The Elementary Forms of Religious Life: Durkheim on the Sacred and the Profane

The Elementary Forms of Religious Life was the last major work by Émile Durkheim. It appeared in Paris in 1912 with the subtitle The Totemic System in Australia, and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP) ranks it as the most important of his major works. He wrote it during his Sorbonne years; he had been teaching there since 1902.

An introduction opens the book and a Conclusion closes it. Between them come three parts: Book I deals with preliminary questions, Book II with beliefs (the totem, the totemic principle, the soul, spirits and gods) and Book III with rites. In the table of contents Durkheim sets out two aims. The main one is to analyse the simplest religion known and so identify the elementary forms of religious life. The second is to explain where the “categories” come from, the basic notions we think with.

Durkheim’s definition of religion

Durkheim clears away the definitions then in use before offering his own. He will not tie religion to belief in gods or spirits, because some major religions lack that idea or give it little weight. His example is Buddhism, whose core is salvation, reached by knowing and practising the doctrine. He also sets aside the supernatural and mystery, an idea he thinks came late.

Durkheim sorts religious phenomena into beliefs and rites. Beliefs are representations, ways of thinking; rites are fixed ways of acting. What every form of religious thought has in common is a division of the world into sacred and profane. Sacred covers far more than the divine: a rock, a tree, a spring or a house can all become sacred. The two realms differ absolutely, in kind, and Durkheim writes that even good and evil are less sharply opposed. In the IEP’s summary, the sacred has to be guarded against the profane, which would defile it.

The definition arrives in the first chapter. Durkheim builds it from two pieces. One is a coherent body of beliefs and practices directed at sacred things, which he glosses as things kept separate and surrounded by bans. The other is what those beliefs and practices make of the people who share them: one moral community, which he calls a “Church”. The IEP finds three elements in it that every religion has: a moral community, sacred objects, and the beliefs and practices bound up with them. Durkheim gives the Church as much weight as the rest of the definition, because it shows that religion is a collective thing.

The Church also marks the boundary with magic. Magical beliefs can spread as widely as religious ones, yet the people who share them never become a group.

	Religion	Magic
Who takes part	A community of believers	The magician’s clients
How participants relate	United by the same beliefs and practices	May not know one another
Organization	A Church	No “magical Church”

According to Giovanni Filoramo, writing for the Treccani encyclopedia in 1997, two of Durkheim’s students, Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, played a large part in shaping this definition of the sacred. Durkheim had already published an essay on defining religious phenomena in 1899, which the 1912 version replaced.

Why Australian totemism?

At the outset Durkheim says he wants to study and explain the religion that, on the knowledge of his time, he considered the simplest. He calls it “primitive”, the vocabulary of the period. A religious system counts as elementary, in his terms, when it belongs to a society with the simplest social organization known. He has two reasons for picking Australia. Australian totemism was the most fully documented, and the clan structure of those tribes looked to him like the simplest on record. For comparison he draws on the Indigenous peoples of North America, where totemism had first been observed; the word “totem” itself, Treccani notes, comes from the Ojibwa language and was taken into English by John Long in 1791.

The IEP reads the choice as a matter of method: in a simple form, the essential elements of religion should be easier to make out. Durkheim was after the social forces that give rise to religion in different settings, the IEP adds, and was not trying to pin down the exact moment it first appeared.

He never did fieldwork. What he knew about the rites of the Central Australian tribes came from the observations of Spencer and Gillen, Schulze and Strehlow.

The totem as the clan’s name and emblem

In the book the totem is first of all the name of the clan, and also its emblem, something close to a coat of arms. A clan, as Durkheim describes it, is a group of kin who count each other as relatives only because they carry the same name. He compares the totem to a flag: the visible mark that sets each clan apart from the rest.

Practical example: Arunta rituals used churinga (tjurunga in Strehlow’s spelling), pieces of wood or polished stone, usually oval or elongated, engraved with the totem’s design. According to the reports Durkheim read, women and young men who had not yet been initiated were forbidden to touch them or even look at them. Durkheim remarks that these designs were more sacred than the animal or plant they showed.

Durkheim also denies that totemism is a cult of animals. A clan member does not approach the totemic animal the way a believer approaches a god, because he too belongs to the sacred world, and the two are nearly equals. Sometimes the man even treats the animal as his own property, a point Durkheim turns against Tylor and Wundt.

