The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (Unabridged). Durkheim Émile
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in a later work, Max Müller went so far as to make even the notion of god in general the product of a wholly verbal process and thus of a mythological elaboration (Physic. Rel., p. 138).
170 Undoubtedly outside the real myths there were always fables which were not believed, or at least were not believed in the same way and to the same degree, and hence had no religious character. The line of demarcation between fables and myths is certainly floating and hard to determine. But this is no reason for making all myths stories, any more than we should dream of making all stories myths. There is at least one characteristic which in a number of cases suffices to differentiate the religious myth: that is its relation to the cult.
171 See above, p. 28.
172 More than that, in the language of Max Müller, there is a veritable abuse of words. Sensuous experience, he says, implies, at least in certain cases, "beyond the known, something unknown, something which I claim the liberty to call infinite" (Natural Rel., p. 195; cf. p. 218). The unknown is not necessarily the infinite, any more than the infinite is necessarily the unknown if it is in all points the same, and consequently like the part which we know. It would be necessary to prove that the part of it which we perceive differs in nature from that which we do not perceive.
173 Max Müller involuntarily recognizes this in certain passages. He confesses that he sees little difference between Agni, the god of fire, and the notion of ether, by which the modern physicist explains light and heat (Phys. Rel., pp. 126 f.). Also, he connects the notion of divinity to that of agency (p. 138) or of a causality which is not natural and profane. The fact that religion represents the causes thus imagined, under the form of personal agents, is not enough to explain how they got a sacred character. A personal agent can be profane, and also, many religious forces are essentially impersonal.
174 We shall see below, in speaking of the efficacy of rites and faith, how these illusions are to be explained (Bk. III, ch. ii).
CHAPTER IV
TOTEMISM AS AN ELEMENTARY RELIGION
History of the Question. — Method of Treating it
Howsoever opposed their conclusions may seem to be, the two systems which we have just studied agree upon one essential point: they state the problem in identical terms. Both undertake to construct the idea of the divine out of the sensations aroused in us by certain natural phenomena, either physical or biological. For the animists it is dreams, for the naturists, certain cosmic phenomena, which served as the point of departure for religious evolution. But for both, it is in the nature, either of man or of the universe, that we must look for the germ of the grand opposition which separates the profane from the sacred.
But such an enterprise is impossible: it supposes a veritable creation ex nihilo. A fact of common experience cannot give us the idea of something whose characteristic is to be outside the world of common experience. A man, as he appears to himself in his dreams, is only a man. Natural forces, as our senses perceive them, are only natural forces, howsoever great their intensity may be. Hence comes the common criticism which we address to both doctrines. In order to explain how these pretended data of religious thought have been able to take a sacred character which has no objective foundation, it would be necessary to admit that a whole world of delusive representations has superimposed itself upon the other, denatured it to the point of making it unrecognizable, and substituted a pure hallucination for reality. Here, it is the illusions of the dream which brought about this transfiguration; there, it is the brilliant and vain company of images evoked by the word. But in one case as in the other, it is necessary to regard religion as the product of a delirious imagination.
Thus one positive conclusion is arrived at as the result of this critical examination. Since neither man nor nature have of themselves a sacred character, they must get it from another source. Aside from the human individual and the physical world, there should be some other reality, in relation to which this variety of delirium which all religion is in a sense, has a significance and an objective value. In other words, beyond those which we have called animistic and naturistic, there should be another sort of cult, more fundamental and more primitive, of which the first are only derived forms or particular aspects.
In fact, this cult does exist: it is the one to which ethnologists have given the name of totemism.
I
It was only at the end of the eighteenth century that the word totem appeared in ethnographical literature. It is found for the first time in the book of an Indian interpreter, J. Long, which was published in London in 1791.175 For nearly a half a century, totemism was known only as something exclusively American.176 It was only in 1841 that Grey, in a passage which has remained celebrated,177 pointed out the existence of wholly similar practices in Australia. From that time on, scholars began to realize that they were in the presence of a system of a certain generality.
But they saw there only an essentially archaic institution, an ethnographical curiosity, having no great interest for the historian. MacLennan was the first who undertook to attach totemism to the general history of humanity. In a series of articles in the Fortnightly Review,178 he set himself to show that totemism was not only a religion, but one from which were derived a multitude of beliefs and practices which are found in much more advanced religious systems. He even went so far as to make it the source of all the animal-worshipping and plant-worshipping cults which are found among ancient peoples. Certainly this extension of totemism was abusive. The cults of animals and plants depend upon numerous causes which cannot be reduced to one, without the error of too great simplicity. But this error, by its very exaggerations, had at least the advantage, that it put into evidence the historical importance of totemism.
Students of American totemism had already known for a long time that this form of religion was most intimately united to a determined social organization, that its basis is the division of the social group into clans.179 In 1877, in his Ancient Society,180 Lewis H. Morgan undertook to make a study of it, to determine its distinctive characteristics, and at the same time to point out its generality among the Indian tribes of North and Central America. At nearly the same moment, and even following the direct suggestion of Morgan, Fison and Howitt181 established the existence of the same social system in Australia, as well as its relations with totemism.
Under the influence of these directing ideas, observations could be made with better method. The researches which the American Bureau of Ethnology undertook, played an important part in the advance of these studies.182 By 1887, the documents were sufficiently numerous and significant to make Frazer consider it time to unite them and present them to us in a systematic form. Such is the object of his little book Totemism,183 where the system is studied both as a religion and as a legal institution. But this study was purely descriptive; no effort was made to explain totemism