René Girard, Violence and the Sacred
‘Sacred is bad inside the community, it is good when it is returned to the exterior’
René Girard wrote:
CHAPTER 1
… The function of sacrifice is to quell violence within the community and to prevent conflicts from erupting. … [that is the main argument to be pursued]
… In primitive societies the risk of unleashed violence is so great and the cure so problematic that the emphasis naturally falls on prevention. The preventive measures naturally fall within the domain of religion, where they can on occasion assume a violent character. Violence and the sacred are inseparable. But the covert appropriation by sacrifice of certain properties of violence—particularly the ability of violence to move from one object to another—is hidden from sight by the awesome machinery of ritual. …
… Primitive societies do not have built into their structure an automatic brake against violence; but we do, in the form of powerful institutions whose grip grows progressively tighter as their role grows progressively less apparent. The constant presence of a restraining force allows modern man safely to transgress the limits imposed on primitive peoples without even being aware of the fact. In “policed” societies the relationships between individuals, including total strangers, is characterized by an extraordinary air of informality, flexibility, and even audacity.
Religion invariably strives to subdue violence, to keep it from running wild. Paradoxically, the religious and moral authorities in a community attempt to instill nonviolence, as an active force into daily life and as a mediating force into ritual life, through the application of violence. Sacrificial rites serve to connect the moral and religious aspects of daily life, but only by means of a lengthy and hazardous detour. Moreover, it must be kept in mind that the efficacy of the rites depends on their being performed in the spirit of pietas [respect to ancestors, institutions etc.], which marks all aspects of religious life. We are beginning to understand why the sacrificial act appears as both sinful and saintly, an illegal as well as a legitimate exercise of violence. …
Primitive religion tames, trains, arms, and directs violent impulses as a defensive force against those forms of violence that society regards as inadmissible. It postulates a strange mixture of violence and nonviolence. The same can perhaps be said of our own judicial system of control.
There may be a certain connection between all the various methods employed by man since the beginning of time to avoid being caught up in an interminable round of revenge. They can be grouped into three general categories:
preventive measures in which sacrificial rites divert the spirit of revenge into other channels;
the harnessing or hobbling of vengeance by means of compensatory measures, trials by combat, etc., whose curative effects remain precarious;
the establishment of a judicial system—the most efficient of all curative procedures.
We have listed the methods in ascending order of effectiveness. The evolution from preventive to curative procedures is reflected in the course of history or, at any rate, in the course of the history of the Western world. The initial curative procedures mark an intermediary stage between a purely religious orientation and the recognition of a judicial system’s superior efficiency. These methods are inherently ritualistic in character, and are often associated with sacrificial practices.
The curative procedures employed by primitive societies appear rudimentary to us. We tend to regard them as fumbling efforts to improvise a judicial system. Certainly their pragmatic aspects are clearly visible, oriented as they are not toward the guilty parties, but toward the victims—since it is the latter who pose the most immediate threat. The injured parties must be accorded a careful measure of satisfaction, just enough to appease their own desire for revenge but not so much as to awaken the desire elsewhere. It is not a question of codifying good and evil or of inspiring respect for some abstract concept of justice; rather, it is a question of securing the safety of the group by checking the impulse for revenge. The preferred method involves a reconciliation between parties based on some sort of mutual compensation. If reconciliation is impossible, however, an armed encounter can be arranged in such a manner that the violence is wholly self-contained. This encounter can take place within an enclosed space and can involve prescribed regulations and specifically designated combatants. Its purpose is to cut violence short.
To be sure, all these curative measures are steps in the direction of a legal system. But the evolution, if indeed evolution is the proper term, is not continuous. The break comes at the moment when the intervention of an independent legal authority becomes constraining. Only then are men freed from the terrible obligations of vengeance. Retribution in its judicial guise loses its terrible urgency. Its meaning remains the same, but this meaning becomes increasingly indistinct or even fades from view. In fact, the system functions best when everyone concerned is least aware that it involves retribution. The system can—and as soon as it can it will—reorganize itself around the accused and the concept of guilt. In fact, retribution still holds sway, but forged into a principle of abstract justice that all men are obliged to uphold and respect.
We have seen that the “curative” measures, ostensibly designed to temper the impulse toward vengeance, become increasingly mysterious in their workings as they progress in efficiency. As the focal point of the system shifts away from religion and the preventive approach is translated into judicial retribution, the aura of misunderstanding that has always formed a protective veil around the institution of sacrifice shifts as well, and becomes associated in turn with the machinery of the law.
As soon as the judicial system gains supremacy, its machinery disappears from sight. Like sacrifice, it conceals—even as it also reveals—its resemblance to vengeance, differing only in that it is not self-perpetuating and its decisions discourage reprisals. In the case of sacrifice, the designated victim does not become the object of vengeance because he is a replacement, is not the “right” victim. In the judicial system the violence does indeed fall on the “right” victim; but it falls with such force, such resounding authority, that no retort is possible.
