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Les Origines de la culture
Rare Book
288 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
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About the author
René Girard
123 books846 followersRené Girard was a French-born American historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science whose work belongs to the tradition of anthropological philosophy.
He was born in the southern French city of Avignon on Christmas day in 1923. Between 1943 and 1947, he studied in Paris at the École des Chartres, an institution for the training of archivists and historians, where he specialized in medieval history. In 1947 he went to Indiana University on a year’s fellowship and eventually made almost his entire career in the United States. He completed a PhD in history at Indiana University in 1950 but also began to teach literature, the field in which he would first make his reputation. He taught at Duke University and at Bryn Mawr before becoming a professor at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. In 1971 he went to the State University of New York at Buffalo for five years, returned to Johns Hopkins, and then finished his academic career at Stanford University where he taught between 1981 and his retirement in 1995.
Girard is the author of nearly thirty books, with his writings spanning many academic domains. Although the reception of his work is different in each of these areas, there is a growing body of secondary literature on his work and his influence on disciplines such as literary criticism, critical theory, anthropology, theology, psychology, mythology, sociology, economics, cultural studies, and philosophy.Girard’s fundamental ideas, which he has developed throughout his career and provide the foundation for his thinking, are that desire is mimetic (all of our desires are borrowed from other people), that all conflict originates in mimetic desire (mimetic rivalry), that the scapegoat mechanism is the origin of sacrifice and the foundation of human culture, and religion was necessary in human evolution to control the violence that can come from mimetic rivalry, and that the Bible reveals these ideas and denounces the scapegoat mechanism.
In 1990, friends and colleagues of Girard’s established the Colloquium on Violence and Religion to further research and discussion about the themes of Girard’s work. The Colloquium meets annually either in Europe or the United States.
René Girard died on November 4, 2015, at the age of 91 in Stanford.
He was born in the southern French city of Avignon on Christmas day in 1923. Between 1943 and 1947, he studied in Paris at the École des Chartres, an institution for the training of archivists and historians, where he specialized in medieval history. In 1947 he went to Indiana University on a year’s fellowship and eventually made almost his entire career in the United States. He completed a PhD in history at Indiana University in 1950 but also began to teach literature, the field in which he would first make his reputation. He taught at Duke University and at Bryn Mawr before becoming a professor at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. In 1971 he went to the State University of New York at Buffalo for five years, returned to Johns Hopkins, and then finished his academic career at Stanford University where he taught between 1981 and his retirement in 1995.
Girard is the author of nearly thirty books, with his writings spanning many academic domains. Although the reception of his work is different in each of these areas, there is a growing body of secondary literature on his work and his influence on disciplines such as literary criticism, critical theory, anthropology, theology, psychology, mythology, sociology, economics, cultural studies, and philosophy.Girard’s fundamental ideas, which he has developed throughout his career and provide the foundation for his thinking, are that desire is mimetic (all of our desires are borrowed from other people), that all conflict originates in mimetic desire (mimetic rivalry), that the scapegoat mechanism is the origin of sacrifice and the foundation of human culture, and religion was necessary in human evolution to control the violence that can come from mimetic rivalry, and that the Bible reveals these ideas and denounces the scapegoat mechanism.
In 1990, friends and colleagues of Girard’s established the Colloquium on Violence and Religion to further research and discussion about the themes of Girard’s work. The Colloquium meets annually either in Europe or the United States.
René Girard died on November 4, 2015, at the age of 91 in Stanford.
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December 3, 2024
Odłożone po dwóch pierwszych rozdziałach. Rozmówca Girarda jest jego fanem, więc książkę czyta się jakby napisała to jedna osoba (przy okazji się masturbując), w konsekwencji brak tutaj jakiejkolwiek głębi. Spłycanie wszystkiego do pożądania mimetycznego i mechanizmu kozła ofiarnego przeplatane jest z repetetywnym wałkowaniem ciągle tych samych frazesów bez większej eksploracji tematów (np. konsumpcjonizmu). Osoba znająca nawet zarys teorii Girarda na podstawie artykułu na Wikipedii nie znajdzie tutaj nic ciekawego.
January 9, 2024
Kitabı bir söyleşi olarak ilerlemesi itibariyle tartışma mevzularına çok daha açık yaklaşılması ve samimi olması açısından beğendim.
Bu anlatının, modern dünyanın yerli/yabancı, hâkim/azınlık dinamikleri ve "tarihin kök ânları" (Habil-Kabil olayı, İsa'nın çarmıha gerilişi) içindeki örnekleri arasında elbette belirli ve gözardı edilemez bir yeri var. Ancak kültürün kökenlerine konumlandırılmasındaki ısrar, bir Hıristiyan olduğunu duyuran Girard'ın inancıyla -tabii olarak- içli dışlı bir ifadenin neticesi gibi duruyor.
