The Girard Reader (4 page)

aspect of the collective murder itself insofar as it effectively resolves and terminates crises of

mimetic rivalry among human groups.

Sacrifice is the resolution and conclusion of ritual because a collective murder or expulsion

resolves the mimetic crisis that ritual mimics. What kind of mechanism can this be? Judging

from the evidence, direct and indirect, this resolution must belong to the realm of what is

commonly called a scapegoat effect.

The word "scapegoat" means two things: the ritual described in Le-viticus

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viticus 16 or similar rituals which are themselves imitations of the model I have in mind. I

distinguish between scapegoat as ritual and scapegoat as effect. By a scapegoat effect I mean

that strange process through which two or more people are reconciled at the expense of a

third party who appears guilty or responsible for whatever ails, disturbs, or frightens the

scapegoaters. They feel relieved of their tensions and they coalesce into a more harmonious

group. They now have a single purpose, which is to prevent the scapegoat from harming

them, by expelling and destroying him.

Scapegoat effects are not limited to mobs, but they are most conspicuously effective in the

case of mobs. The destruction of a victim can make a mob more furious, but it can also bring

back tranquility. In a mob situation, tranquility does not return, as a rule, without some kind

of victimage to assuage the desire for violence. That collective belief appears so absurd to the

detached observer, if there is one, that he is tempted to believe the mob is not duped by its

own identification of the scapegoat as a culprit. The mob appears insincere and hypocritical.

In reality, the mob really believes. If we understand this, we also understand that a scapegoat

effect is real; it is an unconscious phenomenon, but not in the sense of Freud.

How can the scapegoat effect involve real belief? How can such an effect be generated

without an objective cause, especially with the lightning speed that can often be observed in

the case of the scapegoating mobs? The answer is that scapegoat effects are mimetic effects;

they are generated by mimetic rivalry itself, when it reaches a certain degree of intensity. As

an object becomes the focus of mimetic rivalry between two or more antagonists, other

members of the group tend to join in, mimetically attracted by the presence of mimetic desire.

Mimesis is mimetically attractive, and we can assume that at certain stages, at least in the

evolution of human communities, mimetic rivalry can spread to an entire group. This is what

is suggested by the acute disorder phase with which many rituals begin. The community turns

into a mob under the effect of mimetic rivalry. The phenomena that take place when a human group turns into a mob are identical to those produced by mimetic rivalry, and they can be

defined as that loss of differentiation which is described in mythology and reenacted in ritual.

We found earlier that mimetic rivalry tends toward reciprocity. The model is likely to be

mimetically affected by the desire of his imitator. He becomes the imitator of his own

imitator, just as the latter becomes the model of his own model. As this feedback process

keeps reinforcing itself, each constitutes in the other's path a more and more irritating

obstacle and each tries to remove this obstacle more and more forcefully. Violence is thus

generated. Violence is not originary; it is a by-product of mimetic rivalry. Violence is

mimetic rivalry itself becoming violent as

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the antagonists who desire the same object keep thwarting each other and desiring the object

all the more. Violence is supremely mimetic.

The antagonists are caught in an escalation of frustration. In their dual role of obstacle and

model, they both become more and more fascinated by each other. Beyond a certain level of

intensity they are totally absorbed and the disputed object becomes secondary, even

irrelevant. judging from many rituals, their mutual fascination can reach the level of a

hypnotic trance. That particular condition becomes the principal goal of certain religious

practices under the name of possession.

At this paroxystic level of mimetic rivalry, the element of mimicry is still around, more

intense than ever. It has to focus on the only entities left in the picture, which are the

antagonists themselves. This means that the selection of an antagonist depends on the

mimetic factor rather that on previous developments. Transfers of antagonism must take

place, therefore, for purely mimetic reasons. Mimetic attraction is bound to increase with the

number of those who converge on one and the same antagonist. Sooner or later a snowball

effect must occur that involves the entire group minus, of course, the one individual, or the

few against whom all hostility focuses and who become the "scapegoats," in a sense

analogous to but more extreme than our everyday sense of the word "scapegoat." Whereas

mimetic appropriation is inevitably divisive, causing the contestants to fight over an object

they cannot all appropriate together, mimetic antagonism is ultimately unitive, or rather

reunitive since it provides the antagonists with an object they can really share, in the sense

that they can all rush against that victim in order to destroy it or drive it away.

If I am right, the contradiction between prohibitions and rituals is only apparent. The purpose

of both is to spare the community another mimetic perturbation. In normal circumstances,

this purpose is well served by the prohibitions. In abnormal circumstances, when a new crisis

seems impending, the prohibitions are of no avail anymore. Once the contagion of mimetic

violence is reintroduced into the community, it cannot be contained. The community, then,

changes its tactic entirely. Instead of trying to roll back mimetic violence it tries to get rid of

it by encouraging it and by bringing it to a climax that triggers the happy solution of ritual

sacrifice with the help of a substitute victim. There is no difference of purpose between

prohibitions and rituals. The behavior demanded by the first and the behavior demanded by

the disorderly phase of ritual are in opposition, of course, but the mimetic reading makes this

opposition intelligible. In the absence of this reading, anthropologists have either minimized

the opposition or viewed it as an insoluble contradiction that ultimately confirmed their

conception of religion as utter nonsense. Others, under the influence of psychoanalysis, have viewed the transgressive aspect of ritual, in regard to prohibitions,

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as an end in itself, in keeping, of course, with the contemporary ethos and its predilection for

disorder, at least among intellectuals who feel, perhaps, they do not have enough of it in their

own lives.