The clan’s god is the clan itself

The totem, Durkheim observes, symbolizes two things at the same time: the god and the clan. If one emblem stands for both, then god and society must be one and the same. So the totemic principle, which acts as the clan’s “god”, is the clan itself: its members think of it as a being and give it the shape of their totem animal or plant.

A society has everything it takes to arouse a sense of the divine, Durkheim explains, since its members depend on it and feel it stands above them, much as worshippers feel about their god. The IEP sums the thesis up as “society worshipping itself”, adding that religion is how individuals picture the group and their own place in it. For a case closer to home, Durkheim points to the first years of the French Revolution, when public opinion turned the Fatherland, Liberty and Reason into sacred things.

Practical example: the IEP illustrates the mechanism with modern objects. A postage stamp, a flag or football have no value of their own; they get it from the collective forces they stand for.

On Filoramo’s reading, the sacred for Durkheim is a cultural and social quality, which an object acquires regardless of its natural properties or its usefulness. The object is just the place where the sacred shows itself, so sacred symbols change as society changes. Filoramo also points out that the sacred is contagious, above all on its negative, taboo side. In Book III Durkheim treats this contagiousness as one of the reasons for the system of prohibitions that keeps sacred and profane apart.

Collective effervescence

Life in Australian societies, according to Durkheim, swings between two phases. In one, people live scattered in small bands that hunt, fish and gather food. In the other they come together at fixed places for religious ceremonies, the “corroboree”, which can go on from a few days to a few months. Gathered together, Durkheim writes, people are soon worked up to an unusual pitch of excitement, as though a kind of “electricity” were passing between them. Each emotion that someone expresses is picked up by the others and grows, like an avalanche gathering mass on its way down. In the IEP’s account, it is this thinking and acting in unison that binds the group together. Durkheim states his hypothesis with care: the religious idea seems to have been born in exactly these states of collective effervescence. In support he notes that in Australia nearly all religious activity is concentrated in the periods of gathering.

The two phases become templates for the two worlds. Ordinary, dispersed life serves as the model of the profane; the life of the gatherings, charged with extraordinary forces, as the model of the sacred. In the IEP’s account, the collective force is then projected onto a visible object, which becomes sacred.

	Sacred	Profane
What it is	Whatever is set apart and protected by prohibitions	What the sacred must be shielded from (IEP)
Model in social life	Gatherings and ceremonies	Scattered life spent finding food
Contact	Contagious, spreads like an infection (Filoramo)	Kept at a distance by rites of prohibition

Durkheim’s theory of religion: true in its own way

From this explanation Durkheim concludes that no religion can be called false: each one answers to real conditions of human existence. Believers who sense a moral force greater than themselves, one they depend on, are right about it in his view: the force is society, and it is real. The same goes for the exaltation felt during rites, which is genuine and comes from the group, a force that lies beyond the single person and above them. For the IEP this is why Durkheim refuses to write religion off as fantasy: all religions are true, at least symbolically.

In the Conclusion Durkheim sorts what lasts from what passes. In worship and faith he sees something “eternal”, which will outlive the symbols of any particular religion. The task of explaining the world, by contrast, is bound to give way to science, and the speculative side of religion looks more likely to change than to vanish. Of his own 1912 he writes that the old gods “are growing old or dying, and others are not yet born”. Whenever a society forms or renews itself, he adds, it creates ideals.

Rites: the negative cult, the positive cult and piacular rites

Belief on its own is not enough for Durkheim, in the IEP’s reading: collective force has to be renewed from time to time, and rites do that work. The IEP counts funerals, rain dances and national holidays among them, all serving one end, which is to reaffirm the unity of the group. Book III sorts rites into families.

Rite	What it does	Example or note in the book
Negative cult	Keeps sacred and profane apart through prohibitions, the “taboo”	An entry into religious life that does not exhaust it
Positive cult	Brings believers into active contact with sacred forces (offerings, communion, imitation, commemoration)	The Arunta Intichiuma
Piacular rites	Respond to a misfortune or commemorate one	Mourning

Practical example: in the Intichiuma the clan gathers at a sacred site to ensure that the totemic species will reproduce. Treccani notes that at some festivals like this one the ban on killing and eating one’s own totem is lifted, and the group eats a small amount of it.

