Sacrifice

Ch. 3: Sacrifice Revealed in the Biblical and Vedic Religions

62 3 Sacrifice Revealed in the Biblical and Vedic Religions In my first two lectures, I found in the Brahmanas the phenomenon of the scapegoat, which is the basis for my theory of sacrifice. The phenomenon is sparked when mimetic rivalries reach their paroxysm and fasten suddenly on a single victim. The unanimous execration and destruction of a pseudo -enemy reconciles the community at the relatively modest cost of a single victim. The phenomenon is all the more valuable insofar as communities succeed in reproducing it using substitute victims: this is ritual sacrifice. We find it everywhere and in forms too nearly alike to justify the theory that it is a pure fiction, a pseudo-institution. Modern anthropology embraces this error and so remains blind to the sacrificial and religious origins of humanity. Sacrifice is the primordial institution of human culture. It is 63 rooted in mimeticism, a phenomenon far more intense in humans than in even highly mimetic animals. It is consequently more conflictual. The dominance patterns that constitute animal societies cannot be stabilized among humans. Mimetic crises arise and are resolved by scapegoat phenomena and their ritual repetitions. It must be in this way that specifically human societies commence: they are founded on sacrifices and the institutions derived from them. Seeing that they are reconciled by their scapegoats but not quite sure why, the sacrificers mimic the founding violence as closely as possible. This is why sacrifice is completely universal , and universally recognizable. The actual sacrifices are, however, never perfectly identical. The founding event varies from one culture to another, within narrow limits, but it is never perfectly identical twice in a row. What also vary are the recollections of it and the interpretations to which it is submitted. Sacrifices differ, but not so much as to justify the present relativism, the negation of all universality, and contempt for religion. Far from being simply “neurotic,” the iron will to exactitude in imitation corresponds to a legitimate concern for 64 efficacy. The domains of human activity most liable to generate conflicts—death, sexual relations, property, etc.—are those most regulated by sacrifices. All cultural institutions must be interpreted in terms of the transformations sacrifices undergo and the evolution that specializes them, little by little, into funerals, marriage, rites of initiation, schools, political power, etc. The communities saved in extremis by their scapegoats are naturally incapable of recognizing, in the extraordinary violence that protects them, a pure and simple mimetic escalation of the ordinary violence that menaces them. This initial stage is purely naturalistic, materialistic even. And yet, mimetic theory never disdains human beings by attributing primitive religion to idiotic superstition like current anthropology does. It demonstrates why all archaic societies believe in the beneficial intervention of a supernatural power who teaches them their sacrifices. This supernatural power is generally assimilated to the first victim, the scapegoat. By divining that the heart of the mystery is sacrifice itself , Vedic religion demonstrates an exceptional perspicacity. The Brahmanas appear bizarre only because of the incredible 65 modern ignorance of religion. The Vedas go a long way in their understanding of sacrifice, but without escaping, in the texts we have read so far, the source of primordial error that characterizes archaic religion: the sacralization of reconciling violence. Resemblances between Myths and the Gospels But what of the Biblical and the Christian in the context of mimetic theory? If we reread the Gospels, we find there with little trouble the sequence of events common to founding myths and to the stories we have recounted from the Brahmanas. Here, too, a mimetic crisis precedes a scapegoat phenomenon. Even those researchers most eager to reduce religion to an imaginary phenomenon are unable to deny, for once, that they are faced with something real. The crisis the Gospels describe, the gradual suffocation of the tiny Jewish state by Roman power, is doubtless historical. The majority of historians are furthermore agreed that Jesus really existed and that 66 he died by crucifixion. At the paroxysm of the crisis, in the Gospels as in myths, a drama is set in motion that qualifies as “sacrificial” in the broad sense—the killing of Jesus. He is accused, like Oedipus, like all mythic heroes, of an unpardonable crime: he takes himself to be God. He will therefore be crucified and, in the end, he is divinized. Why these resemblances? During the first centuries of its existence, Christianity stirred up...