Authors: RENÉ GIRARD
clearer it becomes that there is nothing here to suppress or to hide. There is no
justification for the idea that religious thought either represses or deliberately refuses to
acknowledge a threatening self-awareness. Such awareness does not yet
____________________
1. See chapter 15, "Freud and the Oedipus Complex." -
J.W.
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present any threat to religion. It is we who are threatened by it, we who flee from it.
If religious misapprehensions were to be regarded in the same light as psychoanalysis
regards its material, we should require some religious equivalent to the Freudian
repression of the patricide/incest desire, something that must be hidden and kept hidden.
Yet such is hardly the case. To be sure, there are many details of the generative event
that have dropped out, many elements that have become so warped, misshapen, and
transfigured as to be unrecognizable when reproduced in mythical or ritualistic form.
Yet no matter how gaping the lacunae may appear, no matter how grotesque the
deformations, they are not ultimately indispensable to the religious attitude, the religious
misapprehension. Even if it were brought face to face with the inner workings of the
mechanism, the religious mind would be unable to conceive of the transformation of bad
into good, of violence into culture, as a spontaneous phenomenon calling for a positive
approach.
It is natural to assume that the best-concealed aspect of the generative mechanism will
be the most crucial element, the one most likely to render the sacrificial system
nonfunctional if it becomes known. This aspect will be the arbitrary selection of the
victim, its essential insignificance, which contradicts the meaning accumulated upon its
head by the scapegoat projections.
Close examination will reveal that even this aspect is not really hidden; it can be readily
detected once we know what we must look for. Frequently the rituals themselves are
engineered so that they include an element of chance in the choice of the victim, but
mythologies have never taken this into account.
Although we have already called attention to those rites designed to give a role to
chance in the selection of the victim, it may be that we have not put sufficient stress on
this essential aspect.
Sporting contests and games of chance appear to modern man most incongruous as
ritual practices. The Uitoto Indians, for example, incorporate a balloon game into their
ritual; and the Kayans of Borneo use a top in the course of their religious ceremonies.
Even more remarkable, apparently even more incongruous, is the game of dice that
figures in the funeral rites of the Canelos Indians. Only the men participate in this game.
Divided into two rival groups and lined up on either side of the deceased, they take turns
casting their dice
over
the corpse. The sacred spirit, in the person of the dead man,
determines the outcome of each throw. The winner is awarded one of the dead man's
domestic animals, which is slaughtered on the spot, and the women prepare a meal from
it for the assembled mourners.
Jensen, in citing these facts, remarks that the games are not simply
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additions to established religious practic
es. 2. I
f one were to say that the Canelos Indians
"play at dice during the funeral rites of their parents," one would be conveying the
wrong idea of the ceremonies. For this game takes place only in conjunction with these
funeral rites. It is modern man who thinks of games of this sort as exclusively secular,
and we must not project that idea onto the Canelos Indians. This is not to say that our
own games have nothing to do with rites; in fact, they originate in rites. But, as usual,
we have got things reversed. For us, games of chance are a secular activity upon which a
religious meaning has been superimposed. The true state of affairs is precisely the
opposite: games originate in rites that have been divested, to a greater or lesser degree,
of their sacred character. Huizinga's famous theory of play should be inverted. It is not
play that envelops the sacred, but the sacred that envelops the notion of play.
Death, like any passage, entails violence. The passage into the beyond by a member of
the community may provoke (among other difficulties) quarrels among the survivors,
for there is always the problem of how to redistribute the dead man's belongings. In
order to meet the threat of maleficent contagion the community must have recourse to
the universal model, to generative violence; it must attend to the advice of the sacred
itself. In this particular case, the community has perceived and retained the role of
choice in the liberating decision. If violence is given free play, chance alone is
responsible for the ultimate resolution of the conflict; and the rite tries to force the hand
of chance before violence has had the opportunity to act. The rite aims straight at the
final result, achieving, as it were, a minimum expenditure of violence.
The Canelos dice game offers a clue to the reason why the theme of chance recurs so
frequently in folklore, myth, and fable. Oedipus, it will be remembered, refers to himself
as the son of
Tychè
-- that is, Fortune or Chance. There were towns in the ancient world
in which the selection of magistrates was made by drawing lots, for the power bestowed
by ritually regulated chance always contains a sacred element, the sacred "fusion of
opposites." Indeed, the more we reflect on this theme of Chance, the more universal it
appears. In popular legend and fairy tale Chance is often invoked to "find" kings or,
conversely (and the converse is always the other face of the same coin), to designate
someone to undertake a difficult or perilous mission, a mission that might involve self-
sacrifice for the general good -- someone, in short, to assume the role of surrogate
victim:
On tira-t à la courte paille
Pour savoir qui serait mangé
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2. Jensen,
Mythes et cultes chez les peuples primitifs, trans. M. Metzger and J. Goffinet (
Paris: Payot, 1954), 77-83.
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(One drew for the short straw
to know who would be eaten.)
3.
Yet is there any way of proving that the motif of Chance has its origin in the arbitrary
nature of the violent resolution? There are numerous instances in which the drawing of
lots so clearly supports the meaning proposed here that it is virtually impossible to doubt
the connection. One such example is the Old Testament Book of Jonah. God tells Jonah
to go forth and warn the people of Nineveh that their city will be destroyed if they do
not repent of their ways. Hoping to evade this thankless task, the reluctant prophet
embarks on a ship sailing for Tarshish:
But the Lord sent out a great wind into the sea, and there was a mighty tempest in the
sea, so that the ship was like to be broken.
