Authors: RENÉ GIRARD
myth to the reality it (mis)represents cannot be revealed. That this reversal still is a form of
scapegoating can be seen from the continued inability of our culture to bring to light the
reality of victimization behind even the most transparent myths, such as our Venda example.
As we discover the exact degree to which real magic, persecutional magic, influences our
text, we become able to circumscribe its effects with precision, and far from embracing
magical thinking, which is what the mimetic theory seems to be doing as long as we do not
understand it, our reading moves farther away from magic than all previous readings.
The irrational thinker is not the mimetic interpreter but the narrow rationalist or the textual
nihilist who resemble one another in their
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refusal to face the possibility that the law of contamination by the unbelievable might be just
as irrelevant to foundational myths as it already is to all distorted accounts of scapegoating in
our world.
When we apply the wrong law to our myth, we mimetically reproduce at the interpretive level
the confusion that characterizes the myth. We keep placing believable and unbelievable
features in the same category. We undifferentiate what should be differentiated.
The only real discrepancy between the anti-referential schools and mythical thinking
stricto
sensu
is that mythical thinking trusts everything in a myth, whereas the anti-referential school trusts nothing. This is an advance, no doubt, but a very limited one that must give way to a
more nuanced evaluation of the various themes.
The current interpretive nihilism is the twin brother of positivism and its misguided critical
prudence. They both desire a second degree of mythical thinking that can and will be
transcended by the selective referentiality of the mimetic theory.
The contamination by the fantastic and my metaphor of the rotten apple are two different
names for a textual principle of interpretive guilt by association, if I may say so, an expulsion
too encompassing that does not distinguish the wheat from the chaff. What this expulsion
really expels is . . . the expulsion that generates the text and that, being kept safely covered
up, remains as virulently operative as it always was under the blanket of the anti-realistic,
anti-referential principle, at a time when the real solution of the mythical enigma is at hand.
The mimetic theory provides an approach sophisticated enough to utilize all textual resources
most effectively without surrendering to any referential fallacy, unless, of course, it is abused,
and abuses are always possible. This is another subject, however, that cannot be discussed in
the present essay.
At this time in our history, the only context in which academic researchers have learned to
identify the scapegoat genesis of a text, the only context in which it is permissible to suspend
the law of contamination by the unbelievable, insofar as evidence warrants, is still our own
Western historical context. Within our own cultural realm, the lesson was learned centuries
ago, I repeat, and so thoroughly that we can identify and interpret all relevant clues almost immediately and automatically.
In a historical context, we all perceive intuitively the tell-tale signs of scapegoating in any
text structured like our Venda myth. We all perform the operation required by its elucidation
so rapidly that they hardly reach our consciousness. Instead of appearing audacious to the
point of
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temerity, my interpretive moves seem commonplace and their validity is taken for granted.
Gradually, I believe, the situation will change and at some time in the future, the
demythification
of myth will become as easy and banal as the
demystification
of a witchcraft trial record has been for centuries.
There are objective reasons, I said, why the interpretation of myth is lagging so far behind the
interpretation of historical texts. The first reason is that the fantastic themes are often but not
always more spectacular in a myth and the tell-tale signs of real scapegoating are harder to
see. The second reason is the historical background and the historical experience that we have
of our own society. Our society is the place where the battle against magical accusations was
fought and where it was won. Mythology seems alien and forbiddingly majestic by
comparison.
But there are also subjective reasons, the ideological prejudices of anthropologists and other
students of myth. Our society as a whole is always biased in its own favor. But, precisely
because they are so used to fighting this kind of prejudice, our professional interpreters are
guilty of the reverse bias. They are biased in favor of myths and they prefer not to see in them
the same collective violence that they are delighted to denounce in our own history.
Ever since the Renaissance, a quasi-religious respect for mythology has characterized and
still characterizes academic research. Our ability to decipher scapegoat phenomena applies
itself preferentially to the Judaic and Christian domains, for reasons which, at bottom, are
anti-religious and anti-Christian.
The whole unfinished business of deciphering mythology and ritual belongs to the ongoing
history
of our ability to read scapegoat phenomena in all human relations as well as inside
texts. Everything we are now poised to achieve will represent a new advance beyond the last
great step, which was taken centuries ago, when the remnants of magical thinking in our
world were finally liquidated. At that time, our culture reached a threshold beyond which the
mythical and religious texts of all mankind become food for demystification or
"deconstruction" in the same manner and for the same reasons as medieval witch-hunting and
other forms of collective persecution. We have now been standing on that threshold for four
or five centuries but we still hesitate to cross it. The mimetic-scapegoat theory is the crossing
of that threshold.
Our willingness to cross the threshold depends on our constantly deepening ability to detect
mimetic polarizations and scapegoating, and this deepening was long ago triggered by the
influence on us of the Bible and above all of the Gospels. We can verify this, I believe, in the
very form of the mimetic scapegoat interpretation.
All it takes to crack open our myth and all similar myths is the application to them of the principle of the innocent victim unjustly
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scapegoated. The model for this analysis is the story of the crucifixion and associated texts in
the Christian Gospels. This is what we did in the case of our Venda myth. In order to identify
the second wife as a "scapegoat," all we have to do is to slip under our text the text of the Christian Passion, the original revelation of the scapegoat mechanism.
