So everything leads us back to this same idea: before all, rites are

means by which the social group reaffirms itself periodically. From

this, we may be able to reconstruct hypothetically the way in which the

totemic cult should have arisen originally. Men who feel themselves

united, partially by bonds of blood, but still more by a community of

interest and tradition, assemble and become conscious of their moral

unity. For the reasons which we have set forth, they are led to

represent this unity in the form of a very special kind of

consubstantiality: they think of themselves as all participating in the

nature of some determined animal. Under these circumstances, there is

only one way for them to affirm their collective existence: this is to

affirm that they are like the animals of this species, and to do so not

only in the silence of their own thoughts, but also by material acts.

These are the acts which make up the cult, and they obviously can

consist only in movements by which the man imitates the animal with

which he identifies himself. When understood thus, the imitative rites

appear as the first form of the cult. It will be thought that this is

attributing a very considerable historical importance to practices

which, at first view, give the effect of childish games. But, as we have

shown, these naïve and awkward gestures and these crude processes of

representation translate and maintain a sentiment of pride, confidence

and veneration wholly comparable to that expressed by the worshippers in

the most idealistic religions when, being assembled, they proclaim

themselves the children of the almighty God. For in the one case as in

the other, this sentiment is made up of the same impressions of security

and respect which are awakened in individual consciousnesses by this

great moral force which dominates them and sustains them, and which is

the collective force.

The other rites which we have been studying are probably only variations

of this essential rite. When the close union of the animal and men has

once been admitted, men feel acutely the necessity of assuring the

regular reproduction of the principal object of the cult. These

imitative practices, which probably had only a moral end at first, thus

became subordinated to utilitarian and material ends, and they were

thought of as means of producing the desired result. But

proportionately as, through the development of mythology, the ancestral

hero, who was at first confused with the totemic animal, distinguished

himself more and more, and became a more personal figure, the imitation

of the ancestor was substituted for the imitation of the animal, or took

a place beside it, and then representative ceremonies replaced or

completed the imitative rites. Finally, to be surer of attaining the end

they sought, men felt the need of putting into action all the means at

their disposal. Close at hand they had reserves of living forces

accumulated in the sacred rocks, so they utilized them; since the blood

of the men was of the same nature as that of the animal, they used it

for the same purpose and shed it. Inversely, owing to this same kinship,

men used the flesh of the animal to remake their own substance. Hence

came the rites of oblation and communion. But, at bottom, all these

different practices are only variations of one and the same theme:

everywhere their basis is the same state of mind, interpreted

differently according to the situations, the moments of history and the

dispositions of the worshippers.

CHAPTER V

PIACULAR RITES AND THE AMBIGUITY OF THE NOTION OF SACREDNESS

Howsoever much they may differ from one another in the nature of the

gestures they imply, the positive rites which we have been passing under

review have one common characteristic: they are all performed in a state

of confidence, joy and even enthusiasm. Though the expectation of a

future and contingent event is not without a certain uncertainty, still

it is normal that the rain fall when the season for it comes, and that

the animal and vegetable species reproduce regularly. Oft-repeated

experiences have shown that the rites generally do produce the effects

which are expected of them and which are the reason for their existence.

Men celebrate them with confidence, joyfully anticipating the happy

event which they prepare and announce. Whatever movements men perform

participate in this same state of mind: of course, they are marked with

the gravity which a religious solemnity always supposes, but this

gravity excludes neither animation nor joy.

These are all joyful feasts. But there are sad celebrations as well,

whose object is either to meet a calamity, or else merely to commemorate

and deplore it. These rites have a special aspect, which we are going to

attempt to characterize and explain. It is the more necessary to study

them by themselves since they are going to reveal a new aspect of the

religious life to us.

We propose to call the ceremonies of this sort piacular. The term

_piaculum_ has the advantage that while it suggests the idea of

expiation, it also has a much more extended signification. Every

misfortune, everything of evil omen, everything that inspires sentiments

of sorrow or fear necessitates a _piaculum_ and is therefore called

piacular.[1233] So this word seems to be very well adapted for

designating the rites which are celebrated by those in a state of

uneasiness or sadness.

I

Mourning offers us a first and important example of piacular rites.

However, a distinction is necessary between the different rites which go

to make up mourning. Some consist in mere abstentions: it is forbidden

to pronounce the name of the dead,[1234] or to remain near the place

where the death occurred;[1235] relatives, especially the female ones,

must abstain from all communication with strangers;[1236] the ordinary

occupations of life are suspended, just as in feast-time,[1237] etc. All

these practices belong to the negative cult and are explained like the

other rites of the same sort, so they do not concern us at present. They

are due to the fact that the dead man is a sacred being. Consequently,

everything which is or has been connected with him is, by contagion, in

a religious state excluding all contact with things from profane life.

But mourning is not made up entirely of interdicts which have to be

observed. Positive acts are also demanded, in which the relatives are

both the actors and those acted upon.

Very frequently these rites commence as soon as the death appears

imminent. Here is a scene which Spencer and Gillen witnessed among the

Warramunga. A totemic ceremony had just been celebrated and the company

of actors and spectators was leaving the consecrated ground when a

piercing cry suddenly came from the camp: a man was dying there. At

once, the whole company commenced to run as fast as they could, while

most of them commenced to howl. "Between us and the camp," say these

observers, "lay a deep creek, and on the bank of this, some of the men,

scattered about here and there, sat down, bending their heads forwards

between their knees, while they wept and moaned. Crossing the creek we

found that, as usual, the men's camp had been pulled to pieces. Some of

the women, who had come from every direction, were lying prostrate on

the body, while others were standing or kneeling around, digging the

sharp ends of yam-sticks into the crown of their heads, from which the

blood streamed down over their faces, while all the time they kept up a

loud, continuous wail. Many of the men, rushing up to the spot, threw

themselves upon the body, from which the women arose when the men

approached, until in a few minutes we could see nothing but a struggling

mass of bodies all mixed up together. To one side, three men of the

Thapungarti class, who still wore their ceremonial decorations, sat down

wailing loudly, with their backs towards the dying man, and in a minute

or two another man of the same class rushed on to the ground yelling and

brandishing a stone knife. Reaching the camp, he suddenly gashed both

thighs deeply, cutting right across the muscles, and, unable to stand,

fell down into the middle of the group, from which he was dragged out

after a time by three or four female relatives, who immediately applied

their mouths to the gaping wounds while he lay exhausted on the ground."

The man did not actually die until late in the evening. As soon as he

had given up his last breath, the same scene was re-enacted, only this

time the wailing was still louder, and men and women, seized by a

veritable frenzy, were rushing about cutting themselves with knives and

sharp-pointed sticks, the women battering one another's heads with

fighting clubs, no one attempting to ward off either cuts or blows.

Finally, after about an hour, a torchlight procession started off across

the plain, to a tree in whose branches the body was left.[1238]

Howsoever great the violence of these manifestations may be, they are

strictly regulated by etiquette. The individuals who make bloody

incisions in themselves are designated by usage: they must have certain

relations of kinship with the dead man. Thus, in the case observed by

Spencer and Gillen among the Warramunga, those who slashed their thighs

were the maternal grandfather of the deceased, his maternal uncle, and

the maternal uncle and brother of his wife.[1239] Others must cut their

whiskers and hair, and then smear their scalps with pipe-clay. Women

have particularly severe obligations. They must cut their hair and cover

the whole body with pipe-clay; in addition to this, a strict silence is

imposed upon them during the whole period of mourning, which may last as

long as two years. It is not rare among the Warramunga that, as a result

of this interdiction, all the women of a camp are condemned to the most

absolute silence. This becomes so habitual to them that even after the

expiration of the period of mourning, they voluntarily renounce all

spoken language and prefer to communicate with gestures--in which, by

the way, they acquire a remarkable ability. Spencer and Gillen knew one

old woman who had not spoken for over twenty-four years.[1240]

The ceremony which we have described opens a long series of rites which

succeed one another for weeks and even for months. During the days which

follow, they are renewed in various forms. Groups of men and women sit

on the ground, weeping and lamenting, and kissing each other at certain

moments. These ritual kissings are repeated frequently during the period

of mourning. It seems as though men felt a need of coming close together

and communicating most closely; they are to be seen holding to each

other and wound together so much as to make one single mass, from which

loud groans escape.[1241] Meanwhile, the women commence to lacerate

their heads again, and, in order to intensify the wounds they make, they

even go so far as to burn them with the points of fiery sticks.[1242]

Practices of this sort are general in all Australia. The funeral rites,

that is, the ritual cares given to the corpse, the way in which it is

buried, etc., change with different tribes,[1243] and in a single tribe

they vary with the age, sex and social importance of the

individual.[1244] But the real ceremonies of mourning repeat the same

theme everywhere; the variations are only in the details. Everywhere we

find this same silence interrupted by groans,[1245] the same obligation

of cutting the hair and beard,[1246] or of covering one's head with

pipe-clay or cinders, or perhaps even with excrements;[1247] everywhere,

finally, we find this same frenzy for beating one's self, lacerating

one's self and burning one's self. In central Victoria, "when death

visits a tribe there is great weeping and lamentation amongst the women,

the elder portion of whom lacerate their temples with their nails. The

parents of the deceased lacerate themselves fearfully, especially if it

be an only son whose loss they deplore. The father beats and cuts his

head with a tomahawk until he utters bitter groans, the mother sits by

the fire and burns her breasts and abdomen with a small fire-stick.

Sometimes the burns thus inflicted are so severe as to cause

death."[1248]

According to an account of Brough Smyth, here is what happens in one of

the southern tribes of the same state. As the body is lowered into the

grave, "the widow begins her sad ceremonies. She cuts off her hair above

her forehead, and becoming frantic, seizes fire-sticks, and burns her

breasts, arms, legs and thighs. She seems to delight in the

self-inflicted torture. It would be rash and vain to interrupt her. When

exhausted, and when she can hardly walk, she yet endeavours to kick the

embers of the fire, and to throw them about. Sitting down, she takes the

ashes into her hands, rubs them into her wounds, and then scratches her

face (the only part not touched by the fire-sticks) until the blood

mingles with the ashes, which partly hide her cruel wounds. In this

plight, scratching her face continually, she utters howls and

lamentations."[1249]

The description which Howitt gives of the rites of mourning among the

Kurnai is remarkably similar to these others. After the body has been

wrapped up in opossum skins and put in a shroud of bark, a hut is built

in which the relatives assemble. "There they lay lamenting their loss,

saying, for instance, 'Why did you leave us?' Now and then their grief

would be intensified by some one, for instance, the wife, uttering an

ear-piercing wail, 'My spouse is dead,' or another would say, 'My child

is dead.' All the others would then join in with the proper term of

relationship, and they would gash themselves with sharp stones and

tomahawks until their heads and bodies streamed with blood. This bitter

wailing and weeping continued all night."[1250]

Sadness is not the only sentiment expressed during these ceremonies; a

sort of anger is generally mixed with it. The relatives feel a need of

avenging the death in some way or other. They are to be seen throwing

themselves upon one another and trying to wound each other. Sometimes

the attack is real; sometimes it is only pretended.[1251] There are even

cases when these peculiar combats are organized. Among the Kaitish, the

hair of the deceased passes by right to his son-in-law. But he, in

return, must go, in company with some of his relatives and friends, and

provoke a quarrel with one of his tribal brothers, that is, with a man

belonging to the same matrimonial class as himself and one who might

therefore have married the daughter of the dead man. This provocation

cannot be refused and the two combatants inflict serious wounds upon

each other's shoulders and thighs. When the duel is terminated, the

challenger passes on to his adversary the hair which he had temporarily

inherited. This latter then provokes and fights with another of his

tribal brothers, to whom the precious relic is next transmitted, but

only provisionally; thus it passes from hand to hand and circulates from

group to group.[1252] Also, something of these same sentiments enters

into that sort of rage with which each relative beats himself, burns

himself or slashes himself: a sorrow which reaches such a paroxysm is

not without a certain amount of anger. One cannot fail to be struck by

the resemblances which these practices present to those of the vendetta.

Both proceed from the same principle that death demands the shedding of

blood. The only difference is that in one case the victims are the

relatives, while in the other they are strangers. We do not have to

treat especially of the vendetta, which belongs rather to the study of

juridic institutions; but it should be pointed out, nevertheless, how it

is connected with the rites of mourning, whose end it announces.[1253]

In certain societies, the mourning is terminated by a ceremony whose

effervescence reaches or surpasses that produced by the inaugural

ceremonies. Among the Arunta, this closing rite is called _Urpmilchima_.

