Sacrifice

Ch.2: The Founding Myths of Vedic Sacrifice

30 2 The Founding Myths of Vedic Sacrifice In my first lecture, I spoke of the nearly obligatory prelude to sacrifice—the rivalries of the gods and demons in the Brahmanas, the great Vedic commentaries on sacrifice. These rivalries are the reciprocal imitations of desire. They are therefore mimetic in the sense given this term by mimetic theory and so, at the moment of paroxysm, these rivalries spontaneously engender the sacrifice that interrupts them. What the reason for this sudden change is, the Brahmanas do not say. Mimetic theory, following its scientific inspiration, insists the change must be a purely natural phenomenon released during the paroxysm of violent rivalries for natural and identifiable reasons, a phenomenon largely ignored by anthropologists and sociologists. I have shown that mimeticism must suddenly change direction and seize a single 31 victim, who is obviously irrelevant but who is nevertheless promptly lynched by the unanimous community. I call this the founding murder, or single victim mechanism. For the price of one violent act, limited to a single victim, it reconciles the community against and finally around this same victim. In the end the victim is seen as almost too good to be true. He is taken for a savior. Simultaneously violent and peaceful, malevolent and benevolent, he is divinized in the sense of the archaic sacred. Incessant rivalry is at once a social pathology that is potentially lethal to human communities and a condition favorable to the spontaneous release of the only phenomenon likely to put an end to it, which we may call a scapegoat phenomenon. But perhaps I would do better to give up this expression for it; I realize now that it causes misunderstandings .11 Every human community realizes quickly, inevitably, that the beneficial effects of the founding murder do not last forever and they attempt to renew them by imitating the first murder, immolating new victims chosen deliberately for this role. The invention of ritual sacrifice must be the first properly human initiative, the point of departure for 32 religious culture, which is to say, the point of departure for human culture itself. Sacrifice is not then merely an instrument of peace; it sets in motion a process of repetition that engenders, no doubt very gradually, what we call our social and political institutions . The more sacrifices are repeated, the more they tend to become what we call funerals, marriages, rites of passage, initiations of all sorts, and likewise royalty—political power is always suffused with the sacred—all the institutions, in short, of our culture. The benefits that humanity derives from sacrifices are therefore real, and only this reality can account for the attachment of sacrificial peoples to them. Without sacrifices, humanity would have succumbed not once but a thousand times over to the destructive power of its own violence during the major portion of its history, and especially during its immense prehistory. Just as mimetic crises and their resolutions never unfold in exactly the same fashion, so too sacrifices are never exactly the same in different societies; nevertheless they always look enough alike to be recognizable as sacrifices . Recent attempts to deny the universality of this institution 33 are plainly contrary to common sense and are sterilizing to the study of religion. Human culture is fundamentally and originally religious rather than secondarily and supplementally. The most formidable ethnocentrism does not minimize the celebrated differences between cultures, which no one would think to do in our day, but, on the contrary, exaggerates them so as better to ignore the universal role of religion, not only in the survival of humanity but in the social organization that has slowly emerged from sacrificial rites and that the Brahmanas interpret precisely in terms of difference. My relative justification of archaic religion—my acknowledgement of its social function—does not warrant the claim of some that I exempt myself from the community of “serious ” researchers, that I do not even deserve to be refuted because my thought is a product of religious inspiration and blatantly transgresses scientific rationality. It suffices to read my books with a minimum of attention to prove the falsity of this accusation. Mimetic theory renders an account of sacrifice and archaic religion in terms of a purely natural force, human hypermimeticism. Because it exacerbates 34 rivalries, this hypermimeticism destroys the dominance patterns in animal societies, but it replaces them, in the paroxysm of violence it releases, with another...