Authors: RENÉ GIRARD
Cain, to prevent anyone finding him from striking him down." I see in this the establishment
of a differential system, which serves, as always, to discourage mimetic rivalry and
generalized conflict.
-148-
G.L.:
A great number of communities attribute their own foundation to a similar type of
murder. Rome, for example. Romulus kills Remus and the city of Rome is founded. In both
cases, the murder of one brother by another has the same founding and differentiating power.
Discord between doubles is succeeded by the order of the new community.
R.G.:
There is nonetheless a difference between the two myths that can easily be disregarded,
within the normal context of statements about mythology. In our own particular context --
that is, an anthropology entirely centered on victimage mechanisms and thus open to the
proposition that to regard them as arbitrary is to misinterpret them -- this difference can
acquire a great significance.
In the Roman myth, the murder of Remus appears as an action that was perhaps to be
regretted, but was justified by the victim's transgression. Remus did not respect the ideal limit
traced by Romulus between the inside and the outside of the city. The motive for the killing is
at once insignificant -- since the city does not yet exist -- and crucial, literally fundamental. In
order for the city to exist, no one can be allowed to flout with impunity the rules it prescribes.
So Romulus is justified. His status is that of a sacrificer and High Priest; he incarnates Roman
power under all its forms at one and the same time. The legislative, the judiciary, and the
military forms cannot yet be distinguished from the religious; everything is already present
within the last.
By contrast, even if Cain is invested with what are basically the same powers, and even if he
has the ear of the deity, he is nonetheless presented as a vulgar murderer. The fact that the
first murder precipitates the first cultural development of the human race does not in any way
excuse the murderer in the biblical text. The founding character of the murder is signaled just
as clearly, and perhaps even more clearly, than in the nonbiblical myths. But there is
something else, and that is moral judgment. The condemnation of the murder takes
precedence over all other considerations. "Where is your brother Abel?"
The importance of this ethical dimension in the Bible is well-known. And yet few
commentaries have sought to define it with rigor, particularly for texts which are not
necessarily the most ancient, but which have to deal with archaic data. In my view, Max
Weber has been the most successful in this regard. In his great but incomplete work
Ancient
Judaism
, he comes to the conclusion at several stages that the biblical writers have an undeniable tendency to take the side of the victim on moral grounds, and to spring to the
victim's defens
e. 1.
____________________
1. Max Weber,
Ancient Judaism
, trans. H. H. Garth and D. Martingale ( Glencoe, III.: Free
Press, 1952), 19-22, 86; 475-76; 492-95. Obviously Max Weber's theses must be
compared with that of Nietzsche in The Anti-Christ and elsewhere.
-149-
Max Weber sees this observation as having a purely sociological and cultural significance.
He takes the view that the propensity to favor the victim is characteristic of a particular
cultural atmosphere peculiar to Judaism, and he looks for its explanation in the innumerable
catastrophes of Jewish history and the fact that the Jewish people had not experienced any
great historical success comparable to the successes of the empirebuilders surrounding them:
Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, et al.
He is therefore not at all interested in what might be derived on the level of mythic and
religious texts from a factor that appears to him to be in the last analysis a form of prejudice
comparable to so many others, a prejudice in favor of victims. Seen in the context of the
victimary anthropology centered on victimage mechanisms that we have just sketched out,
this attitude of indifference is unacceptable. Suppose that the texts of mythology are the
reflection, at once faithful and deceptive, of the collective violence that founds a community;
suppose that they bear witness of a real violence, that they do not lie even if in them the
victimage mechanism is falsified and transfigured by its very efficacy; suppose, finally that
myth is the persecutors' retrospective vision of their own persecution. If this is so, we can
hardly regard as insignificant a change in perspective that consists in taking the side of the
victim, proclaiming the victim's innocence and the culpability of his murderers.
Suppose that, far from being a gratuitous invention, myth is a text that has been falsified by
the belief of the executioners in the guiltiness of their victim; suppose, in other words, that
myths incorporate the point of view of the community that has been reconciled to itself by the
collective murder and is unanimously convinced that this event was a legitimate and sacred
action, desired by God himself, which could not conceivably be repudiated, criticized, or
analyzed. If that is so, an attitude that involves rehabilitating the victim and denouncing the
persecutors is not something that calls only for disillusioned and blasé commentaries. This
attitude can hardly fail to have repercussions not merely on mythology itself, but on all that is
involved in the hidden foundation of collective murder: forms of ritual, interdictions, and
religious transcendence. One by one, the whole range of cultural forms and values, even
those that appear to be furthest removed from the domain of myth, would be affected.
J.-M.O.:
Isn't this happening already in the Cain myth, however primitive it may be?
R.G.:
If we examine the story with care, we come to see that the lesson of the Bible is
precisely that the culture born of violence must return to violence. In the initial stages, we
observe a brilliant flowering of culture: techniques are invented; towns spring from the
desert. But very
-150-
soon, the violence that has been inadequately contained by the founding murder and the legal barriers deriving from it starts to escape and propagate. The borderline between legalized
punishment, vengeance, and the blood feud is erased when Cain's seven victims become, for
Lamech, seventy-seven.
G.L.:
It is quite obvious that we have here a case of undifferentiated violence propagating
contagiously...