It can be argued that the function of the judicial system is not really concealed; and we can hardly be unaware that the judicial process is more concerned with the general security of the community than with any abstract notion of justice. Nonetheless, we believe that the system is founded on a unique principle of justice unknown to primitive societies. The scholarly literature on the subject seems to bear out this belief. It has long been assumed that a decisive difference between primitive and civilized man is the former’s general inability to identify the guilty party and to adhere to the principle of guilt. Such an assumption only confuses the issue. If primitive man insists on averting his attention from the wrongdoer, with an obstinacy that strikes us as either idiotic or perverse, it is because he wishes above all to avoid fueling the fires of vengeance.
If our own system seems more rational, it is because it conforms more strictly to the principle of vengeance. Its insistence on the punishment of the guilty party underlines this fact. Instead of following the example of religion and attempting to forestall acts of revenge, to mitigate or sabotage its effects or to redirect them to secondary objects, our judicial system rationalizes revenge and succeeds in limiting and isolating its effects in accordance with social demands. The system treats the disease without fear of contagion and provides a highly effective technique for the cure and, as a secondary effect, the prevention of violence.
This rationalistic approach to vengeance might seem to stem from a peculiarly intimate relationship between the community and the judicial system. In fact, it is the result not of any familiar interchange between the two, but of the recognition of the sovereignty and independence of the judiciary, whose decisions no group, not even the collectivity as a body, can challenge. (At least, that is the principle.) The judicial authority is beholden to no one. It is thus at the disposal of everyone, and it is universally respected. The judicial system never hesitates to confront violence head on, because it possesses a monopoly on the means of revenge. Thanks to this monopoly, the system generally succeeds in stifling the impulse to vengeance rather than spreading or aggravating it, as a similar intervention on the part of the aggrieved party would invariably do.
In the final analysis, then, the judicial system and the institution of sacrifice share the same function, but the judicial system is infinitely more effective. However, it can only exist in conjunction with a firmly established political power. And like all modern technological advances, it is a two-edged sword, which can be used to oppress as well as to liberate. Certainly that is the way it is seen by primitive cultures, whose view on the matter is indubitably more objective than our own.
If the function of the system has now become apparent, that is because it no longer enjoys the obscurity it needs to operate effectively. A clear view of the inner workings indicates a crisis in the system; it is a sign of disintegration. No matter how sturdy it may seem, the apparatus that serves to hide the true nature of legal and illegal violence from view eventually wears thin. The underlying truth breaks through, and we find ourselves face to face with the specter of reciprocal reprisal. This is not a purely theoretical concept belonging to the intellectual and scholarly realm, but a sinister reality; a vicious circle we thought we had escaped, but one we find has tightened itself, all unsuspected, around us.
The procedures that keep men’s violence in bounds have one thing in common: they are no strangers to the ways of violence. There is reason to believe that they are all rooted in religion. …
… A primitive society, a society that lacks a legal system, is exposed to the sudden escalation of violence. Such a society is compelled to adopt attitudes we may well find incomprehensible. Our incomprehension seems to stem from two main factors. In the first place, we know absolutely nothing about the contagion of violence, not even whether it actually exists. In the second place, the primitive people themselves recognize this violence only in an almost entirely dehumanized form; that is, under the deceptive guise of the sacred.
Considered all together, the ritual precautions against violence are firmly rooted in reality, absurd though some of them may appear to our own eyes. If the sacrificial catharsis actually succeeds in preventing the unlimited propagation of violence, a sort of infection is in fact being checked.
CHAPTER 4
… [We] should consider the a priori conditions that any theory must fulfill to command our scrutiny. If sacrifice has a real origin, the memory of which myths keep alive in one way and rituals commemorate in another, then it seems clear that we are dealing with an event that initially made a very strong impression. Very strong, but not unforgettable—for in the end it is forgotten. But this impression, although subject to later modification, lives on in the religious observances and perhaps in all the cultural manifestations of the society. There is no need to postulate some form of individual or collective subconscious to account for its survival.
The extraordinary number of commemorative rites that have to do with killing leads us to imagine that the original event must have been a murder. Freud, in Totem and Taboo, lucidly perceived this necessity. And the remarkable similarities among the sacrificial rites of various localities suggest that the murder was always of the same general type. This does not mean that the murder was a single historical event or that it belongs exclusively to prehistory. Although the event looks exceptional from the perspective of any given society, it seems quite commonplace in a broad, comparative context. The sacrificial crisis and the surrogate-victim mechanism fulfill all the conditions required of a satisfactory hypothesis.