Spencer and Gillen assisted at two of these rites. One was celebrated in

honour of a man, the other of a woman. Here is the description they give

of the latter.[1254]

They commence by making some ornaments of a special sort, called

_Chimurilia_ by the men and _Aramurilia_ by the women. With a kind of

resin, they fixed small animal bones, which had previously been gathered

and set aside, to locks of hair furnished by the relatives of the dead

woman. These are then attached to one of the head-bands which women

ordinarily wear and the feathers of black cockatoos and parrots are

added to it. When these preparations are completed, the women assemble

in their camp. They paint their bodies different colours, according to

their degree of kinship with the deceased. After being embraced by one

another for some ten minutes, while uttering uninterrupted groans, they

set out for the tomb. At a certain distance, they meet a brother by

blood of the dead woman, who is accompanied by some of his tribal

brothers. Everybody sits down on the ground, and the lamentations

recommence. A _pitchi_[1255] containing the Chimurilia is then presented

to the elder brother, who presses it against his stomach; they say that

this is a way of lessening his sorrow. They take out one of the

Chimurilia and the dead woman's mother puts it on her head for a little

while; then it is put back into the _pitchi_, which each of the other

men presses against his breast, in his turn. Finally, the brother puts

the Chimurilia on the heads of two elder sisters and they set out again

for the tomb. On the way, the mother throws herself on the ground

several times, and tries to slash her head with a pointed stick. Every

time, the other women pick her up, and seem to take care that she does

not hurt herself too much. When they arrive at the tomb, she throws

herself on the knoll and endeavours to destroy it with her hands, while

the other women literally dance upon her. The tribal mothers and aunts

(sisters of the dead woman's father) follow her example; they also throw

themselves on the ground, and mutually beat and tear each other; finally

their bodies are all streaming with blood. After a while, they are

dragged aside. The elder sisters then make a hole in the earth of the

tomb, in which they place the Chimurilia, which had previously been torn

to pieces. Once again the tribal mothers throw themselves on the ground

and slash each other's heads. At this moment, "the weeping and wailing

of the women who were standing round seemed to drive them almost

frenzied, and the blood, streaming down their bodies over the white

pipe-clay, gave them a ghastly appearance. At last only the old mother

was left crouching alone, utterly exhausted and moaning weakly on the

grave."[1256] Then the others raised her up and rubbed off the pipe-clay

with which she was covered; this was the end of the ceremony and of the

mourning.[1256]

Among the Warramunga, the final rite presents some rather particular

characteristics. There seems to be no shedding of blood here, but the

collective effervescence is translated in another manner.

Among his people, before the body is definitely interred, it is exposed

upon a platform placed in the branches of a tree; it is left there to

decompose slowly, until nothing remains but the bones. Then these are

gathered together and, with the exception of the humerus, they are

placed inside an ant-hill. The humerus is wrapped up in a bark box,

which is decorated in different manners. The box is then brought to

camp, amid the cries and groans of the women. During the following days,

they celebrate a series of totemic rites, concerning the totem of the

deceased and the mythical history of the ancestors from whom the clan is

descended. When all these ceremonies have been terminated, they proceed

to the closing rite.

A trench one foot deep and fifteen feet long is dug in the field of the

ceremony. A design representing the totem of the deceased and certain

spots where the ancestor stopped is made on the ground a little distance

from it. Near this design, a little ditch is dug in the ground. Ten

decorated men then advance, one behind another, and with their hands

crossed behind their heads and their legs wide apart they stand

astraddle the trench. At a given signal, the women run from the camp in

a profound silence; when they are near, they form in Indian file, the

last one holding in her hands the box containing the humerus. Then,

after throwing themselves on the ground, they advance on their hands and

knees, and pass all along the trench, between the legs of the men. The

scene shows a state of great sexual excitement. As soon as the last

woman has passed, they take the box from her, and take it to the ditch,

near which is an old man; he breaks the bone with a sharp blow, and

hurriedly buries it in the debris. During this time, the women have

remained at a distance, with their backs turned upon the scene, for they

must not see it. But when they hear the blow of the axe, they flee,

uttering cries and groans. The rite is accomplished; the mourning is

terminated.[1257]

II

These rites belong to a very different type from those which we have

studied hitherto. We do not mean to say that important resemblances

cannot be found between the two, which we shall have to note; but the

differences are more apparent. Instead of happy dances, songs and

dramatic representations which distract and relax the mind, they are

tears and groans and, in a word, the most varied manifestations of

agonized sorrow and a sort of mutual pity, which occupy the whole scene.

Of course the shedding of blood also takes place in the Intichiuma, but

this is an oblation made with a movement of pious enthusiasm. Even

though the motions may be the same, the sentiments expressed are

different and even opposed. Likewise, the ascetic rites certainly imply

privations, abstinences and mutilations, but ones which must be borne

with an impassive firmness and serenity. Here, on the contrary,

dejection, cries and tears are the rule. The ascetic tortures himself in

order to prove, in his own eyes and those of his fellows, that he is

above suffering. During mourning, men injure themselves to prove that

they suffer. By all these signs, the characteristic traits of the

piacular rites are to be recognized.

But how are they to be explained?

One initial fact is constant: mourning is not the spontaneous expression

of individual emotions.[1258] If the relations weep, lament, mutilate

themselves, it is not because they feel themselves personally affected

by the death of their kinsman. Of course, it may be that in certain

particular cases, the chagrin expressed is really felt.[1259] But it is

more generally the case that there is no connection between the

sentiments felt and the gestures made by the actors in the rite.[1260]

If, at the very moment when the weepers seem the most overcome by their

grief, some one speaks to them of some temporal interest, it frequently

happens that they change their features and tone at once, take on a

laughing air and converse in the gayest fashion imaginable.[1261]

Mourning is not a natural movement of private feelings wounded by a

cruel loss; it is a duty imposed by the group. One weeps, not simply

because he is sad, but because he is forced to weep. It is a ritual

attitude which he is forced to adopt out of respect for custom, but

which is, in a large measure, independent of his affective state.

Moreover, this obligation is sanctioned by mythical or social penalties.

They believe, for example, that if a relative does not mourn as is

fitting, then the soul of the departed follows upon his steps and kills

him.[1262] In other cases, society does not leave it to the religious

forces to punish the negligent; it intervenes itself, and reprimands the

ritual faults. If a son-in-law does not render to his father-in-law the

funeral attentions which are due him, and if he does not make the

prescribed incisions, then his tribal fathers-in-law take his wife away

from him and give him another.[1263] Therefore, in order to square

himself with usage, a man sometimes forces tears to flow by artificial

means.[1264]

Whence comes this obligation?

Ethnographers and sociologists are generally satisfied with the reply

which the natives themselves give to this question. They say that the

dead wish to be lamented, that by refusing them the tribute of sorrow

which is their right, men offend them, and that the only way of

preventing their anger is to conform to their will.[1265]

But this mythological interpretation merely modifies the terms of the

problem, without resolving it; it is still necessary to explain why the

dead imperatively reclaim the mourning. It may be said that it is

natural for men to wish to be mourned and regretted. But in making this

sentiment explain the complex system of rites which make up mourning, we

attribute to the Australian affective exigencies of which the civilized

man himself does not always give evidence. Let us admit--as is not

evident _a priori_--that the idea of not being forgotten too readily is

pleasing to a man who thinks of the future. It is still to be

established that it has ever had enough importance in the minds of the

living for one to attribute to the dead a state of mind proceeding

almost entirely from this preoccupation. It seems especially improbable

that such a sentiment could obsess and impassion men who are seldom

accustomed to thinking beyond the present moment. So far is it from

being a fact that the desire to survive in the memory of those who are

still alive is to be regarded as the origin of mourning, that we may

even ask ourselves whether it was not rather mourning itself which, when

once established, aroused the idea of and the taste for posthumous

regrets.

The classic interpretation appears still more unsustainable when we know

what the primitive mourning consists in. It is not made up merely of

pious regrets accorded to him who no longer is, but also of severe

abstinences and cruel sacrifices. The rite does not merely demand that

one think of the deceased in a melancholy way, but also that he beat

himself, bruise himself, lacerate himself and burn himself. We have even

seen that persons in mourning sometimes torture themselves to such a

degree that they do not survive their wounds. What reason has the dead

man for imposing such torments upon them? Such a cruelty on his part

denotes something more than a desire not to be forgotten. If he is to

find pleasure in seeing his own suffer, it is necessary that he hate

them, that he be thirsty for their blood. This ferocity would

undoubtedly appear natural to those for whom every spirit is necessarily

an evil and redoubted power. But we know that there are spirits of every

sort; how does it happen that the soul of the dead man is necessarily an

evil spirit? As long as the man is alive, he loves his relatives and

exchanges services with them. Is it not strange that as soon as it is

freed from his body, his soul should instantly lay aside its former

sentiments and become an evil and tormenting genius? It is a general

rule that the dead man retains the personality of the living, and that

he has the same character, the same hates and the same affections. So

this metamorphosis is not easily understandable by itself. It is true

that the natives admit it implicitly when they explain the rite by the

exigencies of the dead man, but the question now before us is to know

whence this conception came. Far from being capable of being regarded

as a truism, it is as obscure as the rite itself, and consequently

cannot account for it.

Finally, even if we had found the reasons for this surprising

transformation, we would still have to explain why it is only temporary.

For it does not last beyond the period of mourning; after the rites have

once been accomplished, the dead man becomes what he was when alive, an

affectionate and devoted relation. He puts the new powers which he

receives from his new condition at the service of his friends.[1266]

Thenceforth, he is regarded as a good genius, always ready to aid those

whom he was recently tormenting. Whence come these successive transfers?

If the evil sentiments attributed to the soul come solely from the fact

that it is no longer in life, they should remain invariable, and if the

mourning is due to this, it should be interminable.

These mythical explanations express the idea which the native has of the

rite, and not the rite itself. So we may set them aside and face the

reality which they translate, though disfiguring it in doing so. If

mourning differs from the other forms of the positive cult, there is one

feature in which it resembles them: it, too, is made up out of

collective ceremonies which produce a state of effervescence among those

who take part in them. The sentiments aroused are different; but the

arousal is the same. So it is presumable that the explanation of the

joyous rites is capable of being applied to the sad rites, on condition

that the terms be transposed.

When some one dies, the family group to which he belongs feels itself

lessened and, to react against this loss, it assembles. A common

misfortune has the same effects as the approach of a happy event:

collective sentiments are renewed which then lead men to seek one

another and to assemble together. We have even seen this need for

concentration affirm itself with a particular energy: they embrace one

another, put their arms round one another, and press as close as

possible to one another. But the affective state in which the group then

happens to be only reflects the circumstances through which it is

passing. Not only do the relatives, who are effected the most directly,

bring their own personal sorrow to the assembly, but the society

exercises a moral pressure over its members, to put their sentiments in

harmony with the situation. To allow them to remain indifferent to the

blow which has fallen upon it and diminished it, would be equivalent to

proclaiming that it does not hold the place in their hearts which is due

it; it would be denying itself. A family which allows one of its

members to die without being wept for shows by that very fact that it

lacks moral unity and cohesion: it abdicates; it renounces its

existence. An individual in his turn, if he is strongly attached to the

society of which he is a member, feels that he is morally held to

participating in its sorrows and joys; not to be interested in them

would be equivalent to breaking the bonds uniting him to the group; it

would be renouncing all desire for it and contradicting himself. When

the Christian, during the ceremonies commemorating the Passion, and the

Jew, on the anniversary of the fall of Jerusalem, fast and mortify

themselves, it is not in giving way to a sadness which they feel

spontaneously. Under these circumstances, the internal state of the

believer is out of all proportion to the severe abstinences to which

they submit themselves. If he is sad, it is primarily because he

consents to being sad, and he consents to it in order to affirm his

faith. The attitude of the Australian during mourning is to be explained

in the same way. If he weeps and groans, it is not merely to express an

individual chagrin; it is to fulfil a duty of which the surrounding

society does not fail to remind him.

