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Overview
The Bible reveals collective violence, similar to that which generates sacrifice everywhere, but instead of making victims guilty, the Bible and the Gospels reveal the persecutors of a single victim. Instead of elaborating myths, they tell the truth absolutely contrary to the archaic sense. Once exposed, the single victim mechanism can no longer function as the model for would-be sacrificers.
Recognizing that the Vedic tradition also converges on a revelation that discredits sacrifice, mimetic theory locates within sacrifice itself a paradoxical power of quiet reflection that leads, in the long run, to the eclipse of this institution which is violent but nevertheless fundamental to the development of human culture. Far from unduly privileging the Western tradition and awarding it a monopoly on the knowledge and repudiation of blood sacrifice, mimetic analysis recognizes comparable, but never truly identical, traits in the Vedic tradition.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780870139925 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2011 |
| Series: | Breakthroughs in Mimetic Theory |
| Pages: | 104 |
| Product dimensions: | 4.50(w) x 6.00(h) x 0.60(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Sacrifice
By René Girard
Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 2011 René GirardAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87013-992-5
Chapter One
Sacrifice in the Vedic Tradition
Mimetic Rivalry and Sacrifice in the Brahmanas
After some hesitation, at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century anthropology turned resolutely to the study of individual cultures. Researchers began to take very seriously the differences between cultures, but without renouncing the great theoretical questions that presuppose the unity of man. They believed that beyond the archaic cults, each different from the others, there was the enigma of religion as such and that its solution must be imminent.
Everyone was more or less agreed that blood sacrifice lay at the heart of this enigma. Beyond carefully descriptive essays such as Hubert and Mauss's Essay on the Nature and Function of Sacrifice, ambitious researchers dreamed of working out a definitive theory that would at last explain why, in the most diverse cultures, with the exception of the Christian and the modern world which issues from it, men have always immolated victims to their divinities.
After a century of aborted attempts, in the middle of the twentieth century anthropologists began to wonder, quite legitimately, whether they were doomed to failure by a premise implicit in their efforts: the unity of religion, which presupposes that of human culture. They wondered whether anthropology had not been the victim of "Western ethnocentrism."
Nothing is more praiseworthy than mistrust of ethnocentrism. How could it fail to threaten us, when all modern anthropological concepts come from the West, including that of ethnocentrism—a charge that is brandished by the West alone, and against itself exclusively?
Mistrust of ethnocentrism is more than legitimate; it is indispensable, and yet we must not make of it the prehistoric bludgeon that false progressivism and false radicalism made of it in the second half of the twentieth century. The notion of ethnocentrism was made to serve a poorly disguised anti-intellectualism that reduced to silence the most legitimate anthropological curiosity. For several years the frenzy of "deconstruction" and demolition sustained an intense excitement in research that today has collapsed, killed by its own success.
It is not excessive ambition that threatens us now, but bureaucratization and provincialization as research is more and more limited to the local and the particular. Once the great questions are discredited, for want of intellectual stimulation anthropology languishes. Still quite lively in the era of Durkheim and the early Lévi-Strauss, the discipline has since tended to settle into a rather disappointing academic routine.
If it were clear that the celebrated "differences" are alone real, that they override resemblances and identities in every case, we would gladly resign ourselves to this situation. But the dogmatic nihilism of the last quarter century is little more than an avant-garde slogan doubling as a flagrant logical absurdity. Research is brought to heel with the intimidation "post-colonialist," and this cannot last forever.
No, sacrifice cannot be defined primarily as a "discourse." No, Saussurian analysis cannot settle its score with religion. A science begins by flouting common sense at its own peril. We must return to the modest realism of fledgling disciplines.
We must rekindle the curiosity that is the true impetus of anthropology, which is more and more intimidated by the snobbery of the void. We are the first great civilization to completely rid ourselves of sacrifice. The intense curiosity this institution inspires in us is inseparable from our singularity in this respect; it is not thereby disqualified.
Classical anthropology asked the right questions. If the answers failed to come, it is not necessarily because they do not exist; it might be because we refuse to seek them where they may be found. Far from exhausting the possibilities of inquiry, anthropology, in its research on sacrifice, has always conjured away the most obviously relevant fact: violence.
There exists a very old and powerful taboo against religious violence. Rather than liberating us from it, radical avant-gardism only reinforces it by denouncing as obviously tendentious and "reactionary" the refusal to conjure away the violence of archaic religion. Realistic exploration is condemned as an attempt to denigrate archaic cultures that in reality have long ceased to exist.
To combat the taboo surrounding religious violence, we must begin by properly locating it. To do this, we should inquire first of that philosopher who, because he vigorously defended this taboo, was obliged to formulate it explicitly at the risk of undermining it. Any taboo too clearly articulated is, for that very reason, threatened.
Plato condemns all literary representations of religious violence. He excludes from his perfect city those artists who make what he considers an obscene and scandalous display of this violence, namely Homer and the tragic poets. What is it the philosopher dreads? Quite simply, a decomposition of religion that is liable to pervade society as a whole.
