The elementary forms of religious life

Introduction

• A fundamental postulate of sociology is that a human institution cannot rest upon error and falsehood; if it did, it could not endure. If it had not been grounded in the nature of things, those very things would hinder its perpetuation.

• Disagree. Institutions can rest in falsehood, so long as that falsehood provides an adaptive benefit. In the short term, this can work; it’s true, however, that long term those falsehoods will clash with reality. The human condition itself—the biological condition even—is rested on falsehood: each biological agent acts under the inherent assumption that they—or their offspring—are the most important biological agent there is. Otherwise, they would cease to exist.

• “But we must know how to reach beneath the symbol to grasp the reality it represents and that gives the symbol its true meaning.”
• Durkheim calls religions true insofar as they all fulfill a human need
• “Religious representation are collective representations that express collective realities; rites are ways of acting that are born only in the midst of assembled groups and whose purpose it’s to evoke, maintain, or recreate certain mental states of those groups.”
• “A calendar expresses the rhythm of collective activity while ensuring its regularity.”
• How has reason gained the power to outperform empirical cognition? Note some mysterious virtue, “but simply to the fact that…man is double. In him are two beings: an individual being that has its basis in the body and whose sphere of action is strictly limited by this fact, and a social being that represents within us the highest reality in the intellectual and the moral realm that is knowable through observation.
• Societies/religions “appear as ingenious instruments of thought, which human groups have painstakingly forged over centuries, and in which they have amassed the best of their intellectual capital. A whole aspect of human history, in a way, is summed up in them.”

Book One: Preliminary questions

Chapter 1: Definition of religious phenomena and of religion

• “Religious conceptions aim above all to express and explain not what is exceptional and abnormal but what is constant and regular.”

• This reminds of an analogy Tolstoy made, where what is remembered by history is that which grabs the most attention (the exceptional and abnormal). History is like a forest, and the attention grabbing stuff is what we see on the horizon of the forest’s surface (the leaves and trunks), and to characterize a forest by its leaves is to miss the dense activity that occurs beneath.

• “Any notions that equates religion with the unexpected [the supernatural] is wide of the mark.”

• Religions do not require belief in spiritual beings. Consider Buddhism, with its four noble truths: 1) the existence of suffering is tied to the perpetual change of things; 2) suffering is caused by desire; 3) the only way to end suffering is to suppress desire; and 4) uprightness, meditation, and wisdom (full knowledge of the doctrine) must be followed to approach nirvana.

• Desire implies that there is a time (that is not the present) at which you will be more happy, which means you must be less happy with the present.

• There are rites without gods, and the belief with these rites is that they produce the desired result. These rites would have sustained themselves owing to their efficacy. If they proved non-efficacious and did not generate the desired results, the movements executed would either be deemed poorly performed or the rite would be dropped.
• Religions involve beliefs and rites—action motivated by those beliefs.

• A fundamental religious belief is the duality of the sacred and profane. Man creates a chasm between these two, for if they mingle the water is muddied and confusion is introduced in what to strive for or avoid, but they both also need each other, for without the profane there would be no need for the sacred, and the worship of the sacred is what defines religions.

• Yin and yang

• “Religious beliefs are those representations that express the nature of sacred things and the relations they have with other sacred things or with profane things. Finally, rites are rules of conduct that prescribe how man must conduct himself with sacred things.”
• “When a number of sacred things have relations of coordination and subordination with one another, so to form a system that has coherence and does not belong to any other system of the same sort, then the beliefs and rite, taken together, constitute a religion.”
• Religious beliefs proper are always shared across the group and practiced together. “The individuals comprising the group feel joined to one another by the fact of common faith.”
• A Church is not just a brotherhood—a college of priests cloistered from a community is no different than a private cult, it is a moral community composed of all that are faithful, priests and commoners alike.
• Durkheim’s definition of religion: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and oracles which unit into one single moral community called a Church.”

