Authors: RENÉ GIRARD
and their ultimate failure. At a certain point in the evolution of mentalities, the themes most
suggestive of what mythology really is become scandalous in the eyes of the faithful, and not
without serious reasons. That is why they are suppressed along lines which seem to be always
the same, more or less, in all observable traditions. Through a similar process, nowadays, the
observations of anthropologists who still pay attention to the violence of mythology and ritual
are being discredited in favor of nihilistic and anti-referential interpretations that are really
much less significant.
The hypothesis of a scapegoat mechanism that turns the magical accusation in a text into the
ostensible truth of that text enables us to circumscribe the unbelievable features and to
distinguish them from the believable ones, the ones about the drought and the drowning of
the victim that ends the drought, which become paradoxically more rather than less
believable through their conjunction with the unbelievable accusation. The suspected
presence of a scapegoat mechanism does more than merely suspend the application of the law
of contamination by the fantastic. It literally reverses it. It turns a law of contamination by the
unbelievable into a law of contamination by the believable. The idea that a text is never more
reliable than the least reliable of its parts is replaced by its own opposite. If a text tells us
about some violence inflicted on the victims of unbelievable accusations, the more
unbelievable the accusation is and the more credulous the author is, the more likely it is that
the violence really occurred.
The reasons for this opposition are clear. In our world, at the beginning of the modern age,
there was a battle against the spirit of witchcraft, and the interpretation of texts inside our
own culture was
-140-
revolutionized by it. The benefits of this great victory have not yet been extended to the texts
of other cultures.
To those who keep stubbornly repeating that an angry snake and his human wife cannot be
the cause of a drought and that the myth is pure nonsense, I will answer that it is true, of
course, but only in an absolute sense. In a relative sense, however, relative to the type of text
to which our fantastic snake and its indiscreet wife belong, the story makes terrific sense, not
as something "true" but as something "false," as the type of deception that happens in the real world, and when it happens it also usually happens that the other themes in a myth such as
ours are real events as well. The referentiality of the snake not as a god but as a magical
accusation commands the referentiality of the whole myth.
In the light of the magical accusation, the death of the woman makes complete sense as a
panicked reaction of the community. So does the idea that this death put an end to the
drought. And in the light of these two themes, of course, the story of the snake makes perfect
sense as a magical accusation that reunites against and around the victim of a mimetically
disturbed community. We are in such a circle of believability that the likelihood of a real social process behind our text is very high.
Our mimetic demythification is a purely interpretive operation, entirely self-contained and
free from a priori assumptions. The claim that the victim is real is no a priori bias in favor of
referentiality; it is demanded by a hypothesis that is simply too powerful to be rejected.
-141-
Part V The Bible, the Gospels, and Christ
-143-
Chapter 10 The Bible's Distinctiveness and the Gospel
The truth of the human condition is twofold. It is both the truth of the mimetic predicament
and the truth of the liberation that comes from revelation of this predicament in the Gospel
witness to the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, which both disclose and overcome the
hidden founding murder. The victimary mechanism of human culture is rooted in this murder.
It was first in ancient Israel that narratorthinkers and prophets began to view their history
from the standpoint of God's concern for victims rather than from the standpoint of the sacred
social order.
The truth of the innocent victim is the power of God disclosed in the suffering of the one who
uncovers our structures of desire and violence. This truth is expressed in the Servant of the
Lord ( Isa. 52:13-53:12), but is attested in its definitive and most sustained form in the Gospel
witness to Jesus as Christ, Lord, Son of Man and Son of God. This selection from
Things
Hidden
, 141-44, 146-49, 151-79, sketches the fundamentals of Girard's view of the Bible.
The format of
Things Hidden
is that of a dialogue between Girard and two psychiatrist
colleagues, Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort, indicated by the initials R.G., J.-M.O.,
and G.L., respectively.
Similarities between the Biblical Myths and World Mythology
R.G.:
We have now dealt with the hypothesis of the scapegoat as an exclusively scientific
one. No doubt our discussions have been far too hasty, as well as too schematic. All the same,
our readers now know
-145-
our gist. We must turn to other subjects. Or rather, we must investigate other, even more
spectacular ways in which the same truth has come to the fore.From this point onward we
shall take it for granted that the victimage mechanisms exist and that their role in the
establishment of religion, culture, and humanity itself is an established fact, no longer open to
doubt. Actually, I never lose sight of the point that this is only a hypothesis. I am hardly
likely to forget it, for the very reason that the material remaining to be studied here will
supply us with new proofs, and increasingly striking ones.First of all, we shall look at Judeo-
Christian Scripture. After that, we shall deal with psychopathology, and this will ultimately
lead us to some conclusions about our own times. People will accuse us of playing at being Pico della Mirandola -- the Renaissance Man -- certainly a temptation to be resisted today, if
we wish to be seen in a favorable light. But in fact a very different thing is in question here.
We simply cannot confine our hypothesis to the area of hominization and primitive religion.
As we shall see, this hypothesis will compel us to broaden our horizons, for it can acquire its
fullest meaning only in universal terms.If we turn to the Old Testament, and particularly to
the books that come first or those that may contain the oldest materials, we find ourselves
immediately in familiar territory. Immediately we come upon the three great moments we
have defined:
1. Dissolution in conflict, removal of the differences and hierarchies which constitute the
community in its wholeness;
2. the
all against one
of collective violence;
3. the development of interdictions and rituals.
