Authors: RENÉ GIRARD
kind. As Amphitryon suggested, the blood shed in the course of the terrible labors and in
the city itself finally turned the hero's head. Instead of drawing off the violence and
allowing it to ebb away, the rites brought a veritable flood of violence down on the
victim. The sacrificial rites were no longer able to accomplish their task; they swelled
the surging tide of impure violence instead of channeling it. The mechanism of
substitutions had gone astray, and those whom the sacrifice was designed to protect
became its victims.
The difference between sacrificial and nonsacrificial violence is anything but exact; it is
even arbitrary. At times the difference threatens to disappear entirely. There is no such
thing as truly "pure" violence. Nevertheless, sacrificial violence can, in the proper
circumstances serve as an agent of purification. That is why those who perform the rites
are obliged to purify themselves at the conclusion of the sacrifice. The procedure
followed is reminiscent of atomic power plants; when the expert has finished
decontaminating the installation, he must himself be decontaminated. And accidents can
always happen.
The catastrophic inversion of the sacrificial act would appear to be
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an essential element in the Heracles myth. The motif reappears, thinly concealed behind
secondary themes, in another episode of his story, in Sophocles'
The Women of Trachis
.
Heracles had mortally wounded the centaur Nessus, who had assaulted Heracles' wife,
Deianira. Before dying, the centaur gave the young woman a shirt smeared with his
sperm -- or, in Sophocles' version, smeared with his blood mixed with the blood of a
Hydra. (Once again, as in the
Ion
, we encounter the theme of the two kinds of blood
mingling to form one.)
The subject of the tragedy, as in Euripides' Heracles, is the return of the hero. In this
instance Heracles is bringing with him a pretty young captive, of whom Deianira is
jealous. Deianira sends a servant to her husband with a welcoming gift, the shirt of
Nessus. With his dying breath the centaur had told her that the shirt would assure the
wearer's eternal fidelity to her; but he cautioned her to keep it well out of the way of any
flame or source of heat.
Heracles puts on the shirt, and soon afterward lights a fire for the rites of sacrificial
purification. The flames activate the poison in the shirt; it is the rite itself that unlooses
the evil. Heracles, contorted with pain, presently ends his life on the pyre he has begged
his son to prepare. Before dying, Heracles kills the servant who delivered the shirt to
him; this death, along with his own and the subsequent suicide of his wife, contributes to
the cycle of violence heralded by Heracles' return and the failure of the sacrifice. Once
again, violence has struck the beings who sought the protection of sacrificial rites.
A number of sacrifice motifs intermingle in these two plays. A special sort of impurity
clings to the warrior returning to his homeland, still tainted with the slaughter of war. In
the case of Heracles, his sanguinary labors render him particularly impure.
The returning warrior risks carrying the seed of violence into the very heart of his city.
The myth of Horatius, as explicated by Georges Dumézil, illustrates this theme:
Horatius kills his sister before any ritual purification has been performed. In the case of
Heracles the impurity triumphs over the rite itself.
If we examine the mechanism of violence in these two tragedies, we notice that when
the sacrifice goes wrong it sets off a chain reaction. The murder of Lycus is presented in
the Euripides play as a last "labor" of the hero, a still-rational prelude to the insane
outburst that follows. Seen from the perspective of the ritualist, it might well constitute a
first link of impure violence. With this incident, as we have noted, violence invades the
heart of the city. This initial murder corresponds to the death of the old servant in
The
Women of Trachis
.
Supernatural intervention plays no part in these episodes, except perhaps to cast a thin
veil over the true subject: the sacrificial celebration
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that has gone wrong. The goddess Lyssa, Nessus's shirt -- these add nothing to the
meaning of the two stories; rather, they act as a veil, and as soon as the veil is drawn
aside we encounter the same theme of "good" violence turning into "bad." The
mythological accompaniments of the stories can be seen as redundant. Lyssa, the
goddess of madness, sounds more like a refugee from an allegorical tale than a real
goddess, and Nessus's shirt joins company with all the acts of violence that Heracles
carries on his back.
The theme of the Warrior's Return is not, strictly speaking, mythological, and readily
lends itself to sociological or psychological interpretations. The conquering hero who
threatens to destroy the liberty of his homeland belongs to history, not myth. Certainly
that is the way Corneille seems to approach the subject in
Horace
, although in his
version of the tale the ideology is somewhat reversed -- the returning warrior is rightly
shocked by his sister's lack of patriotism. We could easily translate the "case histories"
of Heracles and Horatius into psychological or psychoanalytical terms and come up with
numerous working theories, each at variance with the other. But we should avoid this
temptation, for in debating the relative merits of each theory we would lose sight of the
role played by ritual -- a subject that has nothing to do with such debates, even though it
may, as we shall see, open the way to them. Being more
primitive
, ritualistic action is
hospitable to all ideological interpretations and dependent on none. It has only one
axiom: the contagious nature of the violence encountered by the warrior in battle -- and
only one prescription: the proper performance of ritual purification. Its sole purpose is to
prevent the resurgence of violence and its spread throughout the community.
The two tragedies we have been discussing present in anecdotal form, as if dealing
exclusively with exceptional individuals, events that are significant because they affect
the community as a whole. Sacrifice is a social act, and when it goes amiss the
consequences are not limited to some "exceptional" individual singled out by Destiny.