Chapter 2: The leading conceptions of the elementary religion

• Animism

• One theory for animism involves the idea of souls (that can posses us or others) arising due dreaming. Used as a way to explain dreaming, the theory goes that the soul roams around while the dreamer sleeps. Durkheim refutes this. Our dreams involve others, but if we were to ask others whether their souls saw ours in the dream, the dreams wouldn’t coincide. Also, just because we don’t understand something, doesn’t mean we feel the need to explain it. The Sun was thought to be only several feet in diameter for much of humanity’s history. If the unknown about something does nothing to hinder us, the unknown can remain hidden for all we care.

• “Man is in relationship not only with a physical milieu, but also with a social milieu that is infinitely more extensive, stable, and powerful than those to whose influence animals are subject. In order to live, then, he must adapt to it.”
• “Once anger is aroused by the pain, it seeks something on which to discharge itself; the anger naturally goes to the very same thing that provoked it, even though that thing can do nothing.”
• Australian and North American native cultures suggest that the religious man likely started out not by seeing the image of man in things, but seeing himself in the image of things (like other plants and animals)
• The elementary words in ancient societies have tended to be verbs, particularly those relevant to human action: striking, pushing, lifting, climbing, etc. “Man generalized and named his principal modes of action before generalizing and naming the phenomena of nature.”
• In order to maintain itself for a considerable amount of time, an idea or practice must be practically true, that is, an idea that is theoretically incorrect but that still confers benefits that sustain the believer.
• “Let us therefore guard against differentiating among religious beliefs, keeping some because they seem just and wholesome, to us, and rejecting others as unworthy of being called religious because they offend and unsettle us. All myths, even those we find most unreasonable, have been objects of faith. Man believed in them no less than in his own sensations; he regulated his conduct in accordance with them. Despite appearances, therefore, they cannot be with objective foundation.”
• Durkheim claims awe probably wouldn’t have stimulated early religious growth. Primitive humans had not developed science to the extent we had, and thus did not have access to its modesty enhancing nature. They thought they had dominion over the natural world: unchain the wind, force rain to fall, etc.
• Deified natural phenomena in earliest religions were not related to the sun, the moon, the sky (this came about more recently), but to humble plants and animals that the humans were in constant relationship with and on equal footing with.

Chapter 4: Totemism as elementary religion

Book 2: the elementary beliefs

Chapter 1: the principal totemic beliefs

• “While the Australian has quite a strong inclination to represent his totem, he does not do so in order to have a portrait before his eyes that perpetually renews the sensation of it; he does so simply because he feels the need to represent the idea he has by means of an outward physical sign, no matter what that sign may be.”

• Early totems were and symboles derived from it were not precise for some Australians like they were in America. Symbols could even change, but the clan members’ attitudes towards it would remain constant.

• Images of totemic beings are more sacred than the totemic being itself. If the being is a kangaroo, the religious paraphernalia symbolizing the kangaroo is more sacred. Women and uninitiated children (belonging to the profane) may touch a kangaroo, but are under no circumstances allowed to touch the paraphernalia or partake in religious ceremony
• In primitive australian clans, “There is no religious ceremony in which blood does not have some role to play.” Blood is seen as sacred, elders may spread their sacred blood on the initiated, or the penis blood from a subincision may be collected and buried somewhere. Women are forbidden from coming anywhere near these rituals.
• The early Australian indigenous considered “the universe as a large tribe to one of whose divisions he belongs; and all things that are classified in the same group as he, both animate and inanimate, are parts of the body of which he himself is a part.” The divisions are drawn based on different human social organizations, i.e., tribes. The crow clan may belong to a division with rain and thunder, while the pelican clan with fire and frost.
• Durkheim claims that “society furnished the canvas on which logical thought has worked.” An example is that to categorize inanimate and animate into hierarchies requires some notion of hierarchy itself, which doesn’t really exist in benign nature. Hierarchy is more constrained to human society, where superiors, subordinates, and equals exist. He claims that the notion of hierarchical classification could not exist without society
• Totemic tribes were not separated and completely autonomous, worshipping their own totem while ignoring the rest. Instead, all totems implied the others, being “only one part of the same whole, an element of the same religion. The men of a clan in no way regard the beliefs of the neighbouring clans with indifference, skepticism, or hostility that is ordinarily inspired by a religion to which one is a stranger; they themselves share the beliefs.”
• Among the sexes of tribes in Australia, there is a tendency for each sex to have their own totem, each descended from a legendary couple. “Each sex not only honors its totem but also forces the members of the other sex to do so as well. Any violation of this prohibition gives rise to a real and bloody battles between men and women.”