But, it may be protested, if such an event had actually taken place, science would already have discovered it. This assertion fails to take into account an extraordinary deficiency of modern science. The presence of a religious element at the source of all human societies is indubitable; yet, of all social institutions, religion is the only one to which science has been unable to attribute a genuine objective, a real function. I contend that the objective of ritual is the proper reenactment of the surrogate-victim mechanism; its function is to perpetuate or renew the effects of this mechanism; that is, to keep violence outside the community. …
… At present we have good reason to believe that the violence directed against the surrogate victim might well be radically generative in that, by putting an end to the vicious and destructive cycle of violence, it simultaneously initiates another and constructive cycle, that of the sacrificial rite—which protects the community from that same violence and allows culture to flourish.
If this is true, the generative violence constitutes at least the indirect origin of all those things that men hold most dear and that they strive most ardently to preserve. This notion is affirmed, though in a veiled and transfigured manner, by the many etiological myths that deal with the murder of one mythological character by other mythological characters. That event is conceived as the origin of the cultural order; the dead divinity becomes the source not only of sacred rites but also of matrimonial regulations and proscriptions of every kind; in short, of all those cultural forms that give man his unique humanity. ….
… The mythical narrative sometimes takes the form of a contest or game, a quasi-sportive or pugilistic event that evokes the rivalries inherent in the sacrificial crisis. Behind all these themes one can detect the outline of reciprocal violence, gradually transformed into a unanimous act. It is certainly astonishing that all human activities, and even the course of nature itself, are subordinated to this metamorphosis of violence taking place at the heart of the community. When relationships between men are troubled, when men cease to cooperate among themselves and to come to terms with one another, there is no human enterprise that does not suffer. Even the success of the hunt, of fishing expeditions, of food gathering is put in question. Therefore, the benefits attributed to the generative violence extend beyond mankind to nature itself. The act of collective murder is seen as the source of all abundance; the principle of procreation is attributed to it, and all those plants that are useful to man; everything beneficial and nutritive is said to take root in the body of the primordial victim. …
… The Cambridge Ritualists [Frazer et al.] and their disciples have based their interpretation of the role of the pharmakos on the idea that seasonal change—the “death” and “resurrection” of nature—constitutes the original model for the rite, its deep-seated meaning. In fact, there is nothing in nature that could encourage or even suggest such an atrocious sort of ritual killing as the death of the pharmakos.
In my opinion, the sole possible model remains the sacrificial crisis and its resolution.
Nature enters the picture later, when the ritualistic mind succeeds in detecting certain similarities between nature’s rhythms and the community’s alternating pattern of order and disorder. The modus operandi of violence—sometimes reciprocal and pernicious, sometimes unanimous and beneficial—is then taken as the model for the entire universe.
To portray tragedy as a repetition and an adaptation of the seasonal rites, a sort of sacre du printemps, is surely to strip it of those very elements that mark it as tragedy. This remains true even if it is correct ultimately to confer on tragedy a quasi-ritualistic value in Western culture. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists center their interpretation on seasonal and agricultural connotations that do play an important role in many festivals but that are ultimately derived, like all other connotations, from the victimization mechanism. The connection between the drama and the major mythological themes is undeniable, but in order to grasp its full significance we must transcend the approach that limits itself to thematic analysis and renounce those prejudices that might lead us to portray the “scapegoat” purely as a product of blind superstition, a nonfunctional device bereft of any operative value. In the scapegoat theme we should recognize the very real metamorphosis of reciprocal violence into restraining violence through the agency of unanimity. This unique mechanism structures all cultural values even as it conceals itself behind them; it is associated even more fundamentally with the double-edged images of myths and rituals. …
… We should now ask ourselves whether animal sacrifices, too, cannot be defined as the mimesis of an initial collective murder. In my first chapter I suggested that there was no essential difference between human and animal sacrifice. If this is true, the origin of all sacrifices must be the same. The celebrated Judaic scapegoat and all animal rites of the same type lend strong support to my hypothesis. But there is surely no harm in pausing a moment longer to examine a “classical” case of animal sacrifice in order to demonstrate, if possible, its direct connection with the execution of a surrogate victim. If it can be shown that the sacrificial rites are indeed striving to reproduce the mechanism of violent unanimity and that the surrogate victim is indeed the key to all these rites, considerable new light will be shed on the matter of animal sacrifice. …
… Let us turn our attention to one of those rare societies in which sacrifice survives to this day as a living institution and whose customs have been diligently recorded by a trained ethnologist. In Divinity and Experience, Godfrey Lienhardt describes in detail several sacrificial ceremonies that he witnessed among the Dinka. I will summarize the general substance of his descriptions, taking care to emphasize those points that seem especially significant.
