The Elementary Forms of the Religious LifeDurkheim, Émile
Religion
The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
Durkheim, Émile
Cults; Religion; Religion -- Philosophy; Rites and ceremonies; Totemism
There are religious interdictions whose object is to separate two sacred
things of different species from each other. For example, it will be
remembered that among the Wakelbura the scaffold upon which the corpse
is exposed must be made exclusively of materials belonging to the
phratry of the dead man; this is as much as to say that all contact
between the corpse, which is sacred, and the things of the other
phratry, which are also sacred, but differently, is forbidden.
Elsewhere, the arms which one uses to hunt an animal with cannot be made
out of a kind of wood that is classed in the same social group as the
animal itself.[1004] But the most important of these interdictions are
the ones which we shall study in the next chapter; they are intended to
prevent all communication between the purely sacred and the impurely
sacred, between the sacredly auspicious and the sacredly inauspicious.
All these interdictions have one common characteristic; they come, not
from the fact that some things are sacred while others are not, but from
the fact that there are inequalities and incompatibilities between
sacred things. So they do not touch what is essential in the idea of
sacredness. The observance of these prohibitions can give place only to
isolated rites which are particular and almost exceptional; but it could
not make a real cult, for before all, a cult is made by regular
relations between the profane and the sacred as such.
But there is another system of religious interdictions which is much
more extended and important; this is the one which separates, not
different species of sacred things, but all that is sacred from all that
is profane. So it is derived immediately from the notion of sacredness
itself, and it limits itself to expressing and realizing this. Thus it
furnishes the material for a veritable cult, and even of a cult which is
at the basis of all the others; for the attitude which it prescribes is
one from which the worshipper must never depart in all his relations
with the sacred. It is what we call the negative cult. We may say that
its interdicts are the religious interdicts _par excellence_.[1005] It
is only these that we shall discuss in the following pages.
But they take multiple forms. Here are the principal ones which we
observe in Australia.
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