Chapter 5: Origins of these beliefs

• North American aboriginals conceptualized “god” as mana, wakan, or one of many other names. This was a sort of force that flowed through all things, causing active movement and passive resistance. If man was thriving, it was because he had much mana. If a prey evaded a predator, it was because the prey was rich in mana
• Two key ideas to aboriginal faith: all things are imbued with a common life-principle, and life is continuous. “This common life-principle is wakan. The totem is the means by which the individual is put in touch with that source of energy.” If the totem has powers, it is only because wakan flows through it
• The Australian conception of manas/wakan was more narrow, applying to all things. But, their conception of all things was more constrained and local.

• In early Australian totemism, “cults are juxtaposed but not interpenetrating. The totem of a clan is fully sacred only for that clan…Each of them is imagined as being irreducible to similar groups that are radically discontinuous with it and constitutions what amounts to a distinct realm. Under these conditions, it would occur to no one that these heterogeneous worlds were only different manifestations of one and the same fundamental force.”

• Much like the religious landscape of today.

• While manas, the life force, is heterogeneous and coloured by tribal boundaries, magical death forces are homogenous and float above the divisions and subdivisions of social organization.
• “The totemic cult proper is addressed neither to such and such definite animals nor to such and such definite plants but to a sort of diffuse power that permeates things.”
• The totem expresses two things: a visible symbolic expression of the totemic principle or god, and a visible mark of distinctiveness that distinguishes one society from another. “Thus, if the totem is the symbol of both for and the society, is this not because the god and the society are one and the same?…Thus the god of the clan, the totemic principle, can be none other than the clan itself, but the clan transfigured and imagined in the physical form of the plant or animal that serves as totem.”
• “A society is to its members what a god is to its faithful.”
• A god is a being that “man conceives as superior to himself and one on whom he believes he depends…Society also fosters in us the sense of perpetual dependence.”
• “Precisely because society has its own specific nature that is different from our nature as individuals, it pursues ends that are also specifically its own; but because it can achieve those ends only by working through us, it categorically demands our cooperation. Society requires us to make ourselves its servants, forgetful of our own interests. And it subjects us to all sorts of restraints, privations, and sacrifices without which social like would be impossible. And so, at every instant, we must submit to rules of action and thought that we have neither made nor wanted and that sometimes are contrary to our inclinations and to our most basic instincts.”
• These sacrif may be physically imposed, but in society they tend to be psychologically imposed. Rather than physical coercion, society works through our consciousness, guiding our actions via a sort of moral influence. This feels right, this feels wrong. God generates those feelings; the hands of god mould us into what interest the society
• “It is society that speaks through the mouths of those who affirm [moral opinions] in our presence; it is society that we hear when we hear them; and the voice of all itself has a tone that an individual voice cannot have.”
• “Some will object that science is often the antagonist of opinion, the errors of which it combats and corrects. But science can succeed in this task only if it has sufficient authority, and it can gain such authority only from opinion itself. All the scientific demonstrations in the world would have no influence if a people had no faith in science. Even today, if it should happen that science resisted a very powerful current of public opinion, it would run the risk of seeing its credibility eroded.”
• “Because social pressure makes itself felt through mental channels, it was bound to give man the idea that outside him there are one or several powers, moral yet mighty, to which he is subject. Since they speak to him in a tone of command, and sometimes even tell him to violate his most natural inclinations, man was bound to imagine them as being external to him. […] the ordinary observer cannot see where the influence of society comes from. It moves along channels that are too obscure and circuitous, and uses psychic mechanisms that are too complex, to be easily traced to the source.”
• Speaks of collective effervescence, but also of those who speak to and on behalf of large groups. Durkheim claims they tend to become “impatient of limits and slip easily into every kind of extreme.” And how couldn’t they; the thrust of a massive group flows through them as they speak. “It is then no longer a mere individual who speak but a group incarnated and personified.”
• “We cannot help but feel that this [moral thrust generated by society that we feel within ourselves] has an external cause, though we do not see where that cause it or what it is. So we readily conceive of it in the form of a moral power that, while immanent in us, also represents something in us that is other than ourselves.”
• Durkheim explains how we speak languages we did not create, inherit knowledge we did not amass ourselves, and so on. With this inheritance we feel a sense of majesty and awe for the large forces of society. “Because we feel the weight of them, we have no choice but to locate them outside ourselves, as we do for the objective causes of our sensations.” But, simple physical sensations do not bear this immense weight, and so are not considered sacred as are the forces of society.
• “If society should happen to become infatuated with a man, believing it has found in him its deepest aspiration as well as the means of fulfilling them, then that man will be put in a class by himself and virtually deified. Opinion will confer on him a grandeur that is similar in every way to the grandeur that protects the gods.”
• In a similar way to men, ideas become subject to society’s infatuation. “When a belief is shared unanimously by a people, to touch it—that is, to deny or question it—is forbidden.”
• The life of the Australian Aboriginal divides into two phases: 1) monotonous, somewhat solitary economic activity to sustain one’s family; 2) religious congregations. In stark contrast to the monotony of the economic phase, religious congregations are met with incredible excitement that overwhelm tribe members, causing them to howl and bite and throw dust in excitement. During the ceremonies, they howl and sing in unison, and strike shields as drums in hopes to represent their awesome psychic feelings.

