I have some test questions and one essay to complete based on the course religion and violence in the attached Question sheet.

- Introductions by Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Graham Greene, .find other literary figures which enriched the experience of reading. Today the series is recognized for its fine scholarship and reliability in texts that span world literature, drama and poetry, religion, philosophy and politics. Each edition includes perceptive commentary and essential background information to meet the changing needs of readers. EMILE DURKHEIM The Elementary Forms of Religious Life Translated by CAROL COSMAN Abridged with an Introduction and Notes by MARK S. CLAD IS OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS CHAPTER I A DEFINITION OF THE RELIGIOUS PHENOMENON AND OF RELIGION I IN order to identify the simplest and most primitive religion known to us from observation, we must first define what is meant by a religion. If we do not, we might either call a system of ideas and practices religion that are not in the least religious, or bypass religious phenomena without perceiving their true nature. This dan- ger is not imaginary, nor is it just an offering to sterile method- ological formalism; because he failed to take this precaution, Sir James Frazer,* to whom the science of comparative religions is greatly indebted, could not recognize the deeply religious character of beliefs and rites that will be studied below, and in which we now see the seed of humanity's religious life. This is a preliminary matter that must be dealt with first. Not that we could hope to reach the underlying and truly revealing features of religion at this point; these can be determined only at the end of our enquiry. But it is both necessary and possible to indicate a certain number of easily per- ceived outward signs that allow religious phenomena to be recog- nized wherever they are met, and. that prevent them from being confused with others. We shall turn now to this preliminary process. For this process to yield the expected results, we must begin by freeing our minds of any preconceived ideas. Men have had to invent a notion of religion well before the science of religions could estab- lish its systematic comparisons. The demands of existence compel all of us, believers and non-believers, somehow to represent those things that we live with, make judgements about, and take into con- sideration for our conduct. But since these preliminary notions are formed unsystematically, according to the chance events and encounters of li'fe, they are discredited and must be firmly set aside , We have already tried to define the phenomenon of religion in a work published in L 'Annee sociologique (3: I ff.). As we shall see, the definition given there differs from the one now being proposed. At the end of this chapter we explain the reasons for these modifications, which do not, however, imply any essential change in the conception of the facts.

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26 The Elementary Forms of Religious Life in the examination that follows. The elements of the definition we require are not to be found in our prejudices, our passions, or our labits, but in reality itself. So let us confront that reality. Leaving aside any conception of eligion in general, let us consider religions in their concrete reality, nd let us try to discover what they have in common; for religion can e defined only as a function of features found wherever there is digion. In this comparison we shall therefore include all religious ystems available to us, those present and past, the simplest and most rimitive as well as the most recent and refined; for we have no right ) keep some and exclude others, and no logical means to do it. To r1yone who views religion as merely a natural expression of human ~tivity, all religions without exception are instructive: they all ~press man in their own way, and can therefore help us to reach a etter understanding of this aspect of our nature. Besides, we have :en that studying the form religion takes among the most civilized wples is hardly the best approach.! But before tackling the question itself and in order to free the Lind of those common conceptions whose hold can prevent us from :eing things as they are, it is appropriate to examine several of the lost current definitions in which these prejudices are expressed. '~ I ne notion generally considered characteristic of everything ligious is the notion of the supernatural. This means any order of ings beyond our understanding: the supernatural is the world of ystery, the unknowable, the incomprehensible. Religion would en be a kind of speculation on all that escapes science and clear inking in general. 