Bu anlatının, modern dünyanın yerli/yabancı, hâkim/azınlık dinamikleri ve "tarihin kök ânları" (Habil-Kabil olayı, İsa'nın çarmıha gerilişi) içindeki örnekleri arasında elbette belirli ve gözardı edilemez bir yeri var. Ancak kültürün kökenlerine konumlandırılmasındaki ısrar, bir Hıristiyan olduğunu duyuran Girard'ın inancıyla -tabii olarak- içli dışlı bir ifadenin neticesi gibi duruyor.
October 20, 2021
Obligatorisk läsning
August 31, 2024
PART 1 OF MY REVIEW
Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture, by René Girard,
with Pierpaolo Antolello and João Cezar De Castro Rocha
The book was first published in Portuguese and French in 2005 when Girard was 77 years old. At the conclusion of his career as a professor at Stanford, two fellow literary critics (from Cambridge and U. of Manchester) proposed that they interview him to get his thoughts on the many questions they had about his thinking and career. I’m reviewing (well, summing up) the Bloomsbury paperback English edition from 2008.
As with many books, the subtitle is more informative than the title. This is a book about how human cultures originate. It’s also about how they evolve—and it’s about the evolution of Girard’s own thought over his lifetime: how he developed the big ideas for which he is renowned. So his interlocutors ask him about many of the thirty books he wrote and how his theory came together over the course of his career. The questions are setups for Girard’s extensive answers—but most of these are hardball questions, giving Girard a chance to answer his critics.
Trained as an historian, René Girard early strayed into literary criticism and anthropology—and to a lesser degree, psychology and philosophy as well. The big ideas he is known for are two: “mimetic desire” and “the scapegoat.” His study of the great novels across several modern languages and then across the ancient myths of diverse cultures made these two inferences inescapable, he says. In most of the classics, and in the actual history of most civilizations, he recognized these two themes playing out again and again. He began to look for these after noticing how many of the classics and myths tell the story of an original murder. In that sense, his investigation has been into the greatest of murder mysteries.
His interlocutors compare Girard to Darwin, who had been searching through the data until he finally found “a theory by which to work.” For Girard, this was the “mimetic mechanism,” which could be found at the origin of every culture. The mimetic mechanism begins “with mimetic desire, which triggers the start of a psychological and grand societal process.
Unlike other animals, humans lack much of the instinctual motives to know exactly what to do with their lives. Like other animals, we desire food, sex, shelter, etc.—but our deepest desires don’t come naturally. And so we observe others to see what they desire. Neuroscientists are learning about the importance of mirror neurons, which peoiple use not only when we perform certain actions, but when we watch other perform those actions.
So Girard says it becomes clear that parents, peers, and cultural icons provide models that shapes our desires; we not only imitate their fashion, but their goals. We desire what they desire (mimetic desire). But as people start desiring the same objects (mates, positions, wealth), they come into conflict over them, because the most valuable objects most desired are also most rare. So mimetic desire inevitably leads to the next step: mimetic rivalry.
He says that soon this rivalry becomes all-consuming, because as the conflict between one person and his rival escalates, the rival fights back, and the object becomes less important than the winning of the conflict, for both individuals. Girard calls these two individuals “doubles,” and their conflict becomes self-reinforcing. Witnesses to this conflict tend to be drawn into it. When “two people are fighting over the same object, then this object seems more valuable to bystanders,” and more people are drawn into the fray. The desire and the aggression is contagious.
Eventually the conflicts multiply and spread through the whole society, leading to violence, anarchy, and a stage Girard calls the “mimetic crisis.” Societies cannot last long in this state, and leaders who recognize this will look for solutions to create unity again. Here is where Girard proposes his other great discovery: the “scapegoat resolution.” Girard says that the most effective means to “save the community from total self-destruction … is the convergence of all collective anger and rage towards a random victim, a scapegoat…. In the frenzy of the mimetic violence of the mob, a focal point suddenly appears, in the shape of the ‘culprit’ who is thought to be the cause of the disorder and the one who brought the crisis into the community. He is singled out and unanimously killed by the community.”
So the scapegoat or victimary mechanism “channels the collective violence against one arbitrarily chosen member of the community, and this victim becomes the common enemy of the entire community, which is reconciled as a result.”
This “founding murder” then becomes ritualized into a sacrificial system, and becomes the origin of both a new religion and a new society, so that the society is equipped to cope with their mimetic desires and avert or solve future crises. Soon the scapegoat mechanism is forgotten or concealed, because who wants their religion or culture to be founded on murder? So the original murder is ritualized into a sacred rite; the sacrifice is repeated regularly.
