Eight theories of religion second edition

The totem is in the first instance a symbol. But a symbol of what? One answer, we can now see, is the totemic priciple, the hidden force worshipped by the clan. At the same time—and here Durkheim makes his pivotal turn—the totem is also the concrete, visible image of the clan. It is its flag, its banner or logo, its very self in a symbol, just as one might say that the American eagle, “Old Glory,” or “Uncle Sam” is a visible emblem of the United States. But if the totem “is at once the symbol of the god and of the society, is that not because the god and the society are only one?” “The god of the clan, the totemic principle, can therefore be nothing else than the clan itself, personified and represented to the imagination under the visible form of the animal or vegetable which serves as totem.”¹² The totem, in brief, is simultaneously the symbol of both the god and the clan, because both the god and the clan are really the same thing! In succinct form, devotion to a god or gods is how primitive peoples express and reinforce their devotion to the clan.

It is true, of course, that in their rituals of worship, which are always communal, the members of these aborigine clans themselves think they are worshipping some divinity, some animal or plant, “out there” in the world, who can control the rain or make them prosper. But what is really happening is something else, something that can best be grasped in terms of social function. Society needs the commitment of the individual. It “cannot exist,” Durkheim observes, “except in and through individual consciousness”; that is why the totem principle must somehow always “penetrate and organize itself within us.”¹³ Moreover, we can know exactly when and how this occurs. It happens on those awe-inspiring ceremonial occasions when the whole

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Durkheim vividly describes the sentiments that “bubble up” in the excitement of these group ceremonies. They are ritual times, filled with energy, enthusiasm, joy, selfless commitment, and complete security. “It is in the midst of these effervescent social environments and out of this effervescence itself that the religious idea seems to be born.”¹⁴ At such moments the profane is left behind; only the sacred exists.

Once Durkheim has made his key point—the idea that worship of the totem is nothing less than worship of society itself, he feels that all other pieces in the puzzle of Australian society and religion fall quite naturally into their appropriate places. The role of the totem symbol, for example, now seems clear. Carved in wood or stone, it is a concrete object which conveys to each person the fact that the clan, which claims the loyalty of all, is not just something imagined; it is a real thing, which imposes itself on everyone’s life and thoughts. The totem symbol also conveys the idea that society, like itself, is something fixed and permanent; it remains as a focus of inspiration long after the excitement of the religious ceremonies is over. If we ask why animals and plants should be the most common totems, that too is clear. The clan does not want as its symbol something distant and vague; it needs an object that is specific, concrete, and near at hand, something closely tied to its daily experience. If we ask how such primitive societies developed their systems of thought, their ways of ordering and classifying the world, that can be seen clearly as well. The aim of totemism is to notice the interconnectedness of things, the intricate web of ties that bind each person to the next in the clan, the clan as a whole to the natural world, and different parts of the natural world to each other. This urge to embrace and connect all things is so strong, in fact, that it enables primitive totemism, simple as it is, to lay the groundwork for the

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intricately connected systems of language, logic, and science which develop in later stages of civilization.

This “social” idea of the soul is quite enlightening, Durkheim adds, when we think of the age-old religious (and philosophical) problem of its relation to the body. If the soul is, in effect, the clan idealized and implanted within the self, then in that capacity its task is to represent to the individual society’s demands and ideals. The soul is the conscience of the self, the voice of the clan within, informing each of his or her personal obligation to the group. The body, on the other hand, naturally asserts its own self-centered desires, which can and often do clash sharply with the demands and restraints of social life. No wonder, then, that religion has always been suspicious of the desires of the flesh! They satisfy the individual and are profane; religion asserts the claims of the social and is therefore sacred.

The doctrine of the immortality of the soul is also a natural development from totemism. To speak of the soul as immortal is for totem peoples only another way of saying that while individuals die, the clan lives on. Ancestral spirits appear as fragments from the clan’s past that have survived into the present. Interestingly, these spirits often associate themselves with living members of the clan in a way that gives each person a kind of double soul: “one which is within us, or rather, which is us; the other [in the form of the ancestral spirit], which is above us, and whose function it is to control and assist the first one” in doing its duty to the clan. Over time, these guardian spirits begin to grow in power and prestige. They become more important; their sphere of influence widens; and they acquire “mythical personalities of a superior order.” In short, as the concept of the soul and its immortality gradually arises out of the worship of the totemic principle, so, over time, the worship of the gods emerges in its turn from the immortality of ancestral souls.