'Religions', says Spencer,* 'that are diametrically 'posite in their dogmas tacitly agree on recognizing that the world, th all it contains and all that surrounds it, is a mystery seeking an planation.' In his view, religions consist of 'the belief in the omni- esence of something that goes beyond the intellect',' Similarly, See above. We shall not go on at greater length about the necessity of these def- :ions or the method used to arrive at them. These are found in my Us Rigles de la hodeso<"lologique (,895), 43 If. C( Le Suicide (Paris: Alcan, ,897, then PUF), ,If. Herbert Spencer, First Principles (New York: D. Appleton, ,862), 37. [Durkheim d the French translation (Paris: Alcan, '902), 3B--9.] The Elementary Forms of Religious Life 27 Max Miiller* sawall religion as 'an effort to conceive of the inconceivable and to express the inexpressible, an aspiration toward the infinite'.' True, the feeling of mystery has played an important role in cer- tain religions, notably Christianity. Yet the importance of this role has varied considerably at different moments in Christian history. There were periods when this notion of mystery became secondary and even vanished altogether. For men of the seventeenth century, for example, dogma was not a challenge to reason. Faith was easily reconciled with science and philosophy, and thinkers like Pascal, who had a vivid sense of the profound obscurity of things, were so out of step with their times that they were misunderstood by their contemporaries: It might be rather hasty, then, to make an idea that is subject to such eclipses the essential element of even the Christian religion. In any case, this idea appears very late in the history of religions. It is completely alien not only to the peoples we call primitive but also to those who have not reached a certain degree of intellectual cul- ture. Of course, when we see them attribute extraordinary virtues to trivial objects, or peopling the universe with singular principles made up of the most disparate elements and endowed with a sort of ubiquity difficult to imagine, we are ready to find an air of mystery in these ideas. It seems to us that men have resigned themselves to ideas so troubling to our modern reason only because they could not find more rational ones. In reality, however, the explanations that aston- ish us seem supremely simple to the primitive. He sees them not as a kind of ultima ratio* to which intelligence resigns itself only as a last resort, but as the most immediate way of conceptualizing and under- standing what he observes around him. For him, there is nothing strange in using one's voice or gestures to command the elements, to halt or advance the progress of the stars, to make the rain fall or not, and so on. The rites he uses to ensure the fertility of the soil or the fecundity of animal species that provide him with food are no more irrational, in his view, than the technical procedures our agronomists , Max Muller, Introduction to the Science of ReligiO/ls (London: Longmans, ,873), ,8. C( Lectures on the Origin and GroIlJth of ReligIon (London: Longmans, ,878), 23. , The same mentality is also found in the period of scholasticism, as wirness the formula by which the philosophy of the time defined itself: Fides quaerens intellWI/m [Faith in search of intellect).

~ 28 The Elementary Forms of Religious Lift use for the same purpose; The forces he sets in motion by these various means do not seem especially mysterious to him. Certainly these forces differ from those the modern scientist conceives and :eaches us to use; they act differently and cannot be controlled by the :ame procedures; but for the man who believes in them, they are no ess intelligible than weight or electricity is to the physicist today. .1oreover, we shall see in the course of this work that the notion of latural forces is probably derived from the notion of religious forces, o there cannot be the same gulf between them that separates the ational from the irrational. Even the fact that religious forces are ften conceived as spiritual entities, as conscious wills, is no proof of h.eir irrationality. Reason does not reject a priori the idea that so- aIled inanimate bodies, like human bodies, may be moved by intelli- ences, although contemporary science does not easily accommodate 1is hypothesis. When Leibniz imagined the external world as a vast )ciety of minds having only mental relations, he thought he was 'orking as a rationalist, and he saw nothing in this animism that light offend the understanding. Moreover, the idea of the supernatural, as we understand it, is of :cent vintage: it presupposes its opposite, which it negates and hich is not at all primitive. In order to call certain phenomena Ipernatural, one must already have the sense that there is a natural -der of things, in other words, that the phenomena of the universe 'e connected to one another according to certain necessary relation- lips called laws. Once this principle. is established, anything that ~rtains to these laws necessarily appears to be beyond nature, and so :yond reason; for what is natural in this sense is also rational, those :cessary relations expressing only the way that things are logically 1ked. But this notion of universal determinism is very recent; even .e greatest thinkers of classical antiquity were never fully aware of This idea is a triumph of the empirical sciences; it is their basic Istulate and has been demonstrated by their progress. Yet as long as is notion was absent or was not firmly established, the most mar- :llous events never seemed inconceivable. As long as it was not lown that the order of things was immutable and inflexible, as long it was seen as the work of contingent wills, it seemed natural that ese wills or others might modify things arbitrarily. This is why the iraculous interventions which the ancients attributed to their gods ~re not seen as miracles in the modern sense of the word. They The Elementary Forms of Religious Lift were beautiful, rare,. or terrible spectacles, objects of surprise and wonder (Greek 6aul.W:ta, mirabilia, miracula); they were not seen as glimpses into a mysterious world