The insistent rhythm of choral incantations gradually captures the attention of a crowd of bystanders who at first appeared scattered and self-absorbed. Participants begin to brandish weapons in mock warfare. A few isolated individuals strike out at others, but without any real hostility. In these preparatory stages violence is, therefore, already present in a ritual form, but it is still manifestly reciprocal; the ritualistic imitation deals first with the sacrificial crisis itself, with the chaotic antecedents to the unanimous resolution. From time to time somebody detaches himself from the group to beat the cow or calf that has been tied to a nearby stake, or to hurl insults at it. There is nothing static or stilted about the performance; it succeeds in giving shape to a collective impulse that gradually triumphs over the forces of dispersion and discord by bringing corporate violence to bear on a ritual victim. In this rite the metamorphosis of reciprocal violence into unilateral violence is explicitly and dramatically reenacted. And it seems to me that the same can be seen to hold true for an infinite number of rites if one keeps a sharp eye out for signs (often, admittedly, fragmentary and elusive) that reveal the functioning of this particular metamorphosis. In the often-cited example of the Greek Bouphonia, the participants make a point of quarreling among themselves before turning their attention to the designated victim. All the mock battles that generally take place prior to sacrificial ceremonies and all the ritual dances whose formal symmetry is reflected in a perpetual confrontation between the performers lend themselves to an interpretation in which the performances are seen as imitative responses to a sacrificial crisis.
In the Dinka sacrifice it seems that the paroxysm takes place not at the death of the victim, but in the course of the ritual curses pronounced before its death. One gets the impression that these curses are in themselves able to destroy the victim; that it is, as in tragedy, for all practical purposes killed by words. And these words, even if they are not firmly fixed by custom, are fundamentally identical to the accusations hurled by Tiresias against Oedipus [MGH: Girard discusses the Greek myths in a previous chapter]. The actual execution sometimes consists of a veritable stampede of the entire group directed against the victim. In this case, it is the victim’s genitals that are singled out. The same is true of the pharmakos who is whipped on his sexual organs with herbaceous plants. There is thus some reason to believe that the animal victim is a stand-in for an original victim accused, like Oedipus, of patricide, incest, or of some other sexual transgression that signifies the violent abolition of distinctions—the major cause of cultural disintegration. The means of dispatching the victim may vary depending on the nature of the crime; but the death sentence itself remains invariable. The ritualistic mentality imagines that this death will result in benefits too great to be ascribed to a simple punitive measure. These benefits must be real. But the ritualistic mentality does not understand why they have accrued; the only explanations it can offer are mythic. However, this same mentality has a good notion of how these benefits are obtained, and it tries unceasingly to repeat the fruitful process.
The scorn, hostility, and cruelty displayed toward the animal prior to the ritualistic slaughter are replaced upon its death by a show of ritualistic veneration. In bearing away into death the scourge of reciprocal violence, the victim has performed its assigned function. Henceforth the victim will incarnate violence in both its guises, beneficial and baneful; that is, it will personify the All-Powerful who rules from on high. Having been so flagrantly abused, it is only reasonable that the victim should be greatly honored—just as it was reasonable to banish Oedipus when he seemed the bearer of ill fortune and reasonable to honor him when his departure assured the community’s well-being. That adopting the former attitude assures the latter result seems to confirm the rationality of the plan, despite its contradictory appearance.
Lienhardt himself defines the victim as a scapegoat who becomes the receptacle of human passions. We are dealing here with an animal pharmakos, a calf or cow that assumes, not some vague and ill-defined sins, but the very real (though often hidden) hostilities that all the members of the community feel for one another. Our portrayal of sacrifice as an imitation and reenactment of spontaneous collective violence in no way conflicts with the definition I proposed in Chapter 1 [MGH: probably where he writes on p. 17 of “an instrument of prevention in the struggle against violence”.
In fact, spontaneous violence contains an element of appeasement that can also be found in ritual sacrifice, though in diluted form. In the original event, it is unleashed violence that is checked and at the same time partially appeased; in the ritual reenactment, it is the more or less latent aggressions that are dealt with.
The community is both attracted and repelled by its own origins. It feels the constant need to reexperience them, albeit in veiled and transfigured form. By means of rites the community manages to cajole and somewhat subdue the forces of destruction. But the true nature and real function of these forces will always elude its grasp, precisely because the source of the evil is the community itself. The only way in which the ritualistic imagination can succeed in its self-appointed task—a task both painstaking and elusive—is by allowing violence a certain amount of free play, as in the original instance, but not too much; that is, by exercising its memory of the collective expulsion on carefully designated objects and within a rigorous framework.
In societies where sacrifice is still a living institution it displays the cathartic function I attributed to it in my first chapter. The catharsis is performed in a structural setting so strikingly similar to that of unanimous violence that one can only conclude that it is a deliberate, if not an entirely exact, imitation of unanimous violence.
Seen from a broad perspective, certain mythological and ritualistic analogies, previous overlooked, leap into view. Even a cursory examination reveals that the theme of unanimity recurs with extraordinary frequency in all aspects of religious life, in rituals, and in myths. It recurs in cultures so far apart, in forms so disparate, and in texts so diverse in nature that it is impossible to explain it away through some diffusionist theory.