With the emergence of the gods from original totemism, Durkheim comes at last to the realm of religion as it has been more traditionally understood. Even in Australia, he admits, clan religion has developed to the point where it has numerous gods, most of whom are associated not with the smaller clan

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ceremonies but with the larger tribal rites of initiation, which make young men and women full members of adult society. The best way to understand these greater gods, in fact, is to think of them as personifications of these wider tribal units. And the same is true for that other well-known feature of primitive religion which is on exhibit in Australia: the belief in a high god who rules over all. Modern scholars have been fascinated to find among early peoples a belief such as this, which is so strikingly similar to the Jewish and Christian faith in a creator and moral ruler of the world. But in Australia, says Durkheim, the idea of such a god is just a natural extension of the same thinking that accounts for tribal gods. As contacts increased among tribes that lived in a certain region, and as they exchanged ideas, they began to suppose that there was one ancestor of special importance whom they all shared. That ancestor was the high god. His status is grand, but he comes into being like all other gods—as a further extension of the original totemic principle. For whatever the level we observe, the process that gives rise to belief in the gods has left us clear traces of its operation. The gods grow out of the totemic principle as it filters gradually through the clan, first into souls, next to ancestors who become clan spirits, and finally beyond them to the higher and highest of gods.

The last part of the Elementary Forms turns from the matter of beliefs to take up the other side of Australian religion: its ritual performances. Here we must note Durkheim’s earlier observation that religious sentiments and emotions first arise not in private moments but in the great group ceremonials of the clan. It follows from this that the beliefs found in totemism are not the most important thing about it. Rituals are. In Durkheim’s view, the “cult” (from the Latin cultus: “worship”), which consists of emotional group ceremonies held on certain set occasions, is the very core of the clan’s life together. Whenever they occur and however they are performed, these cultic acts of worship are the most important things the people of the clan ever undertake. They are sacred; all else is profane. Their purpose is always to promote consciousness of the clan, to make people feel a part of it, and to keep it in every way separate from the profane.

In totem practice, the cult breaks into two main forms, negative and positive, while a third type, called “piacular” (from the Latin piaculum: “atonement”) plays a role of its own alongside the first two. The rituals of the negative cult have one main task: keeping the sacred always quite separate from the profane. They consist chiefly of prohibitions, or taboos. Taboos

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Normally, then, the sacred is off limits, and the point of the negative cult is to keep it so. When the time and place are right, however, and the clan does move into the realm of the sacred, the means for doing so are then provided by the rituals Durkheim describes as belonging to the positive cult. For Australians, the central rite is the intichiuma, the ceremony which, as we may recall, Robertson Smith, Frazer, and Freud found so uncannily similar to the Christian communion meal. At the beginning of every rainy season, men of the clan start a sequence of ceremonies to promote the growth of their totem. They begin with rituals done over certain sacred stones; a period of keen religious excitement comes next; then amid a solemn ritual the totem creature itself is seized, killed, and eaten in a sacred meal. Why is this done? asks Durkheim. It is, as Robertson Smith correctly saw, the earliest form of the rite of sacrifice, which has assumed such a central place in so many later religions. In worshipping the totem, each person publicly celebrates its existence and declares that he or she will be loyal to it; in return, by eating the totem, each receives back from the god an infusion of divine power and a renewal of the divine life in the soul. Durkheim describes it, ingeniously, as a sacred exchange. In the intichiuma rite, the worshippers give life to their god, and the god returns it to them.

On the level of appearances, there can of course be little doubt that the Australian intichiuma is a strictly religious ritual—a transaction between the people of the clan and their god. Underneath, however, and in reality, it is

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If the sacred principle is nothing more nor less than society transfigured and

In this important paragraph, we can see as clearly as anywhere else in The Elementary Forms the thesis that stands at the heart of Durkheim’s theory. Religious beliefs and rituals are in the last analysis symbolic expressions of social realities. Worship of the totem is really a statement of loyalty to the clan. Eating the totem is really an affirmation and reinforcement of the group, a symbolic way for each member to say that the clan always matters more than the individual selves it comprises.

Totem rituals thus put us in a position to explain religious practice in the same way that totem ideas can explain religious belief. The concept of society once again furnishes the key. The function of religious rituals, which are more fundamental than beliefs, is to provide occasions where individuals renew their commitment to the community, reminding themselves in the most solemn fashion that they depend on the clan, just as it depends on them. Feast days and festivals exist to put society, the community, back in the foreground of people’s minds, and to push personal, self-oriented concerns back into a secondary place, where they belong.

Other rituals besides the intichiuma ceremony are included in the positive cult. There are, for instance, imitative rituals of the sort which Frazer classified as a type of magic. In the rites of certain clans, people mimic the cries of their totem birds, thinking that this will make them reproduce and thrive. In other cases, there are what Durkheim calls “representative” rites, or rituals of remembrance, in which one clan member simply recites the myth of a great ancestor to a group of listeners, apparently just to provide entertainment and

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instruction. But even so, the underlying motive is social. Telling the story of an ancestor, after all, is a way of binding the past members of the community to those alive in the present. And people come to believe that certain rituals can make the totem magically reproduce precisely because of the power those ceremonies have already demonstrated in bringing together the members of the clan. It is the social force of rituals which leads to the thought that they have physical force as well.

