Referencing Huston Smith's The World's Religions and Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, how did the emergence of sacred thought...

In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim defined religion as composed of rites (modes of action) and beliefs (collective representations). He writes that all religious beliefs do the following:

They presuppose a classification of all the things, real and ideal, of which men think, into two classes or opposed groups, generally designated by two distinct terms which are translated well enough by the words profane and sacred.

In other words, the emergence of...

In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim defined religion as composed of rites (modes of action) and beliefs (collective representations). He writes that all religious beliefs do the following:

They presuppose a classification of all the things, real and ideal, of which men think, into two classes or opposed groups, generally designated by two distinct terms which are translated well enough by the words profane and sacred.

In other words, the emergence of the idea of the sacred made it necessary to protect the sacred from the profane. Early societies developed systems in which sacred things and their differentiation from profane things were represented in religious beliefs. Religious rites developed as means of conduct that governed how people should behave in the presence of the sacred. Durkheim writes the following:

A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.

That is, religion is the set of beliefs around what is sacred and the practices that unite everyone who follows them. The emergence of the sacred unified people who shared rites and beliefs. Different primitive religions had different ideas of the sacred. For example, animism believed that the sacred was in the spirits that filled natural objects. 

Huston Smith, author of The World's Religions, quotes the anthropologist Paul Radin, who writes, "Only when we have fully grasped the mystic and symbolic meanings inherent in most of the activities of primitive man can we hope to understand him." In other words, primitive people had a sense of the sacred in their everyday lives, and this sense helped them make meaning in their lives. By understanding the idea of the sacred in primitive societies, modern people can understand how primitive people made sense of their lives. By understanding what primitive people found sacred, we can understand what they valued and what they set apart from the everyday, or the profane.