnesses. Thus secondary sacred beings are formed ; each individual has liis own, made in his own image, associated to his own intimate life, bound up with his own destiny ; it is the soul, the individual totem, the protecting ancestor, etc. These beings are the object of rites which the individual can celebrate by himself, outside of any group ; tliis is the first form of the individual cult. To be sure, it is only a very rudi - mentary cult ; but since the personality of the individual is still only slightly marked, and but little value is attributed to it, the cult which expresses it could hardly be expected to be very highly developed as yet. But as individuals have differ - entiated themselves more and more and the value of an individual

1 See above, pp. 370 n". On this same quest on, aw also our article. " Repre - sentation individueltes et representations coUtxtivea." n the Rtvu it Mtta - pkytxqu. May, inv

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Conclusion 425

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has increased, the corresponding cult has taken a relatively greater place in the totality of the religious life and at the same time it is more fully closed to outside influences.

Thus the existence of individual cults implies nothing which contradicts or embarrasses the sociological interpretation of religion ; for the religious forces to which it addresses itself are only the individualized forms of collective forces. There - fore, even when religion seems to be entirely within the individual conscience, it is still in society that it linds the living source from which it is nourished. We are now able to appreciate the value of the radical individualism which would make religion something purely individual : it misunderstands the fundamental conditions of the religious life. If up to the present it has re - mained in the stage of theoretical aspirations which have never been realized, it is because it is unrealizable. A philosophy may well be elaborated in the silence of the interior imagination, but not so a faith. For before all else, a faith is warmth, life, enthusiasm, the exaltation of the whole mental life, the raising of the individual above himself. Now how could he add to the energies which he possesses without going outside himself ? How could he surpass himself merely by his own forces ? The only source of life at which we can morally reanimate our - selves is that formed by the society of our fellow beings ; the only moral forces with which we can sustain and increase our own are those which we get from others. Let us even admit that there really are beings more or less analogous to those which the mythologies represent. In order that they may exercise over souls the useful direction which is their reason for existence, it is necessary that men believe in them. Now these beliefs are active only when they are partaken by many. A man cannot retain them any length of time by a purely personal effort , it is not thus that they are born or that they are acquired ; it is even doubtful if they can be kept under these conditions. In fact, a man who has a veritable faith feels an invincible need of spreading it : therefore he leaves his isolation, approaches others and sees to convince them, and it is the ardour of the convictions wl ich he arouses that strengthens his own. It would quickly eaken if it remained alone.

It is the s me with religious universalism as with this individualism. Far from being an exclusive attribute of certain very great religions, we have found it, not at the base, it is true, but at the summit of the Australian system. Bunjil, Daramulun or Baiame are not simple tribal gods ; each of them is recognized by a number of different tribes. In a sense, their cult is inter - national. This conception is therefore very near to that found

426 Elementary Forms of Religious Life

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in the most recent theologies. So certain writers have felt it their duty to deny its authenticity, howsoever incontestable this may be.

And we have been able to show how this has been formed. Neighbouring tribes of a similar civilization cannot fail to

be in constant relations with each other. All sorts of circum - stances give an occasion for it : besides commerce, which is still rudimentary, there arc marriages; these international marriages are very common in Australia. In the course of these meetings, men naturally become conscious of the moral relationship which united them. They have the same social organization, the same division into phratrics, clans and matri - monial classes ; they practise the same rites of initiation, or wholly similar ones. Mutual loans and treaties result in re - inforcing these spontaneous resemblances. The gods to which these manifestly identical institutions were attached could hardly have remained distinct in their minds. Everything tended to bring them together and consequently, even supposing that each tribe elaborated the notion independently, they must necessarily have tended to confound themselves with each other. Also, it is probable that it was in inter-tribal assemblies that they were first conceived. For they are chiefly the gods of initiation, and in the initiation ceremonies, the different tribes arc usually represented. So if sacred beings are formed which are connected with no geographically determined society, that is not because they have an extra-social origin. It is because there arc other groups above these geographically determined ones, whose contours are less clearly marked : they have no fixed frontiers, but include all sorts of more or less neighbouring and related tribes. The particular social life thus created tends to spread itself over an area with no definite limits. Naturally the mythological personages who correspond to it have the same character ; their sphere of influence is not limited ; they go beyond the particular tribes and their territory. They are the great international gods.

Now there is nothing in this situation which is peculiar to Australian societies. There is no people and no state which is not a part of another society, more or less unlimited, which embraces all the peoples and all the States with which the first comes in contact, either directly or indirectly ; there is no national life which is not don.inated by a collective life of an international nature. In proportion as wc advance in history, these international groups acquire a greater importance and extent. Thus wc sec how, in certain cases, this univcrsalistic tendency has been able to develop itself to the point of affecting

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Conclusion 427 not only the higher ideas of the religious system, but even the principles upon which it rests.

II Thus there is something eternal in religion which is destined

to survive all the particular symbols in which religious thought has successively enveloped itself. There can be no society which does not feel the need of upholding and reaffirming at regular intervals the collective sentiments and the collective ideas which make its unity and its personality. Now this moral remaking cannot be achieved except by the means of reunions, assemblies and meetings where the individuals, being closely united to one another, reaffirm in common their common sentiments ; hence come ceremonies which do not differ from regular religious cere - monies, cither in their object, the result which they produce, or the processes employed to attain these results. What essential difference is there between an assembly of Christians celebrating the principal dates of the life of Christ, or of Jews remembering the exodus from Egypt or the promulgation of the decalogue, and a reunion of citizens commemorating the promulgation of a lew moral or legal system or some great event in the national life ?