Girard would say that after the original murder, the society does all it can to erase, not record, the memory of the elements related to the innocence of the scapegoated victim. The problem here: This renders the assumed-but-missing elements unfalsifiable. Girard replies that he has seen the pattern emerge on occasions that are “so numerous, ubiquitous and consistent that any doubt disappears.” [118]. Still, he admits, it requires detective work, because “everybody is lying,” — “the ones who do the lynching truly believe that their scapegoats are guilty and therefore deserve to die,” and so we can expect coverups and false stories to be passed down as tradition. [131]
From my own study, I see seven main features that characterize the scapegoating mechanism Girard describes, helping us to identify it where it exists within myths, legends, classics, or the archeological record. When I survey Girard’s examples for these seven features, I see some share all of them, and others that have at least 5 of the 7 elements. In most cases, some features are either missing or unclear.
Features of scapegoating mechanism:
1. Sacrificial murder of innocent human victim
2. Time: near the founding of the culture
3. Circumstance: Society in crisis
4. Cultural belief that the gods can be appeased or appealed to on the basis of this human sacrifice
5. Belief that the victim is guilty or culpable for the crisis
6. Later divinization of the victim
7. The first murder is regularly re-enacted with ritual sacrifices thereafter, whether of human or something else.
EXAMPLES:
When the interlocutors ask Girard about his early discoveries in the 1960s, he speaks of his reading Greek tragedy and his particular fascination with the Oedipus myth, which featured an outsider with a lame foot who was blamed for the plague in Thebes, thus becoming the scapegoat to stop the plague.
Girard recognized analogous victimizing elements in Euripides’ The Bacchae, in which Bacchanalia celebrants run into the woods in a frenzy, not recognizing the king (whose father founded Thebes) as human when they spear him and tear him apart. The collective murder thus became associated with the founding of Thebes.
Similarly, Girard speaks of how he was struck, early on, by the “mimetic content” of Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar. The conspirators against Caesar are easily recruited for the murder because of their mimetic desires as they recognize their hatred for, or jealousy over, the same object. By centering the story on the tragedy of Caesar’s death, Shakespeare did something the Greeks seldom did in their tragedies: he shows how the tragic hero or victim may not be as deserving of murder as his killers imagine. Once again, the hero’s collective murder is located near to the foundation a new society. The “mimetic desires” of Caesar’s “friends” turn to mimetic rivalry and thence to murder, resulting in the birth of the Roman Empire.
Girard gives examples of how he was impressed by execution stories from early histories and myths of Rome. The story of Tarpeia is the story of the collective murder of an accused traitor, the daughter of a Roman commander who was said to have betrayed the city by opening the gates for the attacking Sabines. Expecting to be covered in gold and jewelry, as promised, she was instead covered by their shields to crush her to death.
From that time on, traitors were punished by being thrown from a cliff named “the Tarpeian rock.” Girard sees this as being related to the executions by the crushing of victims who were accused and then stoned to death in Leviticus. In all these cases, the community participates by “killing at a distance,” where “everyone participates but nobody is responsible.” Girard calls this “a way of uniting the community when you have neither the central power nor judicial system that can prevent mimetic conflicts.” And in all these cases, a nation is just at the cusp of formation: the formation of the Roman state, the establishment of the Hebrew state in its promised land.
He refers to the pagan guru Apollonius of Tiana, which strikes me as one of the clearest pieces of myth or history to fit Girard’s sacrificial pattern: Apollonius cures the plague in Ephesus by choosing a vagabond beggar to be stoned as the cause of the epidemic. He was proven correct when the people start to remove the corpse and find a demonic monster instead of a man. His murder/sacrifice, the Ephesians are led to believe, has cured the city. [p. 28]
Girard finds early illustrations of mimetic rivalry in the Brahmanas of the Indian Vedas, which center on the rituals of sacrifice to have desires met, and of the South African Venda myth of Python and his two wives, one which is accused of scaring away a divine snake and thus causing a drought. She is then killed as a “beer offering” by drowning in front of the community, to stop the drought.
According to the Roman legend of Romulus and Remus, these two brothers argued over which hilltop to build a city. To settle the matter they devised a contest to see which would receive the approval of the gods. Remus refused to accept the result and so insulted the new city; so Romulus killed his brother Remus, and then continued to found the city of Rome, along with its institutions, its military, and its religious rituals. In Livy’s version of the story, Romulus may also have been murdered—"torn limb from limb by the senators,” according to a secret tradition that Livy says had “filtered down” to him.
Girard sees the same kind of mimetic desire, rivalry, murder and city-founding in early Genesis, where Eve is induced by the serpent to desire the forbidden fruit, and Adam mimetically follows Eve’s desire for the same object. Cain’s murder of Abel begins with Cain’s envy of his brother, whose sacrifice was accepted by God while his was rejected (similar to Romulus and Remus). Girard points out the Bible’s recognition of envy as immoral in its command from the Decalogue: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house … wife … or anything that belongs to your neighbor” — a clear prohibition of mimetic desire.
