Durkheim, Emile - The Elementary Forms Of The Religious Life
.pdfEMILE DURKHEIM
The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
TRANSLATED BY JOSEPH WARD SWAIN
INTRODUCTION
BY
ROBERT NISBET
Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities Columbia University, New York
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First published in 1915 Second Edition 1976. This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. All rights are reserved. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, 1956, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, electrical, chemical, mechanical, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. Enquiries should be addressed to the publishers.
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INTRODUCTION
There is charm as well as irony in the authorship of this book. For it is without question one of the most powerful justifications of the functional indispensability of religion to society ever written. Yet its author, Emile Durkheim, was himself a professed, virtually devout, agnostic in all matters of religious belief. His overriding commitment from student days on was to science and reason, and there can be no doubt of his strong belief that intellectual progress lay in the transfer from religious to scientific contexts of all fundamental ideas on universe, society and man. Nevertheless, from his studies of the nature of the social bond, Durkheim early reached the view that apart from a deep sense of the sacred—which is for Durkheim the vital substance of all religion—there can be no durable form of society. The sacred and the social are for Durkheim two sides of the same coin, and the distinction between the sacred and the profane is, Durkheim tells us, the profoundest distinction ever reached by the human mind.
Durkheim remains to this day, along with Max Weber, one of the two pre-eminent sociologists of religion. What the sacred is in Durkheim's thought, charisma is in large degree in Weber's. Both men were preoccupied by religion and its role in society, and from this common preoccupation has emerged most of the central propositions of the contemporary sociology of religion. The age in which Weber and Durkheim lived and worked was itself deeply preoccupied by the scientific or rational study of religion. In the generation that bridged the passage of the nineteenth to the twentieth century are to be found the names of E. B. Tyior, Max Muller, William James, Robertson Smith, Herbert Spencer, Sir James G. Frazer, Andrew Lang, Ernest Renan, and Sigmund Freud, one and all devoted, as were Durkheim and Weber, to the study of the origins, development and nature of religion conceived as the subject of scientific analysis. Their works had been preceded of course by those of such earlier interpreters, also rationalist in inspiration, as Feuerbach, Engels, Fustel de Coul-anges and others. But the high point of secular, scientific study of religion was reached about the turn of the century when both Durkheim and Weber were at work.
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Durkheim's scholarly interest in religion goes back at very least to his student years at the famous Ecole Normale Superieure. There Fustel de Coulanges, distinguished historian, author of the influential The Ancient City (1864), taught, became indeed one of Durkheim's most respected teachers. It was in The Ancient City that Fustel had set forth his engaging theory that the foundations of the ancient Greek and Roman city states had been strictly and exclusively religious, inextricably involved in not only all of Greek and Roman belief but also social order. Moreover, the essence of this religious foundation was, for Fustel, the sacred, more precisely what he called the "sacred flame" that was kept alight in every household, symbol of the continuity of the generations. It is unlikely that Durkheim could have been unaware of Fustel's idea of the sacred even though, at the time Durkheim studied under this great scholar, Fustel's active interests had turned entirely to the history of French social, political and legal institutions from medieval times on. Moreover Durkheim as a young man was living through the years in which Ernest Renan was publishing the successive volumes of his eminently scholarly and secular studies of Christianity and of the peoples of ancient Israel, studies in which the interaction of the social and the sacred is dealt with in essentially sociological as well as historical terms. Here too it is hard to suppose that Durkheim was unaffected.
But wherever and however acquired, keen interest in religion is to be found in some of Durkheim's very earliest writings, no matter how inconclusive and amorphous by the standard of his later work his earliest interest may seem to us. Several years before publication of Durkheim's first major work, The Division of Labour (1893), he had declared religion a necessary and vital force in social stability, an indispensable means of social constraint, and had even reached the point, Steven Lukes tells us in his authoritative biography of Durkheim, of actually writing of religion as born of the attachment of the individual to society. Such a declaration, when siifliciently matured and grounded in research, would become the cornerstone of The Elementary Forms.
It was, however, in 1895, according to Lukes, that Durkheim conclusively reached belief in
the sovereign importance of religion in the social order and set himself resolutely and systematically to its study. Apparently it was about this time that Durkheim encountered the works of the English ethnologist Robertson Smith whose studies of the religions of the ancient Semites, among other works, had led him to the conclusion that the origins of religion are to be found, not in belief in spirits, in animism or other state of mind, but, rather, in the social act, in the rite or ceremony that symbolically binds the individual to his kinship community.