We have seen elsewhere how human sentiments are intensified when

affirmed collectively. Sorrow, like joy, becomes exalted and amplified

when leaping from mind to mind, and therefore expresses itself outwardly

in the form of exuberant and violent movements. But these are no longer

expressive of the joyful agitation which we observed before; they are

shrieks and cries of pain. Each is carried along by the others; a

veritable panic of sorrow results. When pain reaches this degree of

intensity, it is mixed with a sort of anger and exasperation. One feels

the need of breaking something, of destroying something. He takes this

out either upon himself or others. He beats himself, burns himself,

wounds himself or else he falls upon others to beat, burn and wound

them. Thus it became the custom to give one's self up to the veritable

orgies of tortures during mourning. It seems very probable that

blood-revenge and head-hunting have their origin in this. If every death

is attributed to some magic charm, and for this reason it is believed

that the dead man ought to be avenged, it is because men must find a

victim at any price, upon whom the collective pain and anger may be

discharged. Naturally this victim is sought outside the group; a

stranger is a subject _minoris resistentiæ_; as he is not protected by

the sentiments of sympathy inspired by a relative or neighbour, there is

nothing in him which subdues and neutralizes the evil and destructive

sentiments aroused by the death. It is undoubtedly for this same reason

that women serve more frequently than men as the passive objects of the

cruellest rites of mourning; since they have a smaller social value,

they are more obviously designated as scapegoats.

We see that this explanation of mourning completely leaves aside all

ideas of souls or spirits. The only forces which are really active are

of a wholly impersonal nature: they are the emotions aroused in the

group by the death of one of its members. But the primitive does not

know the psychical mechanism from which these practices result. So when

he tries to account for them, he is obliged to forge a wholly different

explanation. All he knows is that he must painfully mortify himself. As

every obligation suggests the notion of a will which obliges, he looks

about him to see whence this constraint which he feels may come. Now,

there is one moral power, of whose reality he is assured and which seems

designated for this rôle: this is the soul which the death has

liberated. For what could have a greater interest than it in the effects

which its own death has on the living? So they imagine that if these

latter inflict an unnatural treatment upon themselves, it is to conform

to its exigencies. It was thus that the idea of the soul must have

intervened at a later date into the mythology of mourning. But also,

since it is thus endowed with inhuman exigencies, it must be supposed

that in leaving the body which it animated, the soul lays aside every

human sentiment. Hence the metamorphosis which makes a dreaded enemy out

of the relative of yesterday. This transformation is not the origin of

mourning; it is rather its consequence. It translates a change which has

come over the affective state of the group: men do not weep for the dead

because they fear them; they fear them because they weep for them.

But this change of the affective state can only be a temporary one, for

while the ceremonies of mourning result from it, they also put an end to

it. Little by little, they neutralize the very causes which have given

rise to them. The foundation of mourning is the impression of a loss

which the group feels when it loses one of its members. But this very

impression results in bringing individuals together, in putting them

into closer relations with one another, in associating them all in the

same mental state, and therefore in disengaging a sensation of comfort

which compensates the original loss.--Since they weep together, they

hold to one another and the group is not weakened, in spite of the blow

which has fallen upon it. Of course they have only sad emotions in

common, but communicating in sorrow is still communicating, and every

communion of mind, in whatever form it may be made, raises the social

vitality. The exceptional violence of the manifestations by which the

common pain is necessarily and obligatorily expressed even testifies to

the fact that at this moment, the society is more alive and active than

ever. In fact, whenever the social sentiment is painfully wounded, it

reacts with greater force than ordinarily: one never holds so closely to

his family as when it has just suffered. This surplus energy effaces the

more completely the effects of the interruption which was felt at first,

and thus dissipates the feeling of coldness which death always brings

with it. The group feels its strength gradually returning to it; it

begins to hope and to live again. Presently one stops mourning, and he

does so owing to the mourning itself. But as the idea formed of the soul

reflects the moral state of the society, this idea should change as this

state changes. When one is in the period of dejection and agony, he

represents the soul with the traits of an evil being, whose sole

occupation is to persecute men. But when he feels himself confident and

secure once more, he must admit that it has retaken its former nature

and its former sentiments of tenderness and solidarity. Thus we explain

the very different ways in which it is conceived at different moments of

its existence.[1267]

Not only do the rites of mourning determine certain of the secondary

characteristics attributed to the soul, but perhaps they are not foreign

to the idea that it survives the body. If he is to understand the

practices to which he submits on the death of a parent, a man is obliged

to believe that these are not an indifferent matter for the deceased.

The shedding of blood which is practised so freely during mourning is a

veritable sacrifice offered to the dead man.[1268] So something of the

dead man must survive, and as this is not the body, which is manifestly

immobile and decomposed, it can only be the soul. Of course it is

impossible to say with any exactness what part these considerations have

had in the origin of the idea of immortality. But it is probable that

here the influence of the cult is the same as it is elsewhere. Rites are

more easily explicable when one imagines that they are addressed to

personal beings; so men have been induced to extend the influence of

the mythical personalities in the religious life. In order to account

for mourning, they have prolonged the existence of the soul beyond the

tomb. This is one more example of the way in which rites react upon

beliefs.

III

But death is not the only event which may disturb a community. Men have

many other occasions for being sorry and lamenting, so we might foresee

that even the Australians would know and practise other piacular rites

besides mourning. However, it is a remarkable fact that only a small

number of examples are to be found in the accounts of the observers.

One rite of this sort greatly resembles those which have just been

studied. It will be remembered that among the Arunta, each local group

attributes exceptionally important virtues to its collection of

churinga: this is this collective palladium, upon whose fate the fate of

the community itself is believed to depend. So when enemies or white men

succeed in stealing one of these religious treasures, this loss is

considered a public calamity. This misfortune is the occasion of a rite

having all the characteristics of mourning: men smear their bodies with

white pipe-clay and remain in camp, weeping and lamenting, during a

period of two weeks.[1269] This is a new proof that mourning is

determined, not by the way in which the soul of the dead is conceived,

but by impersonal causes, by the moral state of the group. In fact, we

have here a rite which, in its structure, is indistinguishable from the

real mourning, but which is, nevertheless, independent of every notion

of spirits or evil-working demons.[1270]

Another circumstance which gives occasion for ceremonies of the same

nature is the distress in which the society finds itself after an

insufficient harvest. "The natives who live in the vicinity of Lake

Eyre," says Eylmann, "also seek to prevent an insufficiency of food by

means of secret ceremonies. But many of the ritual practices observed in

this region are to be distinguished from those which have been mentioned

already: it is not by symbolic dances, by imitative movements nor

dazzling decorations that they try to act upon the religious powers or

the forces of nature, but by means of the suffering which individuals

inflict upon themselves. In the northern territories, it is by means of

tortures, such as prolonged fasts, vigils, dances persisted up to the

exhaustion of the dancers, and physical pains of every sort, that they

attempt to appease the powers which are ill-disposed towards men."[1271]

The torments to which the natives submit themselves for this purpose

sometimes leave them in such a state of exhaustion that they are unable

to follow the hunt for some days to come.[1272]

These practices are employed especially for fighting against drought.

This is because a scarcity of water results in a general want. To remedy

this evil, they have recourse to violent methods. One which is

frequently used is the extraction of a tooth. Among the Kaitish, for

example, they pull out an incisor from one man, and hang it on a

tree.[1273] Among the Dieri, the idea of rain is closely associated with

that of bloody incisions made in the skin of the chest and arms.[1274]

Among this same people, whenever the drought is very great, the great

council assembles and summons the whole tribe. It is really a tribal

event. Women are sent in every direction to notify men to assemble at a

given place and time. After they have assembled, they groan and cry in a

piercing voice about the miserable state of the land, and they beg the

_Mura-mura_ (the mythical ancestors) to give them the power of making an

abundant rain fall.[1275] In the cases, which, by the way, are very

rare, when there has been an excessive rainfall, an analogous ceremony

takes place to stop it. Old men then enter into a veritable

frenzy,[1276] while the cries uttered by the crowd are really painful to

hear.[1277]

Spencer and Gillen describe, under the name of Intichiuma, a ceremony

which may well have the same object and the same origin as the preceding

ones: a physical torture is applied to make an animal species multiply.

Among the Urabunna, there is one clan whose totem is a variety of snake

called _wadnungadni_. This is how the chief of the clan proceeds, to

make sure that these snakes may never be lacking. After having been

decorated, he kneels down on the ground, holding his arms straight out.

An assistant pinches the skin of his right arm between his fingers, and

the officiant forces a pointed bone five inches long through the fold

thus formed. This self-mutilation is believed to produce the desired

result.[1278] An analogous rite is used among the Dieri to make the

wild-hens lay: the operators pierce their scrotums.[1279] In certain of

the Lake Eyre tribes, men pierce their ears to make yams

reproduce.[1280]

But these partial or total famines are not the only plagues which may

fall upon a tribe. Other events happen more or less periodically which

menace, or seem to menace, the existence of the group. This is the case,

for example, with the southern lights. The Kurnai believe that this is a

fire lighted in the heavens by the great god Mungan-ngaua; therefore,

whenever they see it, they are afraid that it may spread to the earth

and devour them, so a great effervescence results in the camp. They

shake a withered hand, to which the Kurnai attribute various virtues,

and utter such cries as "Send it away; do not let us be burned." At the

same time, the old men order an exchange of wives, which always

indicates a great excitement.[1281] The same sexual licence is mentioned

among the Wiimbaio whenever a plague appears imminent, and especially in

times of an epidemic.[1282]

Under the influence of these ideas, mutilations and the shedding of

blood are sometimes considered an efficient means of curing maladies. If

an accident happens to a child among the Dieri, his relations beat

themselves on the head with clubs or boomerangs until the blood flows

down over their faces. They believe that by this process, they relieve

the child of the suffering.[1283] Elsewhere, they imagine that they can

obtain the same end by means of a supplementary totemic ceremony.[1284]

We may connect with these the example already given of a ceremony

celebrated specially to efface the effects of a ritual fault.[1285] Of

course there are neither wounds nor blows nor physical suffering of any

sort in these two latter cases, yet the rite does not differ in nature

from the others: the end sought is always the turning aside of an evil

or the expiation of a fault by means of an extraordinary ritual

prestation.

Outside of mourning, such are the only cases of piacular rites which we

have succeeded in finding in Australia. To be sure, it is probable that

some have escaped us, while we may presume equally well that others have

remained unperceived by the observers. But if those discovered up to the

present are few in number, it is probably because they do not hold a

large place in the cult. We see how far primitive religions are from

being the daughters of agony and fear from the fact that the rites

translating these painful emotions are relatively rare. Of course this

is because the Australian, while leading a miserable existence as

compared with other more civilized peoples, demands so little of life

that he is easily contented. All that he asks is that nature follow its

normal course, that the seasons succeed one another regularly, that the

rain fall, at the ordinary time, in abundance and without excess. Now

great disturbances in the cosmic order are always exceptional; thus it

is noticeable that the majority of the regular piacular rites, examples

of which we have given above, have been observed in the tribes of the

centre, where droughts are frequent and constitute veritable disasters.

It is still surprising, it is true, that piacular rites specially

destined to expiate sins, seem to be completely lacking. However, the

Australian, like every other man, must commit ritual faults, which he

has an interest in redeeming; so we may ask if the silence of the texts

on this point may not be due to insufficient observation.

But howsoever few the facts which we have been able to gather may be,

they are, nevertheless, instructive.

When we study piacular rites in the more advanced religions, where the

religious forces are individualized, they appear to be closely bound up

with anthropomorphic conceptions. When the believer imposes privations

upon himself and submits himself to austerities, it is in order to

disarm the malevolence attributed by him to certain of the sacred beings

upon whom he thinks that he is dependent. To appease their hatred or

anger, he complies with their exigencies; he beats himself in order that

he may not be beaten by them. So it seems as though these practices

could not arise until after gods and spirits were conceived as moral

persons, capable of passions analogous to those of men. For this reason,

Robertson Smith thought it possible to assign a relatively late date to

expiatory sacrifices, just as to sacrificial oblations. According to

him, the shedding of blood which characterizes these rites was at first

a simple process of communion: men poured forth their blood upon the

altar in order to strengthen the bonds uniting them to their god. The

rite acquired a piacular and penal character only when its original

significance was forgotten and when the new idea which was formed of

sacred beings allowed men to attribute another function to it.[1286]

But as piacular rites are met with even in the Australian societies, it

is impossible to assign them so late an origin. Moreover, all that we

have observed, with one single exception,[1287] are independent of all

anthropomorphic conceptions: there is no question of either spirits or

gods. Abstinences and effusions of blood stop famines and cure

sicknesses directly and by themselves. No spiritual being introduces his

action between the rite and the effect it is believed to produce. So

mythical personalities intervened only at a late date. After the

mechanism of the ritual had once been established, they served to make

it more easily representable in the mind, but they are not conditions of

its existence. It is for other reasons that it was founded; it is to

another cause that it owes its efficacy.

