The Girard Reader (6 page)

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

____________________

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