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Religion, Smith wrote, "did not exist for the saving of souls, but for the preservation and welfare of society."
It is easy to imagine the attraction of such an hypothesis to the author of The Division of Labour and The Rules of Sociological Method. (1895). Even in his Suicide, which Durkheim was writing at the time (to be published in 1897), he gave religion high marks as a restraint upon the suicidal impulse, but only where the social element of communal authority was strong in religion. The natural and aboriginal function of religion is to bind the individual to the social order, but where this function becomes weak, as in the modern liberal or rationalist religions, its effect is diminished.
Durkheim's interest in the nature of religion and in its sources was becoming stronger all the time. In 1898, while still at the University of Bordeaux, he founded the journal, L'Annee Sociologique, twelve impressive issues of which would appear before suspension at the beginning of World War I, and in these interest in religion, especially primitive religion, is strong in the writings of both Durkheim and his students. No less visible is the attention he was giving to religion in his Bordeaux lectures, which would be brought together with articles and papers by Durkheim's students and published in book form after his death. No matter what we find Durkheim discussing in these lectures and papers—property, contract, morality, education, law, etc.—almost invariably we find him explaining their authority in society in terms of their aboriginal religious foundations. Thus the sanctity of private property goes back to the sanctity of primitive ritual property; the binding character of private contract is anchored in the primitive idea of covenant with a god or spirit, and so on.
There is thus nothing astonishing at all, despite remarks along this line of a few early students and critics of Durkheim, in the appearance of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life in 1912. There had been a long and intensive period of preparation for the writing of the b'ook, saturation in a vast literature on primitive religion, especially that pertaining to the Australian aborigines which Durkheim, along with many others in his day, regarded as the single most primitive extant people, and a good many articles on religious topics by himself and his students, along with the lectures he delivered at Bordeaux and then, from 1902 on, at the University of Paris. For, at very least, seventeen years, Durkheim's primary sociological interest was in religion prior to publication of The Elementary Forms.
Having now briefly set the background and context of the book's appearance, I want to turn to the book itself. Rather than seeking to summarize in narrative fashion its contents, I think it preferable and useful to identify the major aims of the book
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as these may be found in its dominant themes and perspectives. In the most literal sense, it is of course a monograph on the religious customs of the Australians, but we should miss utterly the book's significance if we did not observe the uses which Durkheim makes of his Australian materials. These uses are very broad and highly interpretative, extending to the whole of religion as it may be found everywhere, with the Australian data employed as a kind of verification of Durkheim's views on the universal character of religion.
The book is in the first place evolutionary in character. That it is free of the conventional marks of evolutionary treatments in his day—successions of grand stages, cross-cultural data drawn from dozens, even hundreds, of peoples, and the like—does not offset Durkheim's clearly stated evolutionary intent. If, he writes, we undertake to explain any institution in the social order, it is
always necessary to go back to its most primitive and simple form, in short to its evolutionary origin as the means of understanding later manifestations. In many places in the book there are references to the persisting and evolving religious elements which, he argues, bind primitive and modern religions into a single continuum. If I seem to be stressing this evolutionary character of the book, it is only because many writers have chosen to deal with it as if it were in the antievolutionary movement which was coming into existence in certain anthropological circles in Durkheim's day as the consequence of either functionalist or dif-fusionist premises. The book is as definitely conceived in the light of evolutionary methodology as anything that had been written by Tyior or Spencer, even though its transcending content is that of the origins of religion rather than grand-evolutionary succession of stages.
Second, there is the expressed desire to see religion in the terms of its simplest possible elements, those which may be descried in a people as primitive as the Australians, as the means of discovering what is fundamental, universal, and lasting in religion irrespective of the complexities and differentiations which become introduced in the great world religions. To employ Weber's notable phrase, an "ideal-type" is to be found in this book with respect to religion, one that utilizes the data of but a single people but that nevertheless serves, in Durkheim's mind, for all religions. What he writes here of the totem, the primitive cult, the rite, and the varied meanings of the sacred, is intended to serve in the scientific sense as a model, an ideal-type, from which all that is merely peripheral or incidental has been omitted.