closed to reason. This mentality is all the more easily understood since it has not entirely disappeared. While the principle of determinism is now firmly established in the physical and natural sciences, it was intro- duced into the social sciences only a century ago, and its authority in these fields is still contested. Only a few minds are deeply convinced that societies are subject to necessary laws and constitute a realm of nature. It follows that true miracles are still thought possible. We accept, for example, that a legislator can create an institution out of nothing by the simple exercise of his will, transforming one social system into another, just as believers in so many religions accept that divine will has drawn the world out of nothingness or can arbitrarily transmute some beings into others. As far as social matters are con- cerned, we still have the mentality of primitives. And yet when it comes to sociology, so many contemporaries are reluctant to give up this old-fashioned idea, though not because the life of societies seems obscure and mysterious to them. Rather, they are so easily satisfied by these explanations that they cling to these illusions which are repeatedly belied by experience, because soCial matters seem to them the most obvious things in the world; they do not grasp their true obscurity, and they have not yet recognized the need to replicate the painstaking procedures of the natural sciences in order to dispel this darkness. The same state of mind is found at the root of many religious beliefs that surprise us by their simplistic nature. Science, not religion, has taught men that things are complex and difficult to understand. But, Jevons* replies, I the human mind has no need of a scientific culture as such to notice that fixed sequences and a constant order of succession prevail in the world, and to observe that, on the other hand, this order is often broken. The sun is suddenly eclipsed, rain does not fall when it should, the moon takes its time reappearing after its periodic disappearance, and so on. Because these events are outside the ordinary course of things, they are attributed to extra- ordinary, exceptional-in a word, extra-natural-causes. It is in this I Frank Byron Jevons, An Introduction to the History of Religion {London: Methuen, 1902),15.

30 The Elementary Forms of Religious Life f~rm that the idea of the supernatural was born at the beginning of hIstory, and from that moment religious thought acquired its own unique object. The supernatural is not, however, merely the unforeseen. The novel is as much a part of nature as its opposite. If we assert that phenomena usually succeed one another in a fixed order we also . , notIce that this order is always approximate, that it is not quite the s~me at different moments, and that it includes all sorts of excep- tIOns. Our slightest experience teaches us that our expectations are often disappointed, and these disappointments are too frequent to seem extraordinary. Experience contains elements of chance as well as a certain uniformity, so we have no reason to attribute these elem- ~n~s to entirely different forces. To have the idea of the supernatural, It IS not enough for us to witness unexpected events; rather, these events must be regarded as impossible-as irreconcilable with an order that seems, rightly or wrongly, to be a necessary part of the nature of things. This notion of a necessary order has been gradually con.structed by the empirical sciences; it follows that the opposite notIOn could not have pre-dated them. Furthermore, no matter how men have conceived novelties and contingencies revealed by experience, there is nothing in these 'con- ceptions that might characterize religion. Religious conceptions aim above all to express and explain not what is exceptional and abnormal but, on the contrary, what is constant and regular. Gener- ally, th~ gods serve farless to account for monstrosities, oddities, and anomabes, than for the usual course of the universe, the movement ~f the stars, the rhythm of the seasons, the annual growth of vegeta- tIOn, the perpetuation of the species, and so on. So the notion of the religious does not coincide with the extraordinary and the unexpected. Jevons replies that this conception of religious forces is not primitive. These forces must first have been imagined to account for disorders and accidents, and only later used to expla~ the uni- formities o~ nature. But it is hard to see what could have prompted men to assIgn them such clearly opposite functions. Besides, the hYP?thesis that sacred beings were first confined to the negative role o~ dIsturbers is entirely arbitrary. We shall see, in fact, that beginning with the simplest religions we know, the basic task of sacred beings has been to sustain the normal course of life in a positive way. Thus the idea of mystery is not original. It is not inherent in man' , The Elementary Forms of Religious Life 3 I i~;tman himself has forged this idea with his own hands, along with its ::';c, contrary. That is why the idea of mystery figures in only a small number of advanced religions. It cannot be made the chief character- 'istic of religious phenomena, then, without excluding from the defin- ition most of the facts to be defined. II Another idea that has frequently been used to define religion is divinity. 