If we find a little difficulty to-day in imagining what these feasts and ceremonies of the future could consist in, it is because we are going through a stage of transition and moral mediocrity. Hie great things of the past which filled our fathers with enthusiasm do not excite the same ardour in us, either because they have come into common usage to such an extent that we are unconscious of them, or else because they no longer answer to our actual aspirations ; but as yet there is nothing to replace them. We can no longer impassionate ourselves for the principles in the name of which Christianity recommended to masters that they treat their slaves humanely, and, on the other hand, the idea which it has formed of human equality and fraternity seems to us to-day to leave too large a place for unjust inequalities. Its pity for the outcast seems to us too Platonic ; we desire another which would be more practicable ; but as yet we cannot clearly see what it should be nor how it could be realized in facts. In a word, the old gods are growing old or already dead, and others are not yet bom. This is what rendered vain the attempt of Comte with the old historic souvenirs artificially revived :;it is life itself, and not ? ead past which can produce a living cult. But this state of in . itude and confused agitation cannot last for ever. A day will come when our societies will

428 Elementary F 'his of Religious Life Tj

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know again those hours of creative effervescence, in the course of which new ideas arise and new formula; are found which serve for a while as a guide to humanity ; and when these hours sKall have been passed through once, men will spontaneously fed the need of reliving them from time to time in thought, thai is to say, of keeping alive their memory by means of celebrations which regularly reproduce their fruits. We have already seen how the French Revolution established a whole cycle of holidays to keep the principles with which it was inspired in a state of perpetual youth. If this institution quickly fell away, it was because the revolutionary faith lasted but a moment, and de - ceptions and discouragements rapidly succeeded the first moments of enthusiasm. But though the work may have mis canted, it enables us to imagine what might have happened in other conditions ; and everything leads us to believe that it will be taken up again sooner or later. There are no gospels which are immortal, but neither is there any reason for believing that humanity is incapable of inventing new ones. As to the question of what symbols this new faith will express itself with, whether they will resemble those of the past or not, and whether or not they will be more adequate for the reality which they seek to translate, that is something which surpasses the human faculty of foresight and which docs not appertain to the principal question.

But feasts and rites, in a word, the cult, arc not the whole religion. This is not merely a system of practices, but also a system of ideas whose object is to explain the world ; we have seen that even the humblest have their cosmology. Whatever connection there may be between these two elements of the religious life, they are still quite different. The one is turned towards action, which it demands and regulates ; the other b turned towards thought, which it enriches and organizes. Then they do not depend upon the same conditions, and consequently it may be asked if the second answers to necessities as universal and as permanent as the first.

When specific characteristics arc attributed to religious thought, and when it is believed that its function is to express, by means peculiar to itself, an aspect of reality which evades ordinary knowledge as well as science, one naturally refuses to admit that religion can ever abandon its speculative r61c. But our analysis of the facts docs not seem to have shown this specific quality of religion. The religion which we have just studied is one of those whose symbols are the most disconcerting for the reason. There all appears mysterious. These beings which belong to the most heterogeneous groups at the same time, who multiply

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without ceasing to Dc one, who divide without diminishing, all seem, at first view, to belong to an entirely different world from the one where wc live ; some have even gone so far as to say that the mind which constructed them ignored the laws of logic completely. Perhaps the contrast between reason and faith has never been more thorough. Then if there has ever been a moment in history when their hetcrogeneousness should have stood out clearly, it is here. But contrary to all appear - ances, as we have pointed out, the realities to which religious speculation is then applied are the same as those which later ervc as the subject of reflection for philosophers : they are

nature, man, society. The mystery which appears to surround them is wholly superficial and disappears before a more pains - taking observation : it is enough merely to set aside the veil

ith which mythological imagination has covered them for them to appear such as they really are. Religion sets itself to translate these realities into an intelligible language which does not differ m nature from that employed by science ; the attempt is made by both to connect things with each other, to establish internal relations between them, to classify them and to systematize them. We have even seen that the essential ideas of scientific logic are of religious origin. It is true that in order to utilize them, science ;ives them a new elaboration ; it purges them cf all accidental lements ; in a general way, it brings a spirit of criticism into

ill its doings, which religion ignores ; it surrounds itself with precautions to " escape precipitation and bias," and to hold .side the passions, prejudices and all subjective influences. But these pcrfectionings of method are not enough to differentiate t from religion. In this regard, both pursue the same end ; cientinc thought is only a more perfect form of religious thought, rims it seems natural that the second should progressively etire before the first, as this becomes better fitted to perform he task.

And there is no doubt that this regression has taken place n the course of history. Having left religion, science tends to .ubstitute itself for this latter in all that which concerns the ognitive and intellectual functions. Christianity has already letinitely consecrated this substitution in the order of material hings. Seeing in matter that which is profane before all else, t readily left the knowledge of this to another discipline, traduiit nundum hotmnum diijmtmtu. :i " He gave the world over to the lisputes of men " ; it is thus thai che natural sciences have been ible to establish themselves and ;.iakc their authority recognized without very great difficulty. But it could not give up the world rf souls so easily ; for it isbefore alljover souls that the god of

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the Christians aspires to reign. That is why the idea of sub- mitting the psychic life to science produced the effect of a sort of profanation for a long time ; even to-day it is repugnant to many minds. However, experimental and comparative psychology is founded and to-day we must reckon with it. But the world of the religious and moral life is still forbidden. The great majority of men continue to believe that here there is an order of things which the mind cannot penetrate except by very special ways. Hence comes the active resistance which is met with every time that someone tries to treat religious and moral phenomena scientifically. But in spite of these oppositions, these attempts are constantly repeated and this persistence even allows us to foresee that this final barrier will finally give way and that science will establish herself as mistress even in this reserved region.