As noted above, the Dinka sacrificial execution often takes the form of a stampede of young men, who trample the beast down and crush him by their sheer mass. When the animal is too large to be killed in this way, he is slaughtered in a more conventional manner; but a simulated stampede is still performed as a prelude to the slaughter. The sacrificial ceremony requires a show of collective participation, if only in purely symbolic form. …
…. The function of sacrifice … not only allows for but requires a surrogate victim—in other words, violent unanimity. In ritual sacrifice the victim, when actually put to death, diverts violence from its forbidden objectives within the community. But for whom, precisely, is this victim substituted? Heretofore we could only conceive of this substitution in terms of individual psychological mechanisms, which clearly do not provide an adequate picture of the process. If there were no surrogate victim to transform the sacrifice from an essentially private concern into one involving the whole community, we would be obliged to regard the victim as a substitute for particular individuals who have somehow provoked the sacrificer’s anger. If the transfer is purely personal, as it is in psychoanalysis, then sacrifice cannot be a true social institution involving the entire community. But sacrifice … is essentially a communal institution …
… To understand how and why sacrifice functions as it does, we should consider the proposition that the ritual victim is never substituted for some particular member of the community or even for the community as a whole: it is always substituted for the surrogate victim. As this victim itself serves as a substitute for all the members of the community, the sacrificial substitution does indeed play the role that we have attributed to it, protecting all the members of the community from their respective violence—but always through the intermediary of the surrogate victim. …
… The original act of violence is unique and spontaneous. Ritual sacrifices, however, are multiple, endlessly repeated. All those aspects of the original act that had escaped man’s control—the choice of time and place, the selection of the victim—are now premeditated and fixed by custom. The ritual process aims at removing all element of chance and seeks to extract from the original violence some technique of cathartic appeasement. The diluted force of the sacrificial ritual cannot be attributed to imperfections in its imitative technique. After all, the rite is designed to function during periods of relative calm; as we have seen, its role is not curative, but preventive. If it were more “effective” than it in fact is—if it did not limit itself to appropriate sacrificial victims but instead, like the original act of violence, vented its force on a participating member of the community—then it would lose all effectiveness, for it would bring to pass the very thing it was supposed to prevent: a relapse into the sacrificial crisis. The sacrificial process is as fully adapted to its normal function as collective murder is to its abnormal and normative function. There is every reason to believe that the minor catharsis of the sacrificial act is derived from that major catharsis circumscribed by collective murder.
Ritual sacrifice is founded on a double substitution. The first, which passes unperceived, is the substitution of one member of the community for all, brought about through the operation of the surrogate victim. The second, the only truly “ritualistic” substitution, is super-imposed on the first. It is the substitution of a victim belonging to a predetermined sacrificial category for the original victim. The surrogate victim comes from inside the community, and the ritual victim must come from outside; otherwise the community might find it difficult to unite against it.
How, it may be asked, does the second substitution graft itself onto the first? How does the original violence succeed in imposing a centrifugal force on the rite? In short, how does the sacrificial technique operate? I will attempt to return to these questions, but at this point I wish to draw attention to the essentially mimetic character of sacrifice with regard to the original, generative act of violence. Thanks to this mimetic aspect we can understand how the sacrificial process can exist and function, without being obliged to attribute to the ritualistic mind a manipulative ability or a clairvoyance that it most certainly does not possess.
It is entirely possible to regard the sacrificial rite as a commemoration of a real event without reducing it to the triviality of one of our own national holidays; or, for that matter, without ascribing it to some neurotic compulsion, as psychoanalysts are wont to do. A trace of very real violence persists in the rite, and there is no doubt that the rite succeeds at least partially because of its grim associations, its lingering fascination; but its essential orientation is peaceful. Even the most violent rites are specifically designed to abolish violence. To see these rites as expressions of man’s pathological morbidity is to miss the point.
It goes without saying that the rite has its violent aspects, but these always involve a lesser violence, proffered as a bulwark against a far more virulent violence. Moreover, the rite aims at the most profound state of peace known to any community: the peace that follows the sacrificial crisis and results from the unanimous accord generated by the surrogate victim. To banish the evil emanations that accumulate within the community and to recapture the freshness of this original experience are one and the same task. Whether order reigns supreme or whether its reign is already challenged, the same model, the same plan of action is invariably proposed. It is the plan, associated with the victorious resolution of all communal crises, that involves violence against the surrogate victim. …
… In order to verify my hypothesis, then, it must be applied to many different forms of ritual and myth, as far apart in content, history, and geography as possible. If it is correct, the complex rites will provide the most striking confirmation. The more complex a system, the more numerous will be the elements it strives to reproduce in the operation analyzed above. As most of these elements are, in principle, already in our possession, the most difficult problems should resolve themselves of their own accord. The scattered fragments of the system should cohere, and the unintelligible become intelligible.