Third is an aspect of the book that has been too often neglected entirely by its critics, one I do not hesitate to refer to as pheno-
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menological. It may seem strange to some to refer to Durkheim in this fashion, for he is commonly dealt with, especially by the symbolic interactionists, as the positivist pure and simple, the very antithesis of the investigator concerned in verstehende terms with the meaning of a given element or structure of human behaviour. But from the beginning of his book Durkheim leaves us in no doubt that his dominant objective is that of portraying religion in the terms which, he tells us, have been crucial in the minds of the religiously committed themselves. Durkheim is severe on those rationalists who have thought their analysis of religion complete when they have delineated religion in assertedly scientific fashion without regard to the elements which are dominant in the minds of the religiously devout. Rationalists have typically concentrated, Durkheim writes, on the objects of religious propositions, cosmological, ethical, and other. But the universal and enduring appeal of religion to its votaries lies, Durkheim stresses, not in what it may say about things, external or internal, but, rather, in what it does for the believer in his relation to world, society, and self. It is not in search of new truths about universe and self that the communicant turns to his god; it is, rather, in quest of the spiritual strength that only one's god can give him, Durkheim argues, that accounts for the religious experience. On this point, Durkheim concludes, the testimony of the conse-cratedly religious is worth far more than the research results of rationalists who have approached religion as outside observers.
Fourth, the book is not only a study of religion; it is also an inquiry into the sources of the categories of the human mind: such categories as time, space, cause, and the other structures of the mind through which individual experience becomes assimilated and ordered. As I have said, distinction between the sacred and the profane is, for Durkheim, the greatest single distinction the human mind is capable of; greater than distinction between good and bad, right and wrong, the logical and illogical, or any other. So powerful was this distinction upon the primitive mind, so binding and authoritative the hold of the sacred, that from this sphere of sacred experience sprang eventually the basic structures of human thought applied to all realms. Thus, Durkheim tells us, it was the experience over countless generations of participating regularly and rhythmically in the communal, sacred rites that gradually created a sense of time. Similarly, it was the spectacle of the all-powerful, absolute primitive community that established the idea first of god or gods and then of the kind of causal omnipotence that would in due time become secularized into the category of
cause that exists in human minds. Hume had thought these categories the results of additive, cumulative, sensation-
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based experience that takes place in the life of each individual from infancy on. Kant, responding to Hume, had declared the categories built into the very function of the human brain. Durkheim, rejecting both of these epistemological propositions (though favouring Kant in some degree at the expense of Hume), argues that the categories are the evolutionary products of the individual's long exposure to the constraints of the sacred in social context.
It cannot be said that Durkheim's sociology of knowledge, or rather of the sources of mind, has won wide acceptance. It has quite manifest faults; among them the problem posed by the transfer into the germ plasm of environmentally acquired traits, a transfer not acceptable to modern genetics. And yet it has to be said that even if Durkheim's sociological explanation of the nature of mind and thought is deficient, his typology has proved to be of much use to those sociologists or comparative historians of culture concerned with the variations among peoples of cultural perception. The perception of time, cause, space, and force does vary immensely among peoples despite fundamental likeness of native mental faculties, and it is in these terms, those of the sociology of knowledge, that Durkheim's treatment of the categories of the mind has proved to be fruitful.
Fifth, it is impossible to miss in Durkheim's treatment of religion a consistently structural approach. It is not the structuralism of a Levi-Strauss in our day or of any of those working in the wake of a Noam Chomsky on the elemental linguistic-mental structures, but Durkheim's approach is a structural one all the same, and we know that Levi-Strauss himself was strongly influenced in the beginning by Durkheim's writings on symbol and rite. Of all the great sociologists at work in the early part of this century, Durkheim, I would argue, did the most to replace explanations founded in terms of psychological, individual, forces or states with explanations anchored in the patterned, persisting relationships of human beings, relationships among themselves and to their norms. Durkheim is pre-eminently the sociologist of social structure, and there is a vivid and unbroken line from his work, particularly his study of religion, to the writings of those who describe themselves in our day as functionalists or structuralists among anthropologists, sociologists and social psychologists. For Durkheim the foundation of all religion lies in the sacred significance the structure of kinship holds for primordial man, and any scientific study of religion must concern itself with such structures as the molecular cult and with the positive and the negative rites of the cult, though, as I have stressed above, such structural thinking in no way prevents Durkheim from giving
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explicit attention to religion as it is perceived and assimilated by the religious.