That is what the conflict between science and religion really amounts to. It is said that science denies religion in principle. But religion exists ; it is a system of given facts ; in a word, it is a reality. How could science deny this reality ? Also, in so far as religion is action, and in so far as it is a means of making men live, science could not take its place, for even if this expresses life, it does not create it ; it may well seek to explain the faith, but by that very act it presupposes it. Thus there is no conflict except upon one limited point. Of the two functions which religion originally fulfilled, there is one, and only ono, which

- tends to escape it more and more : that is its speculative function. That which science refuses to grant to religion is not its right to exist, but its right to dogmatize upon the nature of things and the special competence which it claims for itself for knowing man and the world. As a matter of fact, it does not know itself. It docs not even know what it is made of, nor to what need it answers. It is itself a subject for science, so far is it from being able to make the law for science I And from another point of view, since there is no proper subject for religious speculation outside that reality to which scientific reflection is applied, it is evident that this former cannot play the same role in the future that it has played in the past.

However, it seems destined to transform itself rather than to . disappear.

f ( We have said that there is something eternal in religion : it is the cult and the faith. Men cannot celebrate ceremonies for which they see no reason, nor can they accept a faith which tlicy in no way undtand. To spread itself or merely to main - tain itself, it must lx justified, that is to say, a theory must be made of it. A theory of this sort must undoubtedly be founded

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upon the different sciences, from the moment when these exist ; first of all, upon the social sciences, for religious faith has its origin in society ; then upon psychology, for society is a synthesis of human consciousnesses ; and finally upon the sciences c nature, for man and society are a part of the universe and can be abstracted from it only artificially. But howsoever important these facts taken from the constituted sciences may be, they are not enough ; for faith is before all else an impetus to action, while science, no matter how far it may be pushed, always remains at a distance from this. Science is fragmentary and incomplete ; it advances but slowly and is never finished ; but life cannot wait. The theories which are destined to make men live and act are therefore obliged to pass science and complete it prematurely. They are possible only wnen the practical exigencies and the vital necessities which we feel without distinctly conceiving them push thought in advance, beyond that which science permits us to affirm. Thus religions, even the most rational and laicized, cannot and never will be able to dispense with a particular form of speculation which, though having the same subjects as science itself, cannot be really scientific : the obscure intuitions of sensation and sentiment too often take the place of logical reasons. On one side, this speculation resembles that which we meet with in the religions of the past ; but on another, it is different. While claiming and exercising the right of going beyond science, it must commence by knowing this and by inspiring itself with it. Ever since the authority of science was established, it must be reckoned with ; one can go farther than it under the pressure of necessity, but he must take his direction from it. He can affirm nothing that it denies, deny nothing that it affirms, and establish nothing that is not directly or indirectly founded upon principles taken from it. From now on, the faith no longer exercises the same hegemony as formerly over the system of ideas that we may continue to call religion. A rival power rises up before it which, being born of it, ever after submits it to its criticism and control. And everything makes us foresee that this control will constantly become more extended and efficient, while no limit can be assigned to its future influence.

Ill But if the fundamental notions of science are of a religious

nrigin, how has religion been able to bring them forth ? At first ight, one does not see what relations there can be between

religion and logic. Or, since the reality which religious thought lx presses is society, the question can be stated in the following

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432 Elementary Forms of Religious Life ! terms, which make the entire difficulty appear even better; what has been able to make social life so important a source for the logical life ? It seems as though nothing could have predestined it to this role, for it certainly was not to satisfy their speculative needs that men associated themselves to gethcr.

Perhaps we shall be found over bold in attempting so complex a question here. To treat it as it should be treated, the sociological conditions of knowledge should be known mucH better than they actually are ; we are only beginning to catch glimpses of some of them. However, the question is so grave, and so directly implied in all that has preceded, that we must make an effort not to leave it without an answer. Perhaps it is not impossible, even at present, to state some general principles which may at least aid in the solution.

Logical thought is made up of concepts. Seeking how society can have played a role in the genesis of logical thought thus reduces itself to seeking how it can have taken a part in the formation of concepts.

' If, as is ordinarily the case, we see in the concept only a general idea, the problem appears insoluble. By his own power, the in - dividual can compare his conceptions and images, disengage that which they have in common, and thus, in a word, generalize. Then it is hard to see why this generalization should be possible only in and through society. But, in the first place, it is inadmissible that logical thought is characterized only by the greater extension of the conceptions of which it is nv, 1e up. If particular ideas have nothing logical about them, wny should it be different with general ones? The general exists only in the particular; it is the particut simplified and impoverished. Then the first could have no virtues or privileges which the second has not. Inversely, if conceptual thought can be applied to the class; species or variety, howsoever restricted these may be, why can it not be extended to the individual, that is to say, to the limit towards which the conception tends, proportionately as its extension diminishes? As a matter of fact, there arc many concepts which have only individuals as their object. Jn every sort of religion, gods are individualities distinct from each other; however, they are conceived, not perceived. Each people repre - sents its historic or legendary heroes in fashions which vary with the time. Finally, every one of us forms an idea of the individuals with whom he comes in contact, of their character, of their appearance, their distinctive traits and their moral and physical temperaments : these notions, too, are real concepts. It is true l7" IT! ftonnnl tlfM OT ffimwxl rit4ntt rt..rV Vn rri irrsniir

Conclusion 433

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scientific concepts, are there a great many that are perfectly adequate for their object ? In this direction, there are only differences of degree between them.

Therefore the concept must be defined by other characteristics. It is opposed to sensual representations of every order sensa - tions, perceptions or images by the following properties.

