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63 CHAPTER 6 Anthropologies of the Scapegoat Frazer and Girard on Archaic Religion and Atonement We have come to the end of our typological history of the scapegoat. What remains is to adduce the word’s earliest nonexegetical, metaphorical uses. Before we do this, let us pause to situate our corrected history within a broader theoretical framework or two. Patterns in the data under review in this first portion of our study need to be reckoned, especially in view of the citations we shall come to in the final chapters of this book with their curious distribution into “types.” We are, moreover, finally in a position to check the two most important theorists of the scapegoat—Sir James Frazer and René Girard—against the actual record. How well do they anticipate the textual evidence? What help might they give us interpreting the data? Frazer is regarded as the first to insist on persistent features, repeating sequences, and a unity of meaning for the scapegoat. He is of course reading ethnographic data, rather than theological typologies. As we shall see, the radically foundational place of the scapegoat in Girard’s thought furnishes an account of the pattern common to both. Having submerged the crucifixion of Jesus along with the Greek pharmakos and the Levitical scapegoat in a sea of expulsion ceremonies from every 64 Chapter 6 age and abode under heaven, the British ethnologist J. G. Frazer famously reserves the word scapegoat as a title for one large volume of The Golden Bough. It was apparently a last-minute decision. Until “the very eve of the publication of the relevant section of the Third Edition, he thought of this portion of the argument as ‘The Man of Sorrows’”—a reference to Isaiah’s Suffering Servant.1 He writes, The aspect of the subject with which we are here chiefly concerned is the use of the Dying God as a scapegoatto free his worshippers from the troubles of all sorts with which life on earth is beset. I have sought to trace this curious usage to its origin, to decompose the idea of the Divine Scapegoat into the elements out of which it appears to be compounded. If I am right, the idea resolves itself into a simple confusion between the material and the immaterial, between the real possibility of transferring a physical load to other shoulders and the supposed possibility of transferring our bodily and mental ailments to another who will bear them for us. When we survey the history of this pathetic fallacy from its crude inception in savagery to its full development in the speculative theology of civilized nations, we cannot but wonder at the singular power which the human mind possesses of transmuting the leaden dross of superstition into a glittering semblance of gold. Certainly in nothing is this alchemy of thought more conspicuous than in the process which has refined the base and foolish custom of the scapegoat into the sublime conception of a God who dies to take away the sins of the world.2 Wenotethatthescapegoat,thepharmakoi,andtheSufferingServantassemble underFrazer’scategoryheading,astheydidcenturiesearlierinCalvin’sDayof Atonement typology. They are joined to a myriad of other rites and customs by what Frazer understood as a common error, the confusion of material and immaterial burdens, combined with a rather shabby attempt to foist the latter onto some unfortunate who then bore the brunt for everyone else. Although the“scapegoat”frequentlyundergoesexpulsionandissometimesputtodeath, Frazer emphasizes the category mistake underpinning the ritual transfer. It is what unites the scores of rites and customs collected in his volume. In festivals like the Saturnalia celebrated across the ancient world and marked everywhere by “the inversion of social ranks” and the sacrifice of a man in the role of a god, Frazer saw phenomena that dated “to an early age in the history of agriculture,” when small communities were “presided over by a sacred or divine king, whose primary duty was to secure the orderly succession Anthropologies of the Scapegoat 65 of the seasons” along with the fecundity of both cattle and women.3 Though he appears to have held at least one other, fully incompatible view on the subject , Frazer surmises in The Scapegoat that the king’s original term of office corresponded to one cycle of the seasons, at the end of which his subjects put him to death. Each year “a man, whom the fond imagination of his worshippers invested with the attributes of a god, gave his life for...

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