The mimetic reading is scientific in the same sense as the demystification of witch-hunting
achieved by the modern world. The two are scientific in opposition to the witch-hunters' and
mythmakers' irrationality. Similarly, there is a
scientific
reading of the Nazi genocide in
contrast with the mad theories of the "revisionists."
We must insist simultaneously on this scientific character of the mimetic interpretation and
on its religious origin. The fact that the two words "scientific" and "religious" are used side by side cannot sit well with many people. It suggests that distinctions regarded as universally
valid both by liberal rationalism and by religionists are being abolished. It suggests that the
times we are living are truly revolutionary.
"The stone that the builders rejected has become the keystone." This is the principle which is being applied. It has applications in all possible fields, and it effectuates the most radical
deconstruction. Our ability to read myth has little to do with the Greeks. It is inseparable from
the intense concern for all victims that characterizes the modern world as a whole. It is not
enough to dismiss this concern with a few desultory words about our Judaic and Christian
"heritage." The word implies too much passivity. "Heritage" is an elegant version of a more recent and flat-footed attempt to put Christianity behind us by pompously labeling ourselves
"post-Christian." We are about as "post-Christian" as we are "postnuclear" or "posttechnical"
or "postmimetic." More than ever, the Gospels are the new wine that keeps bursting the old
wine skins.
One last word about a possible objection. Our Venda myth belongs to the rather small
category of myths that have everything a myth can have that may help us uncover their
scapegoat genesis: the scapegoat accusation, the crisis, the "guilt" and "punishment" of the victim, the beneficial consequences of her unanimous expulsion. Many myths lack one or
more of these most revealing features that are all conveniently assembled in our myth.
The myths that lack one or more pieces of the puzzle are obviously less easy to decipher than
our Venda myth. Until now, I have focused mostly on the basement level of mythical
analysis, the easiest level.
In
The Scapegoat
, however, I tried to move beyond this stage in order to show that the
absence of collective violence in a myth is due to normal development in the religious history
of mankind. So are
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other transformations that make the detection of the scapegoat genesis more and more
difficult but, as far as I have ascertained, never really impossible.
This essay is not the place for pursuing further this kind of exploration, but I would like to give some final indications on the road which, in my opinion, such investigation might take
in the case of our Venda myth.
Some readers will have observed that this myth sounds like a variation on a famous mythical
theme: feminine indiscretion,
mala curiositas
. Myths that emphasize that theme are found
everywhere, it seems. In Greek mythology there are two famous examples, the myth of
Psyche and the myth of Semele, two beloved mistresses of Zeus struck by his thunder for
very much the same reason as the second wife in our Venda myth. Their lover has not said
who he is and they are destroyed for pestering him about his divine identity very much in the
manner of our Venda myth. Another closely related story is the Germanic Lohengrin.
Are we to believe that our Venda myth is influenced by these ancient myths, or is it the other
way around? All such hypotheses are absurd, I believe. The only possible explanation for the
similarities between them all is a common genesis of the mythical accusation, which must be
the mimetic jealousy of two rival women, as I outlined in my reading.
Being more "primitive," or "archaic," or diachronically "younger," the Venda myth must have preserved what has completely or partially disappeared from the better known Greek and
Germanic myths. At some point in the future, when the superiority of the mimetic theory is
acknowledged, our Venda myth may turn out to constitute an important piece of evidence in
the understanding of how all myths of the Psyche type were originally constituted.
The victimized heroine is always a favorite wife or mistress. In a polygamous world, she
cannot be accused of adultery. She cannot be indicted simply for being intimate with the
beloved "god." The only possible accusation is of the type we have in all these myths. The
rival must be incriminated for abusing a privilege that was legitimately granted but must
nevertheless be taken away from her, by the most violent means if necessary, because she
keeps pestering the god. The pestering always has something to do with the superhuman
status of the lover, or husband, whom the abandoned woman alone has the right to know.
The disgruntled ex-mistress manages to persuade herself that her more successful rival is
usurping something she alone is entitled to have, a true awareness of who her husband really
is, of how much he is worth.
Like all myths, our African myth hides its own victimization but less efficiently than the
more elaborate Greek and Germanic myths, which must have been modified repeatedly
before they reached us. Two themes are still present in the Venda version that must have
originally belonged
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to the others as well but have subsequently been removed, the slanderous accusation by the
jealous rival and the collective violence that this accusation triggers.
Whereas Zeus is supposed to punish the culprits directly with his own thunder, Python still
needs human intermediaries. He acts through the assembled people and not he, but they, send
the second wife to her death. The Venda version lets us see the crucial role of collective
violence, its identity with sacred power.
Olympian mythology, as a rule, has been cleansed of its most sinister features, according to principles less drastic that those of Plato in
The Republic
but similar in their purpose. The
Venda myth still preserves the crucial collective action for which the thunder of Zeus is really
a metaphor. A careful comparison of African and Greek myths could reveal, I believe, what
pieces of the mythical puzzle are removed, in what order, and for what reason, during the
religious history of these myths. This is the process to which Freud so powerfully alluded in
Moses and Monotbeism
, the multiple attempts at erasing the traces of the collective murder,