Jf Sensual representations are in a perpetual flux ; they come after each other like the waves of a river, and even during the time that they last, they do not remain the same thing. Each of them is an integral part of the precise instant when it takes place. We are never sure of again finding a perception such as we experienced it the first time ; for if the thing perceived has not changed, it is we who are no longer the same. On the con - trary, the concept is, as it were, outside of lime and change ; it is in the depths below all this agitation ; it might be said that it is in a different portion of the mind, which is serener and calmer. It does not move of itself, by an internal and spontaneous evolution, but, on the contrary, it resists change. It is a manner of thinking that, at every moment of time, is fixed and crystallized.1 In so far as it is what it ought to be, it is immutable. If it changes, it is not because it is its nature to do so, but because we have discovered some imperfection in it ; it is because it had to be rectified. The system of concepts with which we think in every - day life is that expressed by the vocabulary of our mother tongue ; for every word translates a concept. Now language is something fixed ; it changes but very slowly, and consequently it is the same with the conceptual system which it expresses. The scholar finds himself in the same situation in regard to the special terminology employed by the science o which he has consecrated himself, and hence in regard to the special scheme of concepts to which this terminology corresponds. It is true that he can make innovations, but these are always a sort of violence done to the established ways of thinking.

And at the same tiim hat it is relatively immutable, the concept is universal, or at least capable of becoming so. A concept is not my concept ; I hold it in common with other men, or, in any cae, can communicate it to them. It is im - possible lor me to make a sensation pass from my consciousness into that of another ; it holds closely to my organism and personality and cannot be detached from them. All that I can do is to invite others to place themselves before the same object as myself and to leave themselves to its action. On the other hand, conversation and all intellectual communication between men is an exchange of concepts. The concept is an essentially

1 William James, PrimtpUs of PsycWofy, I, p. 4O4. r

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impersonal representation ; it is through it that human in-1 telligences communicate.1 I

, The nature of the concept, thus defined, bespeaks its origin, I If it is common to all, it is the w.rk of the community. Since I it bears the mark of no particular mind, it is clear that it wail elaborated by a unique intelligence, where all others meet each I other, and after a fashion, come to nourish themselves. If it I has more stability than sensations or images, it is because the 1 collective representations are more stable than the individual I ones ; for while an individual is conscious even of the slight I changes which take place in his environment, only events of I a greater gravity can succeed in affecting the mental status of I a society. Every time that we are in the presence of a type I of thought or action which is imposed uniformly upon particular I wills or intelligences, this pressure exercised over the individual I betrays the intervention of the group. Also, as we have already I said, the concepts with which we ordinarily think are those I of our vocabulary. Now it is unquestionable that language, I and consequently the system of concepts which it translates, I is the produc of a collective elaboration. What it expresses I is the manner n which society as a whole represents the facts I of experience. The ideas which correspond to the diverse elements I of language are thus collective representations. I

Even their contents bear witness to the same tact. In fact, I there arc scarcely any words among those which we usually I employ wl e meaning does not pass, to a greater or less extent, I the limits of our personal experience. Very frequently a term I expresses things which we have never perceived or experiences I which we have never had or of which we have never been the witnesses. Even when we know some of the objects which it concern:, it is only as particular examples that they serve to illustrate idea which they would never have been able to form by themselves. Thus there is a great deal of knowledge

1 This universality of the concept should not be couiuaed with its g-nerality : they are very different things What we mean by universality is the property which the concept has of being communicable to a number of minds, and to principle, to all minds . but this communicability is wholly independent of the degree of its extension A concept which is applied to only one object, sad whose extension is consequently at the minimum, can be the same for ever ; body : such is the case with the concept of a deity.

It may be objected that frequently, a? the mere effect of repetition, wayssf thinking and acting become hxed and crystallized in the individual, in the form of habits which resist change. But a habit ts only a tendency to repeat an act or idea automatically every tune that the same circumstances appear . it does Ml at ail imply that te idea or act is in the form of an exemplary type, proposed to or imposed upon the mind or will. It is only when a type of this sort is set up. thai is to uv, when a rule or standard is established, that social action can and sboost be presumed I

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Conclusion 435 condensed in the word which I never collected, and which is not individual ; it even surpasses me to such an extent that I cannot even completely appropriate all its results. Which of us knows all the words of the language he speaks and the entire signification of each ?

This remark enables us to determine the sense in which we irean to say that concepts are collective representations. If the; belong to a whole social group, it is not because they repre - sent the average of the corresponding individual representations ; for in that case they would be poorer than the latter in intellectual content, while, as a matter of fact, they contain much that sur- passes the knowledge of the average individual. They are not abstractions which have a reality only in particular conscious- nesses, but they are as concrete representations as an individual could form of his own personal environment : they correspond to the way in which this very special being, society, considers the things of its own proper experience. If, as a matter of fact, the concepts are nearly always general ideas, and if they express categories and classes rather than particular objects, it is because the unique and variable characteristics of things interest society but rarely ; because of its very extent, it can scarcely be affected bymore than their general and permanent qualities. Therefore it is to this aspect of affairs that it gives its attention : it is a part of its nature to see things in large and under the aspect which they ordinarily have. But this generality is not necessary for them, and, in any case, even when these representations have the generic character which they ordinarily have, they are the work of society and arc enriched by its experience.

That is what makes conceptual thought so valuable for us. If concepts were only general ideas, they would not enrich knowledge a great deal, for, as we have already pointed out, the general contains nothing more than the particular. But if before all else they are collective representations, they add to that which we can learn by our own personal experience all that wisdom and science which the group has accumulated in the course of centuries. Thinking by concepts is not merely seeing reality on its most general side, but it is projecting a light upon die sensation which illuminates it, penetrates it and transforms it. Conceiving something is both learning its essential elements better and also locating it in its place ; for each civiliza - tion has its organized system of concepts which characterizes it. Before this scheme of ideas, the individual is in the same situation as the wu? of Plato before the world of Ideas. He must assimilate them to himself, for he must have them to hold intercourse with others ; bui the assimilation is always imperfect.