R.G.:
The Flood also results from an escalation that involves the monstrous dissolution of all
differences: giants are born, the progeny of a promiscuous union between the sons of the gods
and the daughters of men. This is the crisis in which the whole of culture is submerged, and
its destruction is not only a punishment from God; to almost the same extent is the fatal
conclusion of a process which brings back the violence from which it originally managed to
get free, thanks to the temporary benefits of the founding murder.
With reference to the violence that both founds and differentiates, the story of Cain has, in
addition to its unquestionable significance as myth, a much greater power of revelation than
that of non-Judaic myths. Certainly there must be, behind the biblical account, myths in
conformity with the universal norms of mythology; so the initiative of the Jewish authors and
their critical reappraisal must undoubtedly be credited with the affirmation that the victim is
innocent and that the culture founded on murder retains a thoroughly murderous character
that in the end becomes self-destructive, once the ordering and sacrificial benefits of the
original violence have dissipated.
Here we are not just making a vague conjecture. Abel is only the first in a long line of victims
whom the Bible exhumes and exonerates: "The voice of your brother's blood cries to me from
the ground."
Joseph
R.G.:
Although it may be concealed in the Cain myth, the collective character of the
persecution is fully visible in the story of Joseph....[If we look at the chapters] that are most
important for the purposes of our analysis [ Genesis 37 and 39],...[we see that] once again,
the hypothesis that best illuminates the biblical text is also the most common one. The
authors of Genesis have recast a preexistent mythology, adapting it in the spirit of their
special concerns. This involves inverting the relationship between the victim and the
persecuting community. From the mythological perspective, the eleven brothers would
appear first of all as the passive objects of the violence inflicted by a malevolent hero, then as
the recipients of the benefits conferred by this same hero after he has been victimized and
deified. Joseph would thus be at first a cause of disorder, and a remnant of this can be
surmised from the
-151-
dreams that he recounts, dreams of domination that excite the jealousy of his eleven brothers.
The original myths would no doubt have sanctioned the charge of hubris. The kid that
provided the blood in which Joseph's tunic was dipped in order to prove to his father that he
was really dead would have played a directly sacrificial role in the prebiblical account.
In the first part of the account, two separate sources have been combined; each one seeks to rehabilitate the victim at the expense of his brothers, even if each is also concerned with
partially exempting one of the brothers from blame. The first source, known as "Elohist,"
chooses Reuben and the second, known as "Yahwist," chooses Judah. Hence there are two
different stories, juxtaposed with one another, that account for one and the same act of
collective violence.
If we take into account that Joseph's Egyptian master behaved toward him as a father, then
the accusation of the Egyptian's wife has an almost incestuous character. Instead of
corroborating the accusation, as do so many myths (with the story of Oedipus at their head),
the story of Joseph declares that it is false!
J.-M.O.:
You are quite right. But surely the myth to compare with the story of Joseph is not
the Oedipus myth but that of Phaedra and Hippolytus?
R.G.:
Of course. But you will observe that in the Greek myth, as opposed to the Racinian
version, Hippolytus is treated, if not as a guilty party in the modern sense, at least as being
justly punished: his excessive chastity has an element of hubris that offends Venus. By
contrast, in the story of Joseph the victim is simply an innocent party who is falsely accused.
Further on in the story, there is a second account of a victim who is falsely accused and in the
end gets off free. This time, Joseph himself uses trickery to impugn his brother Benjamin --
the other favorite son of Jacob and the only one younger than Joseph -- with guilt. But on this
occasion, one of the ten brothers is not willing to accept the expulsion of the victim. Judah
puts himself forward in Benjamin's place, and Joseph is moved by pity to make himself
known to his brothers and pardon them.
G.L.:
The point that rehabilitating the victim has a desacralizing effect is well demonstrated
by the story of Joseph, who ends up having no demoniac or divine aspects but simply being
human....
J.-M.O.:
Mythological culture and the cultural forms that have been grafted upon it, such as
philosophy or in our own day ethnology, with a few exceptions tend first to justify the
founding murder and then to eliminate the traces of this murder, convincing people that there
is no such thing. These cultural forms have succeeded perfectly in convincing us that
humanity is innocent of these murders. By contrast,
-152-
in the Bible there is an inverse movement, an attempt to get back to origins and look once
again at constitutive acts of transference so as to discredit and annul them -- so as to
contradict and demystify the myths. . . .
R.G.:
The proof that we are not entirely unaware of this inspired role played by the Bible lies in the fact that for centuries we have been accusing it of "laying blame" on humanity, which, of course, as the philosophers assure us, has never harmed a fly in its own right. Clearly the
story of Cain lays blame on Cainite culture by showing that this culture is completely based
upon the unjust murder of Abel. The story of Romulus and Remus does not lay blame upon
the city of Rome since the murder of Remus is presented to us as being justified. No one asks
if the Bible is not right to lay blame as it does, and if the city of man is not in fact founded on concealed victims.
G.L.:
But your analysis has up to now been restricted to Genesis. Can you show that it
remains valid for other great biblical texts?
J.-M.O.:
In Exodus it is the whole of the chosen people which is identified with the
scapegoat, vis-à-vis Egyptian society.
R.G.:
Yes, indeed. When Moses complains that the Egyptians are not willing to let the
Hebrews leave, Yahweh replies that soon the Egyptians will not only let them leave but will
expel
them.
As he himself causes the sacrificial crisis that ravages Egypt (the Ten Plagues), Moses is