'Religion', says Reville, 'is the determination of human life by the feeling of a bond uniting the human mind to the mysterious mind it recognizes as ruling the world and itself, and with which it takes pleasure in feeling united.'! If the word divinity is understood in a precise and narrow sense, this definition excludes a multitude of obviously religious facts. The souls of the dead and spirits of every kind and rank, with which the religious imagination of so many peoples has populated nature, are always the object of rites and sometimes even of regular cults; and yet they are not gods strictly speaking. To include them in this definition, however, all we have to do is replace the word 'god' with the more comprehensive term 'spiritual being'. Tylor* has done this: 'In studying systematically 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. Z Spiritual beings must be understood to mean conscious subjects with capacities superior to those of ordinary men; this qualification includes the souls of the dead, genies, and demons, as well as divin- ities strictly speaking. It is worth noting straight away the particular conception of religion that this definition implies. The only relations we might have with beings of this kind are determined by the nature ascribed to them. These are conscious beings, and we can influence them only as one influences consciousnesses in general, that is, by , Alhert Reville, Proligomenes Ii I'hislOire des religions (Paris: Fischbacher, 188 I), 34. , Edward Burnett Tylor, Primit,'ve Culture (London: John Murray, 1873), i. 491.

3Z The Elementary Forms of Religious Life psychological means, by trying to convince them or move, them, either with words (invocations, prayers) or with offerings and sacri- fices. And since the purpose of religion is to regulate our relations with these special beings, religion would be present only where there are prayers, sacrifices, propitiatory rites, and so on. So we would use a very simple criterion to distinguish what is religious from what is not. Frazer systematically applies this criterion, as do certain ethnographers. But although this definition may seem obvious, given the habits of mind we owe to our religious education, there are a number of facts to which it does not apply that none the less belong to the realm of religion. In the first place, there are great religions in which the idea of gods and spirits is absent, or plays only a secondary and unobtrusive role. This is the case with Buddhism. Buddhism, says Burnouf, 'stands in opposition to Brahmanism as a moral system without god and an atheism without Nature'.' 'It recognizes no god on whom man depends,' says Mr Barth, 'its doctrine is absolutely atheist';2 and Oldenberg, on his side, calls it 'a religion without god'.3 Indeed, the essentials of Buddhism can be summed up in four propositions which the faithful call the Four Noble Truths. The first states that the existence of suffering is bound to the perpetual flux of things; the second locates the cause of suffering in desire; the third makes the suppression of desire the only way to end suffering; the fourth enumerates the three stages one must pass through to achieve this suppression: rectitude, meditation, and finally wisdom, the full possession of the doctrine. After passing through these three stages, one comes to the end of the road and achieves deliverance, salvation through Nirvana. It is true that at least in certain divisions of the Buddhist Church the , Buddha is regarded as a kind of god. He has his temples and has become the object of a cult, albeit a very simple one that consists '. Eugene Burnout; Introduction Ii !'histoire du bouddhisme indien (2nd edn., Paris: MaIsonneuve, 1876),464. The last word of the text means that Buddhism does not even accept the existence of an eternal Nature. , Auguste Barth, The Religions oj India, trans. Revd J. Wood (London: Houghton Mifflin, 1882), 110. ) Hermann OIdenberg, Le Bouddha (French trans., Paris: Alcan, 1894),51. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life essentially of the offerings of certain flowers and the adoration of ',relics or sacred images. It is little more than a cult of memory. But . this divinization of the Buddha, if that is the right expression, is peculiar to what is called northern Buddhism. 'The Buddhists of the " South', says Kern, 'and the least advanced among the Buddhists of . the North can be said, according to currently known facts, to speak of the founder of their doctrine as if he were a man." They certainly attribute extraordinary powers to the Buddha, superior to those of ordinary mortals; but it was a very ancient belief in India, and very common in many different religions, that a great saint is endowed with exceptional virtues. Yet despite the superhuman faculties often attributed to him, a saint is not a god, any more than a priest or a magician is a god. Besides, according to the greatest scholarly authorities, this kind of theism and the complex mythology that usually goes with it is merely a derivative and deviant form of Buddhism. Buddha was, in the first instance, considered only 'the wisest of men'! [. . .J Finally, whatever one thinks of the divinity of Buddha, it remains a conception completely external to what is really basic in Bud- dhism. Buddhism consists above all of the notion of salvation, and salvation merely requires one to know and practise the good doc- trine. That doctrine could not be known, of course, if Buddha had not come to reveal it; but once that revelation was made, the Buddha's work was done. From this moment on, he ceased to be a necessary factor in religious life. The practice of the Four Noble Truths would be possible, then, even if the memory of the man who revealed them should fade. It is quite different from Christianity, which is inconceivable without the ever-present idea and the ever-practised cult of Christ. For it is through the ever-living and continually sacrificed Christ that the community of the faithful continues to communicate with the supreme source of its spiritual life. What we have just said applies equally to another great Indian religion, Jainism. Moreover, the two doctrines seem to have nearly the same conception of the world and of life. 