The word “piacular” comes from the Latin piaculum, atonement. Durkheim holds that every misfortune, bad omen or cause for dread calls for a rite of this kind, and the main example in the book is mourning. Ritual mourning, he writes, is a duty the group imposes as well as the expression of private grief: in the rites he describes, people lament partly because they are expected to.

The categories of thought come from social life

The book’s second aim concerns the categories, the notions that philosophers since Aristotle have placed at the foundation of thought: time, space, class, number, cause, substance, personality. Durkheim treats them as collective representations that grow out of group life and are shaped by its organization, and he argues that the main ones were born in and from religion. The IEP gives two examples: time as a category rests on the rhythm of social life, and space on how the group arranges itself on the land.

Durkheim insists that a social origin does not strip the ideas of time, space and cause of their objective value. Steven Lukes, the IEP reports, faulted him for running together the capacity to think in categories and their content, such as the way time is divided up.

Durkheim himself sums up the book’s general conclusion in a single claim: religion is something eminently social. In the Conclusion he also maintains that Australian totemism already holds the great ideas and main types of rite found in more complex religions, from the sacred-profane pair and the soul to sacrifice and mourning rites.

The critics: evidence, method, sacred and profane

Thomassen (2017) recalls that the book drew both praise and criticism from the day it appeared. The IEP lists three lines of attack: the method, the reading of the ethnographic data, and the charge that it undermines traditional religion.

Evans-Pritchard dwells on the evidence in an essay published after his death, in 1981. He notes that no one in Durkheim’s circle, Durkheim included, knew those peoples directly, and that Spencer and Gillen’s writings on the Arunta supplied nearly all of Durkheim’s evidence. As far as he could tell, neither Spencer nor Gillen spoke the Arunta language. He says he believes the Australian material served to illustrate a theory already in place.

The sampling problem had come up early. In his 1913 review Malinowski found the objections to drawing such broad conclusions from one case very serious ones, and in 1915 Goldenweiser regretted that Durkheim had leaned almost entirely on Australia when the data from there were so imperfect. Even Radcliffe-Brown, who was close to Durkheim, wrote in a letter to Mauss that the ethnographic chapters rested on a string of misunderstandings, according to Thomassen.

Other objections go after the theory. Evans-Pritchard rejects the sacred-profane dichotomy as false: an opposition built in the mind and absent from what he observed, one that never served him in the field and that leaves no room for intermediate cases. Malinowski had already doubted that it held outside Central Australia. Evans-Pritchard also argues that totems are sacred only to part of the community, that Durkheim offers no proof that gods were once totems, and that he never asks what totemism actually is. Among the book’s worst confusions he lists the slippery use of the word “primitive”, and he finds it meaningless to call the Aborigines of Central Australia “more primitive in time” than anyone else. He also thinks the charge that Durkheim treated society as a thing is partly justified.

Arnold van Gennep, author of The Rites of Passage (1909), reviewed the book in the Mercure de France in January 1913, and Thomassen calls the piece biting and sarcastic. Van Gennep knew the Australian sources thoroughly. On Thomassen’s account he denied that the book held any real theory and dismissed it as a “metaphysical” abstraction dreamed up at a desk. He objected to Durkheim placing the Arunta at a set stage of development as a shortcut to origins, and he pointed out that his own work on Australian rites, totemism and myths had been ignored. In 1920, Evans-Pritchard notes, van Gennep observed that totemism is absent among peoples then ranked even lower than the Central Australians on the “scale of civilization”.

The very category of totemism has also been questioned. Goldenweiser had flagged how hard it was to pin down as early as 1910, and in 1962 Claude Lévi-Strauss, according to Treccani, showed that it was a projection by scholars onto non-European material: totemism was above all a way of classifying the world. In the same years as Durkheim’s book, Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1912-1913) looked for its roots in the Oedipus complex.

What the book left behind

Despite the criticism, the IEP reports, a number of later scholars took up the idea that religion has a social basis, among them Randall Collins, who built a microsociology on Durkheim’s account of ritual. Between 1937 and 1939 the College of Sociology of Caillois, Bataille and Leiris revived his link between the sacred and collective effervescence. In 2017 Thomassen described the book as the most cited and most used work in the sociology of religion, still read in university courses.