In the Gospels, Jesus more positively asks us to imitate him, rather than our neighbor, which if practiced, avoids the mimetic rivalry.
But Girard sees in Cain and Abel, as in Romulus and Remus, the picture of the founding of the first civilization. After murdering his brother, Cain goes off to the east and builds a city (and civilization has its etymological origin in civil and citizen, related to the city). Girard associates Cain, civilization's founder, with this murder of his brother, because as he is sent away after murdering Abel, the law against murder is given: “If anyone kills Cain, he will suffer vengeance seven times over” (Genesis 4:15). Girard says proposes that “law represents the foundation of culture, because capital punishment is already ritual murder.” So capital punishment by stoning, as prescribed in Leviticus is the repetition of the original murder, re-enacted and with the participation of the whole community. And the law given back in the story of Cain’s crime is immediately followed up by the beginnings of civilization, with a description of the domestication of animals, the origins of music, and the origins of metallurgy with bronze and iron tools.
Another example they discuss is the Prometheus myth, about how Prometheus brought humans all the arts of civilization and was then made a sacrificial victim when Zeus chained him to a rock and sent an eagle to eat his liver every day.
They discuss Richard Dawkins and his theory of memes to describe a minimal unit of cultural transmission, though Girard says Dawkins has no awareness of mimetic rivalry.
Scapegoats can be chosen almost randomly—or they may become the victim when they recognize the innocence of other victims, or the arbitrariness of their scapegoating or the cultural inequities that the system is promoting. This is what happened to Socrates, when he spoke out against the inequities of the system. In Plato’s Republic, a character says that a truly just man will be accused of injustice and “be scourged, racked, bound, … and, at last, after suffering every kind of evil, he will be impaled.”
Girard points out such treatment and accusations against Job, as well as the servant of the Lord in Isaiah, and especially of Jesus, where Jesus is the clearest illustration of the scapegoat mechanism because of the way he speaks out against the establishment and on behalf of their injustice toward the oppressed and thereby flags himself as the a scapegoat to his persecutors. In John’s Gospel, when the high priest Caiaphas addresses the council, he tells them: “it is expedient for you that one man die for the people, and that the whole nation not perish.” And John says: “So from that day on they planned together to kill him.”
Girard sums up the significance of most cultures’ ignorance of the scapegoat mechanism they relied upon: “In a nutshell: before the advent of Judaism and Christianity, in one way or the other, the scapegoat mechanism was accepted and justified, on the basis that it remained unknown. It brought peace back to the community at the height of the chaotic mimetic crisis. All archaic religions grounded their ritual precisely around the re-enactment of the founding murder. In other words, they considered the scapegoat to be guilty of the eruption of the mimetic crisis. By contrast, Christianity, in the figure of Jesus, denounced the scapegoat mechanism for what it actually is: the murder of an innocent victim, killed in order to pacify a riotous community. That’s the moment in which the mimetic mechanism is fully revealed.” [61]
He says: “I think that the unconscious nature of sacrificial violence is revealed in the New Testament, particularly in Luke: “‘Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing’” (Luke 23:34). And in Acts, also written by Luke, Peter later addresses the crowd who had been there for the crucifixion and says “You acted in ignorance” (Acts 3:17).
Ethologist Konrad Lorenz, in his observations of animal behavior, recognized prehuman dispositions that anticipate scapegoating. In his book On Aggression, he describes how, when two geese approach each other, they show signs of hostility, but most of the time the aggression is redirected and discharged against a third object, and Girard describes this as “a kind of incipient scapegoating mechanism, even if it isn’t proper to call it scapegoating since the third element often is an inanimate object.” But the couple quickly bonds over the mutual aggression toward a third party or object.
Similarly, Lorentz refers to human laughter as a form of redirected aggression, as when a group of people laugh at someone as a kind of gentle scapegoating, and we notice an empathic bond immediately developing within the group.
What human beings add, showing the large leap from lower animal culture to human culture, is the symbolic sphere, which Girard says is essential to the ritual re-enactment of the scapegoat mechanism. But how does this symbolic ability emerge? For Girard, symbolic ability and the scapegoat mechanism are tied together from the start. Chimpanzees carry out collective killings and eating of their victims, usually chosen from lower, monkey species. Girard theorizes that over hundreds of thousands of years, our hominid ancestors were involved in collective killings and experienced peace and solidarity as a result, leading them to want to repeat the event. The transition to symbolic ritual happened as they became capable of staging such a repetition, using a surrogate victim. But this required a larger brain—meaning that the need for a symbolic understanding of a symbolic substitute, a “scapegoat,” provided the necessary selective evolutionary pressure. [77]
Girard claims: “It is only with Christ that the mechanism is uncovered, and also today this discovery is not yet complete. Nobody is yet able to answer Christ’s question: “What is the meaning of that which is written: “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone”? (Luke 20:17)…. If the scapegoat mechanism is our common cultural ‘ancestor,’ ritual sacrifice is an intermediate step in the evolution of cultural forms, while social institutions are mature forms derived from this process.
