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What if the sacred power people worship is the force of their own community?
In The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, Émile Durkheim asks what religion is and why it binds people together. He turns to reports about Aboriginal clans in Australia, examining the totems that organize their sacred life. His aim is to find the shared elements of religion beneath its many forms.
Durkheim follows the links between sacred emblems, souls, spirits and collective rites. He argues that religion expresses the power of the group, then carries that argument into the way people think. Even ideas of time, space and cause, he claims, have roots in social life. The stakes reach beyond belief to the foundations of thought.
What you’ll discover
- The sacred beyond gods Explore why Durkheim starts with the sacred rather than belief in supernatural beings.
- A clan's sacred emblem See how plants and animals become totems within the clan life Durkheim describes.
- The force of gathering Follow his account of how shared rites renew a group's sense of itself.
- Souls and social life Trace his argument that ideas of the soul grow from collective religious life.
- The roots of reason Consider his bold claim that basic categories of thought arise from social life.
Who will love it
This book suits readers curious about why people gather to worship, anyone who enjoys a bold theory argued from evidence, and students of sociology, anthropology, religion or philosophy.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Religion begins in shared life
- Religion sets sacred things apart
- Dreams and nature leave something unexplained
- The emblem holds the sacred power
- Social groups become patterns for thought
- The clan worships its own force
- Souls and gods share one source
- Rites renew the community
- Shared life shapes belief and thought
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The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
by Émile Durkheim · 1912
Australian clans paint totems on their bodies and bleed on sacred rocks, and Durkheim asks what they really worship.
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“In reality, then, no religions are false.”
In short
What do you think a group of people worships when they paint a kangaroo on their skin and open a vein over a sacred rock? Émile Durkheim says they worship themselves, though they do not know it. His answer rests on the religion of Aboriginal Australian clans, which he treats as the simplest religion known.
The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life at a glance
- Reading time
- About 13 h 30 min10 h 40 min fast, 16 h slow
- Length
- 192,400 words
- Library level
- Challenging long sentences, a rich vocabulary
- First published
- 1912by Émile Durkheim
Reading time at 238 words a minute (fast 300, slow 200). How long the classics take to read · Updated
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
Study the simplest religion to find its core
Durkheim opens with a method. To learn what religion is at its core, he says, study the simplest case you can find, because simple cases strip away decoration. Religions such as those of Egypt, India or Greece pile up priests, theologians and layers of doctrine. The essential parts hide under all that growth.
He chooses the clan societies of Australia. Their social organization is the simplest known, and the rites are made of a few gestures repeated again and again. In such a setting the raw material of religion lies open to view.
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Details
- First published
- 1912
- Language
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- Level
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Cite this edition
Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Library of Alexandria, 2026, libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-elementary-forms-of-the-religious-life.
Durkheim, É. (2026). The elementary forms of the religious life. Library of Alexandria. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-elementary-forms-of-the-religious-life (Original work published 1912)
Durkheim, Émile. The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. Library of Alexandria, 2026. https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-elementary-forms-of-the-religious-life.
@book{durkheim2026elementary,
author = {Durkheim, Émile},
title = {The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life},
publisher = {Library of Alexandria},
year = {2026},
url = {https://libraryofalexandria.com/products/the-elementary-forms-of-the-religious-life},
note = {First published 1912}
}
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What is The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life about?
It is a study of the simplest religion known, the totemic clans of Aboriginal Australia, used to explain what religion is. Durkheim argues that religion expresses and renews the life of a community, and that sacred symbols stand for society itself.
What is a totem in Durkheim's book?
A totem is the animal, plant or other thing whose name a clan bears and whose image it carries as an emblem. Members share its name and a sense of kinship, and the emblem becomes the clan's chief sacred object.
What does Durkheim mean by sacred and profane?
Sacred things are objects, words, places or beings set apart and protected by prohibitions. Profane things belong to ordinary daily life. Durkheim holds that every religion divides the world this way, and that the two realms must be kept apart.
The author
Émile Durkheim
1858–1917 · French sociologist
Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist born in Épinal in 1858. He taught in Bordeaux and later in Paris, where he died in 1917. His books include The Division of Labour in Society (1893), Suicide (1897), and The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912).
“In reality, then, no religions are false.”
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