Sixth and finally, I would call attention to Durkheim's treatment of the relation between religion and science in mankind's evolutionary advance. Intellectual progress for Durkheim consists, quite obviously, in the transfer from dominantly religious contexts to dominantly scientific contexts of ideas on cosmology, on society and on the individual; a transfer, in short, from the sacred to the profane. He regards with manifest favour the progress of the sciences and their emancipation as intellectual systems from religion. The future will see, he tells us, a continuation of this trend, with matters still held to be too sacred for scientific examination becoming objects of rationalist-scientific research. And yet, this said, there remains nonetheless for Durkheim an eternality of religion, one that springs from man's ineradicable impulse to pronounce some things sacred in sharp distinction from the profane, from the secular and the purely instrumental or utilitarian. He is unyielding in his view that apart from a bond that is sacred, the human community, indeed any belief-system, must dissolve into atoms. The great problem, he suggests, that faces Western societies is the preservation of a sense of the sacred in our belief-systems and in our social structures sufficient to make possible a social order without, however, diminishing the advance of science as the way of illumination of the unknown. Few would question at this moment the prescience of Durkheim's ideas.
It would be absurd to leave the impression that a book as bold and original as The Elementary Forms has been immune to strong criticisms. Quite the contrary. From the moment of its publication it came under a good deal of attack, just as all of Durkheim's major works did, starting with The Division of Labour. In his study of religion, as in his other studies, critics found an emphasis upon the metaphysical reality of society that was often unacceptable. The disregard of, or submergence of, the individual is undoubtedly the major charge against Durkheim to be found in all the critical literature generated by his waiting. It was said too that his study of the Australian aborigines lacked the authoritative-ness which can come only from direct, field acquaintance with a given people or culture. (To be sure, this criticism applies equally to such notable students of religion as Tyior, Frazer, and also Freud whose Totem and Taboo appeared one year after Durkheim's work and also focused on the Australians.) Durkheim's sharp distinction between religion and magic on the ground that the latter does not produce communal ties ("there is no church of magic") has also come under assault by a number of ethnolo-
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gists. Even Radcliffe-Brown, who was to become one of Durk-heim's strongest and most fertile admirers so far as method was concerned, found Durkheim's interpretation of Australian totem-ism seriously defective. Finally, and with much force, it has been said that use of one people, however intensively it may be studied, as "confirmation" of any theory of the nature of religion is an abuse of scientific method.
In all of these criticisms there is assuredly some degree of validity. It would be preposterous—and also alien to the basic scientific spirit that motivated Durkheim—to assert that the final answer, assuming there even can be a final answer, to the problem of the origin and nature of religion lies in this book. It is, however, the unfailing mark of the classic, whether in science or in literature or art, that in the long run it not only survives against, but even draws a certain degree of added strength and lustre from, criticisms of the magnitude which have been made of The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Criticisms notwithstanding, the eminence of this book in the circles of those concerned with the scientific understanding of religion is not only as great as, if not actually greater than, it was when it first appeared, but one need only examine in the most cursory fashion the line of distinguished works reaching to the present moment that has been, in one degree or other, inspired by Durkheim's treatment of the sacred, to be made aware of its continuing intellectual power.
ROBERT NISBET
New York, 1975
CONTENTS
Introduction by Robert Nisbet
INTRODUCTION
SUBJECT of our STUDY : RELIGIOUS SOCIOLOGY and the THEORY of KNOWLEDGE
I.—Principal subject of the book : analysis of the simplest religion known. to determine the elementary forms of the religious life—Why they are more easily found and explained in the primitive religions
II.—Secondary subject of research: the genesis of the fundamental notions of thought or the categories—Reasons for believing that their origin is religious and consequently social—How a way of restating the theory of knowledge is thus seen .
BOOK I
PRELIMINARY QUESTIONS
CHAPTER I
DEFINITION of RELIGIOUS PHENOMENA and of RELIGION
Usefulness of a preliminary definition of religion; method to be followed in seeking this definition—Why the usual definitions should be examined first
Religion defined by the supernatural and mysterious—Criticism: the notion of mystery is not primitive
I.— Religion defined in connection with the idea of God or a spiritual being………………. II.—Religions without gods—Rites in deistic religions which imply no idea of divinity……. III.—Search for a positive definition—Distinction between beliefs and rites—Definition of beliefs—First characteristic: division of things between sacred and profane—Distinctive characteristics of this definition—Definition of rites in relation to beliefs—Definition of religion
……….
IV.—Necessity of another characteristic to distinguish magic from religion—The idea of the Church—Do individualistic religions exclude the idea of a Church ? ……………………………….