He says that his “main evidence is ritualistic violence, even more than myths.” [120] Evidence of human sacrifice in earliest cultures comes to us from primitive societies in both the old and new worlds. Girard draws our attention to Phoenician culture, who anthropologists once argued, had no such actual practice except in certain ancient literature. “Since that time,” says Girard, “archeologists have discovered an entire cemetery of sacrificial victims close to Carthage [a Phoenician colony], where they exhumed half-burned infants mixed together with animals. [102]
I’d also note that we now have good archeological evidence for many ancient cultures around the world practicing human sacrifice, often of children, because of belief that the gods demanded what was most valuable. I’d note the Inca children recently discovered after being drugged on coca and buried alive near the summit of Llullaillaco, a dormant volcano where they were perfectly preserved by the cold, dry conditions. In life these children appear to have been children of rulers and nobles.
Near the end of the Joseph story in Genesis... - SEE PART 2
Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture, by René Girard,
with Pierpaolo Antolello and João Cezar De Castro Rocha
The book was first published in Portuguese and French in 2005 when Girard was 77 years old. At the conclusion of his career as a professor at Stanford, two fellow literary critics (from Cambridge and U. of Manchester) proposed that they interview him to get his thoughts on the many questions they had about his thinking and career. I’m reviewing (well, summing up) the Bloomsbury paperback English edition from 2008.
As with many books, the subtitle is more informative than the title. This is a book about how human cultures originate. It’s also about how they evolve—and it’s about the evolution of Girard’s own thought over his lifetime: how he developed the big ideas for which he is renowned. So his interlocutors ask him about many of the thirty books he wrote and how his theory came together over the course of his career. The questions are setups for Girard’s extensive answers—but most of these are hardball questions, giving Girard a chance to answer his critics.
Trained as an historian, René Girard early strayed into literary criticism and anthropology—and to a lesser degree, psychology and philosophy as well. The big ideas he is known for are two: “mimetic desire” and “the scapegoat.” His study of the great novels across several modern languages and then across the ancient myths of diverse cultures made these two inferences inescapable, he says. In most of the classics, and in the actual history of most civilizations, he recognized these two themes playing out again and again. He began to look for these after noticing how many of the classics and myths tell the story of an original murder. In that sense, his investigation has been into the greatest of murder mysteries.
His interlocutors compare Girard to Darwin, who had been searching through the data until he finally found “a theory by which to work.” For Girard, this was the “mimetic mechanism,” which could be found at the origin of every culture. The mimetic mechanism begins “with mimetic desire, which triggers the start of a psychological and grand societal process.
Unlike other animals, humans lack much of the instinctual motives to know exactly what to do with their lives. Like other animals, we desire food, sex, shelter, etc.—but our deepest desires don’t come naturally. And so we observe others to see what they desire. Neuroscientists are learning about the importance of mirror neurons, which peoiple use not only when we perform certain actions, but when we watch other perform those actions.
So Girard says it becomes clear that parents, peers, and cultural icons provide models that shapes our desires; we not only imitate their fashion, but their goals. We desire what they desire (mimetic desire). But as people start desiring the same objects (mates, positions, wealth), they come into conflict over them, because the most valuable objects most desired are also most rare. So mimetic desire inevitably leads to the next step: mimetic rivalry.
He says that soon this rivalry becomes all-consuming, because as the conflict between one person and his rival escalates, the rival fights back, and the object becomes less important than the winning of the conflict, for both individuals. Girard calls these two individuals “doubles,” and their conflict becomes self-reinforcing. Witnesses to this conflict tend to be drawn into it. When “two people are fighting over the same object, then this object seems more valuable to bystanders,” and more people are drawn into the fray. The desire and the aggression is contagious.
Eventually the conflicts multiply and spread through the whole society, leading to violence, anarchy, and a stage Girard calls the “mimetic crisis.” Societies cannot last long in this state, and leaders who recognize this will look for solutions to create unity again. Here is where Girard proposes his other great discovery: the “scapegoat resolution.” Girard says that the most effective means to “save the community from total self-destruction … is the convergence of all collective anger and rage towards a random victim, a scapegoat…. In the frenzy of the mimetic violence of the mob, a focal point suddenly appears, in the shape of the ‘culprit’ who is thought to be the cause of the disorder and the one who brought the crisis into the community. He is singled out and unanimously killed by the community.”
So the scapegoat or victimary mechanism “channels the collective violence against one arbitrarily chosen member of the community, and this victim becomes the common enemy of the entire community, which is reconciled as a result.”
