‘The believer who has communicated with his god is not merely a man who
sees new truths of which the unbeliever is ignorant; he is a man who is
stronger’ (595/416). Durkheim’s emphasis on religion as a form of action as
well as thought thus has two important ideas, each ‘irrationalist’ in disposition
and Calvinist in origin. The first was ‘the ritual theory of myth’, inspired by
Robertson Smith and later applied to the study of classical antiquity by the
Cambridge Ritualists (see Smith 1889/1972:18–20; Ackerman 1975, 1987;
Jones and Vogt 1984).