It acts through the collective forces which it puts into play. Does a

misfortune which menaces the group appear imminent? Then the group

unites, as in the case of mourning, and it is naturally an impression of

uneasiness and perplexity which dominates the assembled body. Now, as

always, the pooling of these sentiments results in intensifying them. By

affirming themselves, they exalt and impassion themselves and attain a

degree of violence which is translated by the corresponding violence of

the gestures which express them. Just as at the death of a relative,

they utter terrible cries, fly into a passion and feel that they must

tear and destroy; it is to satisfy this need that they beat themselves,

wound themselves, and make their blood flow. When emotions have this

vivacity, they may well be painful, but they are not depressing; on the

contrary, they denote a state of effervescence which implies a

mobilization of all our active forces, and even a supply of external

energies. It matters little that this exaltation was provoked by a sad

event, for it is real, notwithstanding, and does not differ specifically

from what is observed in the happy feasts. Sometimes it is even made

manifest by movements of the same nature: there is the same frenzy which

seizes the worshippers and the same tendency towards sexual debauches, a

sure sign of great nervous over-excitement. Robertson Smith had already

noticed this curious influence of sad rites in the Semitic cults: "in

evil times," he says, "when men's thoughts were habitually sombre, they

betook themselves to the physical excitement of religion as men now take

refuge in wine.... And so in general when an act of Semitic worship

began with sorrow and lamentation--as in the mourning for Adonis, or the

great atoning ceremonies which became common in later times--a swift

revulsion of feeling followed, and the gloomy part of the service was

presently succeeded by a burst of hilarious revelry."[1288] In a word,

even when religious ceremonies have a disquieting or saddening event as

their point of departure, they retain their stimulating power over the

affective state of the group and individuals. By the mere fact that they

are collective, they raise the vital tone. When one feels life within

him--whether it be in the form of painful irritation or happy

enthusiasm--he does not believe in death; so he becomes reassured and

takes courage again, and subjectively, everything goes on as if the rite

had really driven off the danger which was dreaded. This is how curing

or preventive virtues come to be attributed to the movements which one

makes, to the cries uttered, to the blood shed and to the wounds

inflicted upon one's self or others; and as these different tortures

necessarily make one suffer, suffering by itself is finally regarded as

a means of conjuring evil or curing sickness.[1289] Later, when the

majority of the religious forces had taken the form of moral

personalities, the efficacy of these practices was explained by

imagining that their object was to appease an evil-working or irritated

god. But these conceptions only reflect the rite and the sentiments it

arouses; they are an interpretation of it, not its determining cause.

A negligence of the ritual acts in the same way. It, too, is a menace

for the group; it touches it in its moral existence for it touches it in

its beliefs. But if the anger which it causes is affirmed ostensibly and

energetically, it compensates the evil which it has caused. For if it is

acutely felt by all, it is because the infraction committed is an

exception and the common faith remains entire. So the moral unity of the

group is not endangered. Now the penalty inflicted as an expiation is

only a manifestation of the public anger, the material proof of its

unanimity. So it really does have the healing effect attributed to it.

At bottom, the sentiment which is at the root of the real expiatory

rites does not differ in nature from that which we have found at the

basis of the other piacular rites: it is a sort of irritated sorrow

which tends to manifest itself by acts of destruction. Sometimes it is

assuaged to the detriment of him who feels it; sometimes it is at the

expense of some foreign third party. But in either case, the psychic

mechanism is essentially the same.[1290]

IV

One of the greatest services which Robertson Smith has rendered to the

science of religions is to have pointed out the ambiguity of the notion

of sacredness.

Religious forces are of two sorts. Some are beneficent, guardians of the

physical and moral order, dispensers of life and health and all the

qualities which men esteem: this is the case with the totemic principle,

spread out in the whole species, the mythical ancestor, the

animal-protector, the civilizing heroes and the tutelar gods of every

kind and degree. It matters little whether they are conceived as

distinct personalities or as diffused energies; under either form they

fulfil the same function and affect the minds of the believers in the

same way: the respect which they inspire is mixed with love and

gratitude. The things and the persons which are normally connected with

them participate in the same sentiments and the same character: these

are holy things and persons. Such are the spots consecrated to the cult,

the objects which serve in the regular rites, the priests, the ascetics,

etc.--On the other hand, there are evil and impure powers, productive of

disorders, causes of death and sickness, instigators of sacrilege. The

only sentiments which men have for them are a fear into which horror

generally enters. Such are the forces upon which and by which the

sorcerer acts, those which arise from corpses or the menstrual blood,

those freed by every profanation of sacred things, etc. The spirits of

the dead and malign genii of every sort are their personified forms.

Between these two categories of forces and beings, the contrast is as

complete as possible and even goes into the most radical antagonism. The

good and salutary powers repel to a distance these others which deny and

contradict them. Therefore the former are forbidden to the latter: any

contact between them is considered the worst of profanations. This is

the typical form of those interdicts between sacred things of different

species, the existence of which we have already pointed out.[1291] Women

during menstruation, and especially at its beginning, are impure; so at

this moment they are rigorously sequestered; men may have no relations

with them.[1292] Bull-roarers and churinga never come near a dead

man.[1293] A sacrilegious person is excluded from the society of the

faithful; access to the cult is forbidden him. Thus the whole religious

life gravitates about two contrary poles between which there is the same

opposition as between the pure and the impure, the saint and the

sacrilegious, the divine and the diabolic.

But while these two aspects of the religious life oppose one another,

there is a close kinship between them. In the first place, both have the

same relation towards profane beings: these must abstain from all

contact with impure things just as from the most holy things. The former

are no less forbidden than the latter: they are withdrawn from

circulation alike. This shows that they too are sacred. Of course the

sentiments inspired by the two are not identical: respect is one thing,

disgust and horror another. Yet, if the gestures are to be the same in

both cases, the sentiments expressed must not differ in nature. And, in

fact, there is a horror in religious respect, especially when it is very

intense, while the fear inspired by malign powers is generally not

without a certain reverential character. The shades by which these two

attitudes are differentiated are even so slight sometimes that it is not

always easy to say which state of mind the believers actually happen to

be in. Among certain Semitic peoples, pork was forbidden, but it was not

always known exactly whether this was because it was a pure or an impure

thing[1294] and the same may be said of a very large number of

alimentary interdictions.

But there is more to be said; it very frequently happens that an impure

thing or an evil power becomes a holy thing or a guardian power, without

changing its nature, through a simple modification of external

circumstances. We have seen how the soul of a dead man, which is a

dreaded principle at first, is transformed into a protecting genius as

soon as the mourning is finished. Likewise, the corpse, which begins by

inspiring terror and aversion, is later regarded as a venerated relic:

funeral anthropophagy, which is frequently practised in the Australian

societies, is a proof of this transformation.[1295] The totemic animal

is the pre-eminently sacred being; but for him who eats its flesh

unduly, it is a cause of death. In a general way, the sacrilegious

person is merely a profane one who has been infected with a benevolent

religious force. This changes its nature in changing its habitat; it

defiles rather than sanctifies.[1296] The blood issuing from the

genital organs of a woman, though it is evidently as impure as that of

menstruation, is frequently used as a remedy against sickness.[1297] The

victim immolated in expiatory sacrifices is charged with impurities, for

they have concentrated upon it the sins which were to be expiated. Yet,

after it has been slaughtered, its flesh and blood are employed for the

most pious uses.[1298] On the contrary, though the communion is

generally a religious operation whose normal function is to consecrate,

it sometimes produces the effects of a sacrilege. In certain cases, the

persons who have communicated are forced to flee from one another as

from men infected with a plague. One would say that they have become a

source of dangerous contamination for one another: the sacred bond which

unites them also separates them. Examples of this sort of communion are

numerous in Australia. One of the most typical has been observed among

the Narrinyeri and the neighbouring tribes. When an infant arrives in

the world, its parents carefully preserve its umbilical cord, which is

believed to conceal a part of its soul. Two persons who exchange the

cords thus preserved communicate together by the very act of this

exchange, for it is as though they exchanged their souls. But, at the

same time, they are forbidden to touch or speak to or even to see one

another. It is just as though they were each an object of horror for the

other.[1299]

So the pure and the impure are not two separate classes, but two

varieties of the same class, which includes all sacred things. There are

two sorts of sacredness, the propitious and the unpropitious, and not

only is there no break of continuity between these two opposed forms,

but also one object may pass from the one to the other without changing

its nature. The pure is made out of the impure, and reciprocally. It is

in the possibility of these transmutations that the ambiguity of the

sacred consists.

But even if Robertson Smith did have an active sentiment of this

ambiguity, he never gave it an express explanation. He confined himself

to remarking that, as all religious forces are indistinctly intense and

contagious, it is wise not to approach them except with respectful

precautions, no matter what direction their action may be exercised in.

It seemed to him that he could thus account for the air of kinship which

they all present, in spite of the contrasts which oppose them

otherwise. But the question was only put off; it still remains to be

shown how it comes that the powers of evil have the same intensity and

contagiousness as the others. In other words, how does it happen that

they, too, are of a religious nature? Also, the energy and force of

expansion which they have in common do not enable us to understand how,

in spite of the conflict which divides them, they may be transformed

into one another or substituted for each other in their respective

functions, and how the pure may contaminate while the impure sometimes

serves to sanctify.[1300]

The explanation of piacular rites which we have proposed enables us to

reply to this double question.

We have seen, in fact, that the evil powers are the product of these

rites and symbolize them. When a society is going through circumstances

which sadden, perplex or irritate it, it exercises a pressure over its

members, to make them bear witness, by significant acts, to their

sorrow, perplexity or anger. It imposes upon them the duty of weeping,

groaning or inflicting wounds upon themselves or others, for these

collective manifestations, and the moral communion which they show and

strengthen, restore to the group the energy which circumstances threaten

to take away from it, and thus they enable it to become settled. This is

the experience which men interpret when they imagine that outside them

there are evil beings whose hostility, whether constitutional or

temporary, can be appeased only by human suffering. These beings are

nothing other than collective states objectified; they are society

itself seen under one of its aspects. But we also know that the

benevolent powers are constituted in the same way; they, too, result

from the collective life and express it; they, too, represent the

society, but seen from a very different attitude, to wit, at the moment

when it confidently affirms itself and ardently presses on towards the

realization of the ends which it pursues. Since these two sorts of

forces have a common origin, it is not at all surprising that, though

facing in opposite directions, they should have the same nature, that

they are equally intense and contagious and consequently forbidden and

sacred.

From this we are able to understand how they change into one another.

Since they reflect the abjective state in which the group happens to be,

it is enough that this state change for their character to change. After

the mourning is over, the domestic group is re-calmed by the mourning

itself; it regains confidence; the painful pressure which they felt

exercised over them is relieved; they feel more at their ease. So it

seems to them as though the spirit of the deceased had laid aside its

hostile sentiments and become a benevolent protector. The other

transmutations, examples of which we have cited, are to be explained in

the same way. As we have already shown, the sanctity of a thing is due

to the collective sentiment of which it is the object. If, in violation

of the interdicts which isolate it, it comes in contact with a profane

person, then this same sentiment will spread contagiously to this latter

and imprint a special character upon him. But in spreading, it comes

into a very different state from the one it was in at first. Offended

and irritated by the profanation implied in this abusive and unnatural

extension, it becomes aggressive and inclined to destructive violences:

it tends to avenge itself for the offence suffered. Therefore the

infected subject seems to be filled with a mighty and harmful force

which menaces all that approaches him; it is as though he were marked

with a stain or blemish. Yet the cause of this blemish is the same

psychic state which, in other circumstances, consecrates and sanctifies.

But if the anger thus aroused is satisfied by an expiatory rite, it

subsides, alleviated; the offended sentiment is appeased and returns to

its original state. So it acts once more as it acted in the beginning;

instead of contaminating, it sanctifies. As it continues to infect the

object to which it is attached, this could never become profane and

religiously indifferent again. But the direction of the religious force

with which it seems to be filled is inverted: from being impure, it has

become pure and an instrument of purification.

