IT HAS BEEN SOME TIME since the question of the origin of religion was seriously entertained. Today, there is little sign of the matter ever being resuscitated and once again becoming the focus of lively debate as of old; for, looking upon the bold speculations of the forefathers-names such as F. Max MUller, W. Robertson Smith, and James Frazer immediately come to mind-contemporary scholars of religion tend to consider themselves to be in a new phase of scholarship, having learned, above all, not to ask impossible questions. After all, those grand old ideas, or so-called theories of the origin of religion, were conceived by the powerful Victorian imagination in the lacunae of concrete data and naturally turned out to be stillborn, or so we have been told; and if we still study these ideas today, it is supposedly only to assist their decorous burial. Still, it is the prerogative of origin as such, than the paucity of factual grounding, that has come under suspicion in recent times, together with the assumption of the unity, simplicity, and self-identity of absolute beginning-in short, all of the pristine metaphysics of presence/permanence/plenitude that the concept of origin is said to embody. In this connection we have also come to see that the sovereignty of the author/originator over his text is as imaginary as any other assumption of a unitary origin. In light of this general critique, it might seem a questionable endeavor to draw attention once again to the dubious exploits of those great books that so unambiguously set out in search of origins many decades ago, the books that are now laid to rest in the sepulchral category called classics. On the other hand, if we are to encounter some unlaid ghost at the burial site of one of such classics, the uncanny double of the author/master might tell us stories than the dead master had ever dreamt, or would have allowed. Though perhaps not a literary match for the purple prose of Frazer's Golden Bough, Emile Durkheim's Elementary Forms of the Religious Life'-by common accord ... Durkheim's most ambitious work2 is counted among the masterful performances of the speculative genius. The year was 1912; the objective, the excavation of the origin of religion; and the general context of discussion, totemism, which the author estimated to be the more fundamental and primitive of all the known forms of religion (107). In the course of several hun-