'Like the Buddhists,' says Barth, 'the J ainists are atheists. They reject the idea of a creator; , Hendrick Kern, HislOire du bouddhisme dans !'Inde, vol. i (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1901),289. , Burnouf, Introduction, 120. 33 34 The Elementary Forms of Religious Life . for them the world is eternal and they explicitly deny that a perfect being could exist from all eternity. The Jina has become perfect, but he was not always so.' Like the Buddhists of the north, the Jainists, or at least some of them, have none the less reverted to a kind of deism. The Deccan inscriptions mention a Jinapati, a kind of supreme Jina, who is called the first creator; but such language, says the same author, 'conflicts with the most explicit declarations of their most authoritative writers'. I Moreover, this indifference to the divine is so pronounced in Buddhism and Jainism because its seeds were already present in Brahmanism, from which both religions derive. At least in some of its forms, Brahmanic speculation issued in 'a frankly materialist and atheist explanation of the universe'! Over time, the multiple divin- ities that the peoples ofIndia had first learned to worship merged into a sort of impersonal and abstract principle, the essence of all that exists. Man contains within himself this supreme reality, which no longer has divine personality, or rather he is one with it since nothing exists outside it. To find and unite with this reality, he need not search outside himself for some external support; it is enough to focus on the self and meditate.* [. . .] These are great religions in which invoca- tions, propitiations, sacrifices, and prayers, strictly speaking, are far from central and so do not present the distinctive mark by which we claim to recognize specifically religious expressions. Even in deistic religions we find a great number of rites that are entirely independent of any idea of gods or spiritual beings. First of all, there are a multitude of prohibitions. The Bible, for example, commands women to live in isolation for a specified period each month,] and requires the same sort of isolation during childbirth.4 It forbids yoking together the ox and the ass, or wearing clothing in which wool is mixed with linen,s though it is impossible to see what role the belief in Yahweh can have played in these prohibitions. He is absent from all the prohibited relations, and could have no interest in them. The same can be said of most dietary restrictions. Such , Barth, Religions of India, 146. , A. Barth, 'Religions de ['Inde', in Encyclopidie des sciences re/igieuses (Paris: Sandor & Fischbacher, 1877-82), vi. 548. J Leviticus IS: 19-24. · Leviticus 12. , Deuteronomy 22: 10-1 I. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life 35 'restrictions are not peculiar to the Hebrews but are found in various forms in many religions. It is true that these rites are purely negative, but they are none the less religious. In addition, there are other rites that require the believer to perform positive acts of a similar nature. They act on their own, and their efficacy does not depend on divine power; they mechanically promote the effects which are their justification. They involve neither prayers nor offerings addressed to a being on whose goodwill the expected result depends; rather this result is achieved by the automatic operation of the ritual. [. . .J . In every cult there are practices that act by themselves, through a virtue of their own, without any god mediating between the indi- vidual who executes the rite and the goal pursued. When the Jew stirred the air at the feast of Tabernacles by shaking willow branches in a certain rhythm, it was to make the wind rise and rain fall. He believed that the rite produced the desired result automatically, pro- vided it was correctly performed. Furthermore, this explains the primary importance attached by nearly every cult to the material aspect of ceremonies. This religious formalism-probably the first form of legal formalism-derives from the fact that, containing the source of their own efficacy, the formula to be pronounced and the movements to be executed would fail if they did not follow precisely those already hallowed by success. Thus there are rites without gods, and there are even rites from which gods derive. Not all religious qualities emanate from divine personalities, and there are cultic practices that have other goals than man's union with a divinity. Religion therefore transcends the idea of gods or spirits, and so cannot be defined exclusively as a function of that idea. III Setting these definitions aside, let us address the problem directly. First, let us note that all these formulas attempt to express the nature of religion as a whole. They