In résumé, the two poles of the religious life correspond to the two

opposed states through which all social life passes. Between the

propitiously sacred and the unpropitiously sacred there is the same

contrast as between the states of collective well-being and ill-being.

But since both are equally collective, there is, between the

mythological constructions symbolizing them, an intimate kinship of

nature. The sentiments held in common vary from extreme dejection to

extreme joy, from painful irritation to ecstatic enthusiasm; but, in

any case, there is a communion of minds and a mutual comfort resulting

from this communion. The fundamental process is always the same; only

circumstances colour it differently. So, at bottom, it is the unity and

the diversity of social life which make the simultaneous unity and

diversity of sacred beings and things.

This ambiguity, moreover, is not peculiar to the idea of sacredness

alone; something of this characteristic has been found in all the rites

which we have been studying. Of course it was essential to distinguish

them; to confuse them would have been to misunderstand the multiple

aspects of the religious life. But, on the other hand, howsoever

different they may be, there is no break of continuity between them.

Quite on the contrary, they overlap one another and may even replace

each other mutually. We have already shown how the rites of oblation and

communion, the imitative rites and the commemorative rites frequently

fulfil the same function. One might imagine that the negative cult, at

least, would be more sharply separated from the positive cult; yet we

have seen that the former may produce positive effects, identical with

those produced by the latter. The same results are obtained by fasts,

abstinences and self-mutilations as by communions, oblations and

commemorations. Inversely, offerings and sacrifices imply privations and

renunciations of every sort. The continuity between ascetic and piacular

rites is even more apparent: both are made up of sufferings, accepted or

undergone, to which an analogous efficacy is attributed. Thus the

practices, like the beliefs, are not arranged in two separate classes.

Howsoever complex the outward manifestations of the religious life may

be, at bottom it is one and simple. It responds everywhere to one and

the same need, and is everywhere derived from one and the same mental

state. In all its forms, its object is to raise man above himself and to

make him lead a life superior to that which he would lead, if he

followed only his own individual whims: beliefs express this life in

representations; rites organize it and regulate its working.

CONCLUSION

At the beginning of this work we announced that the religion whose study

we were taking up contained within it the most characteristic elements

of the religious life. The exactness of this proposition may now be

verified. Howsoever simple the system which we have studied may be, we

have found within it all the great ideas and the principal ritual

attitudes which are at the basis of even the most advanced religions:

the division of things into sacred and profane, the notions of the soul,

of spirits, of mythical personalities, and of a national and even

international divinity, a negative cult with ascetic practices which are

its exaggerated form, rites of oblation and communion, imitative rites,

commemorative rites and expiatory rites; nothing essential is lacking.

We are thus in a position to hope that the results at which we have

arrived are not peculiar to totemism alone, but can aid us in an

understanding of what religion in general is.

It may be objected that one single religion, whatever its field of

extension may be, is too narrow a base for such an induction. We have

not dreamed for a moment of ignoring the fact that an extended

verification may add to the authority of a theory, but it is equally

true that when a law has been proven by one well-made experiment, this

proof is valid universally. If in one single case a scientist succeeded

in finding out the secret of the life of even the most protoplasmic

creature that can be imagined, the truths thus obtained would be

applicable to all living beings, even the most advanced. Then if, in our

studies of these very humble societies, we have really succeeded in

discovering some of the elements out of which the most fundamental

religious notions are made up, there is no reason for not extending the

most general results of our researches to other religions. In fact, it

is inconceivable that the same effect may be due now to one cause, now

to another, according to the circumstances, unless the two causes are at

bottom only one. A single idea cannot express one reality here and

another one there, unless the duality is only apparent. If among certain

peoples the ideas of sacredness, the soul and God are to be explained

sociologically, it should be presumed scientifically that, in principle,

the same explanation is valid for all the peoples among whom these same

ideas are found with the same essential characteristics. Therefore,

supposing that we have not been deceived, certain at least of our

conclusions can be legitimately generalized. The moment has come to

disengage these. And an induction of this sort, having at its foundation

a clearly defined experiment, is less adventurous than many summary

generalizations which, while attempting to reach the essence of religion

at once, without resting upon the careful analysis of any religion in

particular, greatly risk losing themselves in space.

I

The theorists who have undertaken to explain religion in rational terms

have generally seen in it before all else a system of ideas,

corresponding to some determined object. This object has been conceived

in a multitude of ways: nature, the infinite, the unknowable, the ideal,

etc.; but these differences matter but little. In any case, it was the

conceptions and beliefs which were considered as the essential elements

of religion. As for the rites, from this point of view they appear to be

only an external translation, contingent and material, of these internal

states which alone pass as having any intrinsic value. This conception

is so commonly held that generally the disputes of which religion is the

theme turn about the question whether it can conciliate itself with

science or not, that is to say, whether or not there is a place beside

our scientific knowledge for another form of thought which would be

specifically religious.

But the believers, the men who lead the religious life and have a direct

sensation of what it really is, object to this way of regarding it,

saying that it does not correspond to their daily experience. In fact,

they feel that the real function of religion is not to make us think, to

enrich our knowledge, nor to add to the conceptions which we owe to

science others of another origin and another character, but rather, it

is to make us act, to aid us to live. The believer who has communicated

with his god is not merely a man who sees new truths of which the

unbeliever is ignorant; he is a man who is _stronger_. He feels within

him more force, either to endure the trials of existence, or to conquer

them. It is as though he were raised above the miseries of the world,

because he is raised above his condition as a mere man; he believes that

he is saved from evil, under whatever form he may conceive this evil.

The first article in every creed is the belief in salvation by faith.

But it is hard to see how a mere idea could have this efficacy. An idea

is in reality only a part of ourselves; then how could it confer upon us

powers superior to those which we have of our own nature? Howsoever rich

it might be in affective virtues, it could add nothing to our natural

vitality; for it could only release the motive powers which are within

us, neither creating them nor increasing them. From the mere fact that

we consider an object worthy of being loved and sought after, it does

not follow that we feel ourselves stronger afterwards; it is also

necessary that this object set free energies superior to these which we

ordinarily have at our command and also that we have some means of

making these enter into us and unite themselves to our interior lives.

Now for that, it is not enough that we think of them; it is also

indispensable that we place ourselves within their sphere of action, and

that we set ourselves where we may best feel their influence; in a word,

it is necessary that we act, and that we repeat the acts thus necessary

every time we feel the need of renewing their effects. From this point

of view, it is readily seen how that group of regularly repeated acts

which form the cult get their importance. In fact, whoever has really

practised a religion knows very well that it is the cult which gives

rise to these impressions of joy, of interior peace, of serenity, of

enthusiasm which are, for the believer, an experimental proof of his

beliefs. The cult is not simply a system of signs by which the faith is

outwardly translated; it is a collection of the means by which this is

created and recreated periodically. Whether it consists in material acts

or mental operations, it is always this which is efficacious.

Our entire study rests upon this postulate that the unanimous sentiment

of the believers of all times cannot be purely illusory. Together with a

recent apologist of the faith[1301] we admit that these religious

beliefs rest upon a specific experience whose demonstrative value is, in

one sense, not one bit inferior to that of scientific experiments,

though different from them. We, too, think that "a tree is known by its

fruits,"[1302] and that fertility is the best proof of what the roots

are worth. But from the fact that a "religious experience," if we choose

to call it this, does exist and that it has a certain foundation--and,

by the way, is there any experience which has none?--it does not follow

that the reality which is its foundation conforms objectively to the

idea which believers have of it. The very fact that the fashion in which

it has been conceived has varied infinitely in different times is enough

to prove that none of these conceptions express it adequately. If a

scientist states it as an axiom that the sensations of heat and light

which we feel correspond to some objective cause, he does not conclude

that this is what it appears to the senses to be. Likewise, even if the

impressions which the faithful feel are not imaginary, still they are in

no way privileged intuitions; there is no reason for believing that they

inform us better upon the nature of their object than do ordinary

sensations upon the nature of bodies and their properties. In order to

discover what this object consists of, we must submit them to an

examination and elaboration analogous to that which has substituted for

the sensuous idea of the world another which is scientific and

conceptual.

This is precisely what we have tried to do, and we have seen that this

reality, which mythologies have represented under so many different

forms, but which is the universal and eternal objective cause of these

sensations _sui generis_ out of which religious experience is made, is

society. We have shown what moral forces it develops and how it awakens

this sentiment of a refuge, of a shield and of a guardian support which

attaches the believer to his cult. It is that which raises him outside

himself; it is even that which made him. For that which makes a man is

the totality of the intellectual property which constitutes

civilization, and civilization is the work of society. Thus is explained

the preponderating rôle of the cult in all religions, whichever they may

be. This is because society cannot make its influence felt unless it is

in action, and it is not in action unless the individuals who compose it

are assembled together and act in common. It is by common action that it

takes consciousness of itself and realizes its position; it is before

all else an active co-operation. The collective ideas and sentiments are

even possible only owing to these exterior movements which symbolize

them, as we have established.[1303] Then it is action which dominates

the religious life, because of the mere fact that it is society which is

its source.

In addition to all the reasons which have been given to justify this

conception, a final one may be added here, which is the result of our

whole work. As we have progressed, we have established the fact that the

fundamental categories of thought, and consequently of science, are of

religious origin. We have seen that the same is true for magic and

consequently for the different processes which have issued from it. On

the other hand, it has long been known that up until a relatively

advanced moment of evolution, moral and legal rules have been

indistinguishable from ritual prescriptions. In summing up, then, it may

be said that nearly all the great social institutions have been born in

religion.[1304] Now in order that these principal aspects of the

collective life may have commenced by being only varied aspects of the

religious life, it is obviously necessary that the religious life be the

eminent form and, as it were, the concentrated expression of the whole

collective life. If religion has given birth to all that is essential in

society, it is because the idea of society is the soul of religion.

Religious forces are therefore human forces, moral forces. It is true

that since collective sentiments can become conscious of themselves only

by fixing themselves upon external objects, they have not been able to

take form without adopting some of their characteristics from other

things: they have thus acquired a sort of physical nature; in this way

they have come to mix themselves with the life of the material world,

and then have considered themselves capable of explaining what passes

there. But when they are considered only from this point of view and in

this rôle, only their most superficial aspect is seen. In reality, the

essential elements of which these collective sentiments are made have

been borrowed by the understanding. It ordinarily seems that they should

have a human character only when they are conceived under human

forms;[1305] but even the most impersonal and the most anonymous are

nothing else than objectified sentiments.

It is only by regarding religion from this angle that it is possible to

see its real significance. If we stick closely to appearances, rites

often give the effect of purely manual operations: they are anointings,

washings, meals. To consecrate something, it is put in contact with a

source of religious energy, just as to-day a body is put in contact with

a source of heat or electricity to warm or electrize it; the two

processes employed are not essentially different. Thus understood,

religious technique seems to be a sort of mystic mechanics. But these

material man[oe]uvres are only the external envelope under which the

mental operations are hidden. Finally, there is no question of

exercising a physical constraint upon blind and, incidentally, imaginary

forces, but rather of reaching individual consciousnesses, of giving

them a direction and of disciplining them. It is sometimes said that

inferior religions are materialistic. Such an expression is inexact. All

religions, even the crudest, are in a sense spiritualistic: for the

powers they put in play are before all spiritual, and also their

principal object is to act upon the moral life. Thus it is seen that

whatever has been done in the name of religion cannot have been done in

vain: for it is necessarily the society that did it, and it is humanity

that has reaped the fruits.

But, it is said, what society is it that has thus made the basis of

religion? Is it the real society, such as it is and acts before our very

eyes, with the legal and moral organization which it has laboriously

fashioned during the course of history? This is full of defects and

imperfections. In it, evil goes beside the good, injustice often reigns

supreme, and the truth is often obscured by error. How could anything so

crudely organized inspire the sentiments of love, the ardent enthusiasm

and the spirit of abnegation which all religions claim of their

followers? These perfect beings which are gods could not have taken

their traits from so mediocre, and sometimes even so base a reality.

