ABSTRACT
“Sacred,” entered English from the earlier French sacre around the twelfth or thirteenth century, originally deriving from the ancient Latin verb sacrare and the related adjective sacer. Durkheim thought about religion in ways that were contrary to what was the already well-established tradition across Europe of defining religion as the outward expressions of prior private experience or individual feeling or sentiment, and in a way that is important to distinguish from the Eliadean preference for the noun “the sacred”. Taking etymology seriously, Durkheim’s definition places front and center the presumption that human actors are the signifiers and that devising and then enacting their rule systems is what quite literally sets things apart and thereby makes them seem to be sacred to members of such groups. Simply recounting, regardless the level of detail, that something is either sacred or profane tells the critical scholar nothing other than that their work to understand the people.
