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
But its action does not stop there. When words were once forged to
represent these personalities which the popular imagination had placed
behind things, a reaction affected these words themselves: they raised
all sorts of questions, and it was to resolve these problems that myths
were invented. It happened that one object received a plurality of
names, corresponding to the plurality of aspects under which it was
presented in experience; thus there are more than twenty words in the
Vedas for the sky. Since these words were different, it was believed
that they corresponded to so many distinct personalities. But at the
same time, it was strongly felt that these same personalities had an air
of relationship. To account for that, it was imagined that they formed a
single family; genealogies, a civil condition and a history were
invented for them. In other cases, different things were designated by
the same term: to explain these homonyms, it was believed that the
corresponding things were transformations of each other, and new
fictions were invented to make these metamorphoses intelligible. Or
again, a word which had ceased to be understood, was the origin of
fables designed to give it a meaning. The creative work of language
continued then, making constructions ever more and more complex, and
then mythology came to endow each god with a biography, ever more and
more extended and complete, the result of all of which was that the
divine personalities, at first confounded with things, finally
distinguished and determined themselves.
This is how the notion of the divine is said to have been constructed.
As for the religion of ancestors, it was only a reflection of this
other.[157] The idea of the soul is said to have been first formed for
reasons somewhat analogous to those given by Tylor, except that
according to Max Müller, they were designed to account for death, rather
than for dreams.[158] Then, under the influence of diverse, partially
accidental, circumstances,[159] the souls of men, being once disengaged
from the body, were drawn little by little within the circle of divine
beings, and were thus finally deified themselves. But this new cult was
the product of only a secondary formation. This is proven by the fact
that deified men have generally been imperfect gods or demi-gods, whom
the people have always been able to distinguish from the genuine
deities.[160]
II
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