[MGH: The next chapters attempt to confirm the hypothesis, including discussion of kingship. We skip forwards to the conclusions].
CHAPTER 10
Every god, hero, and mythic creature so far encountered, from the sacred African king to Chief Pestilence of the Tsimshians, embodies the interplay of violence projected by an act of generative unanimity. …
… The theory of a violence that is sometimes reciprocal, sometimes unanimous and generative, is the first truly to take into account the double nature of all primitive divinities, the blending of beneficent and maleficent that characterizes all mythical figures who involve themselves in mortal affairs. Dionysus is at one and the same time the “most terrible” and the “most gentle” of the gods. There is a Zeus who hurls thunderbolts and a Zeus “as sweet as honey.” In fact, there is no ancient divinity who does not have a double face. If the Roman Janus turns to his worshippers a countenance alternately warlike and peaceful, that is because he too reflects the same alternation; and if he comes in time to symbolize foreign war, that is because foreign war is merely another form of sacrificial violence.
If we understand the interplay of violence in primitive societies, the origins and structure of all mythical and supernatural beings becomes clear. As we have seen, the surrogate victim meets his death in the guise of the monstrous double. All sacred creatures partake of monstrosity, whether overtly or covertly; this aspect of their nature can be traced to the monstrous double. The marriage of beneficent and maleficent constitutes, of course, the original and fundamental monstrosity, the superhuman creature’s absorption of the difference between “good” and “bad” difference, that basic difference that dominates all others.
There is no essential difference between the monstrous aspects of Oedipus and the monstrous aspects of Dionysus. Dionysus is simultaneously god, man, and bull; Oedipus is simultaneously son, husband, father, and brother of the same human beings. Both have incorporated into themselves differences normally considered irreconcilable. Religious thinking puts all differences at the same level; it assimilates family and cultural differences to natural differences. When we are dealing with mythology, therefore, we must make do without any clear distinction between physical monstrosity and moral monstrosity. Religious thought makes no distinction between biological twins and twins of violence engendered by the disintegration of the cultural order.
All the episodes of the Oedipus myth are repetitions of one another. Once we recognize this fact it becomes apparent that all the figures in the various episodes are monsters and that their resemblance is far closer than appearance alone might suggest. …
[MGH: A relevant INSERT from Chapter 2, where Girard discusses the device of impartiality: “Tragedy begins at that point where the illusion of impartiality, as well as the illusions of the adversaries, collapses. For example, in Oedipus the King, Oedipus, Creon, and Tiresias are each in turn drawn into a conflict that each had thought to resolve in the role of impartial mediator. It is not clear to what extent the tragedians themselves managed to remain impartial. For example, Euripides … barely conceals … his preference for the Athenian public’s approval. In any case, his partiality is superficial. The preferences registered for one side or another never prevent the authors from constantly underlining the symmetrical relationship between the adversaries. At the very moment when they appear to be abandoning impartiality, the tragedians do their utmost to deprive the audience of any means of taking sides. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides all utilize the same procedures and almost identical phraseology to convey symmetry, identity, reciprocity.”]
… The sacred king is also a monster. He is simultaneously god, man, and savage beast. Royal titles like “the Lion” or “the Leopard” may degenerate into mere formulas, but they have their origin in memories of the monstrous double and generative unanimity. Moral and physical monstrosity are thus blended and confused. Like Oedipus, the king is at once stranger and son, the most intimate of insiders and the most bizarre of outsiders; he is an exemplar of enormous tenderness and frightful savagery. As an incestuous criminal, he stands above and beyond all the rules he promulgates and enforces. He is the wisest and the most lunatic, the blindest and the most lucid of men. This monopolizing of differences, which makes of the king a sacred monster in every possible sense of the term, finds vivid expression in ritual chants:
The chieftain is neither this nor that.
The chieftain is neither good nor bad.
He is at once guest, foreigner, and host villager.
He is the wise man and the fool.
[Theuws, “Naître et mourir dans le rituel Luba” p. 172.]
It should be no cause for surprise, then, that the august inhabitants of Olympus have been charged with a fair number of rapes, murders, parricides, and incestuous acts, as well as innumerable incidents of savagery and madness. Nor should we be surprised to discover that these divine personages seem to be made up of bits and pieces taken from every order of reality—human, animal, inorganic, cosmic. Nothing is more futile than to seek stable distinctions among these monsters, unless it is the attempt to derive psychological insights from their stories, insights pertaining either to individuals or to the “collective consciousness”. Of all learned pursuits undertaken in the course of Western history, that one is surely the most foolhardy. The pseudo-rational treatment of monsters, the classification of monster stories into “archetypes”, can only serve as a humorless revision of Ovid’s subtle and exhaustive Metamorphoses; it can only serve further to elaborate the mythological process. To pontificate on the subject of monsters is in effect to take them seriously, to enter into their game; it is to be duped by their appearance instead of recognizing the human being who lurks behind the monstrous form.