To the first moment belong the very first lines of the text on the creation of the world, as well
as the tale of the confusion of the Tower of Babel and that of the corruption of Sodom and
Gomorrah. We also see immediately that in Exodus the ten plagues of Egypt form the
equivalent of the plague at Thebes in Sophocles. The Flood, again, belongs with these
metaphors of crisis. And in every case, from the first lines of Genesis, we have the theme of
the warring brothers or twins: Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his eleven brothers,
et al.
The second moment is no less easy to locate. It is always by violence, by the expulsion of one
of the brothers, that the crisis is resolved, and differentiation returns once again.
In every one of the great scenes of Genesis and Exodus there exists a theme or quasi-theme of
the founding murder of expulsion. Obviously, this is most striking in the expulsion from the
Garden of Eden; there,
-146-
God takes the violence upon himself and founds humanity by driving Adam and Eve far
away from him.
In the blessing that Isaac gives to Jacob rather than to his brother Esau, we are again dealing
with the violent resolution of a conflict between warring brothers, and the surreptitious
character of Jacob's act in substituting himself for his brother, when the act is discovered,
does not compromise the outcome. It matters little, in effect, who is the victim, provided that
there is one.
In Jacob's struggle with the angel, a conflict between
doubles
is in question -- one that hangs in the balance for a long time because the contestants are perfectly matched. Jacob's
adversary is first of all called a
man
; and it is with the defeat of this adversary and his
expulsion at the hands of the victor that he becomes a God from whom Jacob demands and
obtains a blessing. In other words, the combat of
doubles
results in the expulsion of one of
the pair, and this is identified directly with the return to peace and order.
In every one of these scenes, the relationship between
brothers
or
doubles
has in the first instance a character of undecidability, resolved by expulsion through violence despite an
arbitrary element involved, as in the case of Jacob and Esau.
Since the single victim brings reconciliation and safety by restoring life to the community, it is not difficult to appreciate that a sole survivor in a world where all others perish can,
thematically, amount to the same thing as a single victim extracted from a group in which no
one, save the victim, perishes. Noah's Ark, which alone is spared by the Flood, guarantees
that the world will begin all over again. It is Lot and his family who are the sole survivors of
the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Lot's wife, who is changed into a pillar of salt,
brings back into this story the motif of the single victim.
Let us now look at the third moment -- at the establishment of interdictions and sacrifices, or
circumcision, which comes to the same thing. Here references to this side of things can
become confused with references to the founding mechanism. For instance, in the sacrifice of
Isaac the necessity of sacrifice threatens the most precious being, only to be satisfied, at the
last moment, with a substituted victim, the ram sent by God.
In the story of Isaac's blessing of Jacob, the theme of the kids offered to the father in a
propitiatory meal represents a sacrificial institution -and one detail that reveals clearly,
despite its link with the other themes of the story, the way in which the sacrifice operates. It is
thanks to the hair of those kids that Isaac can mistake Jacob's hide-covered limbs for Esau,
and so Jacob escapes his father's curse.
In all these mythic accounts, society and even nature appear as a whole being put in order, or
in which order is being reestablished. In
-147-
general, these belong to the end of the victimage account, the place where the logic of the
hypothesis expects to be. But in the story of the creation of the world, the founding moment
comes at the beginning and no victimage is involved. For Noah, the final reorganization is
implied not only in the Covenant after the Flood, but also in the confinement of prototypes of
all species within the Ark; here we have something like a floating system of classification, on
the basis of which the world will repeople itself in conformity with the norms of God's will.
We can also cite here God's promise to Abraham after the sacrifice of the ram substituted for
Isaac, as well as the rules which are prescribed for Jacob after the expulsion of his divinized
double. In both cases, the change of name points to the founding character of the process.
J.-M.O.:
Up to now you have only shown us the similarities between the biblical myths and
the myths which you spoke about earlier. Are you not concerned with stressing the
differences between these mythologies and the Bible?
R.G.:
I shall shortly be talking about these differences. If I insist first of all upon the
similarities, it is to demonstrate clearly that I am not embarrassed by them, and that I am not
trying to spirit them away. There can be no doubt that the first books of the Bible rest upon
myths that are very close to those found all over the world. What I shall try to prove to you
now is that these analogies are not the end of the matter. The biblical treatment of these
myths offers something which is absolutely distinctive, and this is what I shall be trying to
define.
The Distinctiveness of the Biblical Myths
Cain
R.G.:
First let us take the story of Cain in Chapter 4 of Genesis. . . . The myth of Cain is presented in classic fashion. One of the two brothers kills the other, and the Cainite
community is founded.
People have often asked why God, although he condemns the murder, responds to the appeal
of the murderer. Cain says: "Whoever comes across me will kill me!" And God responds: "If anyone kills Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold." God himself intervenes, and
in response to the founding murder he enunciates the law against murder. This intervention
makes it clear, in my view, that the decisive murder, here as elsewhere, has a founding
character. And to talk in terms of "founding" is also to talk in terms of "differentiating,"
which is why we have, immediately afterward, these words: "And the Lord put a mark on