• During these congregations, participants often get carried away. Typical taboos , like the intermingling of the sexes (which during normal times remain separate), trading of wives, and the odd engagement in incestuous relations (which are normally strictly forbidden)

• Sounds like the typical rave

• “It is not difficult to imagine that a man in such a state of exaltation should no longer know himself. Feeling possessed and led on by some sort of external power that makes him think and act differently than he normally does, he naturally feels he is no longer himself. It seems to him that he has become a new being. The decorations with which he is decked out, and the masklike decorations that cover his face, represent this inward transformation even more than they help bring it about. And because his companions feel transformed in the same way at the same moment, and express this feeling by their shouts, movements, and bearing, it is as if he was in reality transported into a special world entirely different from the one in which he ordinarily lives, a special world inhabited by exceptionally intense forces that invade and transform him… In one world he languidly carries on his daily life; the other is one that he cannot enter without abruptly entering into relations with extraordinary powers that excite him to the point of frenzy.”
• “Religion was able to be the womb in which the principal seeds of human civilization has developed.” Early religion described the forces that move both bodies (manas) and minds (manas as well, but with a larger moral/sacred weight). And it is religious practices that ensured the “continuity of moral life (law, morals, fine arts) and those that are useful to material life (natural sciences, technology).”
• “As [the primitive] imagines it, the power to which the cult is addressed does not loom far above, crushing him with its superiority; instead, it is very near and bestows upon him useful abilities that he is not born with…In sum, joyful confidence, rather than terror or constraint, is at the root of totemism.”
• When religions ascribe moral power to symbols, rites, and stories, they are not duped by illusion. “The main object of religion is not to give man a representation of the natural universe…But religion is first and foremost a system of ideas by means of which individuals imagines the society of which they are members and the obscure yet intimate relations they have with it…And although this representation is symbolic and metaphorical, it is not unfaithful. It fully translates the essence of the relations to be accounted for. It is true with a truth that is eternal that there exists outside us something greater than we and with which we commune.”
• “A very intense social life always does a sort of violence to the individual’s body and mind and disrupts their normal functioning.”
• “And although the moral force that sustains the worshipper does not come from the idol he worships or the emblem he venerates, still it is external to him; and he feels this. The objectivity of the symbol is but an expression of that externality.”
• Tribes could not be identified by a leader, since leadership shifted and was unstable, nor based on location since tribes were nomadic. A symbolic representation in the form of the totem formed a stable entity onto which society could latch
• Durkheim proposes that religion is what bridged the gap between the discrete. The senses alone divide to understand, the collective sense endowed upon man by religion connected the divided, connecting man to the animal or plant that his totem represented, and seeing them as belonging to the same nature.
• “Nowhere can a collective feeling become conscious of itself without fixing upon a tangible object.”
• “The great service that religions have rendered to thought is to have constructed a first representation of what the relations of kinship between things might be…As soon as man became aware that internal connections exist between things, science and philosophy became possible.”