This “founding murder” then becomes ritualized into a sacrificial system, and becomes the origin of both a new religion and a new society, so that the society is equipped to cope with their mimetic desires and avert or solve future crises. Soon the scapegoat mechanism is forgotten or concealed, because who wants their religion or culture to be founded on murder? So the original murder is ritualized into a sacred rite; the sacrifice is repeated regularly.
Girard would say that after the original murder, the society does all it can to erase, not record, the memory of the elements related to the innocence of the scapegoated victim. The problem here: This renders the assumed-but-missing elements unfalsifiable. Girard replies that he has seen the pattern emerge on occasions that are “so numerous, ubiquitous and consistent that any doubt disappears.” [118]. Still, he admits, it requires detective work, because “everybody is lying,” — “the ones who do the lynching truly believe that their scapegoats are guilty and therefore deserve to die,” and so we can expect coverups and false stories to be passed down as tradition. [131]
From my own study, I see seven main features that characterize the scapegoating mechanism Girard describes, helping us to identify it where it exists within myths, legends, classics, or the archeological record. When I survey Girard’s examples for these seven features, I see some share all of them, and others that have at least 5 of the 7 elements. In most cases, some features are either missing or unclear.
Features of scapegoating mechanism:
1. Sacrificial murder of innocent human victim
2. Time: near the founding of the culture
3. Circumstance: Society in crisis
4. Cultural belief that the gods can be appeased or appealed to on the basis of this human sacrifice
5. Belief that the victim is guilty or culpable for the crisis
6. Later divinization of the victim
7. The first murder is regularly re-enacted with ritual sacrifices thereafter, whether of human or something else.
EXAMPLES:
When the interlocutors ask Girard about his early discoveries in the 1960s, he speaks of his reading Greek tragedy and his particular fascination with the Oedipus myth, which featured an outsider with a lame foot who was blamed for the plague in Thebes, thus becoming the scapegoat to stop the plague.
Girard recognized analogous victimizing elements in Euripides’ The Bacchae, in which Bacchanalia celebrants run into the woods in a frenzy, not recognizing the king (whose father founded Thebes) as human when they spear him and tear him apart. The collective murder thus became associated with the founding of Thebes.
Similarly, Girard speaks of how he was struck, early on, by the “mimetic content” of Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar. The conspirators against Caesar are easily recruited for the murder because of their mimetic desires as they recognize their hatred for, or jealousy over, the same object. By centering the story on the tragedy of Caesar’s death, Shakespeare did something the Greeks seldom did in their tragedies: he shows how the tragic hero or victim may not be as deserving of murder as his killers imagine. Once again, the hero’s collective murder is located near to the foundation a new society. The “mimetic desires” of Caesar’s “friends” turn to mimetic rivalry and thence to murder, resulting in the birth of the Roman Empire.
Girard gives examples of how he was impressed by execution stories from early histories and myths of Rome. The story of Tarpeia is the story of the collective murder of an accused traitor, the daughter of a Roman commander who was said to have betrayed the city by opening the gates for the attacking Sabines. Expecting to be covered in gold and jewelry, as promised, she was instead covered by their shields to crush her to death.
From that time on, traitors were punished by being thrown from a cliff named “the Tarpeian rock.” Girard sees this as being related to the executions by the crushing of victims who were accused and then stoned to death in Leviticus. In all these cases, the community participates by “killing at a distance,” where “everyone participates but nobody is responsible.” Girard calls this “a way of uniting the community when you have neither the central power nor judicial system that can prevent mimetic conflicts.” And in all these cases, a nation is just at the cusp of formation: the formation of the Roman state, the establishment of the Hebrew state in its promised land.
He refers to the pagan guru Apollonius of Tiana, which strikes me as one of the clearest pieces of myth or history to fit Girard’s sacrificial pattern: Apollonius cures the plague in Ephesus by choosing a vagabond beggar to be stoned as the cause of the epidemic. He was proven correct when the people start to remove the corpse and find a demonic monster instead of a man. His murder/sacrifice, the Ephesians are led to believe, has cured the city. [p. 28]
Girard finds early illustrations of mimetic rivalry in the Brahmanas of the Indian Vedas, which center on the rituals of sacrifice to have desires met, and of the South African Venda myth of Python and his two wives, one which is accused of scaring away a divine snake and thus causing a drought. She is then killed as a “beer offering” by drowning in front of the community, to stop the drought.
According to the Roman legend of Romulus and Remus, these two brothers argued over which hilltop to build a city. To settle the matter they devised a contest to see which would receive the approval of the gods. Remus refused to accept the result and so insulted the new city; so Romulus killed his brother Remus, and then continued to found the city of Rome, along with its institutions, its military, and its religious rituals. In Livy’s version of the story, Romulus may also have been murdered—"torn limb from limb by the senators,” according to a secret tradition that Livy says had “filtered down” to him.