Historians seem to agree that Greek tragedy belonged to a period of transition between
the dominance of an archaic theocracy and the emergence of a new, "modern" order
based on statism and laws. Before its decline the archaic order must have enjoyed a
certain stability; and this stability must have reposed on its religious element -- that is,
on the sacrificial rites.
Although they predate the tragedians, the pre-Socratics are often regarded as the
philosophers of classical tragedy. In their writings we can find echoes of the religious
crisis we are attempting to define. The fifth fragment of Heraclitus quite clearly deals
with the decay of sacrificial rites, with their inability to purify what is impure. Religious
beliefs are compromised by the decadent state of the ritual:
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In vain do they strive for purification by besmirching themselves with blood, as the man
who has bathed in the mire seeks to clean himself with mud. Such antics can only strike
the beholder as utter folly! In addressing their prayers to images of the gods, they might
just as well be speaking to the walls, without seeking to know the true nature of gods or
heroes.
The difference between blood spilt for ritual and for criminal purposes no longer holds.
The Heraclitus fragment appears in even sharper relief when compared to analogous
passages in the Old Testament. The preexilian prophets Amos, Isaiah, and Micah
denounce in vehement terms the impotence of the sacrificial process and ritual in
general. In the most explicit manner they link the decay of religious practices to the
deterioration of contemporary behavior. Inevitably, the eroding of the sacrificial system
seems to result in the emergence of reciprocal violence. Neighbors who had previously
discharged their mutual aggressions on a third party, joining together in the sacrifice of
an "outside" victim, now turn to sacrificing one another. Empedocles'
Purifications
brings us even closer to the problem:
135.
When will the sinister noise of this carnage cease? Can you not see that you are
devouring another with your callous hearts?
137.
The father seizes hold of the son, who has changed form; in his mad delusion he
kills him, murmuring prayers. The son cries out, imploring his insane executioner to
spare him. But the father hears him not, and cuts his throat, and spreads a great feast in
his palace. In the same way the son takes hold of the father, the children their mother,
one slaughtering the other and devouring their own flesh and blood.
The concept of a "sacrificial crisis" may be useful in clarifying certain aspects of Greek
tragedy. To a real extent it is a sacrificial religion that provides the language for these
dramas; the criminal in the play sees himself not so much as a righter-of-wrongs as a
performer-of-sacrifices. We always view the "tragic flaw" from the perspective of the
new, emergent order, never from that of the old order in the final stages of decay. The
reason for this approach is clear: modern thought has never been able to attribute any
real function to the practice of sacrifice, and because the nature of the practice eludes us,
we naturally find it difficult to determine when and if this practice is in the process of
disintegration. In the case of Greek tragedy it is not enough merely to believe in the
existence of the old order; we must look deeper if we hope to discover the religious
problems of the era. Unlike the Jewish prophets, whose viewpoint was historical, the
Greek tragedians evoked their own sacrificial crisis in terms of legendary figures whose
forms were fixed by tradition.
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All the bloody events that serve as background to the plays -- the plagues and
pestilences, civil and foreign wars -- undoubtedly reflect the contemporary scene, but
the images are unclear, as if viewed through a glass darkly. Each time, for example, a
play of Euripides deals with the collapse of a royal house (as in Heracles, Iphigenia in
Aulis, or The Bacchae), we are convinced that the poet is suggesting that the scene
before our eyes in only the tip of the iceberg, that the real issue is the fate of the entire
community. At the moment when Heracles is slaughtering his family offstage, the
chorus cries out: "Look, look! The tempest is shaking the house; the roof is falling in."
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Part IV The Scapegoat and Myths as Texts
of Persecution
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Chapter 7 The Scapegoat as Historical Referent
Girard has consistently maintained that mythical texts do not characteristically present an
explicit
theme
of scapegoating; myth camouflages scapegoating even as it represents patterns
of meaning in stories of gods, ancient heroes, foundations of social order and ritual, etc.
However, even if much of any myth or legend may be fantastic or unbelievable to modern
critical thinking, particularly within the scholarly disciplines of the humanities and social
sciences, the stories and texts that seem incredible do have empirical or historical referents at
the generative level. The two chief referents are a social or cultural
crisis
and collective
violence against a victim (or victims) who are both blamed for the crisis and, in archaic
societies, credited with the peace and harmony that are restored once the lynching has taken
place. In this excerpt, which is the first chapter of
The Scapegoat
, Girard uses a fourteenth-
century text By Guillaume de Machaut,
Judgment of the King of Navarre
, as a test case for
showing that texts in which persecution is accepted or justified have the same structure as
myths. Every historian or comparative religionist reading Guillaume's epic poem will easily
discern its unbelievable mythical elements, but none of them will doubt that a severe crisis
occasioned by the bubonic plague occurred in France in the late 1340s and that an untold
number of Jews were accused of causing the plague and murdered in paroxysms of mob
violence.
Guillaume de Machaut was a French poet of the mid-fourteenth century. His
Judgment of the
King of Navarre
deserves to be better known. The main part of the work is a long poem in the
conventional, courtly style, but its opening is striking. Guillaume claims that he participated
in a confusing series of catastrophic events before he finally closeted himself
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in his house in terror to await death or the end of the indescribable ordeal. Some of the events
he describes are totally improbable, others only partially so. Yet the account leaves the
impression that something must actually have happened.
There are signs in the sky. People are knocked down by a rain of stones. Entire cities are