“Only one form of social activity has not yet been explicitly linked to religion: economic activity. Nevertheless, the techniques that derive from magic turn out, by this very fact, to have indirectly religious origins. Furthermore, economic value is a sort of power or efficacy, and we know the religious origins of the idea of power. Since mana can be conferred by wealth, wealth itself has some. From this we see that the idea of economic value and that of religious value cannot be unrelated; but the nature of these relationship has not yet been studied.”

Footnote 4 from the Conclusion of Emile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912). There is so much in that footnote.