Sacred and Profane (Émile Durkheim)
Émile Durkheim's sociological theory of religion, presented in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), argues that the fundamental distinction in religious thought is between the sacred (objects, spaces, times, and persons set apart from ordinary life and treated with special reverence and danger) and the profane (ordinary, everyday, accessible), and that what religious ritual actually does is create social solidarity by generating collective emotional experience (collective effervescence) that the group projects onto sacred symbols, the god is the society worshipping itself.
Durkheim's theory was built from the study of Australian Aboriginal totemism, the practice of identifying a clan with a specific animal or plant (the totem) that serves as the clan's sacred symbol. Durkheim's insight: the totem is simultaneously the group's god and the group's symbol. When Aboriginals revere the eagle-hawk totem, they are expressing reverence for the clan itself, in projected form. Religion is not about supernatural beings but about the social group's self-worship, the mechanism through which a society maintains its collective identity, transmits its values, and generates the emotional solidarity that holds it together.
Collective effervescence, Durkheim's term for the heightened emotional state generated by collective ritual, is the empirical heart of the theory. When people gather for religious ceremonies, the emotional intensity produced by synchronized movement, chanting, shared focus, and physical proximity generates an experience of something larger than the individual self that participants interpret as contact with the sacred. Durkheim's point: this experience is real (the emotional and neurological state is genuinely produced), but its source is social, not supernatural. The sacred is the social made transcendent.
The sacred/profane distinction has proven more durable than the specifically sociological conclusion: the recognition that human communities universally mark certain objects, spaces, times, and persons as set apart from ordinary life, as requiring special behavior, special reverence, special danger, is confirmed by cross-cultural anthropology. The sacred is not culturally arbitrary (some things are universally or near-universally treated as potentially sacred: the dead, birth, threshold crossings, leaders, religious specialists) but culturally inflected (which specific symbols carry sacred status varies by tradition).
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Frequently asked questions
What did Durkheim mean by sacred and profane? ＋
Sacred: objects, spaces, times, and persons set apart from ordinary life, treated with special reverence and danger. Profane: ordinary, everyday, accessible. Durkheim's argument: religious ritual creates collective effervescence (heightened emotional state from synchronized collective action) that generates social solidarity, the god is the society projecting itself onto a sacred symbol. Built from study of Australian Aboriginal totemism: the totem is simultaneously the group's god and the group's collective symbol.