Religion is different, and the purpose of ritual is reconciliation and reordering through

sacrifice. The current views of ritual as essentially transgressive are given a semblance of

credibility by the fact that long before anthropologists and psychoanalysts showed up on the

scene, the religious believers themselves had often lost touch with the unity of purpose of

their various religious practices and begun to perceive the opposition between prohibitions

and ritual as an unintelligible contradiction. And they normally tried to cope with this

contradiction either by minimizing it and making their prohibitions less stringent as well as

their rituals less disorderly or on the contrary by emphasizing and "maximizing" so to speak the opposition and turning their rites into the so-called festival that presents itself explicitly as

a period of time in which the social rules and taboos of all kinds do not apply.

Modern theorists have some support from late religious developments, in other words, when

they try to elude or give trivial answers to the problem posed by the behavioral opposition

between prohibitions and rituals. This is the wide road of modern interpretation, and it has

turned out to be an impasse. We will not take that road, therefore, and we will face the

contrast between ritual and prohibition in all its sharpness, not to espouse some

psychoanalytical view, of course, but to perceive the true paradox of ritual -- which is the

genesis and regeneration as well as degeneration of the cultural order through paroxystic

disorder.

Mythology and religious cults form systems of representation necessarily untrue to their own

genesis. The episode of mimetic violence and reconciliation is always recollected and

narrated, as well as reenacted, from the perspective of its beneficiaries, who are also its

puppets. From the standpoint of the scapegoaters and their inheritors -- the religious

community -- there is no such thing as scapegoating in our sense. A scapegoat effect that can

be acknowledged as such by the scapegoaters is no longer effective, it is no longer a

scapegoat
effect
. The victim must be perceived as truly responsible for the troubles that come to an end when it is collectively put to death. The community could not be at peace with itself

once more if it doubted the victim's enormous capacity for evil. The belief in this same

victim's enormous capacity for doing good is a direct consequence of that first belief. The

peace seems to be restored as well as destroyed by the scapegoat himself.

An arbitrary victim would not reconcile a disturbed community if its members realized they

are the dupes of a mimetic effect. I must insist on this aspect because it is crucial and often

misunderstood. The mythic systems of representation obliterate the scapegoating on which

they are

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founded, and they remain dependent on this obliteration. Scapegoating has never been

conceived by anyone as an activity in which he himself participates and may still be

participating even as he denounces the scapegoating of others. Such denunciation can even become a precondition of successful scapegoating in a world like ours, where knowledge of

the phenomenon is on the rise and makes its grossest and most violent forms obsolete.

Scapegoating can continue only if its victims are perceived primarily as scapegoaters.

Traces of an act of collective scapegoating that has effectively reconciled a community are

elusive since the phenomenon is necessarily recollected from the deluded standpoint it

generates. At first sight, this situation seems discouraging, but in reality it is highly favorable

to the demonstration of my thesis: features that characterize the deluded standpoint of the

scapegoaters are easily ascertainable. Once they are ascertained, we can verify that they are

really present in primitive mythology; they constitute the constants or near constants of that

mythology, in contradistinction to the variables, which are quite significant as well but

demand lengthier analysis. The victim cannot be perceived as innocent and impotent; he (or

she, as the case may be) must be perceived if not necessarily as a culprit in our sense, at least

as a creature truly responsible for all the disorders and ailments of the community, in other

words for the mimetic crisis that has triggered the mimetic mechanism of scapegoating. We

can verify, indeed, that the victim is usually presented in that fashion. He is viewed as

subversive of the communal order and as a threat to the well-being of the society. His

continued presence is therefore undesirable and it must be destroyed or driven away by other

gods, perhaps, or by the community itself.

The Oedipus myth does not tell us Oedipus is a mimetic scapegoat. Far from disproving my

theory, this silence confirms it as long as it is surrounded by the telltale signs of scapegoating

as, indeed, it is. The myth reflects the standpoint of the scapegoaters, who really believe their

victim to be responsible for the plague in their midst, and they connect that responsibility

with anti-natural acts, horrendous transgressions that signify the total destruction of the social

order. All the themes of the story suggest we must be dealing with the type of delusion that

has always surrounded and still surrounds victimage by mobs on the rampage. In the Middle

Ages, for instance, when the Jews were accused of spreading the plague during the period of

the Black Death, they were also accused of unnatural crimes à la Oedipus.

The most interesting question is: Why are we able to see through this type of delusion in

some instances, and unable in others, especially in the case of that vast corpus of mysterious

récits
we call mythology? Why are the greatest specialists in the field still fooled by themes which historians of the Western world have long ago recognized as indicative of perse-

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cution in their own areas of research? Historians are working in areas with which they feel

more at ease and are more knowledgeable because they are culturally closer, but this is part

of the story; it may account for the tortuous nature of our progress toward a greater

understanding of persecution everywhere but not for the progress itself. So-called primitive

or archaic people are fooled by their own myths as much or even more than by the myths of

others. The amazing thing about us is not that so many are still fooled but that many are not

and that suspicion, as a whole, is on the increase. Our sterility as creators of myth must not be