proceed as if religion formed a kind of seamless entity, although in reality it is a whole formed of parts, a more or less complex system of myths, dogmas, rites, and ceremonies. Now, a whole can be defined only in relation to the parts that comprise it, so it is more methodical to try and characterize the 36 The Elementary Forms of Religious Life ~lementary phenomena that generate any religion than to character- I~e t~e system they produce. This method seems even more compd- hng In hght of the fact that religious phenomena exist that do not result in any specific religion. These provide the material of folklore. In general they are the debris of vanished religions, disorganized remnants; but some are formed spontaneously under the influence of local causes. In Europe, Christianity tried to absorb and assimilate them, giving them a Christian coloration. None the less, there are many that have persisted until recently, or that still persist more or less. indepe~dently: maypole festivals, the summer solstice, carnival, vanous beliefs relating to genies and local demons, and so on. A definition that fails to take them into account would not cover everything rdigious. ~eligious ?henomena fall quite naturally into two basic categories: bellef~ and ntes. The first are states of opinion and consist of repre- sentatIOns; the second are fixed modes of actions. These two classes of phenomena differ as much as thought differs from action. . Rites can be defined and distinguished from other human prac- tIC~S, notably moral practices, only by the special nature of their object. A ~orallaw, ~ike a rite, prescribes ways of acting, but these ~ddress objects of a dIfferent kind. Therefore, to characterizetlte rite Itself, the object of the rite must first be characterized. Now: the special nature of this object is expressed in belief The rite c;n be defined, then, only after defining the belief. All known ~eligious beliefs, whether simple or complex, present a co~mon q.uallty: they presuppose a classification of things-the real or Ideal things that men represent for themselves-into two classes ~wo opposite kinds, generally designated by two distinct terms effect~ Ively translated by the words profane and sacred. The division of tlte world. into two comprehens~v~ domains, one sacred, the other pro- fa~~, IS the hallmark of religIOus thought. Beliefs, myths, gnomic SPIrIts: and legends are either representations or systems of repre- sentatIOn t~at express the nature of sacred things, the virtues and powers attr~buted to them, their history, their relations with each other and.wlth profane things. But sacred things should not be taken to mean sIm~ly those personal beings we call gods or spirits. A rock, a tree: a spring, a stone, a piece of wood, a house, in other words anything at all, can be sacred. A rite can have this sacred character as well; in fact, no rite exists that does not have it to some degree. There The Elementary Forms of Religious Life 37 are words, speeches, and formulas that can be spoken only by con- secrated persons; there are gestures and movements that cannot be executed by everyone. If, according to mythology, Vedic sacrifice was not just a way of winning favour with the gods but actually created them, that is because it possessed a virtue comparable to those of the most sacred beings. The circle of sacred objects, then, cannot be fixed once and for all; its scope varies endlessly from one religion to another. Buddhism is a religion because, in the absence of gods, it accepts the existence of sacred things, namely the Four Noble Truths and the practices that derive from them. I Up to this point we have confined ourselves to listing a certain number of sacred things as examples. Now we must indicate the general features that distinguish them from profane things. One might be tempted to define them first by the place they are generally assigned in the hierarchy of beings. They are regarded as superior in dignity and power to profane things, and particularly to man when he is merdy a man and does not himself participate in the sacred. He is represented, in fact, as occupying a lower and depend- ent place in relation to sacred things; and this representation is cer- tainly not inaccurate. But nothing about it is truly characteristic of the sacred. It is not enough to make one thing subordinate to make the otlter sacred in relation to it. Slaves depend on their masters, subjects on their king, soldiers on their chiefs, the lower classes on the governing classes, the miser on his gold, the ambitious on power and those who have it. Now, if we sometimes say that a person's rdigion consists of beings or things which he considers eminently valuable and in some way superior to himself, it is clear that in all such cases the word is meant metaphorically, and that there is noth- ing in these relations that is properly religious in the strict sense of the term! On the other hand, we must not lose sight of the fact that there are things that man feels relatively comfortable with, though they are supremely sacred. An amulet has a sacred character, and yet it does not inspire exceptional respect. Even face to face with his gods, man is not always in such a markedly inferior state; he often uses what , Not to speak of the sage and the saint who practise these truths and are for this reason sacred. , This is not to say that these relations cannot take on a religious character, but they do not necessarily do so.

