The Girard Reader (28 page)

myth to the reality it (mis)represents cannot be revealed. That this reversal still is a form of

scapegoating can be seen from the continued inability of our culture to bring to light the

reality of victimization behind even the most transparent myths, such as our Venda example.

As we discover the exact degree to which real magic, persecutional magic, influences our

text, we become able to circumscribe its effects with precision, and far from embracing

magical thinking, which is what the mimetic theory seems to be doing as long as we do not

understand it, our reading moves farther away from magic than all previous readings.

The irrational thinker is not the mimetic interpreter but the narrow rationalist or the textual

nihilist who resemble one another in their

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refusal to face the possibility that the law of contamination by the unbelievable might be just

as irrelevant to foundational myths as it already is to all distorted accounts of scapegoating in

our world.

When we apply the wrong law to our myth, we mimetically reproduce at the interpretive level

the confusion that characterizes the myth. We keep placing believable and unbelievable

features in the same category. We undifferentiate what should be differentiated.

The only real discrepancy between the anti-referential schools and mythical thinking
stricto

sensu
is that mythical thinking trusts everything in a myth, whereas the anti-referential school trusts nothing. This is an advance, no doubt, but a very limited one that must give way to a

more nuanced evaluation of the various themes.

The current interpretive nihilism is the twin brother of positivism and its misguided critical

prudence. They both desire a second degree of mythical thinking that can and will be

transcended by the selective referentiality of the mimetic theory.

The contamination by the fantastic and my metaphor of the rotten apple are two different

names for a textual principle of interpretive guilt by association, if I may say so, an expulsion

too encompassing that does not distinguish the wheat from the chaff. What this expulsion

really expels is . . . the expulsion that generates the text and that, being kept safely covered

up, remains as virulently operative as it always was under the blanket of the anti-realistic,

anti-referential principle, at a time when the real solution of the mythical enigma is at hand.

The mimetic theory provides an approach sophisticated enough to utilize all textual resources

most effectively without surrendering to any referential fallacy, unless, of course, it is abused,

and abuses are always possible. This is another subject, however, that cannot be discussed in

the present essay.

At this time in our history, the only context in which academic researchers have learned to

identify the scapegoat genesis of a text, the only context in which it is permissible to suspend

the law of contamination by the unbelievable, insofar as evidence warrants, is still our own

Western historical context. Within our own cultural realm, the lesson was learned centuries

ago, I repeat, and so thoroughly that we can identify and interpret all relevant clues almost immediately and automatically.

In a historical context, we all perceive intuitively the tell-tale signs of scapegoating in any

text structured like our Venda myth. We all perform the operation required by its elucidation

so rapidly that they hardly reach our consciousness. Instead of appearing audacious to the

point of

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temerity, my interpretive moves seem commonplace and their validity is taken for granted.

Gradually, I believe, the situation will change and at some time in the future, the

demythification
of myth will become as easy and banal as the
demystification
of a witchcraft trial record has been for centuries.

There are objective reasons, I said, why the interpretation of myth is lagging so far behind the

interpretation of historical texts. The first reason is that the fantastic themes are often but not

always more spectacular in a myth and the tell-tale signs of real scapegoating are harder to

see. The second reason is the historical background and the historical experience that we have

of our own society. Our society is the place where the battle against magical accusations was

fought and where it was won. Mythology seems alien and forbiddingly majestic by

comparison.

But there are also subjective reasons, the ideological prejudices of anthropologists and other

students of myth. Our society as a whole is always biased in its own favor. But, precisely

because they are so used to fighting this kind of prejudice, our professional interpreters are

guilty of the reverse bias. They are biased in favor of myths and they prefer not to see in them

the same collective violence that they are delighted to denounce in our own history.

Ever since the Renaissance, a quasi-religious respect for mythology has characterized and

still characterizes academic research. Our ability to decipher scapegoat phenomena applies

itself preferentially to the Judaic and Christian domains, for reasons which, at bottom, are

anti-religious and anti-Christian.

The whole unfinished business of deciphering mythology and ritual belongs to the ongoing

history
of our ability to read scapegoat phenomena in all human relations as well as inside

texts. Everything we are now poised to achieve will represent a new advance beyond the last

great step, which was taken centuries ago, when the remnants of magical thinking in our

world were finally liquidated. At that time, our culture reached a threshold beyond which the

mythical and religious texts of all mankind become food for demystification or

"deconstruction" in the same manner and for the same reasons as medieval witch-hunting and

other forms of collective persecution. We have now been standing on that threshold for four

or five centuries but we still hesitate to cross it. The mimetic-scapegoat theory is the crossing

of that threshold.

Our willingness to cross the threshold depends on our constantly deepening ability to detect

mimetic polarizations and scapegoating, and this deepening was long ago triggered by the

influence on us of the Bible and above all of the Gospels. We can verify this, I believe, in the

very form of the mimetic scapegoat interpretation.

All it takes to crack open our myth and all similar myths is the application to them of the principle of the innocent victim unjustly

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scapegoated. The model for this analysis is the story of the crucifixion and associated texts in

the Christian Gospels. This is what we did in the case of our Venda myth. In order to identify

the second wife as a "scapegoat," all we have to do is to slip under our text the text of the Christian Passion, the original revelation of the scapegoat mechanism.