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436 Elementary Forms of Religious Life

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Each of us sees them after his own fashion. There are some which escape us completely and remain outside of our circle of vision ; there are others of which we perceive certain aspects only. There are even a great many which we pervert in holding, for as they are collective by nature, they cannot become in - dividualized without being retouched, modified, and consequently falsified. Jience comes the great trouble we have in under- standing each other, and the fact that we even lie to each other without wishing to : it is because we all use the same words without giving them the same meaning.

We are now able to see wh.t the part of society in the genesis of logical thought is. Thir is possible only from the moment when, above the fugitive conceptions which they owe to sencuous experience, men have succeeded in conceiving a whole world of stable ideas, the common ground of all intelligences. In fact, logical thinking is always impersonal thinking, and is also thought sub species aicrnitalisas though for all time. Impersonality and stability arc the two characteristics of truth. Now logical life evidently presupposes that men know, at leas confusedly, that there is such a thing as truth, distinct from -suas appear - ances. But how have they been able to arrive a mis conception ? We generally talk as though it should have spontaneously presented itself to them from the moment they opened their eyes upon the world. However, there :s nothing in immediate experience which could suggest it ; everything even contradicts it. Thus the child and the animal have no suspicion of it. History shows that it has taken centuries for it to disengage and establish itself. In our Western world, it was with the great thinkers of Greece that it first became clearly conscious of itself and of the consequences which it implies ; when the discovery was made, it caused an amazement which Plato has translated into magnificent language. But if it is only at this epoch that the idea is expressed in philosophic formula?, it was necessarily pre-existent in the stage of an obscure sentiment. Philosophers have sought to elucidate this sentiment, but they have not succeeded. In order that they might reflect upon it and analyse it, it was necessary that it be given them, and that they seek to know whence it came, that is to say, in what experience it was founded. 1 his is in collective experience. It is under the form of collective thought that impersonal thought is for the first time revealed to humanity ; we cannot sec by what other way this revelation could have been made. From the mere fact that society exists, there is also, outside of the individual sensa - tions and images, a whole system of representations which enjoy marvellous properties. By means of them, men understand

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Conclusion 437 each other and intelligences grasp each other. They have within them a sort of force or moral ascendancy, in virtue of which they impose themselves upon individual minds. Hence the individual at least obscurely takes account of the fact that above his private ideas, there is a world of absolute ideas accord - ing to which he must shape his own ; he catches a glimpse of a whole intellectual kingdom in which he participates, but which is greater than he. This is the first intuition of the realm of I truth. From the moment when he first becomes conscious of these higher ideas, he sets himself to scrutinizing their nature ; he asks whence these pre-eminent representations hold their prerogatives and, in so far as he believes that he has discovered their causes, he undertakes to put these causes into action for himself, in order that he may draw from them by his own force the effects which they produce ; that is to say, he attributes to himself the right of making concepts. Thus the faculty of conception has individualized itself. But to understand its origins and function, it must be attached to i.ie social conditions upon which it depends.

It may be objected that we show the concept in one of its aspects only, and that its unique role is not the assuring of a harmony among minds, but also, and to a greater extent, their harmony with the nature of things. It seems as though it had a reason for existence only on condition of being true, that is to say, objective, and as though itb impersonality were only a consequence of its objectivity. It is in regard to things, thought of as adequately as possible, that minds ought to communicate. Nor do we deny that the evolution of concepts has been partially in this direction. The concept which was first held as true because it was collective tends to be no longer collective except on condition of being held as true : we demand its credentials of it before according it our confidence. But we must not lose sight of the fact that even to-day the great majority of the concepts which wc use are not methodi - cally mnstitu H we get them from language, that is to say, from common experience, without submitting them to any crithism. The scientifica'ly elaborated and criticized con - cepts are alwiys in the very slight minority. Also, between them and those which draw ali their authority from the fact that they are collective, there arc only differences of degree. A collective representation presents guarantees of objectivity by the fact that it is collective : for it is not without sufficient reason that if has been able to generalize and maintain itself with persistence. If it were out of accord with the nature of things, it would never have been able to acquire an extended

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and prolonged empire over intellects. At bottom, the confidenceinspired by scientific concepts is due to the fact that they canbe methodically controlled. But a collective representation isnecessarily submitted to a control that is repeated indefinitely the men who accept it verify it by their own experience. There -fore, it could not be wholly inadequate for its subject. It istrue that it may express this by means of imperfect symbols ; but scientific symbols themselves arc never more than approxim -ativc. It is precisely this principle which is at the basis ofthe method which we follow in the study of religious phenomena:we take it as an axiom that religious beliefs, howsoeverstrange their appearance may be at times, contain a truthwhich must be discovered.1

On the other hand, it is not at all true that concepts, evenwhen constructed according to the rules of science, get theirauthority uniquely from their objective value. It is notenough that they be true to bo believed. If they are not inharmony with the other beliefs and opinions, or, in a word,with the mass of the other collective representations, they , will be denied ; minds will be cloced to them ; consequently it

will be as though they did not exist. To-day it is generallysufficient that they bear the stamp of science to rec' e asort of privileged credit, because we have faith in science.But this faith docs not differ essentially from religious faith.In the last resort, the value which we attribute to sciencedepends upon the idea which we collectively form of its natureand role in life ; that is as much as to say that it expressesa state of public opinion. In all social life, in fact, science restsupon opinion. It is undoubtedly true that this opinion canbe taken as the object of a study and a science made of itthis is what sociology principally consists in. But the scienceof opinion does not make opinions; it can only observe themand make them more conscious of themselves. It is truethat by this means it can lead them to change, but sciencecontinues to be dependent upon opinion at the very momentwhen it seems to be making is laws : for, as we have alreadyshown, it is from opinion that it holds the force necessary to actupon opinion.2 Saying that concepts express the manner in which societyrepresents things is also saying that conceptual thought iscoeval with humanity itself. We refuse to see in it the productof a more or less retarded culture. A man who did not think 1 Ihus we sec how far it is from fcing true that a conception lacks objectivevalue merely because it has a social origin. uuo

See also above, p. 20S.