In addition to both the positive and negative cult there are, finally, certain important rituals Durkheim calls “piacular.” These are the clan’s rites of atonement and mourning, which always take place after a death or some other tragic event. Tylor thought that primitive peoples held such rituals in order to make peace with the spirits of the dead, who were angry that their life had ended. But once again, Durkheim provides a social reason. In cultures where funeral mourners weep loudly and beat themselves in despair, these acts are not just spontaneous outbursts. They are quite formal gestures, required by custom from all clan members, even those who hardly knew the dead person. And why? Because when someone dies, it is not just the immediate family that has been weakened; the whole clan has lost a member, a portion of its strength. At such a time, it needs, through the cult, to regroup, revive, and reaffirm itself. In the earliest ages, the rites performed—processions, wailings, breast-beatings— were not even directed to any spirits or gods. Belief in these supernatural beings actually developed later in time and only as a result of the ritual, just to give people a better mental image as a focus for their action. Originally, there were no gods to command a ritual; there was only the ritual, which over time itself created the gods.

Piacular rites, finally, show the double-sided power of the sacred, which can be dim and demonic as well as bright and divine. Just as the positive cult is a celebration of the clan in the full vigor of its joy and confidence, it falls to the piacular cult to carry it through its darker passages—the moments of grief, catastrophe, fear, or uncertainty that can descend on a community at any place or time. An example of Durkheim’s point can here be supplied from recent history. Few Americans who were living in November 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, can ever forget the overwhelming emotional impact on the nation of the elegant, somber funeral procession that moved through the streets of the capital and was followed by the heartbreaking rites of burial at Arlington National Cemetery. For those in every town and state who watched on television, it could well have seemed that an entire nation was a single, grieving family. Durkheim’s concept of a piacular rite well explains

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Durkheim contends that if his analysis is correct, there is a great deal to be learned from the primitive peoples of Australia. In the totemism of their tribes and clans, one finds on clear display all of the truly “elementary forms” of the religious life: a separation between the sacred and the profane; ideas of souls and spirits; the beginnings of mythical beings and great gods; and a full assortment of rituals, including those of prohibition (taboo), celebration, imitation, remembrance, and sorrow. With these building blocks in hand, it becomes possible to construct a theory that can be applied throughout history and across cultures to explain religious behavior of any kind wherever we may find it. Durkheim’s theory holds that no matter where we look for the determining causes of religion—all religions—those causes invariably turn out to be social. Though harder to detect in the great and dominant religions of the world, they are as unmistakably present in these complex traditions as they are in the simplest totemism. East or West, ancient or modern, beliefs and rituals always express a society’s needs—its constant call upon all members to think first of the group, to sense its importance, feel its power, and sacrifice personal pleasures for its permanent well-being. Religion’s role, accordingly, is not to make claims about “the outside world,” not to teach what it thinks are truths about the creation of the world, the existence of a god, or a life after death. On all of these subjects, which people once thought proper for faith, it has had to yield to science, a more valid system of thought which, in fact, religion helped to create. Religion’s true purpose is not intellectual but social. It serves as the carrier of social sentiments, providing symbols and rituals that enable people to express the deep emotions which anchor them to their community. Insofar as it does this, religion, or some substitute for it, will always be with us. For then it stands on its true home ground, preserving and protecting the very “soul of society.”

In following Durkheim’s approach to religion, we have naturally had to pass over certain details, but the main outlines of his theory should now be fairly clear. From almost the moment it appeared, The Elementary Forms stirred excitement, especially in France, where Durkheim had associates and disciples

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who were already disposed to look at religion through sociological lenses. Even beyond France, however, Durkheim’s originality was widely recognized. In Britain, the study of anthropology was shaped by his influence, as was the new field of social psychology in the United States, where such noteworthy spokesmen as G. H. Mead and C. H. Cooley adapted his ideas to their programs of research. Durkheim’s imprint can also be seen in such leading studies of religion as W. Lloyd Warner’s The Family of God (1959), which explores the power of Christian symbolism in American communities, and contemporary sociologist Robert Bellah’s analyses of religion and society in both the United States and Japan. Clearly, among those who work in the social sciences, Durkheim’s thought continues to win new admirers and open fresh lines of inquiry.

As we have seen throughout this discussion, the core of Durkheim’s view lies in his claim that “religion is something eminently social.”¹⁷ He insists that although as individuals all of us make choices in our lives, we make them within a social framework that is a “given” for us from the day of birth. “We speak a language that we did not make; we use instruments that we did not invent; we invoke rights that we did not found; a treasury of knowledge is transmitted to each generation that it did not gather itself.”¹⁸ Religion is in all cultures the most prized part of that social treasury. It serves society by providing from infancy onward the ideas, rituals, and sentiments that guide the life of every person within it. In the present circumstance, discussions of “social influence” on religion, and vice versa, are so routine as to seem like common sense; everyone speaks in such terms. But to see how distinctive this perspective is, we need only remind ourselves of how Tylor wrote on religion just half a century before Durkheim. When he considers primitive religion, he speaks only of a single “savage philosopher,” thinking his way all alone to the ideas of the soul and the gods. Similarly for Freud. Though he does grasp the roles of family and society, his focus, too, is primarily on the personality of the individual. Durkheim’s view, however, is decidedly different. He is not the first or only thinker of his age to have glimpsed the power of

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“the social” in human life, but he is unique in understanding its full importance and in pushing it to the forefront of study.