Status Updates From O Bode Expiatório

Genuinely unbelievably Funny that in the chapter about Baldr - this myth is my specialty, basically the lynchpin of my own work really - Girard argues with literally all the bad faith rhetorical tricks, in extreme bad faith, precisely in the chapter about the representative of Good Faith being killed LMAO. God I was expecting to go into this to like it but this is unbelievably bad.

[...] we can start the argument from a purely bio-evolutionary standpoint too rather than anything anthropological, even. But Girard is taking the approach of 19th century monomaniacs, convinced that all of this must "literally" be the same thing, just "attenuated" more or less depending on circumstance (which really means, on the writer's convenience). It really feels like a postmodern reboot of The Golden Bough.

by the point we get to St. Sebastian - the Christian gay icon, the one who is always sexily getting torn apart by arrows - things have gotten outright silly, and it's disappointed because I feel like I can argue for Girard's point better than he is doing here: there's a real argument, from multiple angles, holding human scapegoats and victims to be at not just the core but the very origins of religion [...]

"Sun-gods must be people so sick that men turn to a great fire such as Teotihuacan’s to destroy them. If then the epidemic recedes, the victim becomes divine in that he is burned and becomes one with the fire that instead of destroying him mysteriously transforms him into a force for good. The victim is thus transformed into that inextinguishable flame that shines on humanity."
okay we have gotten way derailed lmao

[cont] "There are many examples of this combination."
....are there? Like, that's not even true of Apollo, for real. He is not "the sun", he is solar in the Indo-European sense, no different than Mithra. This role is taken up by the Sun Goddess PROPER in the Balts, Saulé, and she's not like that for sure.

"We should note in this passage that the Aztec sun-god is also the god of pestilence, like the Greek god Apollo. Apollo’s resemblance to the Aztec god might be greater if Olympian censure had not cleansed him of all the stigmata of a victim.."

okay monsieur girard I was kinda down at first, I myself have said things to the extent of "it's a scapegoat thing" but this is getting very strained. Hard strained.