ABSTRACT
We have seen the way in which the right of property appears to have been established. The sacredness diffused in things, which withheld them from any profane appropriation, was conducted by means of a certain definite ritual either to the threshold or to the periphery of the field. It there established something like a girdle of sanctity or sacred encircling mound, protecting the domain from any trespass by outsiders. To cross this zone and enter the little island insulated from the rest of the land by ritual, was reserved to those alone who had carried out the rites, that is, those who had contracted especial bonds with the sacred beings, the original owners of the soil. By degrees, this sacredness residing in the things themselves passed into the persons: the things ceased to be sacred in themselves; they no longer possessed this quality, except indirectly, because they were subject to persons who themselves were sacred. Property, from being collective, became individual. For, so long as it derived exclusively from the sacred quality of objects, it was not related to any definite 183subject or individual; it was not in persons, nor (with all the more reason) in any particular person that it had its source and place of origin, and therefore no person whatever could be considered as holding it. The whole group enclosed by this, as it were, sacred zone had equal rights, and the fresh generations were destined to enjoy the same rights by the very fact of being born within that group. Individual property came into being only when an individual split off from the family aggregate who embodied in himself all the sacred life diffused amongst the people and things of the family, and who became the holder of all the rights of the group.