CHAPTER II
LEADING CONCEPTIONS of the ELEMENTARY RELIGION
I.—Animism
Distinction of animism and naturism
I.—The three theses of animism : Genesis of the idea of the soul; Formation of the idea of spirits ; Transformation of the cult of spirits into the cult of nature. ………………………………48
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II.—Criticism of the first thesis—Distinction of the idea of the soul from that of a double— Dreams do not account for the idea of the soul ……………………………………..……………55
III.—Criticism of the second thesis—Death does not explain the transformation of a soul into a spirit—The cult of the souls of the dead is not primitive …………………………………...60 IV.—Criticism of the third thesis—The anthromoporphic instinct— Spencer's criticism of it; reservations on this point—Examination of the facts by which this instinct is said to be proved— Difference between a soul and the spirits of nature—Religious anthropomorphism is not primitive………………………………………………………………………………………………
… 65
V.—Conclusion : animism reduces religion to nothing more than a system of hallucinations
……………………………………………………………………………………………………...68
CHAPTER III
LEADING CONCEPTIONS OF THE ELEMENTARY RELIGION—(continued} II.—Nafurism History
of the theory ………………………………………………………………………………………..71 I.—Exposition of Max Miiller's naturism …………………………………………………73
II.—If the object of religion is to express natural forces, it is hard to see how it has maintained itself, for it expresses them in an erroneous manner—Pretended distinction between religion and mythology
…………………………………………………………………………………….78
III.—Naturism does not explain the division of things into sacred and
profane …………………………………………………………………………………...84
CHAPTER IV
TOTEMISM AS AN ELEMENTARY RELIGION
I.—Brief history of the question of totemism ……………………………………………..88 II.—Reasons of method for which oar study will be given specially to the totemism of Australia—The place which will be given to facts from America
……………………………………93
BOOK II
THE ELEMENTARY BELIEFS
CHAPTER I TOTEMIC BELIEFS The Totem as Name and as Emblem
I.—Definition of the clan—The totem as name of the clan—Nature of the things which serve as totems—Ways in which the totem is acquired —The totems of phratries ; of matrimonial classes ……………………………………………………………………………………………..102
II.—The totem as emblem—Totemic designs engraved or carved upon
objects; tattooings or designs upon the body ……………………………………………...113 III.—Sacred character of the totemic emblem—The churinga—The
nurtunja—The waninga—Conventional character of totemic emblems…………………. 119 CHAPTER II TOTEMIC BELIEFS—(continued)
The Totemic Animal and Man
I.—Sacred character of the totemic animals—Prohibition to eat them, kill them or pick the totemic plants—Different moderations given these prohibitions—Prohibition of contact—The sacred character of the animal is less marked than that of the emblem
…………………………….128
II.—The man—His relationship with the totemic animal or plant— Different myths explaining this relationship—The sacred character of the man is more apparent in certain parts of the organism : the blood, hair, etc.—How this character varies with sex and age— Totemism is not plant or animal worship
………………………………………………………………………………..134
CHAPTER III TOTEMIC BELIEFS—(continued) The Cosmological System of Totemism and the Idea of Class
I.—The classification of things into clans, phratries and classes …………………………141
II.—Genesis of the notion of class : the first classifications of things take their forms from society—Differences between the sentiment of the differences of things and the idea of class—Why this is of social origin…………………………………………………………………………….. 144 III.—Religious significance of these classifications: all of the things classified into a clan partake of the nature of the totem and its sacred character—The cosmological system of totemism—Totemism as the tribal religion
……………………………………………………………148
CHAPTER IV TOTEMIC BELIEFS—(end} The Individual Totem and the Sexual Totem I.—Individual totem as a forename ; its sacred character—Individual totem as personal
emblem—Bonds between the man and his individual totem—Relations with the collective totem
...157
II.—The totems of sexual groups—Resemblances and differences with the
collective and individual totems—Their tribal nature ……………………………………165
CHAPTER V
ORIGINS of these BELIEFS
Critical Examination of Preceding Theories
I.—Theories which derive totemism from a previous religion : from the ancestor cult (Wilken and Tyior) ; from the nature cult (Jevons)— Criticism of these theories………………...168 II.—Theories which derive collective totemism from individual totemism— Origins attributed by these theories to the individual totem (Frazer, Boas, Hill Tout)—Improbability of these hypotheses—Reasons showing the priority of the collective
totem………………………………… 172
III.—Recent theory of Frazer : conceptions! and local totemism—The begging of the question upon which it rests—The religious character of the totem is denied—Local totemism is not primitive …………………………………………………………………………………………..180 IV.—Theory of Lang: that the totem is only a name—Difficulties in explaining the religious character of totemic practices from this point of view ……………………………………………184