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Conclusion 439 with concepts would not be a man, for he would not be a social being. If reduced to having only individual perceptions, he would be indistinguishable from the beasts. If it has been possible to sustain the contrary thesis, it is because con - cepts have been defined by characteristics which are not essential to them. They have been identified with general ideas1 and with clearly limited and circumscribed general ideas. In these conditions it has possibly seemed as though the inferior societies had no concepts properly so called ; for they have only rudimentary processes of generalization ami the ideas which they use are not generally very well defined. But the greater part of our concepts are equally indetermincd ; we force ourselves to define them only in discussions or when doing careful work. We have also seen that conceiving is not generalizing. Thinking conceptually is not simply isolating and grouping together the common characteristics of a certain number of objects ; it is relating the variable to the permanent, the individual to the social. And since logical thought commences with tne concept, it follows that it has always existed; there is no period in history when men have lived in a chronic confusion and contradiction. To be sure, we cannot insist too much upon the different characteristics which logic presents at different periods in history ; it develops like the societies themselves. But howsoever real these differences may be, they should not cause us to neglect the similarities, which are no less essential.

IV We arc now in a position to take up a final question which

has already been raised in our introduction and which has been taken as understood in the remainder of this work. We have seen that at least some of the categories are social things. The question is where they got this character.

Undoubtedly it will be easily understood that since they are themselves concepts, they arc the work of the group. It can even be said that there arc no other concepts which present to an equal degree the signs by which a collective representation is recognized. In fact, their stability and impersonality are such that they have often passed as being absolutely universal and immutable. Also, as they express the fundamental conditions for an agreement between minds, it seems evident that they have been elaborated by society.

1 Ivy-Bruh1, Us fowiinn: mental rs dan Us soctttis infineures, pp. 1 31-138. Ibtd., p. 44 See above, p. 18.

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440 Elementary Farms of Religious Life But the problem concerning them is more complex, for they

axe social in . another sense and, as it were in the second degree. They liot . only come from society, but the things which they express are of a social nature. Not only is it society which has founded them, but thejr contents are the different aspects of the social being: the category of class was at first indistinct from the concept of the human group; it i? ihe rhythm of social life which is at the basis of the category of time; the territory occupied by the society furnished the material for the category of space ; it is the collective force which was the prototype of the concept of efficient, force, an essential element in the category of causality. However, the categories are not made to be applied only to the social realm ; they reach out to all reality. Then how is it that they have taken from society the models upon which they have been constructed ?

It is because they are the pre-eminent concepts, which have a preponderating part in our knowledge. In fact, the function of the categories is to dominate and envelop all the other concepts : they are permanent moulds for the mental life. Now for them to embrace such an object, they must be founded upon a reality of equal amplitude.

Undoubtedly the relations which they express exist in an implicit way in individual consciousnesses. The individual lives in time, and, as we have said, he has a certain sense of temporal orientation. He is situated at a determined point in space, and it has even been held, and sustained with good reasons, that all sensations have something special about them.1 He has a feeling of resemblances; similar representations are brought together and the new representation formed by their union has a sort of generic character. We also have the sensation of a certain regularity in the order of the succession of phenomena ; even an animal is not incapable of this. However, all these relations are strictly personal for the individual who recognizes them, and consequently the notion of them which he may have can in no case go beyond his own narrow horizon. The generic images which are formed in my consciousness by the fusion of similar images represent only the objects which I have perceived directly; there b nothing there which could give me the idea of a lass, that is to say, of a mould including the whole group of all possible objects which satisfy the same condition. Also, it would be necessary to have the idea of group in the first place, and the mere observations of our interior life could

William James, Pnmtpiu of Psychology, I. p. 134.

Conclusion 441 never awaken that in us. But, above all, there is no individual experience, howsoever extended and prolonged it may be, which could give a suspicion of the existence of a whole class which would embrace every single being, and to which other classes are only co-ordinated or subordinated species. This idea ofo, which is at the basis of the classifications which we have just cited, could not have come from the individual himself, who is only a part in relation to the whole and who never attains more than an infinitesimal fraction of reality. And yet there is perhaps no other category of greater importance; for as the role of the categories is to envelop all the other concepts, the category par excellence would seem to be this very concept of totality. The theorists of knowledge ordinarily postulate it as if it came of itself, while it really surpasses the contents of each individual consciousness taken alone to an infinite degree.

For the same reasons, the space which I know by my senses, of which I am the centre and where everything is disposed in relation to me, could not be space in general, which contains all extensions and where these arc co-ordinated by personal guide-lines which arc common to everybody. In the same way, the concrete duration which I feel passing within me and with me could not give me the idea of time in general : the first expresses only the rhythm of my individual life; the second should correspond to the rhythm of a life which is not that of any individual in particular, but in which all participate.1 In the same wa finally, the regularities which I am able to conceive in the manner in which my sensations succeed one another may well have a value for me ; they explain how it comes about that when I am given the first of two phenomena whose concurrence I have observed, I tend to expect the other. But this personal state of expectation could not be confounded with the conception of a universal order of succession which imposes itself upon all minds and all events.

Since the world expressed by the entire system of concepts is the one that society regards, society alone can furnish the most general notions with which it should be represented. Such an object can be embraced only by a subject which contains all the individual subjects within it. Since the universe does not exist except in so far as it is thought of, and since it is not

1 Men frequently speak of space and time as if they were only concrete extent and duration, such as the individual consciousness can feel, but enfeebled by abstraction. In reality, they arc representations of a wholly different sort, made out of other elements, according to a diflerent plan, and with equally different ends in view.