----.-- The Elementary Forms of Religious Life amounts to physical force on them to achieve his desire. He beats the fetish when he is displeased, only to be reconciled with it if it becomes more compliant to the wishes of its worshipper. To make rain, stones are thrown into the spring or in the sacred lake where the rain god is supposed to live; it is believed that this will force him to come out and show himself. Moreover, while it is true that man depends on his gods, the dependence is mutual. The gods also need man; without offerings and sacrifices, they would die. We shall have occasion to show that this dependence of the gods on their faithful is maintained even in the most refined religions. However, if a purely hierarchical distinction is both too general and too vague a criterion, the only way to define the relation between the sacred and the profane is their heterogeneity. This heterogeneity suffices to characterize this classification of things and to distinguish it from any other for one particular reason: it is absolute. There is no other example in the history of human thought of two categories of things so profoundly differentiated or so radically opposed to one another. The traditional opposition between good and evil is nothing by comparison; good and evil are opposite species of the same genus, namely morality, just as health and sickness are merely two different aspects of the same order of facts-life. By contr-ast, the sacred and the profane have always and everywhere been conceived by the human mind as separate genera, as two worlds that have nothing in common. The energies at play in one are not merely different in their degree of intensity; they are different in kind. This opposition is conceived differently in different religions. In some, localizing these two kinds of things in distinct regions of the physical universe seems sufficient to separate them; in others, sacred things are cast into an ideal and transcendent setting, while the material world is left entirely to others. But while the forms of the contrast vary, the fact is universal. This does not mean that a being can never pass from one world to the other; but when it happens, the way this passage occurs highlights the essential duality of the two realms. It implies a true metamorphosis. This is demonstrated particularly well in rites of initiation, which are practised by a great many peoples. The initi- ation is a long series of ceremonies whose purpose is to introduce the young man to religious life: for the first time he leaves the purely profane world, where he spent his childhood, to enter the circle of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life sacred things. Now, this change of status is conceived, not as the simple ana normal development of pre-existing seeds, but as a trans- formation totius substantiae. * It is said that at this moment the young man dies, that the particular person he was ceases to exist and is instantaneously replaced by another. He is reborn in a new form. Appropriate ceremonies are performed to bring about this death and rebirth, which are not merely symbolic but are taken literally. This seems to be proof of a rupture between the profane being he was and the religious being he becomes. This heterogeneity is so great it often degenerates into a serious antagonism. The two worlds are not only conceived as separate, but as hostile and jealous rivals. Since a man can belong fullYLo one realm only if he is entirely out of the other, he is exhorted to with- draw completely from the profane to live an exclusively religious life. Monasticism artificially organizes a closed setting, parallel to and apart from the natural setting in which most men live the life of their times. And there is mystic asceticism, whose purpose is to sever man's last remaining attachments to the profane world. Indeed, there is religious suicide, the logical culmination of this asceticism, since the only way of escaping profane life entirely is to escape life altogether. The opposition of these two genera is translated externally by a visible sign that allows ready recognition of this very special classifi- cation wherever it exists. Because man's notion of the sacred is always and everywhere separated from his notion of the profane by a sort of logical gulf between the two, the mind radically rejects any mingling or even contact between the things that correspond to these realms. Such promiscuous mingling or even contact dangerously contradicts the state of dissociation in which these ideas are found in human consciousness. The sacred thing is, par excellence, that which the profane must not and cannot touch with impunity. This prohib- ition surely makes all communication impossible between the two worlds; for if the profane could enter into relations with the sacred, the sacred would serve no purpose. Now, this contact is always in itself a delicate operation that requires precautions and a more or less complicated initiation; but it is not even possible unless the profane loses its specific features and becomes sacred to some extent. The two genera cannot be brought together and still maintain their separate natures. 