ABSTRACT
The concentration on sacrifice is hardly surprising to anyone familiar with Robertson Smith's classic Lectures on the Religion of the Semites. In the Elementary Forms, for example, Emile Durkheim applauded Smith's argument that magic is opposed to religion as the individual is opposed to the social. The notable exception was Arthur Sykes's Essay on the Nature, Design, and Origin of Sacrifice , which at least hinted that the rite involved a meal shared in fellowship with the god, and that its function was to symbolize, renew, and reaffirm social bonds. In the Prolegomena, however, this position was joined with another still more controversial argument: a major re-interpretation of the original nature of Hebrew sacrifice. Durkheim explored his new ideas in a series of lecture courses at the Sorbonne; and with the completion of the Elementary Forms, he began La Morale, whose projected contents read like a full-scale revision of Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative.