V.—All these theories explain totemism only by postulating other religious
notions anterior to it ………………………………………………………………………186
CHAPTER VI
ORIGINS OF THESE BELIEFS—(continued) The Notion of the Totemic Principle, or Mana, and the Idea of Force
I.—The notion of the totemic force or principle—Its ubiquity—Its character at once physical and moral ……………………...…………………………………………………………………..188
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II.—Analogous conceptions in other inferior societies—The gods in Samoa, the wakan of the Sioux, the orenda of the Iroquios, the mana of Melanesia—Connection of these notions with totemism—The Arun-kulta of the Arunta…………………………………………………………191 III.—Logical priority of impersonal force over the different mythical personalities—Recent theories which tend to admit this priority …………………………………………………………198
IV.—The notion of religious force is the prototype of that of force in general …………..203
CHAPTER VII ORIGINS OF THESE BELIEFS—{end) Origin of the Idea of the Totemic Principle or Mana
I.—The totemic principle is the clan, but thought of under a more empirical form ……....205
II.—General reasons for which society is apt to awaken the sensation of the sacred and the divine—Society as an imperative moral force; the notion of moral authority—Society as a force which raises the individual outside of himself—Facts which prove that society creates the sacred………..……..……..……..……..……..……..……..……..……..……..……..……….……..2 06
III.—Reasons peculiar to Australian societies—The two phases through which the life of these societies alternatively passes : dispersion, concentration—Great collective effervescence during the periods' of concentration—Examples—How the religious idea is bom out of this effervescence Why collective force has been thought of under totemic forms : it is the totem that is the emblem of the clan—Explanation of the principal totemic beliefs……..……..……..…….……..……..……..…….……..……..……..…….……..……………2
14
IV.—Religion is not the product of fear—It expresses something real—Its essential idealism—This idealism is a general characteristic of collective mentality—Explanation of the external character of religious forces in relation to their subjects—The principle that the part is equal to the whole……………………………………………………………………………………………….… ……..219
V.—Origin of the notion of emblem : emblems a necessary condition of collective representations—Why the clan has taken its emblems from the animal and vegetable kingdoms……….223
VI.—The proneness of the primitive to confound the kingdoms and classes which we distinguish—Origins of these confusions—How they have blazed the way for scientific explanations—They do not exclude the tendency towards distinction and opposition
……………………….
CHAPTER VIII
THE IDEA OF THE SOUL
I.—Analysis of the idea of the soul in the Australian societies …………………………...240 II.—Genesis of this idea—The doctrine of reincarnation according to Spencer and Gillen : it implies that the soul is a part of the totemic principle—Examination of the facts collected by Strehlow ; they confirm the totemic nature of the soul …………………………………………..246
III.—Generality of the doctrine of reincarnation—Diverse facts in support
of the proposed genesis …………………………………………………………………..256 IV.—Antithesis of the soul and the body : what there is objective in this— Relations of the individual soul with the collective soul—The idea of the soul is not chronologically after that of mana ………………………………………………………………………………………………262
V.—Hypothesis to explain the belief in its survival .. ……………………………………267
VI.—The idea of a soul and the idea of a person : impersonal elements in the personality
…………………………………………………………………………………………..…………269
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CHAPTER IX THE IDEA OF SPIRITS AND Gons
I.—Difference between a soul and a spirit—The souls of the mythical ancestors are spirits, having determined functions—Relations between the ancestral spirit, the individual soul and the individual totem— Explanation of this latter—Its sociological significance …………………….273
II.—Spirits and magic …………………………………………………………………...281 III.—The civilizing heroes ………………………………………………………………..283 IV.—The great gods—Their origin—Their relations with the totemic system—Their tribal and international character …………………………………………………………………..……285
V.—Unity of the totemic system …………………………………………………………295
BOOK III
THE PRINCIPAL RITUAL ATTITUDES
CHAPTER I
THE NEGATIVE CULT AND ITS FUNCTIONS ТИЕ ASCETIC RITES
I.—The system of interdictions—Magic and religious interdictions— Interdictions between sacred things of different sorts—Interdictions between sacred and profane—These latter are the basis of the negative cult—Leading types of these interdictions ; their reduction to two essential types
……………………………………………………………………………………………………..299 II.—The observance of interdictions modifies the religious state of indivi-viduals—Cases where this efficacy is especially apparent: ascetic practices—The religious efficacy of sorrow—