Ch 8: The notion of soul

• The notion of soul appears in pretty much every Australian tribe. Their conceptions are vague, but the soul generally finds its home in the body and once death occurs, the soul escape, or is encouraged by ritual to escape, where it then travels to a world beyond. Concepts similar to heaven and hell existed, although more local and less mythological. More respected individuals see their souls benefitting from higher status in the afterlife as well.
• Most tribes conceptualized the soul as coming from a finite bank of souls, the originated from the uncreated beings that always were. The uncreated beings used to roam the earth, but when that period ended they became one with the earth and their souls dispersed. Since then, their souls have been recycled, first passing through ancestors (which started as demigods, half man half totem animal/plant) until eventually reaching the people of the present. This is the totemic principle incarnated in each individual, an individualization of the invisible social phenomena that compels man to act with the best interest of the group in mind
• “In short, just as society exists only through individuals, the totemic principle lives only in and through the individual consciousnesses whose coming together forms the clan. If they did not feel the totemic principle within them, it would not be; it is they who put it into things. And so it must subdivide and fragment among individuals. Each of these fragments is a soul.”
• Reincarnation isn’t much of a thing in these tribes. It happens only rarely that a soul reemerges in a new life, generally the soul leaves off to the land of the dead, returning only briefly to encourage development of the lineage. It’s more incarnation; the highest totemic ancestor gives a part of itself each time a new member is conceived and born. The totem—the society—flows into this new member, establishing that they are connected to the societal construct that holds the society together.

• “When the civilizing hero Mangakunjerkunja gave a personal churinga to each member of the Kangaroo clan, he spoke these words: ‘Here is the body of a kangaroo.’ In this way, the churinga is the body of the ancestor, the actual individual, and the totemic animal, all at once.”

• Similar to Christianity, where participants are given the body of Christ. Also similar to the holy trinity, where the ancestor is like the father, the individual the son, and the totemic animal the Holy Spirit. The force connecting the three is God, or, equivalently, the society

• “Although our moral conscience is part of our consciousness, we do not feel on an equal footing with it. We cannot recognize our own voice in that voice that makes itself heard only to order us to do some things and not to do others. The very tone in which it speaks announces that it is expressing something in us that is other than us. This is what is objective about the idea of the soul. […] It is true that our nature is double; there truly is a parcel of divinity in us, because there is in us a parcel of the grand ideals that are the soul of collectivity.”
• “A thing is sacred because, in some way, it inspires a collective feeling of respect that removes it from profane contact.”
• What makes something sacred are the feelings it evokes. “This is why the Arunta could be led to see the churinga as the body common to the individual, the ancestor, and even the totemic being. It is a way of saying to himself that the feelings which those different things evoke are identical.”
• Durkheim argues that the immortality of the soul naturally follows from man’s recognition that while individuals die, the clan survives, “so the forces that constitute his life must have the same perpetuity. These forces are the souls that animate individual bodies, because it is in and by them that the group realizes itself. For that reason, they must endure.” And “since it is always the same clan with the same totemic principle, it must also be the same souls” that are merely fragments of the same totemic principle
• A conception of continuity/immortality of the soul is useful in making the continuity/immortality of the longer-lasting collective intelligible.