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442 Elementary Forms of Religious Life

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completed thought of except by society, it takes a placein this latter; it becomes a part of society's interior life,while this is the totality, outside of which nothing exists.r- The concept of totality is only the ab -t form of the concept of society : it is the whole which inc . - ill things, the supreme class which embraces all other .. ,ts. Such is the finalprinciple upon which repose all the, primitive classificationswhere beings from every realm are placed and classified insocial forms, exactly like men.1 But if the world is inside of society, the space which this latter occupies becomes con -founded with space in general. In fact, we have seen how eachthing has its assigned place in social space, and the degreeto which this space in general differs from the concrete expanseswhich we perceive is well shown by the fact that this localizationis wholly ideal and in no way resembles what it would havebeen if it had been dictated to us by sensuous experience alone.2Ior the same reason, the rhythm of collective life dominatesand embraces the varied rhythms of all the elementary livesfrom wlncn it results; consequently the time which it ex -presses dominates and embraces all particular durations. Itis time in general. For a long time the history of the worldhas been only another aspect of the history of society. Theone commences with the other ; the periods of the first aredetermined by the periods of the second. This impersonaland total duration is measured, and the guide-lines in relationto which it is divided and organized are fixed by the movementsof concentration or dispersion of society ; or, more generally,the periodical necessities for a collective renewal. If thesecritical instants are generally attached to some materialphenomenon, such as the regular recurrence of such or sucha star or the alternation of the seasons, it is because objective signs arc necessary to make this essentially social organization intelligible to all. In the same way, finally, the causal relation, from the moment when it is collectively stated by the group, becomes independent of every individual consciousness ; itnses above all particular minds and events. It is a law whosevalue depends upon no person. We have already shown howit is clearly thus that it seems to have originated.

Another reason explains why the constituent elements ofthe categories should have been taken from social life : it isbecause the relations which they express could not have been learned except in and through society. If they are in a sense

At bottom, the concept of totality, that of society and that of divinity arovery probably only different aspects of the same notion.Sec our Classifications prmitnts, he. cil., pp. 40 if.

Conclusion 443 immanent in the life of an individual, he has neither a reason nor the means for learning them, reflecting upon them and forming them into distinct ideas. In order to orient himself personally in space and to know at what moments he should satisfy his various organic needs, he has no need of making, once and for all, a conceptual representation of time and space. Many animals arc able to find the road which leads to places with which they are familiar; they come back at a proper moment without knowing any of the categories ; sensations arc enough to direct them automatically. They would also be enough for men, if their sensations had to satisfy only individual needs. To recognize the fact that one thing resembles another , which we have already experienced, it is in no way necessary that we arrange them all in groups and species : the way in which similar images call up each other and unite is enough to give the feeling of resemblance. The impression that a ccrtaiu thing has already been seen or experienced implies no classification. To recognize the things which we should seek or from which we should flee, it would not be necessary to attach the effects of the two to their causes by a logical bond, if individual conveniences were the only ones in question. Purely empirical sequences and strong connections between the concrete representations would be as sure guides for the will. Not only is it true that the animal has no others, but also our own personal conduct frequently supposes nothing more. The prudent man is the one who has a very clear sensation of what must be done, but which he would ordinarily be quite incapable of stating as a general law.

It is a different matter with society. This is possible only when the individuals and things which compose it arc divided into certain groups, that is to say, classified, and when these groups arc classified in relation to each other. Society supposes a self-conscious organization which is nothing other than a classification. This organization of society naturally extends itself to the place which this occupies. To avoid all collisions, it is necessary that each particular group have a determined portion of space assigned to it: in other terms, it is necessary that space in general be divided, differentiated, arranged, and that these divisions and arrangements be known to everybody. On the other hand, every summons to a celebration, a hunt or a military expedition implies fixed and established dates, and consequently that a common time is agreed upon, which everybody conceives in the same fashion. Finally, the co-operation of many persons with the same end in view is possible only when they arc in agreement as to

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I 444 Elementary Forms of Religious Life . 1

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the relation which exists between this end and the mtms of attaining it, that is to say, when the same causal relation is admitted by all the co-operators in the enterprise. It is not surprising, therefore, that social time, social space, social classes and causality should be the basis of the corresponding cate - gories since it is under their social forms that these different relations were first grasped with a certain clarity by the human intellect.

In summing up, then, 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. Quite on the con - trary, the collective consciousness is the highest form of the psychic life, since it is the consciousness of the consciousnesses. Being placed outside of and above individual and leal con - tingencies, it sees things only in their permanent and essential aspects, which it crystallizes into communicable ideas. t the same time that it sees from above, it sees farther; at every moment of time, it embraces all known reality; that is why it alone can furnish the mind with the moulds which are applicable to the totality of things and which make it possible to think of them. It does not create these moulds artificially ; it finds them within itself ; it docs nothing but become conscious of them. They translate the ways of being which are found in all the stages of reality but which appear in their full clarity only at the sjmmit, because the extreme complexity of the psychic life which passes there necessitates a greater development of consciousness. Attri - buting social origins to logical thought is not debasing it or diminishing its value or reducing it to nothing more than a system of artificial combinations; on the contrary, it is relating it to a cause which implies it naturally. But this is not saying that the ideas elaborated in this way arc at once adequate for their object. If society is something universal in relation to the individual, it is none the less an individuality itself, which has its own personal physiognomy and its idiosyncrasies; it is a particular subject and consequently particularizes whatever it thinks of. Therefore collective

p representations also contain subjective elements, and these must be progressively rooted out, if we arc to approach reality more closely. But howsoever crude these may have been at the beginning, the fact remains that with them the germ of a new mentality was given, to which the individual could never have raised himself by his own efforts : by them the way was opened to a stable, impersonal and organized thought which then had nothing to do except to develop its nature.