39 The Elementary Forms of Religious Life Now we have a first criterion of religious beliefs; Within these two fundamental genera, of course, there are secondary species that are also more or less incompatible with each other. But what is character- istic of the religious phenomenon is that it always assumes a binary division of the known and knowable universe into two genera that include all that exists but radically exclude each other. Sacred things are those things protected and isolated by prohibitions; profane things are those things to which such prohibitions apply and which must keep their distance from what is sacred. Religious beliefs are representations that express the nature of sacred things and the relations they sustain among themselves or with profane things. Finally, rites are rules of conduct that prescribe how man must conduct himself with sacred things. When a certain number of sacred things sustain relations of coordination and subordination between them, forming a system that has a certain unity but does not enter into any other system of the same kind, this set of beliefs and corresponding rites constitutes a religion. By this definitiori, a religion is not necessarily contained in a single and consistent idea, and cannot be reduced to a unique principle that may vary according to circumstances but is basically identical everywhere; rather it is a whole formed from distinct and relatively individualized parts. Every homogeneous group of sacred things, or indeed every sacred thing of any importance, constitutes a centre of organization around which a group of beliefs and rites, a particular cult, gravitates. And no religion, however unified, fails to recognize the plurality of sacred things. Even Christianity, at least in its Catholic form, includes, in addition to the divine being-who is three in one, besides-the Virgin, angels, saints, souls of the dead, and so on. And a religion cannot usually be reduced to a single cult but consists of a system of cults that have a certain autonomy. Some- times they are ranked hierarchically and subordinated to some dom- inant cult into which they are eventually absorbed; but sometimes they simply exist side by side in a kind of confederation. The religion we are about to study will provide a good example of this sort of organization. At the same time, groups of religious phenomena may exist that do not belong to any constituted religion because they are not or are no longer integrated into a religious system. When such a cult per- sists for any particular reason, while the whole to which it belonged The Elementary Forms of Religious Life has vanished, it will survive only in fragments. This is what has happened to many agrarian cults that have survived in folklore. In some cases what persists in this form is not even a cult but a simple ceremony or a particular rite. . Although this definition is only preliminary, it already suggests a way to pose the problem that necessarily dominates the science of religions. * If one believes that sacred beings are distinguished merely by the greater intensity of their powers, the question of how men could entertain this idea is a rather simple one: merely identify those forces whose exceptional energy could strike the human mind viv- idly enough to inspire religious feelings. But if, as we have tried to establish, sacred things differ in nature from profane things, if they have a different essence, the problem is quite complex. We must ask ourselves, then, what compelled man to see the world as two hetero- geneous and incompatible worlds, though nothing in palpable experience seems to have suggested the idea of such a radical duality. IV This definition, however, is not yet complete since it applies equally to two orders of things which, though related, must none the less be distinguished: magic and religion. Magic also consists of beliefs and rites. Like religion, it has its myths and its dogmas, but they are more rudimentary, probably because in pursuing technical and utilitarian aims, magic does not waste time in pure speculation. Magic also has its ceremonies, sacri- fices, purification rituals, prayers, chants, and dances. The beings invoked by the magician, the forces he puts into play, are not only similar in nature to the forces and beings addressed by religion but often identical. Beginning with the most primitive societies, the souls of the dead are essentially sacred things and the objects of religious rites. But at the same time they have played a considerable role in magic. In Australia as well as in Melanesia, in ancient Greece as well as among Christian peoples, the souls of the dead, their bones and their hair, are among the magician's most useful tools. Demons are also commonly used in the performance of magic. Now, demons, too, are beings surrounded by prohibitions; they too are separated, living in a world apart, and it is often difficult to distinguish them from gods proper. Even in Christianity, isn't the devil a fallen god? And