• “The determinism that reigns in that world of representations is thus far more supple than the determinism that is roots in our flesh-and-blood constitution, and it leaves the agent with a justified impression of greater liberty.”

• Thinking of religious myths and modern sociological absurdities.

Chapter 9: The notion of spirits and gods

• “Time itself increases and reinforces the sacredness of things. A very old churinga elicits far greater respect than a modern one and is thought to have more virtues.”
• The soul of a man is in his religion, and the soul of his religion is in him. In essence, “it is one soul in two bodies.”
• Most forces back then were thought of in religious form. “A religious principle is regarded as the source of life; hence it was logical for all the events that disturb or destroy life to be brought back to a principle of the same kind.”
• The purpose of initiation is to create men, so the god of which the initiation is centred must be a creative god.

Book 3: The principal modes of ritual conduct

Chapter 1: The negative cult and its functions (The ascetic rites)

• Religious days of rest break man from the profane self-serving of secular needs (gathering material resources), which are incompatible with the sacred. Man cannot approach god (the representation of the group) intimately while serving himself. Ritual cessation of work divides the sacred from profane.

• Religious and profane life do not cohere. To establish authority, the sacred must be established in space—temples or sanctuaries—and in time—holy days. These delineations in space and time make the sacred more tangible; separating the greatness of the group from the feebleness of the individuals. Utility for the group versus utility for individuals.

• The delineations can blend into each other. One can perform personal religious rites at home or daily. But these will always be second tier to rites performed in temples or on holy days.

• In quite a few Australian tribes, the word for initiation is “that which is of the forest.” Young men will go to the forest for months with some godfathers, marked with the occasional rite throughout. Rigorous fasting occurs, some can’t bathe, some can’t speak, some must beg for food, some must remain immobile. The young man must bring himself to his lowest point to acknowledge his limited nature and gain access to the unlimited, highest good (the good of the group)
• “The grandeur of man is made manifest by the way he braves pain. Never does he rise above himself more spectacularly than when he subdues his nature to the point of making it follow a path contrary to the one it would take on its own. […] By the very act of renouncing things, he has risen above things. Because he has silenced his nature, he is stronger than nature.”
• Religious interests are just societal and moral interests in symbolic form.
• “Religious forces are in fact only transfigured collective forces, […] they are made of ideas and feeling that the spectacle of society awakens in us, not of sensations that come to us from the physical world.”
• Religious forces flow to and from objects like energy. The objects themselves are impartial to the force, and any object can be chosen to embody the spirit. The spirit lies within the consciousness, not within the object.
• Religious/sacred contagion served to connect things that sensation leaves separate from one another. It is the source of bringing together and mixing that lays the pathway towards later scientific understanding.

