Authors: RENÉ GIRARD
thick wool on the underside of one of the rams.
A comparison of the two scenes, one from Genesis and the other from the
Odyssey
,
lends credence to the theory of their sacrificial origins. In each case an animal intervenes
at the crucial moment to prevent violence from attaining its designated victim. The two
texts are mutually revealing: the Cyclops of the
Odyssey
underlines the fearful menace
that hangs over the hero (and that remains obscure in the Genesis story); and the
slaughter of the kids in Genesis, along with the offering of the "savory meat," clearly
implies the sacrificial character of the flock, an aspect that might go unnoticed in the
Odyssey
.
Sacrifice has often been described as an act of mediation between a sacrificer and a
"deity." Because the very concept of a deity, much less a deity who receives blood
sacrifices, has little reality in this day and age, the entire institution of sacrifice is
relegated by most modern theorists to the realm of the imagination. The approach of
Hubert and Mauss leads to the judgment of Claude Lévi-Strauss in
La Pensée sauvage
:
because sacrificial rites have no basis in reality, we have every reason to label them
meaningless.
The attempt to link sacrifice to a nonexistent deity brings to mind Paul Valéry's
description of poetry as a purely solipsistic activity practiced by the more able solely out
of love for art, while the less able persist in the belief that they are actually
communicating with someone!
The two ancient narratives examined above make unmistakable reference to the act of
sacrifice, but neither makes so much as a passing mention of a deity. If a god had
intervened in either incident, its significance would have been diminished rather than
increased, and the reader would have been led to conclude, in accordance with the
beliefs common to late antiquity and to the modern world, that sacrifice has no real
function in society. Divine intervention would have meant the elimination of the
pervasive aura of dread, along with its firmly structured economy of violence. We
would have then been thrown back upon a formalistic critical approach that would in no
way further our understanding.
As we have seen, the sacrificial process requires a certain degree of
misunderstanding
.
The celebrants do not and must not comprehend the true role of the sacrificial act. The
theological basis of the sacrifice has a crucial role in fostering this misunderstanding. It
is the god who supposedly demands the victims; he alone, in principle, who savors the
smoke from the altars and requisitions the slaughtered flesh. It is to appease
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his anger that the killing goes on, that the victims multiply. Interpreters who think they
question the primacy of the divine sufficiently by declaring the whole affair "imaginary"
may well remain the prisoners of the theology they have not really analyzed. The
problem then becomes, how can a real institution be constructed on a purely illusory
basis? It is not astonishing that the illusion finally makes it give way, bringing down
with it even the most solid aspects of the institution.
Instead of rejecting the theological basis outright, qua abstraction (which is the same, in
effect, as passively accepting it), let us expose its assumptions to a critical examination.
Let us try to uncover the societal conflicts that the sacrificial act and its theological
interpretations at once dissimulate and appease. We must break with the formalistic
tradition of Hubert and Mauss.
The interpretation of sacrifice as an act of violence inflicted on a surrogate victim has
recently been advanced once again. Godfrey Lienhardt (in
Divinity and Experience
) and
Victor Turner (in a number of works, especially
The Drums of Affliction
), drawing from
fieldwork, portray sacrifice as practiced among the Dinka and the Ndembu as a
deliberate act of collective substitution performed at the expense of the victim and
absorbing all the internal tensions, feuds, and rivalries pent up within the community.
Sacrifice plays a very real role in these societies, and the problem of substitution
concerns the entire community. The victim is not a substitution for some particularly
endangered individual, nor is it offered up to some individual of particularly
bloodthirsty temperament. Rather, it is a substitute for all the members of the
community, offered up by the members themselves. The sacrifice serves to protect the
entire community from
its own
violence; it prompts the entire community to choose
victims outside itself. The elements of dissension scattered throughout the community
are drawn to the person of the sacrificial victim and eliminated, at least temporarily, by
its sacrifice.
If we turn our attention from the theological superstructure of the act -- that is, from an
interpretive version of the event that is often accepted as the final statement on sacrifice
-- we quickly perceive yet another level of religious discourse, in theory subordinated to
the theological dimension, but in reality quite independent of it. This has to do with the
social function of the act, an aspect far more accessible to the modern mind.
It is easy to ridicule a religion by concentrating on its more eccentric rites, rites such as
the sacrifices performed to induce rain or bring fine weather. There is in fact no object
or endeavor in whose name a sacrifice cannot be made, especially when the social basis
of the act has begun to blur. Nevertheless, there is a common denominator that
determines the efficacy of all sacrifices and that becomes increasingly apparent as the
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institution grows in vigor. This common denominator is internal violence -- all the
dissensions, rivalries, jealousies, and quarrels within the community that the sacrifices
are designed to suppress. The purpose of the sacrifice is to restore harmony to the
community, to reinforce the social fabric. Everything else derives from that. If once we
take this fundamental approach to sacrifice, choosing the road that violence opens
before us, we can see that there is no aspect of human existence foreign to the subject,
not even material prosperity. When men no longer live in harmony with one another, the
sun still shines and the rain falls, to be sure, but the fields are less well tended, the
harvests less abundant.
The classic literature of China explicitly acknowledges that propitiatory function of
sacrificial rites. Such practices "pacify the country and make the people settled. . . . It is
through the sacrifices that the unity of the people is strengthened" ( CH'U YU II, 2). The
Book of Rites
affirms that sacrificial ceremonies, music, punishments, and laws have one
and the same end: to unite society and establish order
. 6.
