Authors: RENÉ GIRARD
aspect of the collective murder itself insofar as it effectively resolves and terminates crises of
mimetic rivalry among human groups.
Sacrifice is the resolution and conclusion of ritual because a collective murder or expulsion
resolves the mimetic crisis that ritual mimics. What kind of mechanism can this be? Judging
from the evidence, direct and indirect, this resolution must belong to the realm of what is
commonly called a scapegoat effect.
The word "scapegoat" means two things: the ritual described in Le-viticus
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viticus 16 or similar rituals which are themselves imitations of the model I have in mind. I
distinguish between scapegoat as ritual and scapegoat as effect. By a scapegoat effect I mean
that strange process through which two or more people are reconciled at the expense of a
third party who appears guilty or responsible for whatever ails, disturbs, or frightens the
scapegoaters. They feel relieved of their tensions and they coalesce into a more harmonious
group. They now have a single purpose, which is to prevent the scapegoat from harming
them, by expelling and destroying him.
Scapegoat effects are not limited to mobs, but they are most conspicuously effective in the
case of mobs. The destruction of a victim can make a mob more furious, but it can also bring
back tranquility. In a mob situation, tranquility does not return, as a rule, without some kind
of victimage to assuage the desire for violence. That collective belief appears so absurd to the
detached observer, if there is one, that he is tempted to believe the mob is not duped by its
own identification of the scapegoat as a culprit. The mob appears insincere and hypocritical.
In reality, the mob really believes. If we understand this, we also understand that a scapegoat
effect is real; it is an unconscious phenomenon, but not in the sense of Freud.
How can the scapegoat effect involve real belief? How can such an effect be generated
without an objective cause, especially with the lightning speed that can often be observed in
the case of the scapegoating mobs? The answer is that scapegoat effects are mimetic effects;
they are generated by mimetic rivalry itself, when it reaches a certain degree of intensity. As
an object becomes the focus of mimetic rivalry between two or more antagonists, other
members of the group tend to join in, mimetically attracted by the presence of mimetic desire.
Mimesis is mimetically attractive, and we can assume that at certain stages, at least in the
evolution of human communities, mimetic rivalry can spread to an entire group. This is what
is suggested by the acute disorder phase with which many rituals begin. The community turns
into a mob under the effect of mimetic rivalry. The phenomena that take place when a human group turns into a mob are identical to those produced by mimetic rivalry, and they can be
defined as that loss of differentiation which is described in mythology and reenacted in ritual.
We found earlier that mimetic rivalry tends toward reciprocity. The model is likely to be
mimetically affected by the desire of his imitator. He becomes the imitator of his own
imitator, just as the latter becomes the model of his own model. As this feedback process
keeps reinforcing itself, each constitutes in the other's path a more and more irritating
obstacle and each tries to remove this obstacle more and more forcefully. Violence is thus
generated. Violence is not originary; it is a by-product of mimetic rivalry. Violence is
mimetic rivalry itself becoming violent as
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the antagonists who desire the same object keep thwarting each other and desiring the object
all the more. Violence is supremely mimetic.
The antagonists are caught in an escalation of frustration. In their dual role of obstacle and
model, they both become more and more fascinated by each other. Beyond a certain level of
intensity they are totally absorbed and the disputed object becomes secondary, even
irrelevant. judging from many rituals, their mutual fascination can reach the level of a
hypnotic trance. That particular condition becomes the principal goal of certain religious
practices under the name of possession.
At this paroxystic level of mimetic rivalry, the element of mimicry is still around, more
intense than ever. It has to focus on the only entities left in the picture, which are the
antagonists themselves. This means that the selection of an antagonist depends on the
mimetic factor rather that on previous developments. Transfers of antagonism must take
place, therefore, for purely mimetic reasons. Mimetic attraction is bound to increase with the
number of those who converge on one and the same antagonist. Sooner or later a snowball
effect must occur that involves the entire group minus, of course, the one individual, or the
few against whom all hostility focuses and who become the "scapegoats," in a sense
analogous to but more extreme than our everyday sense of the word "scapegoat." Whereas
mimetic appropriation is inevitably divisive, causing the contestants to fight over an object
they cannot all appropriate together, mimetic antagonism is ultimately unitive, or rather
reunitive since it provides the antagonists with an object they can really share, in the sense
that they can all rush against that victim in order to destroy it or drive it away.
If I am right, the contradiction between prohibitions and rituals is only apparent. The purpose
of both is to spare the community another mimetic perturbation. In normal circumstances,
this purpose is well served by the prohibitions. In abnormal circumstances, when a new crisis
seems impending, the prohibitions are of no avail anymore. Once the contagion of mimetic
violence is reintroduced into the community, it cannot be contained. The community, then,
changes its tactic entirely. Instead of trying to roll back mimetic violence it tries to get rid of
it by encouraging it and by bringing it to a climax that triggers the happy solution of ritual
sacrifice with the help of a substitute victim. There is no difference of purpose between
prohibitions and rituals. The behavior demanded by the first and the behavior demanded by
the disorderly phase of ritual are in opposition, of course, but the mimetic reading makes this
opposition intelligible. In the absence of this reading, anthropologists have either minimized
the opposition or viewed it as an insoluble contradiction that ultimately confirmed their
conception of religion as utter nonsense. Others, under the influence of psychoanalysis, have viewed the transgressive aspect of ritual, in regard to prohibitions,
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as an end in itself, in keeping, of course, with the contemporary ethos and its predilection for
disorder, at least among intellectuals who feel, perhaps, they do not have enough of it in their
own lives.