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Conclusion 445 Also, the causes which have determined this development

do not seem to be specifically different from those which gave it its initial impulse. If logical thought tends to rid itself more and more of the subjective and personal elements which it still retains from its origin, it is not because extra-social factors have intervened ; it is much rather because a social life of a new sort is developing. It is this international life which has already resulted in universalizing religious beliefs. As it extends, the collective horizon enlarges ; the society ceases to appear as the only whole, to become a part of a much vaster one, with indcterrnincd frontiers, which is susceptible i of advancing indefinitely. Consequently things can no longer be contained in the social moulds according to which they were primitively classified ; they must be organized according to principles which are their own, so logical organization differentiates itself from the social organization and becomes autonomous. Really and truly human thought is not a primitive fact; it is the product of history; it is the ideal limit towards which we are constantly approaching, but which in all probability we shall never succeed in reaching.

Thus it is not at all tmc that between science on the one hand, and morals and religion on the other, there exists that sort of antinomy which has so frequently bven admitted, for the two forms of human activity really come from one and the same source. Kant understood this very well, and J therefore he made the speculative reason and the practical reason two different aspects of the same faculty. According to him, what makes their unity is the fact that the two are directed towards the universal. Rational thinking is thinking according to the laws which arc imposed upon all reasonable beings; acting morally is conducting one's self according to those maxims which can be extended without contradiction to all wills. In otlier words, science and morals imply that the individual is capable of raising himself above his own peculiar point of view and of living an impersonal life. In fact, it cannot be doubted that this is a trait common to all the higher forms of thought and action. What Kant's system does not explain, however, is the origin of this sort of contradiction which is realized in man. Why is he forced to do violence to himself by leaving his individuality, and, inversely, why is the im - personal law obliged to be dissipated by incarnating itself in individuals ? Is it answered that there are two antagonistic worlds in which we participate equally, the world of matter and sense on the one hand, and the world of pure and imper- sonal reason on the other? That is merely repeating the

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446 Elementary Farms of Religious Life

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question in slightly different terms, for what we arc trying to find out is why ue must lead these two existences at the same time. Why do these two worlds, which seem to contradict each other, not remain outside of each other, and why must they mutually penetrate one another in spite of their anta - gonism ? The only explanation which has ever been given of this singular necessity is the hypothesis of the Fall, with all the difficulties which it implies, and which need not be repeated here. On the other hand, all mystery disappears the moment that it is recognized that impersonal reason is only another name given to collective thought. For this is possible only through a group of individuals ; it supposes them, and in their turn, they suppose it, for they can continue to exist only by grouping themselves tgether. The kingdom of ends and impersonal truths can reilize itself only by the co-operation of particular wills, and the reasons for which these participate in it are the same as those for which they co-operate. In a word, there is something impersonal in us because there is something social in all of us, and since social life embraces at once both representations and practices, this impersonality naturally extends to ideas as well as to acts.

Perhaps some will be surprised to see us connect the most elevated forms of thought with society : the cause appears quite humble, in consideration of the value which wc attribute to the effect. Between the world of the senses and appetites on i he one hand, and that of reason and morals on the other, the distance is so considerable that the second would seem to have been able to add itself to the first only by a creative act. But attributing to society this preponderating role in the genesis of our nature is not denying this creation ; for society has a creative power which no othei observable being can equal. In fact, all creation, if not a mystical operation which escapes science and knowledge, is the product of a synthesis. Now if the synthesis of particular conceptions whi h take place in each individual consciousness arc already and of themsel es productive of novelties, how much more efficacious these vast syntheses of complete consciousnesses which make society must be ! A society is the most powerful combination of physical and moral forces of which nature offers us an example. Nowhere else is an equal richness of different materials, carried to such a degree of concentration, to be found. Then it is not surprising that a higher life disengages itself which, by reacting upon the elements of which it is the pro- duct, raises them to a higher plane of existence and transforms them.

Conclusion 447 Thus sociology appears destined to open a new way to

the science of man. Up to the present, thinkers were placed before this double alternative : either explain the superior and specific faculties of men by connecting them to the inferior forms of his being, the reason to the senses, or the mind to matter, which is equivalent to denying their uniqueness ; or else attach them to some super-experimental reality which was postulated, but whose existence could be established by no observation. What put them in this difficulty was the fact that the individual passed as being the finis natura the ultimate creation of nature ; it seemed that there was nothing beyond him, or at least nothing that science could touch. But from the moment when it is recognized that above the individual there is society, and that this is not a nominal being created by reason, but a system of active forces, a new manner of explaining men becomes possible. To conserve his distinctive traits it is no longer necessary to put them outside experience. At least, before going to this last extremity, it would be well to see if that which surpasses the individual, though it is within him, does not come from this super-individual reality which we experience in society. To be sure, it cannot be said at present to what point these explanations may be able to reach, and whether or not they are of a nature to resolve all the problems. But it is equally impossible to mark in advance a limit beyond which they cannot go. What must be done is to try the hypothesis and submit it as methodically as possible to the control of facts. This is what we have tried to do.

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Elementary Forms of the Religious Life: A Study in Religious Sociology. Durkheim, Emile,DURKHEIM, ÉMILE.January 1, 1915. Page: 414-447 https://ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/login?qurl=https%3a%2f%2fsearch.ebscohost.com%2flogin.aspx %3fdirect%3dtrue%26db%3dh8h%26AN%3d44800658%26site%3dehost- live%26scope%3dsite&ppid=divp0428