But, on the other hand, does someone think of a perfect society, where

justice and truth would be sovereign, and from which evil in all its

forms would be banished for ever? No one would deny that this is in

close relations with the religious sentiment; for, they would say, it is

towards the realization of this that all religions strive. But that

society is not an empirical fact, definite and observable; it is a

fancy, a dream with which men have lightened their sufferings, but in

which they have never really lived. It is merely an idea which comes to

express our more or less obscure aspirations towards the good, the

beautiful and the ideal. Now these aspirations have their roots in us;

they come from the very depths of our being; then there is nothing

outside of us which can account for them. Moreover, they are already

religious in themselves; thus it would seem that the ideal society

presupposes religion, far from being able to explain it.[1306]

But, in the first place, things are arbitrarily simplified when religion

is seen only on its idealistic side: in its way, it is realistic. There

is no physical or moral ugliness, there are no vices or evils which do

not have a special divinity. There are gods of theft and trickery, of

lust and war, of sickness and of death. Christianity itself, howsoever

high the idea which it has made of the divinity may be, has been obliged

to give the spirit of evil a place in its mythology. Satan is an

essential piece of the Christian system; even if he is an impure being,

he is not a profane one. The anti-god, is a god, inferior and

subordinated, it is true, but nevertheless endowed with extended

powers; he is even the object of rites, at least of negative ones. Thus

religion, far from ignoring the real society and making abstraction of

it, is in its image; it reflects all its aspects, even the most vulgar

and the most repulsive. All is to be found there, and if in the majority

of cases we see the good victorious over evil, life over death, the

powers of light over the powers of darkness, it is because reality is

not otherwise. If the relation between these two contrary forces were

reversed, life would be impossible; but, as a matter of fact, it

maintains itself and even tends to develop.

But if, in the midst of these mythologies and theologies we see reality

clearly appearing, it is none the less true that it is found there only

in an enlarged, transformed and idealized form. In this respect, the

most primitive religions do not differ from the most recent and the most

refined. For example, we have seen how the Arunta place at the beginning

of time a mythical society whose organization exactly reproduces that

which still exists to-day; it includes the same clans and phratries, it

is under the same matrimonial rules and it practises the same rites. But

the personages who compose it are ideal beings, gifted with powers and

virtues to which common mortals cannot pretend. Their nature is not only

higher, but it is different, since it is at once animal and human. The

evil powers there undergo a similar metamorphosis: evil itself is, as it

were, made sublime and idealized. The question now raises itself of

whence this idealization comes.

Some reply that men have a natural faculty for idealizing, that is to

say, of substituting for the real world another different one, to which

they transport themselves by thought. But that is merely changing the

terms of the problem; it is not resolving it or even advancing it. This

systematic idealization is an essential characteristic of religions.

Explaining them by an innate power of idealization is simply replacing

one word by another which is the equivalent of the first; it is as if

they said that men have made religions because they have a religious

nature. Animals know only one world, the one which they perceive by

experience, internal as well as external. Men alone have the faculty of

conceiving the ideal, of adding something to the real. Now where does

this singular privilege come from? Before making it an initial fact or a

mysterious virtue which escapes science, we must be sure that it does

not depend upon empirically determinable conditions.

The explanation of religion which we have proposed has precisely this

advantage, that it gives an answer to this question. For our definition

of the sacred is that it is something added to and above the real: now

the ideal answers to this same definition; we cannot explain one without

explaining the other. In fact, we have seen that if collective life

awakens religious thought on reaching a certain degree of intensity, it

is because it brings about a state of effervescence which changes the

conditions of psychic activity. Vital energies are over-excited,

passions more active, sensations stronger; there are even some which are

produced only at this moment. A man does not recognize himself; he feels

himself transformed and consequently he transforms the environment which

surrounds him. In order to account for the very particular impressions

which he receives, he attributes to the things with which he is in most

direct contact properties which they have not, exceptional powers and

virtues which the objects of every-day experience do not possess. In a

word, above the real world where his profane life passes he has placed

another which, in one sense, does not exist except in thought, but to

which he attributes a higher sort of dignity than to the first. Thus,

from a double point of view it is an ideal world.

The formation of the ideal world is therefore not an irreducible fact

which escapes science; it depends upon conditions which observation can

touch; it is a natural product of social life. For a society to become

conscious of itself and maintain at the necessary degree of intensity

the sentiments which it thus attains, it must assemble and concentrate

itself. Now this concentration brings about an exaltation of the mental

life which takes form in a group of ideal conceptions where is portrayed

the new life thus awakened; they correspond to this new set of psychical

forces which is added to those which we have at our disposition for the

daily tasks of existence. A society can neither create itself nor

recreate itself without at the same time creating an ideal. This

creation is not a sort of work of supererogation for it, by which it

would complete itself, being already formed; it is the act by which it

is periodically made and remade. Therefore when some oppose the ideal

society to the real society, like two antagonists which would lead us in

opposite directions, they materialize and oppose abstractions. The ideal

society is not outside of the real society; it is a part of it. Far from

being divided between them as between two poles which mutually repel

each other, we cannot hold to one without holding to the other. For a

society is not made up merely of the mass of individuals who compose it,

the ground which they occupy, the things which they use and the

movements which they perform, but above all is the idea which it forms

of itself. It is undoubtedly true that it hesitates over the manner in

which it ought to conceive itself; it feels itself drawn in divergent

directions. But these conflicts which break forth are not between the

ideal and reality, but between two different ideals, that of yesterday

and that of to-day, that which has the authority of tradition and that

which has the hope of the future. There is surely a place for

investigating whence these ideals evolve; but whatever solution may be

given to this problem, it still remains that all passes in the world of

the ideal.

Thus the collective ideal which religion expresses is far from being due

to a vague innate power of the individual, but it is rather at the

school of collective life that the individual has learned to idealize.

It is in assimilating the ideals elaborated by society that he has

become capable of conceiving the ideal. It is society which, by leading

him within its sphere of action, has made him acquire the need of

raising himself above the world of experience and has at the same time

furnished him with the means of conceiving another. For society has

constructed this new world in constructing itself, since it is society

which this expresses. Thus both with the individual and in the group,

the faculty of idealizing has nothing mysterious about it. It is not a

sort of luxury which a man could get along without, but a condition of

his very existence. He could not be a social being, that is to say, he

could not be a man, if he had not acquired it. It is true that in

incarnating themselves in individuals, collective ideals tend to

individualize themselves. Each understands them after his own fashion

and marks them with his own stamp; he suppresses certain elements and

adds others. Thus the personal ideal disengages itself from the social

ideal in proportion as the individual personality develops itself and

becomes an autonomous source of action. But if we wish to understand

this aptitude, so singular in appearance, of living outside of reality,

it is enough to connect it with the social conditions upon which it

depends.

Therefore it is necessary to avoid seeing in this theory of religion a

simple restatement of historical materialism: that would be

misunderstanding our thought to an extreme degree. In showing that

religion is something essentially social, we do not mean to say that it

confines itself to translating into another language the material forms

of society and its immediate vital necessities. It is true that we take

it as evident that social life depends upon its material foundation and

bears its mark, just as the mental life of an individual depends upon

his nervous system and in fact his whole organism. But collective

consciousness is something more than a mere epiphenomenon of its

morphological basis, just as individual consciousness is something more

than a simple efflorescence of the nervous system. In order that the

former may appear, a synthesis _sui generis_ of particular

consciousnesses is required. Now this synthesis has the effect of

disengaging a whole world of sentiments, ideas and images which, once

born, obey laws all their own. They attract each other, repel each

other, unite, divide themselves, and multiply, though these combinations

are not commanded and necessitated by the condition of the underlying

reality. The life thus brought into being even enjoys so great an

independence that it sometimes indulges in manifestations with no

purpose or utility of any sort, for the mere pleasure of affirming

itself. We have shown that this is often precisely the case with ritual

activity and mythological thought.[1307]

But if religion is the product of social causes, how can we explain the

individual cult and the universalistic character of certain religions?

If it is born _in foro externo_, how has it been able to pass into the

inner conscience of the individual and penetrate there ever more and

more profoundly? If it is the work of definite and individualized

societies, how has it been able to detach itself from them, even to the

point of being conceived as something common to all humanity?

In the course of our studies, we have met with the germs of individual

religion and of religious cosmopolitanism, and we have seen how they

were formed; thus we possess the more general elements of the reply

which is to be given to this double question.

We have shown how the religious force which animates the clan

particularizes itself, by incarnating itself in particular

consciousnesses. Thus secondary sacred beings are formed; each

individual has his own, made in his own image, associated to his own

intimate life, bound up with his own destiny; it is the soul, the

individual totem, the protecting ancestor, etc. These beings are the

object of rites which the individual can celebrate by himself, outside

of any group; this is the first form of the individual cult. To be sure,

it is only a very rudimentary cult; but since the personality of the

individual is still only slightly marked, and but little value is

attributed to it, the cult which expresses it could hardly be expected

to be very highly developed as yet. But as individuals have

differentiated themselves more and more and the value of an individual

has increased, the corresponding cult has taken a relatively greater

place in the totality of the religious life and at the same time it is

more fully closed to outside influences.

Thus the existence of individual cults implies nothing which contradicts

or embarrasses the sociological interpretation of religion; for the

religious forces to which it addresses itself are only the

individualized forms of collective forces. Therefore, even when religion

seems to be entirely within the individual conscience, it is still in

society that it finds the living source from which it is nourished. We

are now able to appreciate the value of the radical individualism which

would make religion something purely individual: it misunderstands the

fundamental conditions of the religious life. If up to the present it

has remained in the stage of theoretical aspirations which have never

been realized, it is because it is unrealizable. A philosophy may well

be elaborated in the silence of the interior imagination, but not so a

faith. For before all else, a faith is warmth, life, enthusiasm, the

exaltation of the whole mental life, the raising of the individual above

himself. Now how could he add to the energies which he possesses without

going outside himself? How could he surpass himself merely by his own

forces? The only source of life at which we can morally reanimate

ourselves is that formed by the society of our fellow beings; the only

moral forces with which we can sustain and increase our own are those

which we get from others. Let us even admit that there really are beings

more or less analogous to those which the mythologies represent. In

order that they may exercise over souls the useful direction which is

their reason for existence, it is necessary that men believe in them.

Now these beliefs are active only when they are partaken by many. A man

cannot retain them any length of time by a purely personal effort; it is

not thus that they are born or that they are acquired; it is even

doubtful if they can be kept under these conditions. In fact, a man who

has a veritable faith feels an invincible need of spreading it:

therefore he leaves his isolation, approaches others and seeks to

convince them, and it is the ardour of the convictions which he arouses

that strengthens his own. It would quickly weaken if it remained alone.

It is the same with religious universalism as with this individualism.

Far from being an exclusive attribute of certain very great religions,

we have found it, not at the base, it is true, but at the summit of the

Australian system. Bunjil, Daramulun or Baiame are not simple tribal

gods; each of them is recognized by a number of different tribes. In a

sense, their cult is international. This conception is therefore very

near to that found in the most recent theologies. So certain writers

have felt it their duty to deny its authenticity, howsoever

incontestable this may be.

And we have been able to show how this has been formed.

Neighbouring tribes of a similar civilization cannot fail to be in

constant relations with each other. All sorts of circumstances give an

occasion for it: besides commerce, which is still rudimentary, there are

marriages; these international marriages are very common in Australia.

In the course of these meetings, men naturally become conscious of the

moral relationship which united them. They have the same social

organization, the same division into phratries, clans and matrimonial

classes; they practise the same rites of initiation, or wholly similar

ones. Mutual loans and treaties result in reinforcing these spontaneous

resemblances. The gods to which these manifestly identical institutions

were attached could hardly have remained distinct in their minds.

Everything tended to bring them together and consequently, even

supposing that each tribe elaborated the notion independently, they must

necessarily have tended to confound themselves with each other. Also, it

is probable that it was in inter-tribal assemblies that they were first

conceived. For they are chiefly the gods of initiation, and in the

initiation ceremonies, the different tribes are usually represented. So

if sacred beings are formed which are connected with no geographically

determined society, that is not because they have an extra-social

origin. It is because there are other groups above these geographically

determined ones, whose contours are less clearly marked: they have no

fixed frontiers, but include all sorts of more or less neighbouring and

related tribes. The particular social life thus created tends to spread

itself over an area with no definite limits. Naturally the mythological

personages who correspond to it have the same character; their sphere of

influence is not limited; they go beyond the particular tribes and their

territory. They are the great international gods.

Now there is nothing in this situation which is peculiar to Australian

societies. There is no people and no state which is not a part of

another society, more or less unlimited, which embraces all the peoples

and all the States with which the first comes in contact, either

directly or indirectly; there is no national life which is not dominated

by a collective life of an international nature. In proportion as we

advance in history, these international groups acquire a greater

importance and extent. Thus we see how, in certain cases, this

universalistic tendency has been able to develop itself to the point of

affecting not only the higher ideas of the religious system, but even

the principles upon which it rests.