The variations among various types of mythological creatures only become interesting if we relate these variations to their common origin in generative violence. We then realize that the differences reside not in the objects themselves but in the indeterminate nature of the hallucinated indifferentiation they embody, an indifferentiation that is made determinate retrospectively by the generative violence. …
… Let us turn first to a religious practice that may appear very different from those previously examined but one that is in actuality closely related: ancestor worship or, more simply, the worship of the dead.
In certain cultures the gods are either absent or insignificant. In such cases mythic ancestors, or the dead, take the place of the missing divinities and are seen as the founders, guardians and, if need be, disrupters of the cultural order. When incest, adultery, and other social ills begin to proliferate, when family relationships begin to crumble, the dead are displeased and visit their displeasure on the living. They bring nightmares, madness, contagious diseases; they provoke discord among relatives and neighbors and instigate all sorts of perversions.
The crisis assumes the form of a loss of difference between the living and the dead, a casting down of all barriers between two normally separate realms. We have here the proof that the dead incarnate violence; exterior and transcendent violence when order reigns, immanent violence when things turn bad and maleficent reciprocity walks abroad. The dead do not want the total destruction of an order that is after all basically their own. After they have brought about a paroxysm of sorts in the community they are willing once more to accept the homage of their descendants; they cease to haunt the living and withdraw to their usual retreats. If they do not go into exile of their own accord, they allow themselves to be led into exile by the community’s ritual observances. The difference between the living and the dead is thereby restored.
This troubling confusion between living and dead is sometimes regarded as the consequence of the crisis and sometimes as its cause. The punishments that the dead inflict upon the living are indistinguishable from the consequences of wrongdoing. In a small community hubris spreads rapidly, with, as we know, dire results. Thus the vengeance of the dead, like the vengeance of the gods, is both real and implacable. It is, in fact, violence’s own revenge on those who wield it.
In this instance the dead have clearly replaced the gods, and the beliefs relating to the dead lead us back to our discussion of Oedipus, Dionysus, and the rest. Yet a question remains: How can the dead incarnate violence as authoritatively as do the gods?
Death is the ultimate violence that can be inflicted on a living being. It is therefore the extreme of maleficence. With death a contagious sort of violence is let loose on the community, and the living must take steps to protect themselves against it. So they quarantine death, creating a cordon sanitaire all around it. Above all, they have recourse to funeral rites, which (like all other rites) are dedicated to the purgation and expulsion of maleficent violence.
Whatever the cause and circumstances of his death, the dying man finds himself in a situation similar to that of the surrogate victim vis-à-vis the community. The grief of the mourner is a curious mixture of terror and hope—a mixture conducive to resolutions of good conduct in the future. The death of the individual has something of the quality of a tribute levied for the continued existence of the collectivity. A human being dies, and the solidarity of the survivors is enhanced by his death.
The surrogate victim dies so that the entire community, threatened by the same fate, can be reborn in a new or renewed cultural order. Having sown the seeds of death, the god, ancestor, or mythic hero then dies himself or selects a victim to die in his stead. In so doing he bestows a new life on men. Understanding this process, we can also understand why death should be regarded as the elder sister, not to say the mother and ultimate source, of life itself.
Belief in a union between life and death has long been ascribed to the cycle of the seasons, the annual rebirths and deaths in the plant kingdom. Such a theory simply involves heaping one myth on top of another; it refuses to acknowledge the violence that permeates all human relationships. The theme of death and resurrection flourishes in regions where seasonal change is nonexistent or very slight. And even where analogies do exist or when the religious imagination has put them to use, we are not justified in regarding nature as the source of this belief. The periodicity of the seasons serves as a rhythmic accompaniment to the changes that occur in human relationships and have as their pivot the death of a sacrificial victim.
Death, then, contains the germ of life. There is no life on the communal level that does not originate in death. Death can appear as the true godhead, the confluence of the most beneficent and most maleficent forms of violence. …
[MGH: Though there are two further chapters, this is the most useful summing-up:]
… I began by tracing the course of violence through those beings who appear to incarnate it: mythic heroes, sacred kings, gods, and deified ancestors. Those various incarnations enrich our understanding of the many roles of violence and clarify the function of the surrogate victim and the preeminent importance of violent unanimity.
These incarnations are invariably illusory in one sense. Violence belongs to all men, and thus to none in particular. All the actors have the same role, with the exception of the surrogate victim. But anybody can play the part of surrogate victim. It is futile to look for the secret of the redemptive process in distinctions between the surrogate victim and the other members of the community. The crucial fact is that the choice of the victim is arbitrary. The religious interpretations we have considered so far are at fault precisely because they attribute the beneficial results of the sacrifice to the superhuman nature of the victim or of the other participants, insofar as any of these appears to incarnate the supreme violence.
