The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

The collective and relatively egalitarian nature of totemic classes leads Durkheim to posit that totemism is not concerned with a single, identifiable sacred object or being, but rather with a general force that pervades the entire totemic system. “In other words, totemism is the religion, not of such and such animals or men or images, but of an anonymous and impersonal force, found in each of these beings but not to be confounded with any of them” (217). The totem is simply a symbolic representation of that force, which acts as a common energy that unites all the members of the totemic clan. Durkheim makes the case that this conception is also perceptible in Indigenous American religions, as indicated by the Oceti Sakowin term wakan. This term, along with similar expressions in Indigenous American societies, is sometimes translated as “Great Spirit,” but such a rendering differentiates and personifies the fundamental force to a degree unwarranted by the actual Indigenous American idea. Durkheim equates this to the idea of mana in certain Melanesian religions: “The mana is located nowhere definitely and it is everywhere. All forms of life and all the effects of the action, either of men or of living beings or of simple minerals, are attributed to its influence” (223). This sense of a vague, decentralized power in which all things share is the root idea from which all human religion has developed, and which is still most readily seen in totemic societies.

In seeking the origin and meaning of the force behind the totemic principle, Durkheim again notes the close association of the totem and the clan. This connection leads him to posit that it is the clan itself which is the source of the totemic principle: “So if it 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 […] as totem” (236). Society exercises the place of a divinity over individuals: something both distinct from them and over them, but which binds them closely to its own identity and asserts on them its own power and moral authority. “[…] it could not fail to give men the idea that outside themselves there exist one or several powers, both moral and, at the same time, efficacious, upon which they depend” (239).

This influence can be easily observed in the emotional and, one might even say, spiritual effects which are wrought during social meetings in which the group’s collective identity is called upon and stirred up: patriotic rallies, sports games, and the like. An individual undergoing such a social experience feels their emotions raised and their will moved in concert with their fellows, almost as if an entirely outside force was acting upon them. Everything associated with one’s group identity will take on an air of sacredness, and everything outside of or opposed to that identity will seem profane. The elevated emotions of such a meeting result in greater ardor and confidence, a sense of spiritual power, and moral rejuvenation. Collective meetings of the group, held at regular intervals, thus establish a sense of devotion to a united spiritual identity, and the experience of togetherness confirms and strengthens that sense of identity. The totem functions as the flag of the clan, the visual symbol that serves as a locus for the sense of group identity and the sacredness attached to it, and thus the totemic emblem becomes a bridge which carries forward that sense of attachment and sacredness in the periods between ritual meetings. The totem is not sacred in and of itself, but it has the sacredness of the society superimposed on it. Durkheim speculates that the origin of a particular totemic emblem might be derived from an animal or plant which is commonly seen near the location of the group’s ritual meetings.

This reconstruction of totemism as the original form of religious sentiments matches certain unexpected features of anthropological data. Researchers expected to find that religions which they perceived as reflecting an earlier stage of development would be characterized by fear, by sentiments of dread and awe toward spirits or the natural world. In point of fact, however, most have noted not fear, but ardor, loyalty, and a sense of confidence in one’s place in the world as the leading sentiments of such religions, which are precisely the sort of responses one would expect if the earliest religions were expressions of group solidarity. In this sense, then, Durkheim contends that religion deals with reality, not with fantasy or delusion: “In fact, we can say that the believer is not deceived when he believes in the existence of a moral power upon which he depends and from which he receives all that is best in himself: this power exists, it is society” (257).

Having established a theory of how totemism emerged as the fundamental form of human religion, Durkheim now examines it to see if it can explain a nearly ubiquitous feature across human religions, including totemic ones: the belief in a soul. The soul, he believes, is the totemic principle itself, diffused and incarnated in individual persons: “In a word, just as society exists only in and through individuals, the totemic principle exists only in and through the individual consciousnesses whose association forms the clan. If they did not feel it in them it would not exist […]. So it must of necessity be divided and distributed among them” (283). This sense of the soul as the totemic principle (i.e., the influence of society itself) is evident in such features of human experience as the moral weight of conscience which we feel—something distinct from our bodily selves, as it were, but within us and exercising a very real influence upon us. This corresponds directly to the formative values of our society as they incarnate themselves in us. “There really is a particle of divinity in us because there is within us a particle of these great ideas which are the soul of the group” (299). This “soul” is a real phenomenon, not a delusion, because there indisputably exists in us a set of values and an awareness that stem from our society and are not reducible to any observable part of our biological constituents. While this may not mean the same thing that many religions mean by the soul, Durkheim nonetheless argues, along with those religions, that the soul is a real thing.

A common corollary idea to the existence of the soul is the immortality of the soul, and this, too, Durkheim sees as being explained by the effects of society as a totemic principle. An individual in society observes that the life of the society goes on indefinitely, far beyond the life or death of any one person, so the fragments of that social consciousness—individual souls—would also naturally be seen as lasting indefinitely.

Another nearly ubiquitous feature of human religion is the idea of spirits and/or gods, and Durkheim analyzes the patterns of totemic religion to see if it can explain this feature. A spirit, by its commonly accepted conception, is distinguished from a soul by the fact that it is disembodied, whereas a soul properly belongs with a body. There are exceptions, however, namely the extensive mythologies of the souls of ancestors or heroes which later went on to become spirits (often in a divinized form). Durkheim sees in these traditions of ancestor-spirits, and the way they are transformed into localized deities, a correlation with the practice of individual totemism. “Thus the individual totem has all the essential characteristics of the protecting ancestor and fills the same role: this is because it has the same origin and proceeds from the same idea” (316).

Durkheim views both the attachment to an ancestor-spirit and the practice of individual totemism as being the duplication of one’s own soul: binding oneself to the idea of an external soul that is really the values and ideas which make up one’s own soul, though believed to be more powerful in its disembodied form. Humans naturally tend to project their own inner values onto the world around them and to believe that they exist independently of themselves, perhaps in a greater and more purified form, and in many cases this projection is personified as a force or power above themselves.

Once the notion of an external spirit is established on this localized or individualized level, it is natural for it to be gradually extended to encompass more of the external world, and thus the idea of gods emerges. This culminates in its ultimate stage with the projection of a deity who represents the highest virtues and values of human society to the furthest possible degree, and thus some of the totemic religions surveyed by Durkheim have a conception of a supreme, all-beneficent god. This is not something foreign to the totemic system, but an expected articulation of its logic, especially when considered alongside the way that religious ideas tend to overflow the boundaries of one’s own group, thus necessitating religious ideas that can match the scope of cross-tribal interrelationships.