Chapter 2: The Positive Cult

• “At the beginning, sacrifice is instituted not to create a bond of artificial kinship between man and his gods but to maintain and renew the natural kinship that at the beginning of time united men.”
• Sacrifice isn’t necessarily only an act of renunciation, but one of alimentary communion (what is alimentary? — nourishing, sustenant).
• Australian clans often have rituals that encourage the fertility of their totem plant/animal, where dust or blood is spread to distribute seeds of growth. “It is man who makes his gods endure; but at the same time, it is through them that he himself endures. […] He gives to sacred beings a little of what he receives from them and he receives from them, all that he gives them.”
• Sacredness symbols exist only in the minds that think of them. Sacred energy achieves greatest intensity when individuals assemble and relate directly with each other, and that energy dissolves when individuals return to everyday life. Rituals are needed to revitalize sacred energy, to bring back shared attention to the sacred and remind individuals in its value to the whole.
• “The only way to renew the collective representations that refer to sacred beings is to plunge them again into the very source of religious life: assembled groups.” - Rebirth and reinforcement of the sacred occurs in assembly
• Men could not live without gods, but gods do not live if not worshipped. The purpose of cult is not only to put the profane in communion with the sacred, but to also keep the sacred beings alive through perpetual reawakening and regeneration.
• Material offerings do not regenerate gods in themselves, but the act of offering reawakens the idea of the sacred in those who offer, which nourishes their shared conception of god.
• The raison d’être of religions is not to be found in the specific actions prescribed, but in the moral renewal that the actions bring about.
• Material offerings are not about the material itself. The quantity and quality of the offering are but proportional reflections of the strength of the offerer’s thought.
• “What the worshipper in reality gives his god is not the food he places on the altar or the blood that he causes to flow from his veins: It is his thought.”
• Individuals get the best parts of themselves from society: language, sciences, arts, moral beliefs. Society only lives through individuals; if the idea of society was extinguished in individual minds—beliefs, traditions, and collective aspirations—the society would die. Individuals cannot do without society (god) no more than society (god) can do without individuals.

Chapter 3: Mimetic Rites and the Principle of Causality

• Aboriginal mimetic rites, where the totemic animal or plant is mimicked, are performed by the clan member to bring about more of that being. The kangaroo clan jump around to bring about more kangaroos. But the actual motivation of mimetic rites is to reinforce and regenerate the kinship and collective belief of the clan.
• The power of religious rites over minds, which is real, makes participants believe in its power over things, which is imaginary.
• “The faithful are in general left indifferent by the facile criticisms that a simplistic rationalism has sometimes leveled against ritual prescriptions. The true justification of religious practices is not in the apparent ends they pursue but in their invisible influence over consciousnesses and in their manner of affecting our states of mind.”
• A preacher focuses less on establishing with systematic proof the truth of some practice or proposition, than upon awakening the sense of moral support that regular religious celebration invokes. In this way, a predisposition towards believing in advance of proof—a leap towards believing—is nourished, which forms the basis of faith.

• “Cause is force before it has manifested the power that is in it. Effect is the same power, but actualized.”

• Potential energy versus kinetic.

• When something that influences us is located beyond consciousness, say a stubbed toe, the force that stubbed the toe isn’t felt, the sensations it caused are. Yet, moral conscience is a force that acts within us, can be felt intimately, yet it is impersonal. It speaks against us at times. That impersonality yet intimacy yields notions of gods (impersonal and powerful) and souls (personal and intimate).

Chapter 4: Representative and commemorative rites

• The physical efficacy of religious practices ascribed by the faithful is an interpretation that masks their true function: “to remake individually and groups morally.” That is, to sustain and proliferate the identity of the group.

• Think religious wears: hijabs or turbans; circumcision; baptism; fasts: ramadan, lent.

• Group mythology revitalizes the collective spirit and maintains collective beliefs, generally by recounting stories of past. The further back the story goes and the more formidable the feats, the more inspired one’s faith.

Chapter 5: Mourning rites

• When someone passes, the clan beat, slash, and burn themselves in agony. This self-mutilation is socially obligatory; if relatives do not engage, they risk being cursed. This is another instance of the group reinforcing their bond through heightened emotion. The clan suffers a loss, so heightened negative emotions—greater than the loss may deserve—are expressed to bring the group even closer together. The loss, in a way, makes them stronger. Heightened emotions ensure this. Collective effervescence applies for negative emotions, too.
• Whether positive or negative, beneficent or horrific gods are just collective expressions made manifest. When a group is at risk of drought, for example, the group feels bad and presses this feeling into individuals. Positive or negative emotions gave rise to gods and demons, it is not the other way around.

• “However complex the outward manifestations of religious life may be, its inner essence is simple […] Everywhere it fulfills the same need and derives from the same state of mind. In all its form; its object is to lift man above himself and to make him live a higher life than he would if he obeyed only his individual impulses. The beliefs express this life in terms of representations; the rites organize and regulate its functioning.