Girard sees the same kind of mimetic desire, rivalry, murder and city-founding in early Genesis, where Eve is induced by the serpent to desire the forbidden fruit, and Adam mimetically follows Eve’s desire for the same object. Cain’s murder of Abel begins with Cain’s envy of his brother, whose sacrifice was accepted by God while his was rejected (similar to Romulus and Remus). Girard points out the Bible’s recognition of envy as immoral in its command from the Decalogue: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house … wife … or anything that belongs to your neighbor” — a clear prohibition of mimetic desire.
In the Gospels, Jesus more positively asks us to imitate him, rather than our neighbor, which if practiced, avoids the mimetic rivalry.
But Girard sees in Cain and Abel, as in Romulus and Remus, the picture of the founding of the first civilization. After murdering his brother, Cain goes off to the east and builds a city (and civilization has its etymological origin in civil and citizen, related to the city). Girard associates Cain, civilization's founder, with this murder of his brother, because as he is sent away after murdering Abel, the law against murder is given: “If anyone kills Cain, he will suffer vengeance seven times over” (Genesis 4:15). Girard says proposes that “law represents the foundation of culture, because capital punishment is already ritual murder.” So capital punishment by stoning, as prescribed in Leviticus is the repetition of the original murder, re-enacted and with the participation of the whole community. And the law given back in the story of Cain’s crime is immediately followed up by the beginnings of civilization, with a description of the domestication of animals, the origins of music, and the origins of metallurgy with bronze and iron tools.
Another example they discuss is the Prometheus myth, about how Prometheus brought humans all the arts of civilization and was then made a sacrificial victim when Zeus chained him to a rock and sent an eagle to eat his liver every day.
They discuss Richard Dawkins and his theory of memes to describe a minimal unit of cultural transmission, though Girard says Dawkins has no awareness of mimetic rivalry.
Scapegoats can be chosen almost randomly—or they may become the victim when they recognize the innocence of other victims, or the arbitrariness of their scapegoating or the cultural inequities that the system is promoting. This is what happened to Socrates, when he spoke out against the inequities of the system. In Plato’s Republic, a character says that a truly just man will be accused of injustice and “be scourged, racked, bound, … and, at last, after suffering every kind of evil, he will be impaled.”
Girard points out such treatment and accusations against Job, as well as the servant of the Lord in Isaiah, and especially of Jesus, where Jesus is the clearest illustration of the scapegoat mechanism because of the way he speaks out against the establishment and on behalf of their injustice toward the oppressed and thereby flags himself as the a scapegoat to his persecutors. In John’s Gospel, when the high priest Caiaphas addresses the council, he tells them: “it is expedient for you that one man die for the people, and that the whole nation not perish.” And John says: “So from that day on they planned together to kill him.”
Girard sums up the significance of most cultures’ ignorance of the scapegoat mechanism they relied upon: “In a nutshell: before the advent of Judaism and Christianity, in one way or the other, the scapegoat mechanism was accepted and justified, on the basis that it remained unknown. It brought peace back to the community at the height of the chaotic mimetic crisis. All archaic religions grounded their ritual precisely around the re-enactment of the founding murder. In other words, they considered the scapegoat to be guilty of the eruption of the mimetic crisis. By contrast, Christianity, in the figure of Jesus, denounced the scapegoat mechanism for what it actually is: the murder of an innocent victim, killed in order to pacify a riotous community. That’s the moment in which the mimetic mechanism is fully revealed.” [61]
He says: “I think that the unconscious nature of sacrificial violence is revealed in the New Testament, particularly in Luke: “‘Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing’” (Luke 23:34). And in Acts, also written by Luke, Peter later addresses the crowd who had been there for the crucifixion and says “You acted in ignorance” (Acts 3:17).
Ethologist Konrad Lorenz, in his observations of animal behavior, recognized prehuman dispositions that anticipate scapegoating. In his book On Aggression, he describes how, when two geese approach each other, they show signs of hostility, but most of the time the aggression is redirected and discharged against a third object, and Girard describes this as “a kind of incipient scapegoating mechanism, even if it isn’t proper to call it scapegoating since the third element often is an inanimate object.” But the couple quickly bonds over the mutual aggression toward a third party or object.
Similarly, Lorentz refers to human laughter as a form of redirected aggression, as when a group of people laugh at someone as a kind of gentle scapegoating, and we notice an empathic bond immediately developing within the group.