In addition to such “personalized” interpretations, there is an impersonal approach. It corresponds to the full range of the term sacred, or rather, of the Latin sacer, which is sometimes translated “sacred,” sometimes “accursed,” for it encompasses the maleficent as well as the beneficent. Analogous words can be found in many languages; the famous mana of the Melanesians, for example, or the wakan of the Sioux and the orenda of the Iroquois.
In one respect at least the structure of the sacer is the least deceptive, the least mythic of all; it postulates no single master of ceremonies, no intervention by a privileged party, even a superhuman one. The fact that the sacer can be understood in terms that require no anthropomorphic presence demonstrates that religion should not be defined as animism or anthropomorphism. If religion consisted of “humanizing” the nonhuman or bestowing “souls” wherever they were felt to be lacking, an impersonal apprehension of the sacred would not be possible.
My effort to group all the subjects considered in this study under a general heading has resulted in the title Violence and the Sacred. This impersonal designation is fundamental to our discussion. In Africa, as in many other parts of the world, there is only a single term to denote the two faces of the sacred—the interplay of order and disorder, of difference lost and retrieved, as enacted in the immutable drama of the sacrifice of the incestuous king. This term serves to describe all the royal transgressions, all forbidden as well as all permitted sexual practices, all forms of violence and brutality; unclean things, decaying matter, monstrosities, disputes between relatives and neighbors, outbursts of spite, envy, and jealousy. In addition, the same term embraces the creative impulse and the urge for order, for peace, calm, and stability. All these varied significations appear under the aegis of royalty. Royalty is an incarnation of the sacred. But these same manifestations of the sacred can also exist apart from royalty; we must have recourse to the sacred in order to understand the institution of royalty, but the reverse does not hold true.
Sacrifice too can be defined solely in terms of the sacred, without reference to any particular divinity; that is, it can be defined in terms of maleficent violence polarized by the victim and metamorphosed by his death (or expulsion from the community, which amounts to the same thing) into beneficent violence. Although the sacred is “bad” when it is inside the community, it is “good” when it returns to the exterior. The language of pure sacredness retains whatever is most fundamental to myth and religion; it detaches violence from man to make it a separate, impersonal entity, a sort of fluid substance that flows everywhere and impregnates on contact. The concept of contagion is obviously a by-product of this way of envisaging the sacred. …
… [The] sacred seems so heterogeneous that the specialists have despaired of ever sorting it out. Yet the theory of generative violence permits us to define the sacred in simple, concrete terms that emphasize its underlying unity without overlooking its complexity; it enables us to bring together all the disparate elements of the sacred into an intelligible whole.
Once we have recognized the role of generative violence, it becomes clear why the sacred is able to include within itself so many opposites. Sometimes it rallies the whole community around itself in order to save mankind and restore culture, sometimes it seems intent on destroying its own creations. Men do not worship violence as such. Primitive religion is no “cult of violence” in the contemporary sense of the phrase. Violence is venerated insofar as it offers men what little peace they can ever expect. Nonviolence appears as the gratuitous gift of violence; and there is some truth in this equation, for men are only capable of reconciling their differences at the expense of a third party. The best men can hope for in their quest for nonviolence is the unanimity-minus-one of the surrogate victim.
Each community sees itself as a lonely vessel adrift in a fast ocean whose seas are sometimes calm and friendly, sometimes rough and menacing. The first requirement for staying afloat is to obey the rules of navigation dictated by the ocean itself. But the most diligent attention to these rules is no guarantee of permanent safety. The ship is far from watertight; ceaselessly, insidiously, it takes in water. Only a constant repetition of rites seems to keep it from sinking.
If it is true that the community has everything to fear from the sacred, it is equally true that the community owes its every existence to the sacred. For in perceiving itself as uniquely situated outside the sphere of the sacred, the community assumes that it has been engendered by it; the act of generative violence that created the community is attributed not to men, but to the sacred itself. Having brought the community into existence, the sacred brings about its own expulsion and withdraws from the scene, thereby releasing the community from its direct contact. …
… We should not conclude … that the surrogate victim is simply foreign to the community. Rather, he is seen as a “monstrous double”. He partakes of all possible differences within the community, particularly the difference between within and without; for he passes freely from the interior to the exterior and back again. Thus, the surrogate victim constitutes both a link and a barrier between the community and the sacred. To even so much as represent this extraordinary victim the ritual victim must belong both to the community and to the sacred.
It should now be clear why ritual victims tend to be drawn from categories that are neither outside nor inside the community, but marginal to it: slaves, children, livestock. This marginal quality is crucial to the proper functioning of the sacrifice. If the victim is to polarize the aggressive tendencies of the community and effect their transfer to himself, continuity must be maintained.
The Source:
René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, originally published in Paris in 1972 as La Violence et Le Sacre by Editions Bernard Grasset; English translation by Patrick Gregory 1977, Johns Hopkins University Press; Bloomsbury Academic 2013
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.