In attempting to formulate the fundamental principles of sacrifice without reference to
the ritualistic framework in which the sacrifice takes place, we run the risk of appearing
simplistic. Such an effort smacks strongly of "psychologizing." Clearly, it would be
inexact to compare the sacrificial act to the spontaneous gesture of the man who kicks
his dog because he dares not kick his wife or boss. However, there are Greek myths that
are hardly more than colossal variants of such gestures. Such a one is the story of Ajax.
Furious at the leaders of the Greek army, who refused to award him Achilles' weapons,
Ajax slaughters the herd of sheep intended as provisions for the army. In his mad rage
he mistakes these gentle creatures for the warriors on whom he means to vent his rage.
The slaughtered animals belong to a species traditionally utilized by the Greeks for
sacrificial purposes; but because the massacre takes place outside the ritual framework,
Ajax is taken for a madman. The myth is not, strictly speaking, about the sacrificial
process; but it is certainly not irrelevant to it. The institution of sacrifice is based on
effects analogous to those produced by Ajax's anger -- but structured, channeled, and
held in check by fixed laws.
In the ritualistic societies most familiar to us -- those of the Jews and of the Greeks of
the classical age -- the sacrificial victims are almost always animals. However, there are
other societies in which human victims are substituted for the individuals who are
threatened by violence.
Even in fifth-century Greece -- the Athens of the great tragedians -human sacrifice had
not, it seems, completely disappeared. The practice
____________________
6. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown,
Structure and Function in Primitive Society
( Glencoe, Ill.:
Free Press, 1952), 158.
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was perpetuated in the form of the
pharmakos
, maintained by the city at its own expense
and slaughtered at the appointed festivals as well as at a moment of civic disaster. If
examined closely for traces of human sacrifice, Greek tragedy offers some remarkable
revelations. It is clear, for example, that the story of Medea parallels that of Ajax on the
sacrificial level, although here we are dealing with human rather than animal sacrifice.
In Euripides'
Medea
the principle of human substitution of one victim for another
appears in its most savage form. Frightened by the intensity of Medea's rage against her
faithless husband, Jason, the nurse begs the children's tutor to keep his charges out of their mother's way:
I am sure her anger will not subside until it has found a victim. Let us pray that the
victim is at least one of our enemi
es. 7.
Because the object of her hatred is out of reach, Medea substitutes her own children. It is
difficult for us to see anything resembling a religious act in Medea's insane behavior.
Nonetheless, infanticide has its place among ritualistic practices; the practice is too well
documented in too many cultures (including the Jewish and the ancient Greek) for us to
exclude it from consideration here. Medea's crime is to ritual infanticide what the
massacre of the sheep in the
Ajax
is to animal sacrifice. Medea prepares for the death of
her children like a priest preparing for a sacrifice. Before the fateful act, she issues the
traditional ritual announcement: all those whose presence might in any way hinder the
effectiveness of the ceremony are requested to remove themselves from the premises.
Medea, like Ajax, reminds us of a fundamental truth about violence; if left unappeased,
violence will accumulate until it overflows its confines and floods the surrounding area.
The role of sacrifice is to stem this rising tide of indiscriminate substitutions and redirect
violence into "proper" channels.
Ajax
has details that underline the close relationship between the sacrificial substitution
of animals and of humans. Before he sets upon the flock of sheep, Ajax momentarily
contemplates the sacrifice of his own son. The boy's mother does not take this threat
lightly; she whisks the child away.
In a general study of sacrifice there is little reason to differentiate between human and
animal victims. When the principle of the substitution is physical resemblance between
the vicarious victim and its prototypes, the mere fact that both victims are human beings
seems to suffice. Thus, it is hardly surprising that in some societies whole categories of
human
____________________
7. Here, and throughout the book, quotations from the Greek plays have been translated
by Patrick Gregory, from the original Greek.
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beings are systematically reserved for sacrificial purposes in order to protect other
categories.
I do not mean to minimize the gap that exists between the societies that practice human
sacrifice and those that do not. However, this gap should not prevent us from perceiving
what they have in common. Strictly speaking, there is no essential difference between
animal sacrifice and human sacrifice, and in many cases one is substituted for the other.
Our tendency to insist on differences that have little reality when discussing the
institution of sacrifice -- our reluctance, for example, to equate animal with human
sacrifice -- is undoubtedly a factor in the extraordinary misunderstandings that still
persist in that area of human culture.
This reluctance to consider all forms of sacrifice as a single phenomenon is nothing
new. Joseph de Maistre, having defined the principle of sacrificial substitution, makes
the bold and wholly unsubstantiated assertion that this principle does not apply to
human sacrifice. One cannot, he insists, kill a man to save a man. Yet this assertion is
repeatedly contradicted by Greek tragedy, implicitly in a play like
Medea
, and explicitly
elsewhere in Euripides.
In Euripides'
Electra
, Clytemnestra explains that the sacrifice of her daughter Iphigenia
would have been justified if it had been performed to save human lives. The tragedian
thus enlightens us, by way of Clytemnestra, on the "normal" function of human sacrifice
-- the function de Maistre had refused to acknowledge. If, says Clytemnestra,
Agamemnon had permitted his daughter to die: