The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Unabridged). Durkheim Émile
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that the primitive distinguishes between his dreams, and does not interpret them all in the same way. In our European societies the still numerous persons for whom sleep is a sort of magico-religious state in which the mind, being partially relieved of the body, has a sharpness of vision which it does not enjoy during waking moments, do not go to the point of considering all their dreams as so many mystic intuitions: on the contrary, along with everybody else, they see in the majority of their dreams only profane conditions, vain plays of images, or simple hallucinations. It might be supposed that the primitive should make analogous distinctions. Codrington says distinctly that the Melanesians do not attribute all their dreams indiscriminately to the wanderings of their souls, but merely those which strike their imagination forcibly:109 undoubtedly by that should be understood those in which the sleeper imagines himself in relations with religious beings, good or evil geniuses, souls of the dead, etc. Similarly, the Dieri in Australia sharply distinguish ordinary dreams from those nocturnal visions in which some deceased friend or relative shows himself to them. In the first, they see a simple fantasy of their imagination; they attribute the second to the action of an evil spirit.110 All the facts which Howitt mentions as examples to show how the Australian attributes to the soul the power of leaving the body, have an equally mystic character. The sleeper believes himself transported into the land of the dead or else he converses with a dead companion.111 These dreams are frequent among the primitives.112 It is probably upon these facts that the theory is based. To account for them, it is admitted that the souls of the dead come back to the living during their sleep. This theory was the more readily accepted because no fact of experience could invalidate it. But these dreams were possible only where the ideas of spirits, souls and a land of the dead were already existent, that is to say, where religious evolution was relatively advanced. Thus, far from having been able to furnish to religion the fundamental notion upon which it rests, they suppose a previous religious system, upon which they depended.113
III
We now arrive at that which constitutes the very heart of the doctrine.
Wherever this idea of a double may come from, it is not sufficient, according to the avowal of the animists themselves, to explain the formation of the cult of the ancestors which they would make the initial type of all religions. If this double is to become the object of a cult, it must cease to be a simple reproduction of the individual, and must acquire the characteristics necessary to put it in the rank of sacred beings. It is death, they say, which performs this transformation. But whence comes the virtue which they attribute to this? Even were the analogy of sleep and death sufficient to make one believe that the soul survives the body (and there are reservations to be made on this point), why does this soul, by the mere fact that it is now detached from the organism, so completely change its nature? If it was only a profane thing, a wandering vital principle, during life, how does it become a sacred thing all at once, and the object of religious sentiments? Death adds nothing essential to it, except a greater liberty of movement. Being no longer attached to a special residence, from now on, it can do at any time what it formerly did only by night; but the action of which it is capable is always of the same sort. Then why have the living considered this uprooted and vagabond double of their former companion as anything more than an equal? It was a fellow-creature, whose approach might be inconvenient; it was not a divinity.114
It seems as though death ought to have the effect of weakening vital energies, instead of strengthening them. It is, in fact, a very common belief in the inferior societies that the soul participates actively in the life of the body. If the body is wounded, it is wounded itself and in a corresponding place. Then it should grow old along with the body. In fact, there are peoples who do not render funeral honours to men arrived at senility; they are treated as if their souls also had become senile.115 It even happens that they regularly put to death, before they arrive at old age, certain privileged persons, such as kings or priests, who are supposed to be the possessors of powerful spirits whose protection the community wishes to keep. They thus seek to keep the spirit from being affected by the physical decadence of its momentary keepers; with this end in view, they take it from the organism where it resides before age can have weakened it, and they transport it, while it has as yet lost nothing of its vigour, into a younger body where it will be able to keep its vitality intact.116 So when death results from sickness or old age, it seems as though the soul could retain only a diminished power; and if it is only its double, it is difficult to see how it could survive at all, after the body is once definitely dissolved. From this point of view, the idea of survival is intelligible only with great difficulty. There is a logical and psychological gap between the idea of a double at liberty and that of a spirit to which a cult is addressed.
This interval appears still more considerable when we realize what an abyss separates the sacred world from the profane; it becomes evident that a simple change of degree could not be enough to make something pass from one category into the other. Sacred beings are not distinguished from profane ones merely by the strange or disconcerting forms which they take or by the greater powers which they enjoy; between the two there is no common measure. Now there is nothing in the notion of a double which could account for so radical a heterogeneity. It is said that when once freed from the body, the spirit can work all sorts of good or evil for the living, according to the way in which it regards them. But it is not enough that a being should disturb his neighbourhood to seem to be of a wholly different nature from those whose tranquillity it menaces. To be sure, in the sentiment which the believer feels for the things he adores, there always enters in some element of reserve and fear; but this is a fear sui generis, derived from respect more than from fright, and where the dominating emotion is that which la majesté inspires in men. The idea of majesty is essentially religious. Then we have explained nothing of religion until we have found whence this idea comes, to what it corresponds and what can have aroused it in the mind. Simple souls of men cannot become invested with this character by the simple fact of being no longer incarnate.
This is clearly shown by an example from Melanesia. The Melanesians believe that men have souls which leave the body at death; it then changes its name and becomes what they call a tindalo, a natmat, etc. Also, they have a cult of the souls of the dead: they pray to them, invoke them and make offerings and sacrifices to them. But every tindalo is not the object of these ritual practices; only those have this honour which come from men to whom public opinion attributed, during life, the very special virtue which the Melanesians call the mana. Later on, we shall have occasion to fix precisely the meaning which this word expresses; for the time being, it will suffice to say that it is the distinctive character of every sacred being. As Codrington says, "it is what works to effect anything which is beyond the ordinary power of men, outside the common processes of nature."117 A priest, a sorcerer or a ritual formula have mana as well as a sacred stone or spirit. Thus the only tindalo to which religious services are rendered are those which were already sacred of themselves, when their proprietor was still alive. In regard to the other souls, which come from ordinary men, from the crowd of the profane, the same author says that they are "nobodies alike before and after death."118 By itself, death has no deifying virtue. Since it brings about in a more or less complete and final fashion the separation of the soul from profane things, it can well reinforce the sacred character of the soul, if this already exists, but it cannot create it.
Moreover, if, as the hypothesis of the animists supposes, the first sacred beings were really the souls of the dead and the first cult that of the ancestors, it should be found that the lower the societies examined are, the more the place given to this cult in the religious life. But it is rather the contrary which is