Then the mariners were afraid, and cried very man unto his god, and cast forth the wares
that were in the ship into the sea, to lighten it of them. But Jonah was gone down into
the sides of the ship; and he lay, and was fast asleep.
So the shipmaster came to him, and said unto him, What meanest thou, O sleeper?
Arise, call upon thy God, if so be that God will think upon us, that we perish not.
And they said every one to his fellow, Come, and let us cast lots, that we may know for
whose cause this evil is upon us. So they cast lots, and the lot fell upon Jonah. ( Jonah
1:4-7)
The ship represents the community, the tempest the sacrificial crisis. The jettisoned
cargo is the cultural system that has abandoned its distinctions. The fact that everybody
calls out to his own particular god indicates a breakdown in the religious order. The
floundering ship can be compared to the city of Nineveh, threatened with destruction
unless its people repent. The forms may vary, but the crisis is always the same.
The passengers cast lots to determine who is responsible for the crisis. Chance can
always be trusted to reveal the truth, for it reflects the will of the divinity. The lot
designates Jonah, who proceeds to confess his culpability:
Then the men were exceedingly afraid, and said unto him, Why hast thou done this? For
the men knew that he fled from the presence of the Lord, because he had told them.
Then they said unto him, What shall we do unto thee, that the sea may be calm unto us?
for the sea wrought, and was tempestuous.
____________________
3. From
"Il était un petit navire,"
folkloric French song. -
Ed
.
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And he said unto them, Take me up, and cast me forth into the sea; so shall the sea be
calm unto you: for I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you. ( Jonah 1:10-
12)
The sailors attempt to gain the shore by their own efforts; they would like to save
Jonah's life. But they finally recognize the futility of their efforts, and address
themselves to the Lord -- even though he is Jonah's Lord and not their own:
Wherefore they cried unto the Lord, and said, We beseech thee, O Lord, we beseech
thee, let us not perish for this man's life, and lay not upon us innocent blood: for thou, O
Lord, hast done as it pleased thee.
So they took up Jonah, and cast him forth into the sea; and the sea ceased from her
raging.
Then the men feared the Lord exceedingly, and offered a sacrifice unto the Lord, and
made vows. ( Jonah 1:14-16)
What we see here is a reflection of the sacrificial crisis and its resolution. The victim is
chosen by lot; his expulsion saves the community, as represented by the ship's crew; and
a new god is acknowledged through the crew's sacrifice to the Lord whom they did not
know before. Taken in isolation this story tells us little, but when seen against the
backdrop of our whole discussion, each detail acquires significance.
Modern man flatly rejects the notion that Chance is the reflection of divine will.
Primitive man views things differently. For him, Chance embodies all the obvious
characteristics of the sacred. Now it deals violently with man, now it showers him with
gifts. Indeed, what is more capricious in its favors than Chance, more susceptible to
those rapid reversals of temper that are invariably associated with the gods?
The sacred nature of Chance is reflected in the practice of the lottery. In some sacrificial
rites the choice of victim by means of a lottery serves to underline the relationship
between Chance and generative violence. In an essay entitled
"Sur le symbolisme
politique: le Foyer commun,"
Louis Gernet cites a particularly revealing ritual, which
took place in Cos during a festival dedicated to Zeus:
The choice of victim was determined by a sort of lottery in which all the cattle, which
were originally presented separately by each division of each tribe, were mixed together
in a common herd. The animal ultimately selected was executed on the following day,
having first been "introduced to Hestia," and undergone various rites. Immediately prior
to the ritual presentation, Hestia herself receives homage in the form of an animal
sacrifi
ce. 4.
____________________
4. Gernet,
Anthropologie de la Grèce antique
( Paris: Maspero, 1968), 393.
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Hestia, the common hearth, in all probability marked the place where the original act of
communal violence was perpetrated. It seems more than likely, therefore, that the
selection of the victim by lottery was meant to simulate that original violence. The
selection is not made by men, but left to divine Chance, acting through violence. The
mixing together of the cattle that had originally been identified by tribe or by division of
tribe is particularly revealing. This deliberate confusion of distinctions, this merger into
a communal togetherness, constitutes an obligatory preamble to the lottery; clearly it
was introduced to reproduce the exact order of the original events. The arbitrary and
violent resolution that serves as a model for the lottery takes place at the very height of
the sacrificial crisis, when the distinctions delegated to the members of society by the
cultural order succumb to the reciprocal violence and are merged into a communal mass.
A traditional discussion of Dionysus involves a demonstration of how he differs from
Apollo or from the other gods. But is it not more urgent to show how Dionysus and
Apollo share the same characteristics, why the one and the other should be called
divine? Surely all the gods, despite their differences, have something in common,
something from which all their distinctive qualities spring. Without such a common
basis, the differences become meaningless.
Scholars of religion devote themselves to the study of gods and divinity. They should be
able to provide clear and concise definitions of these concepts, but they do not. They are
obliged, of course, to decide what falls within their field of study and what falls outside
it, yet they leave the crucial and most decisively scientific task of
defining
their subject
to uninformed public opinion. Even assuming that it is possible -- or justifiable -- to