The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life

In anthropological and sociological usage, especially in older sources, “cult” does not refer to a schismatic or subversive religious group, as is commonly the case in popular use. Rather, “cult” designates the ritual elements of a religious system, often with reference to a single feature or subset of that system. Thus one may refer to the cult of a particular god, and thereby indicate the ritual worship devoted to that god within the context of a broader religious system.

In anthropology, magic refers to practices that are undertaken to exercise control over natural or spiritual forces. The practices of magic in any given society are usually considered as distinct from religious practices, though the two share the same cultural worldview. Magic is often viewed as subversive or inappropriate from the perspective of a given culture’s traditional religious framework, but it can still be widely practiced thanks to the assumed efficacy of its rituals. While some theorists at the turn of the 20th century believed that magic represented an earlier form of human religious development, Durkheim believes that religion was the prior social system, of which magic was a derivation.