II

Thus there is something eternal in religion which is destined to survive

all the particular symbols in which religious thought has successively

enveloped itself. There can be no society which does not feel the need

of upholding and reaffirming at regular intervals the collective

sentiments and the collective ideas which make its unity and its

personality. Now this moral remaking cannot be achieved except by the

means of reunions, assemblies and meetings where the individuals, being

closely united to one another, reaffirm in common their common

sentiments; hence come ceremonies which do not differ from regular

religious ceremonies, either in their object, the results which they

produce, or the processes employed to attain these results. What

essential difference is there between an assembly of Christians

celebrating the principal dates of the life of Christ, or of Jews

remembering the exodus from Egypt or the promulgation of the decalogue,

and a reunion of citizens commemorating the promulgation of a new moral

or legal system or some great event in the national life?

If we find a little difficulty to-day in imagining what these feasts and

ceremonies of the future could consist in, it is because we are going

through a stage of transition and moral mediocrity. The great things of

the past which filled our fathers with enthusiasm do not excite the same

ardour in us, either because they have come into common usage to such an

extent that we are unconscious of them, or else because they no longer

answer to our actual aspirations; but as yet there is nothing to replace

them. We can no longer impassionate ourselves for the principles in the

name of which Christianity recommended to masters that they treat their

slaves humanely, and, on the other hand, the idea which it has formed of

human equality and fraternity seems to us to-day to leave too large a

place for unjust inequalities. Its pity for the outcast seems to us too

Platonic; we desire another which would be more practicable; but as yet

we cannot clearly see what it should be nor how it could be realized in

facts. In a word, the old gods are growing old or already dead, and

others are not yet born. This is what rendered vain the attempt of Comte

with the old historic souvenirs artificially revived; it is life itself,

and not a dead past which can produce a living cult. But this state of

incertitude and confused agitation cannot last for ever. A day will come

when our societies will know again those hours of creative

effervescence, in the course of which new ideas arise and new formulæ

are found which serve for a while as a guide to humanity; and when these

hours shall have been passed through once, men will spontaneously feel

the need of reliving them from time to time in thought, that is to say,

of keeping alive their memory by means of celebrations which regularly

reproduce their fruits. We have already seen how the French Revolution

established a whole cycle of holidays to keep the principles with which

it was inspired in a state of perpetual youth. If this institution

quickly fell away, it was because the revolutionary faith lasted but a

moment, and deceptions and discouragements rapidly succeeded the first

moments of enthusiasm. But though the work may have miscarried, it

enables us to imagine what might have happened in other conditions; and

everything leads us to believe that it will be taken up again sooner or

later. There are no gospels which are immortal, but neither is there any

reason for believing that humanity is incapable of inventing new ones.

As to the question of what symbols this new faith will express itself

with, whether they will resemble those of the past or not, and whether

or not they will be more adequate for the reality which they seek to

translate, that is something which surpasses the human faculty of

foresight and which does not appertain to the principal question.

But feasts and rites, in a word, the cult, are not the whole religion.

This is not merely a system of practices, but also a system of ideas

whose object is to explain the world; we have seen that even the

humblest have their cosmology. Whatever connection there may be between

these two elements of the religious life, they are still quite

different. The one is turned towards action, which it demands and

regulates; the other is turned towards thought, which it enriches and

organizes. Then they do not depend upon the same conditions, and

consequently it may be asked if the second answers to necessities as

universal and as permanent as the first.

When specific characteristics are attributed to religious thought, and

when it is believed that its function is to express, by means peculiar

to itself, an aspect of reality which evades ordinary knowledge as well

as science, one naturally refuses to admit that religion can ever

abandon its speculative rôle. But our analysis of the facts does not

seem to have shown this specific quality of religion. The religion which

we have just studied is one of those whose symbols are the most

disconcerting for the reason. There all appears mysterious. These beings

which belong to the most heterogeneous groups at the same time, who

multiply without ceasing to be one, who divide without diminishing, all

seem, at first view, to belong to an entirely different world from the

one where we live; some have even gone so far as to say that the mind

which constructed them ignored the laws of logic completely. Perhaps the

contrast between reason and faith has never been more thorough. Then if

there has ever been a moment in history when their heterogeneousness

should have stood out clearly, it is here. But contrary to all

appearances, as we have pointed out, the realities to which religious

speculation is then applied are the same as those which later serve as

the subject of reflection for philosophers: they are nature, man,

society. The mystery which appears to surround them is wholly

superficial and disappears before a more painstaking observation: it is

enough merely to set aside the veil with which mythological imagination

has covered them for them to appear such as they really are. Religion

sets itself to translate these realities into an intelligible language

which does not differ in nature from that employed by science; the

attempt is made by both to connect things with each other, to establish

internal relations between them, to classify them and to systematize

them. We have even seen that the essential ideas of scientific logic are

of religious origin. It is true that in order to utilize them, science

gives them a new elaboration; it purges them of all accidental elements;

in a general way, it brings a spirit of criticism into all its doings,

which religion ignores; it surrounds itself with precautions to "escape

precipitation and bias," and to hold aside the passions, prejudices and

all subjective influences. But these perfectionings of method are not

enough to differentiate it from religion. In this regard, both pursue

the same end; scientific thought is only a more perfect form of

religious thought. Thus it seems natural that the second should

progressively retire before the first, as this becomes better fitted to

perform the task.

And there is no doubt that this regression has taken place in the course

of history. Having left religion, science tends to substitute itself for

this latter in all that which concerns the cognitive and intellectual

functions. Christianity has already definitely consecrated this

substitution in the order of material things. Seeing in matter that

which is profane before all else, it readily left the knowledge of this

to another discipline, _tradidit mundum hominum disputationi_, "He gave

the world over to the disputes of men"; it is thus that the natural

sciences have been able to establish themselves and make their authority

recognized without very great difficulty. But it could not give up the

world of souls so easily; for it is before all over souls that the god

of the Christians aspires to reign. That is why the idea of submitting

the psychic life to science produced the effect of a sort of profanation

for a long time; even to-day it is repugnant to many minds. However,

experimental and comparative psychology is founded and to-day we must

reckon with it. But the world of the religious and moral life is still

forbidden. The great majority of men continue to believe that here there

is an order of things which the mind cannot penetrate except by very

special ways. Hence comes the active resistance which is met with every

time that someone tries to treat religious and moral phenomena

scientifically. But in spite of these oppositions, these attempts are

constantly repeated and this persistence even allows us to foresee that

this final barrier will finally give way and that science will establish

herself as mistress even in this reserved region.

That is what the conflict between science and religion really amounts

to. It is said that science denies religion in principle. But religion

exists; it is a system of given facts; in a word, it is a reality. How

could science deny this reality? Also, in so far as religion is action,

and in so far as it is a means of making men live, science could not

take its place, for even if this expresses life, it does not create it;

it may well seek to explain the faith, but by that very act it

presupposes it. Thus there is no conflict except upon one limited point.

Of the two functions which religion originally fulfilled, there is one,

and only one, which tends to escape it more and more: that is its

speculative function. That which science refuses to grant to religion is

not its right to exist, but its right to dogmatize upon the nature of

things and the special competence which it claims for itself for knowing

man and the world. As a matter of fact, it does not know itself. It does

not even know what it is made of, nor to what need it answers. It is

itself a subject for science, so far is it from being able to make the

law for science! And from another point of view, since there is no

proper subject for religious speculation outside that reality to which

scientific reflection is applied, it is evident that this former cannot

play the same rôle in the future that it has played in the past.

However, it seems destined to transform itself rather than to disappear.

We have said that there is something eternal in religion: it is the cult

and the faith. Men cannot celebrate ceremonies for which they see no

reason, nor can they accept a faith which they in no way understand. To

spread itself or merely to maintain itself, it must be justified, that

is to say, a theory must be made of it. A theory of this sort must

undoubtedly be founded upon the different sciences, from the moment

when these exist; first of all, upon the social sciences, for religious

faith has its origin in society; then upon psychology, for society is a

synthesis of human consciousnesses; and finally upon the sciences of

nature, for man and society are a part of the universe and can be

abstracted from it only artificially. But howsoever important these

facts taken from the constituted sciences may be, they are not enough;

for faith is before all else an impetus to action, while science, no

matter how far it may be pushed, always remains at a distance from this.

Science is fragmentary and incomplete; it advances but slowly and is

never finished; but life cannot wait. The theories which are destined to

make men live and act are therefore obliged to pass science and complete

it prematurely. They are possible only when the practical exigencies and

the vital necessities which we feel without distinctly conceiving them

push thought in advance, beyond that which science permits us to affirm.

Thus religions, even the most rational and laicized, cannot and never

will be able to dispense with a particular form of speculation which,

though having the same subjects as science itself, cannot be really

scientific: the obscure intuitions of sensation and sentiment too often

take the place of logical reasons. On one side, this speculation

resembles that which we meet with in the religions of the past; but on

another, it is different. While claiming and exercising the right of

going beyond science, it must commence by knowing this and by inspiring

itself with it. Ever since the authority of science was established, it

must be reckoned with; one can go farther than it under the pressure of

necessity, but he must take his direction from it. He can affirm nothing

that it denies, deny nothing that it affirms, and establish nothing that

is not directly or indirectly founded upon principles taken from it.

From now on, the faith no longer exercises the same hegemony as formerly

over the system of ideas that we may continue to call religion. A rival

power rises up before it which, being born of it, ever after submits it

to its criticism and control. And everything makes us foresee that this

control will constantly become more extended and efficient, while no

limit can be assigned to its future influence.

III

But if the fundamental notions of science are of a religious origin, how

has religion been able to bring them forth? At first sight, one does not

see what relations there can be between religion and logic. Or, since

the reality which religious thought expresses is society, the question

can be stated in the following terms, which make the entire difficulty

appear even better: what has been able to make social life so important

a source for the logical life? It seems as though nothing could have

predestined it to this rôle, for it certainly was not to satisfy their

speculative needs that men associated themselves together.

Perhaps we shall be found over bold in attempting so complex a question

here. To treat it as it should be treated, the sociological conditions

of knowledge should be known much better than they actually are; we are

only beginning to catch glimpses of some of them. However, the question

is so grave, and so directly implied in all that has preceded, that we

must make an effort not to leave it without an answer. Perhaps it is not

impossible, even at present, to state some general principles which may

at least aid in the solution.

Logical thought is made up of concepts. Seeking how society can have

played a rôle in the genesis of logical thought thus reduces itself to

seeking how it can have taken a part in the formation of concepts.

If, as is ordinarily the case, we see in the concept only a general

idea, the problem appears insoluble. By his own power, the individual

can compare his conceptions and images, disengage that which they have

in common, and thus, in a word, generalize. Then it is hard to see why

this generalization should be possible only in and through society. But,

in the first place, it is inadmissible that logical thought is

characterized only by the greater extension of the conceptions of which

it is made up. If particular ideas have nothing logical about them, why

should it be different with general ones? The general exists only in the

particular; it is the particular simplified and impoverished. Then the

first could have no virtues or privileges which the second has not.

Inversely, if conceptual thought can be applied to the class, species or

variety, howsoever restricted these may be, why can it not be extended

to the individual, that is to say, to the limit towards which the

conception tends, proportionately as its extension diminishes? As a

matter of fact, there are many concepts which have only individuals as

their object. In every sort of religion, gods are individualities

distinct from each other; however, they are conceived, not perceived.

Each people represents its historic or legendary heroes in fashions

which vary with the time. Finally, every one of us forms an idea of the

individuals with whom he comes in contact, of their character, of their

appearance, their distinctive traits and their moral and physical

temperaments: these notions, too, are real concepts. It is true that in

general they are formed crudely enough; but even among scientific

concepts, are there a great many that are perfectly adequate for their

object? In this direction, there are only differences of degree between

them.

Therefore the concept must be defined by other characteristics. It is

opposed to sensual representations of every order--sensations,

perceptions or images--by the following properties.