What human beings add, showing the large leap from lower animal culture to human culture, is the symbolic sphere, which Girard says is essential to the ritual re-enactment of the scapegoat mechanism. But how does this symbolic ability emerge? For Girard, symbolic ability and the scapegoat mechanism are tied together from the start. Chimpanzees carry out collective killings and eating of their victims, usually chosen from lower, monkey species. Girard theorizes that over hundreds of thousands of years, our hominid ancestors were involved in collective killings and experienced peace and solidarity as a result, leading them to want to repeat the event. The transition to symbolic ritual happened as they became capable of staging such a repetition, using a surrogate victim. But this required a larger brain—meaning that the need for a symbolic understanding of a symbolic substitute, a “scapegoat,” provided the necessary selective evolutionary pressure. [77]
Girard claims: “It is only with Christ that the mechanism is uncovered, and also today this discovery is not yet complete. Nobody is yet able to answer Christ’s question: “What is the meaning of that which is written: “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone”? (Luke 20:17)…. If the scapegoat mechanism is our common cultural ‘ancestor,’ ritual sacrifice is an intermediate step in the evolution of cultural forms, while social institutions are mature forms derived from this process.
He says that his “main evidence is ritualistic violence, even more than myths.” [120] Evidence of human sacrifice in earliest cultures comes to us from primitive societies in both the old and new worlds. Girard draws our attention to Phoenician culture, who anthropologists once argued, had no such actual practice except in certain ancient literature. “Since that time,” says Girard, “archeologists have discovered an entire cemetery of sacrificial victims close to Carthage [a Phoenician colony], where they exhumed half-burned infants mixed together with animals. [102]
I’d also note that we now have good archeological evidence for many ancient cultures around the world practicing human sacrifice, often of children, because of belief that the gods demanded what was most valuable. I’d note the Inca children recently discovered after being drugged on coca and buried alive near the summit of Llullaillaco, a dormant volcano where they were perfectly preserved by the cold, dry conditions. In life these children appear to have been children of rulers and nobles.
Near the end of the Joseph story in Genesis... - SEE PART 2
January 24, 2020
4.5. Tempted to go Full Marks as it's my guy René and it was just a fascinating, sparkling read, but knocking one star off will keep my mimetic mechanism under control. It probably works best as a gloss on the 'big' works, Violence and the Sacred and Things Hidden, and (inevitably) some of the forward-looking sections miss the mark while others are uncannily prescient of the mess we find ourselves in. A treat for me, anyway.
August 13, 2022
Very broad presentation of Girard’s views, a tour d’horizon. This being his 3rd book I have read I start to resent the same felt gaps of his chain of arguments. But still very rich in thoughts and a treasure of references.
A quote from the end sums it up nicely:
“Christianity is a source of disruption in our world. Christianity constantly suggests that our scapegoats are nothing but innocent victims. Christianity shows that the guilty ones are the murderers of scapegoats, and those who approve of their murderers. Let me conclude by repeating what I have already said. This compassion for the victim is the deeper meaning of Christianity. We will always be mimetic, but we do not have to engage automatically in mimetic rivalries. We do not have to accuse our neighbour; we can learn to forgive him instead.”
A quote from the end sums it up nicely:
“Christianity is a source of disruption in our world. Christianity constantly suggests that our scapegoats are nothing but innocent victims. Christianity shows that the guilty ones are the murderers of scapegoats, and those who approve of their murderers. Let me conclude by repeating what I have already said. This compassion for the victim is the deeper meaning of Christianity. We will always be mimetic, but we do not have to engage automatically in mimetic rivalries. We do not have to accuse our neighbour; we can learn to forgive him instead.”
June 23, 2025
Maybe the best starting point for Girard, although a vague preconception of his theory of mimetic desire would help. Great fast pace, humour and urgency because it's a dialogue. Incredible application of ideas to the present too...
Good prep:
https://entitled-opinions.com/2005/09...
https://entitled-opinions.com/2005/10...
Good prep:
https://entitled-opinions.com/2005/09...
https://entitled-opinions.com/2005/10...
January 1, 2026
managed to squeeze a last one before the end if the year. pretty solid introduction to girard's main two ideas: the scapegoat and mimetic desire. pretty didactic stuff, since it's an actual dialogue. goes into detail into not just girard's version but his responses and rebuttals to comments and criticism
December 29, 2022
The interview-format allowed Girard to actively relate his theory to many different traditions and tendencies. Although it made the presentation of his thinking a bit shallow, it is still rewarding for readers already acquainted with his work. In other words, this is no introductory book.
December 2, 2017
A bit complex but just read!
June 22, 2019
Revolutionary insights. It helped me puts fragments of knowledge and experience into a cohesion that excites me.
November 6, 2023
Obra sintética para comprender a Girard.
December 27, 2024
I think it works well as summary of his works.
June 25, 2025
First Girard read.
March 20, 2013
More insights on the mutual effects of biological and cultural evolution via mimesis and rituals derived from the victim age mechanism. Eventhough I am quite familiar with the theory, I am learning a lot about its evolutionary implications and more.
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