The mimetic reading is scientific in the same sense as the demystification of witch-hunting

achieved by the modern world. The two are scientific in opposition to the witch-hunters' and

mythmakers' irrationality. Similarly, there is a
scientific
reading of the Nazi genocide in

contrast with the mad theories of the "revisionists."

We must insist simultaneously on this scientific character of the mimetic interpretation and

on its religious origin. The fact that the two words "scientific" and "religious" are used side by side cannot sit well with many people. It suggests that distinctions regarded as universally

valid both by liberal rationalism and by religionists are being abolished. It suggests that the

times we are living are truly revolutionary.

"The stone that the builders rejected has become the keystone." This is the principle which is being applied. It has applications in all possible fields, and it effectuates the most radical

deconstruction. Our ability to read myth has little to do with the Greeks. It is inseparable from

the intense concern for all victims that characterizes the modern world as a whole. It is not

enough to dismiss this concern with a few desultory words about our Judaic and Christian

"heritage." The word implies too much passivity. "Heritage" is an elegant version of a more recent and flat-footed attempt to put Christianity behind us by pompously labeling ourselves

"post-Christian." We are about as "post-Christian" as we are "postnuclear" or "posttechnical"

or "postmimetic." More than ever, the Gospels are the new wine that keeps bursting the old

wine skins.

One last word about a possible objection. Our Venda myth belongs to the rather small

category of myths that have everything a myth can have that may help us uncover their

scapegoat genesis: the scapegoat accusation, the crisis, the "guilt" and "punishment" of the victim, the beneficial consequences of her unanimous expulsion. Many myths lack one or

more of these most revealing features that are all conveniently assembled in our myth.

The myths that lack one or more pieces of the puzzle are obviously less easy to decipher than

our Venda myth. Until now, I have focused mostly on the basement level of mythical

analysis, the easiest level.

In
The Scapegoat
, however, I tried to move beyond this stage in order to show that the

absence of collective violence in a myth is due to normal development in the religious history

of mankind. So are

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other transformations that make the detection of the scapegoat genesis more and more

difficult but, as far as I have ascertained, never really impossible.

This essay is not the place for pursuing further this kind of exploration, but I would like to give some final indications on the road which, in my opinion, such investigation might take

in the case of our Venda myth.

Some readers will have observed that this myth sounds like a variation on a famous mythical

theme: feminine indiscretion,
mala curiositas
. Myths that emphasize that theme are found

everywhere, it seems. In Greek mythology there are two famous examples, the myth of

Psyche and the myth of Semele, two beloved mistresses of Zeus struck by his thunder for

very much the same reason as the second wife in our Venda myth. Their lover has not said

who he is and they are destroyed for pestering him about his divine identity very much in the

manner of our Venda myth. Another closely related story is the Germanic Lohengrin.

Are we to believe that our Venda myth is influenced by these ancient myths, or is it the other

way around? All such hypotheses are absurd, I believe. The only possible explanation for the

similarities between them all is a common genesis of the mythical accusation, which must be

the mimetic jealousy of two rival women, as I outlined in my reading.

Being more "primitive," or "archaic," or diachronically "younger," the Venda myth must have preserved what has completely or partially disappeared from the better known Greek and

Germanic myths. At some point in the future, when the superiority of the mimetic theory is

acknowledged, our Venda myth may turn out to constitute an important piece of evidence in

the understanding of how all myths of the Psyche type were originally constituted.

The victimized heroine is always a favorite wife or mistress. In a polygamous world, she

cannot be accused of adultery. She cannot be indicted simply for being intimate with the

beloved "god." The only possible accusation is of the type we have in all these myths. The

rival must be incriminated for abusing a privilege that was legitimately granted but must

nevertheless be taken away from her, by the most violent means if necessary, because she

keeps pestering the god. The pestering always has something to do with the superhuman

status of the lover, or husband, whom the abandoned woman alone has the right to know.

The disgruntled ex-mistress manages to persuade herself that her more successful rival is

usurping something she alone is entitled to have, a true awareness of who her husband really

is, of how much he is worth.

Like all myths, our African myth hides its own victimization but less efficiently than the

more elaborate Greek and Germanic myths, which must have been modified repeatedly

before they reached us. Two themes are still present in the Venda version that must have

originally belonged

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to the others as well but have subsequently been removed, the slanderous accusation by the

jealous rival and the collective violence that this accusation triggers.

Whereas Zeus is supposed to punish the culprits directly with his own thunder, Python still

needs human intermediaries. He acts through the assembled people and not he, but they, send

the second wife to her death. The Venda version lets us see the crucial role of collective

violence, its identity with sacred power.

Olympian mythology, as a rule, has been cleansed of its most sinister features, according to principles less drastic that those of Plato in
The Republic
but similar in their purpose. The

Venda myth still preserves the crucial collective action for which the thunder of Zeus is really

a metaphor. A careful comparison of African and Greek myths could reveal, I believe, what

pieces of the mythical puzzle are removed, in what order, and for what reason, during the

religious history of these myths. This is the process to which Freud so powerfully alluded in

Moses and Monotbeism
, the multiple attempts at erasing the traces of the collective murder,