Sensual representations are in a perpetual flux; they come after each

other like the waves of a river, and even during the time that they

last, they do not remain the same thing. Each of them is an integral

part of the precise instant when it takes place. We are never sure of

again finding a perception such as we experienced it the first time; for

if the thing perceived has not changed, it is we who are no longer the

same. On the contrary, the concept is, as it were, outside of time and

change; it is in the depths below all this agitation; it might be said

that it is in a different portion of the mind, which is serener and

calmer. It does not move of itself, by an internal and spontaneous

evolution, but, on the contrary, it resists change. It is a manner of

thinking that, at every moment of time, is fixed and crystallized.[1308]

In so far as it is what it ought to be, it is immutable. If it changes,

it is not because it is its nature to do so, but because we have

discovered some imperfection in it; it is because it had to be

rectified. The system of concepts with which we think in everyday life

is that expressed by the vocabulary of our mother tongue; for every word

translates a concept. Now language is something fixed; it changes but

very slowly, and consequently it is the same with the conceptual system

which it expresses. The scholar finds himself in the same situation in

regard to the special terminology employed by the science to which he

has consecrated himself, and hence in regard to the special scheme of

concepts to which this terminology corresponds. It is true that he can

make innovations, but these are always a sort of violence done to the

established ways of thinking.

And at the same time that it is relatively immutable, the concept is

universal, or at least capable of becoming so. A concept is not my

concept; I hold it in common with other men, or, in any case, can

communicate it to them. It is impossible for me to make a sensation pass

from my consciousness into that of another; it holds closely to my

organism and personality and cannot be detached from them. All that I

can do is to invite others to place themselves before the same object as

myself and to leave themselves to its action. On the other hand,

conversation and all intellectual communication between men is an

exchange of concepts. The concept is an essentially impersonal

representation; it is through it that human intelligences

communicate.[1309]

The nature of the concept, thus defined, bespeaks its origin. If it is

common to all, it is the work of the community. Since it bears the mark

of no particular mind, it is clear that it was elaborated by a unique

intelligence, where all others meet each other, and after a fashion,

come to nourish themselves. If it has more stability than sensations or

images, it is because the collective representations are more stable

than the individual ones; for while an individual is conscious even of

the slight changes which take place in his environment, only events of a

greater gravity can succeed in affecting the mental status of a society.

Every time that we are in the presence of a _type_[1310] of thought or

action which is imposed uniformly upon particular wills or

intelligences, this pressure exercised over the individual betrays the

intervention of the group. Also, as we have already said, the concepts

with which we ordinarily think are those of our vocabulary. Now it is

unquestionable that language, and consequently the system of concepts

which it translates, is the product of a collective elaboration. What it

expresses is the manner in which society as a whole represents the facts

of experience. The ideas which correspond to the diverse elements of

language are thus collective representations.

Even their contents bear witness to the same fact. In fact, there are

scarcely any words among those which we usually employ whose meaning

does not pass, to a greater or less extent, the limits of our personal

experience. Very frequently a term expresses things which we have never

perceived or experiences which we have never had or of which we have

never been the witnesses. Even when we know some of the objects which it

concerns, it is only as particular examples that they serve to

illustrate the idea which they would never have been able to form by

themselves. Thus there is a great deal of knowledge condensed in the

word which I never collected, and which is not individual; it even

surpasses me to such an extent that I cannot even completely appropriate

all its results. Which of us knows all the words of the language he

speaks and the entire signification of each?

This remark enables us to determine the sense in which we mean to say

that concepts are collective representations. If they belong to a whole

social group, it is not because they represent the average of the

corresponding individual representations; for in that case they would be

poorer than the latter in intellectual content, while, as a matter of

fact, they contain much that surpasses the knowledge of the average

individual. They are not abstractions which have a reality only in

particular consciousnesses, but they are as concrete representations as

an individual could form of his own personal environment: they

correspond to the way in which this very special being, society,

considers the things of its own proper experience. If, as a matter of

fact, the concepts are nearly always general ideas, and if they express

categories and classes rather than particular objects, it is because the

unique and variable characteristics of things interest society but

rarely; because of its very extent, it can scarcely be affected by more

than their general and permanent qualities. Therefore it is to this

aspect of affairs that it gives its attention: it is a part of its

nature to see things in large and under the aspect which they ordinarily

have. But this generality is not necessary for them, and, in any case,

even when these representations have the generic character which they

ordinarily have, they are the work of society and are enriched by its

experience.

That is what makes conceptual thought so valuable for us. If concepts

were only general ideas, they would not enrich knowledge a great deal,

for, as we have already pointed out, the general contains nothing more

than the particular. But if before all else they are collective

representations, they add to that which we can learn by our own personal

experience all that wisdom and science which the group has accumulated

in the course of centuries. Thinking by concepts, is not merely seeing

reality on its most general side, but it is projecting a light upon the

sensation which illuminates it, penetrates it and transforms it.

Conceiving something is both learning its essential elements better and

also locating it in its place; for each civilization has its organized

system of concepts which characterizes it. Before this scheme of ideas,

the individual is in the same situation as the [Greek: noûs] of Plato

before the world of Ideas. He must assimilate them to himself, for he

must have them to hold intercourse with others; but the assimilation is

always imperfect. Each of us sees them after his own fashion. There are

some which escape us completely and remain outside of our circle of

vision; there are others of which we perceive certain aspects only.

There are even a great many which we pervert in holding, for as they are

collective by nature, they cannot become individualized without being

retouched, modified, and consequently falsified. Hence comes the great

trouble we have in understanding each other, and the fact that we even

lie to each other without wishing to: it is because we all use the same

words without giving them the same meaning.

We are now able to see what the part of society in the genesis of

logical thought is. This is possible only from the moment when, above

the fugitive conceptions which they owe to sensuous experience, men have

succeeded in conceiving a whole world of stable ideas, the common ground

of all intelligences. In fact, logical thinking is always impersonal

thinking, and is also thought _sub species ætrnitatis_--as though for

all time. Impersonality and stability are the two characteristics of

truth. Now logical life evidently presupposes that men know, at least

confusedly, that there is such a thing as truth, distinct from sensuous

appearances. But how have they been able to arrive at this conception?

We generally talk as though it should have spontaneously presented

itself to them from the moment they opened their eyes upon the world.

However, there is nothing in immediate experience which could suggest

it; everything even contradicts it. Thus the child and the animal have

no suspicion of it. History shows that it has taken centuries for it to

disengage and establish itself. In our Western world, it was with the

great thinkers of Greece that it first became clearly conscious of

itself and of the consequences which it implies; when the discovery was

made, it caused an amazement which Plato has translated into magnificent

language. But if it is only at this epoch that the idea is expressed in

philosophic formulæ, it was necessarily pre-existent in the stage of an

obscure sentiment. Philosophers have sought to elucidate this sentiment,

but they have not succeeded. In order that they might reflect upon it

and analyse it, it was necessary that it be given them, and that they

seek to know whence it came, that is to say, in what experience it was

founded. This is in collective experience. It is under the form of

collective thought that impersonal thought is for the first time

revealed to humanity; we cannot see by what other way this revelation

could have been made. From the mere fact that society exists, there is

also, outside of the individual sensations and images, a whole system of

representations which enjoy marvellous properties. By means of them, men

understand each other and intelligences grasp each other. They have

within them a sort of force or moral ascendancy, in virtue of which they

impose themselves upon individual minds. Hence the individual at least

obscurely takes account of the fact that above his private ideas, there

is a world of absolute ideas according to which he must shape his own;

he catches a glimpse of a whole intellectual kingdom in which he

participates, but which is greater than he. This is the first intuition

of the realm of truth. From the moment when he first becomes conscious

of these higher ideas, he sets himself to scrutinizing their nature; he

asks whence these pre-eminent representations hold their prerogatives

and, in so far as he believes that he has discovered their causes, he

undertakes to put these causes into action for himself, in order that he

may draw from them by his own force the effects which they produce; that

is to say, he attributes to himself the right of making concepts. Thus

the faculty of conception has individualized itself. But to understand

its origins and function, it must be attached to the social conditions

upon which it depends.

It may be objected that we show the concept in one of its aspects only,

and that its unique rôle is not the assuring of a harmony among minds,

but also, and to a greater extent, their harmony with the nature of

things. It seems as though it had a reason for existence only on

condition of being true, that is to say, objective, and as though its

impersonality were only a consequence of its objectivity. It is in

regard to things, thought of as adequately as possible, that minds ought

to communicate. Nor do we deny that the evolution of concepts has been

partially in this direction. The concept which was first held as true

because it was collective tends to be no longer collective except on

condition of being held as true: we demand its credentials of it before

according it our confidence. But we must not lose sight of the fact that

even to-day the great majority of the concepts which we use are not

methodically constituted; we get them from language, that is to say,

from common experience, without submitting them to any criticism. The

scientifically elaborated and criticized concepts are always in the very

slight minority. Also, between them and those which draw all their

authority from the fact that they are collective, there are only

differences of degree. A collective representation presents guarantees

of objectivity by the fact that it is collective: for it is not without

sufficient reason that it has been able to generalize and maintain

itself with persistence. If it were out of accord with the nature of

things, it would never have been able to acquire an extended and

prolonged empire over intellects. At bottom, the confidence inspired by

scientific concepts is due to the fact that they can be methodically

controlled. But a collective representation is necessarily submitted to

a control that is repeated indefinitely; the men who accept it verify it

by their own experience. Therefore, it could not be wholly inadequate

for its subject. It is true that it may express this by means of

imperfect symbols; but scientific symbols themselves are never more than

approximative. It is precisely this principle which is at the basis of

the method which we follow in the study of religious phenomena: we take

it as an axiom that religious beliefs, howsoever strange their

appearance may be at times, contain a truth which must be

discovered.[1311]

On the other hand, it is not at all true that concepts, even when

constructed according to the rules of science, get their authority

uniquely from their objective value. It is not enough that they be true

to be believed. If they are not in harmony with the other beliefs and

opinions, or, in a word, with the mass of the other collective

representations, they will be denied; minds will be closed to them;

consequently it will be as though they did not exist. To-day it is

generally sufficient that they bear the stamp of science to receive a

sort of privileged credit, because we have faith in science. But this

faith does not differ essentially from religious faith. In the last

resort, the value which we attribute to science depends upon the idea

which we collectively form of its nature and rôle in life; that is as

much as to say that it expresses a state of public opinion. In all

social life, in fact, science rests upon opinion. It is undoubtedly true

that this opinion can be taken as the object of a study and a science

made of it; this is what sociology principally consists in. But the

science of opinion does not make opinions; it can only observe them and

make them more conscious of themselves. It is true that by this means it

can lead them to change, but science continues to be dependent upon

opinion at the very moment when it seems to be making its laws; for, as

we have already shown, it is from opinion that it holds the force

necessary to act upon opinion.[1312]

Saying that concepts express the manner in which society represents

things is also saying that conceptual thought is coeval with humanity

itself. We refuse to see in it the product of a more or less retarded

culture. A man who did not think with concepts would not be a man, for

he would not be a social being. If reduced to having only individual

perceptions, he would be indistinguishable from the beasts. If it has

been possible to sustain the contrary thesis, it is because concepts

have been defined by characteristics which are not essential to them.

They have been identified with general ideas[1313] and with clearly

limited and circumscribed general ideas.[1314] In these conditions it

has possibly seemed as though the inferior societies had no concepts

properly so called; for they have only rudimentary processes of

generalization and the ideas which they use are not generally very well

defined. But the greater part of our concepts are equally indetermined;

we force ourselves to define them only in discussions or when doing

careful work. We have also seen that conceiving is not generalizing.

Thinking conceptually is not simply isolating and grouping together the

common characteristics of a certain number of objects; it is relating

the variable to the permanent, the individual to the social. And since

logical thought commences with the concept, it follows that it has

always existed; there is no period in history when men have lived in a

chronic confusion and contradiction. To be sure, we cannot insist too

much upon the different characteristics which logic presents at

different periods in history; it develops like the societies themselves.

But howsoever real these differences may be, they should not cause us to

neglect the similarities, which are no less essential.

IV

We are now in a position to take up a final question which has already

been raised in our introduction[1315] and which has been taken as

understood in the remainder of this work. We have seen that at least

some of the categories are social things. The question is where they got

this character.

Undoubtedly it will be easily understood that since they are themselves

concepts, they are the work of the group. It can even be said that there

are no other concepts which present to an equal degree the signs by

which a collective representation is recognized. In fact, their

stability and impersonality are such that they have often passed as

being absolutely universal and immutable. Also, as they express the

fundamental conditions for an agreement between minds, it seems evident

that they have been elaborated by society.