Religion is different, and the purpose of ritual is reconciliation and reordering through
sacrifice. The current views of ritual as essentially transgressive are given a semblance of
credibility by the fact that long before anthropologists and psychoanalysts showed up on the
scene, the religious believers themselves had often lost touch with the unity of purpose of
their various religious practices and begun to perceive the opposition between prohibitions
and ritual as an unintelligible contradiction. And they normally tried to cope with this
contradiction either by minimizing it and making their prohibitions less stringent as well as
their rituals less disorderly or on the contrary by emphasizing and "maximizing" so to speak the opposition and turning their rites into the so-called festival that presents itself explicitly as
a period of time in which the social rules and taboos of all kinds do not apply.
Modern theorists have some support from late religious developments, in other words, when
they try to elude or give trivial answers to the problem posed by the behavioral opposition
between prohibitions and rituals. This is the wide road of modern interpretation, and it has
turned out to be an impasse. We will not take that road, therefore, and we will face the
contrast between ritual and prohibition in all its sharpness, not to espouse some
psychoanalytical view, of course, but to perceive the true paradox of ritual -- which is the
genesis and regeneration as well as degeneration of the cultural order through paroxystic
disorder.
Mythology and religious cults form systems of representation necessarily untrue to their own
genesis. The episode of mimetic violence and reconciliation is always recollected and
narrated, as well as reenacted, from the perspective of its beneficiaries, who are also its
puppets. From the standpoint of the scapegoaters and their inheritors -- the religious
community -- there is no such thing as scapegoating in our sense. A scapegoat effect that can
be acknowledged as such by the scapegoaters is no longer effective, it is no longer a
scapegoat
effect
. The victim must be perceived as truly responsible for the troubles that come to an end when it is collectively put to death. The community could not be at peace with itself
once more if it doubted the victim's enormous capacity for evil. The belief in this same
victim's enormous capacity for doing good is a direct consequence of that first belief. The
peace seems to be restored as well as destroyed by the scapegoat himself.
An arbitrary victim would not reconcile a disturbed community if its members realized they
are the dupes of a mimetic effect. I must insist on this aspect because it is crucial and often
misunderstood. The mythic systems of representation obliterate the scapegoating on which
they are
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founded, and they remain dependent on this obliteration. Scapegoating has never been
conceived by anyone as an activity in which he himself participates and may still be
participating even as he denounces the scapegoating of others. Such denunciation can even become a precondition of successful scapegoating in a world like ours, where knowledge of
the phenomenon is on the rise and makes its grossest and most violent forms obsolete.
Scapegoating can continue only if its victims are perceived primarily as scapegoaters.
Traces of an act of collective scapegoating that has effectively reconciled a community are
elusive since the phenomenon is necessarily recollected from the deluded standpoint it
generates. At first sight, this situation seems discouraging, but in reality it is highly favorable
to the demonstration of my thesis: features that characterize the deluded standpoint of the
scapegoaters are easily ascertainable. Once they are ascertained, we can verify that they are
really present in primitive mythology; they constitute the constants or near constants of that
mythology, in contradistinction to the variables, which are quite significant as well but
demand lengthier analysis. The victim cannot be perceived as innocent and impotent; he (or
she, as the case may be) must be perceived if not necessarily as a culprit in our sense, at least
as a creature truly responsible for all the disorders and ailments of the community, in other
words for the mimetic crisis that has triggered the mimetic mechanism of scapegoating. We
can verify, indeed, that the victim is usually presented in that fashion. He is viewed as
subversive of the communal order and as a threat to the well-being of the society. His
continued presence is therefore undesirable and it must be destroyed or driven away by other
gods, perhaps, or by the community itself.
The Oedipus myth does not tell us Oedipus is a mimetic scapegoat. Far from disproving my
theory, this silence confirms it as long as it is surrounded by the telltale signs of scapegoating
as, indeed, it is. The myth reflects the standpoint of the scapegoaters, who really believe their
victim to be responsible for the plague in their midst, and they connect that responsibility
with anti-natural acts, horrendous transgressions that signify the total destruction of the social
order. All the themes of the story suggest we must be dealing with the type of delusion that
has always surrounded and still surrounds victimage by mobs on the rampage. In the Middle
Ages, for instance, when the Jews were accused of spreading the plague during the period of
the Black Death, they were also accused of unnatural crimes à la Oedipus.
The most interesting question is: Why are we able to see through this type of delusion in
some instances, and unable in others, especially in the case of that vast corpus of mysterious
récits
we call mythology? Why are the greatest specialists in the field still fooled by themes which historians of the Western world have long ago recognized as indicative of perse-
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cution in their own areas of research? Historians are working in areas with which they feel
more at ease and are more knowledgeable because they are culturally closer, but this is part
of the story; it may account for the tortuous nature of our progress toward a greater
understanding of persecution everywhere but not for the progress itself. So-called primitive
or archaic people are fooled by their own myths as much or even more than by the myths of
others. The amazing thing about us is not that so many are still fooled but that many are not
and that suspicion, as a whole, is on the increase. Our sterility as creators of myth must not be