The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life [Audiobook]

Religion is at the heart of man’s societies. ‘For a long time,’ Durkheim writes early on in his book, ‘it has been known that the first systems of representations with which men have pictured to themselves the world and themselves were of religious origin.’ Durkheim decided to examine how and why this phenomenon functioned and evolved - by looking specifically at simple societies and their religions, rather than at religions in more complex or developed societies. By examining the religious belief systems, their stories and their structures from sociological and anthropological perspectives, he set out to explore the way religions emerged from the group and what they represented for the group. All judgments on the religious content were suspended. What were the practices, the ethics, what were the beliefs, and how did they reflect and interact with the society from which they sprang?