When we attentively examine archaic religions, we can see that, far from being a Platonic innovation, the concern with dissimulating or minimizing violence is already present at the center of ritual sacrifice. It belongs to the religious itself. Vedic sacrifice, for example, tries hard to minimize its own violence. The rites are organized so as to render the murder of victims as inconspicuous as possible.
Vedic India had no temples and so, before performing a sacrifice, priests would trace the boundaries of a site officially consecrated to this purpose, but it was outside of these boundaries that the immolation was performed. To better conceal the act and avoid the spectacle of bloodshed, they surreptitiously strangled the victim instead of cutting his throat, as was once done.
This ambiguous attitude is common. Many sacrificial systems make a point of minimizing their own violence, excusing it, sometimes even apologizing to victims before immolating them. Joseph de Maistre makes much of these maneuvers in his celebrated "Traité sur les sacrifices," but they are too theatrical, it seems to me, to truly mean what they purport to mean.
By acting as they do, scrupulous sacrificers repeatedly call attention to the violence they pretend to conceal. They suggest to us the true nature of sacrifice, which is really always a kind of murder. It has less to do with renouncing violence—sacrifice hardly renounces that—than with emphasizing its transgressive power. Sacrifice is simultaneously a murder and a most holy act. Sacrifice is divided against itself.
It is undoubtedly no coincidence that, in Vedic India once again, the genuinely violent sacrifices dispense with the charade of nonviolence. The Great Sacrifice of the Horse, for example, comprises as a rule, among other victims, the immolation of a human being. There is no reason to doubt that it took place. This human sacrifice is, however, mentioned casually, as if it were nothing. On the other hand, the charade of feigned violence is played up during rites that are foreign to any real violence, as in the case of soma.
The Sacrifice of Soma
Soma is a plant that grew wild on the Himalayan slopes. Sacrificers derived from it a potion they considered divine, probably for its hallucinogenic properties. There is no certainty on this point because no one is able to identify the plant hiding behind the term soma. All we know is that use of the potion derived from it was made a part of sacrificial rites.
Freshly cut stems were pressed between stones to obtain the draught. This operation was itself an important sacrificial rite, for it was likened to the most reprehensible murder, that of a Brahmin, a member of the highest caste, to which gods like Soma also belonged.
When the Vedic commentators consider sacrifice, the less reason there is to be terrified, the more terrified they pretend to be. This leads us to wonder whether sacrifice does not seek to provoke the shock of extreme violence that actors and spectators commonly experience in the theater. The more insignificant the victim, the lower it is situated in the scale of being, the more difficult that shock is to achieve.
There exists a hierarchy of sacrificial victims which is completely universal and, strangely enough, each of us can attest to it because it resides deep within us and requires no explanation: humans are at the top, animals are in the middle, and plant life on the bottom. It is doubtless to obtain the optimum effect—neither too strong nor too weak—that the Brahmanas "dramatize" to the limit the "sacrifice" of soma and play down that of the human.
What replaces sacrificial rites in our day, insofar as they can be effectively replaced, is violent spectacle. Depending on the dose, the calming effect can be transformed into a violent thrill, an insalubrious incitement. Everything depends here on a modulation similar to that which the Brahmanas seek to achieve, by minimizing the violence of rites which, "objectively," contain too much of it, and by exaggerating the violence of rites that contain too little. During times of upheaval, the system breaks down and violence mounts in the spectacles at the same pace as in the street. This tendency inspired in the sages an anxiety like that of Plato reading Homer.
The Brahmanas
We know the Indian sacrifice called Vedic thanks to the Vedas, sacred books that are even today universally venerated. The word veda means "knowledge," "science." What is the object of Vedic science? Sacrifice, naturally, which is the true unifying principle of this religion. The Vedic scriptures are a world little known in the West, with the very limited exception of the Rig Veda, the Veda of strophes and hymns belonging to the first stratum of this great collection. It is the best known of all the Vedic books, in India as in the West. The texts cited in these lectures come neither from the Rig Veda nor from the first stratum of the Vedas but from the second, comprising vast compilations of rituals and commentaries on sacrifice: the Brahmanas.
Is it perhaps imprudent on my part to interpret difficult, sometimes bewildering texts whose language is unknown to me? What gives me the audacity is the existence of a book that is a kind of selective anthology of the Brahmanas with many citations translated into French, La Doctrine du sacrifice dans les Brahmanas by Sylvain Lévi. It is not the original Sanskrit text that I interpret, but Sylvain Lévi's book.
It dates to an era (1898) when the most famous Indianists of Europe and America not only scorned the Brahmanas but heaped insults on them. They did not hesitate to treat their authors as feebleminded, as saboteurs of their own culture. Lévi believes, on the contrary, in the coherence of these books and that is why he strives to make them accessible to simple amateurs like myself.
In Lévi's time, the Brahmanas had such a bad reputation that his book went largely unremarked. When Presses Universitaires de France reprinted it in 1966 things had scarcely changed, to judge from Louis Renou's preface. This eminent Indianist confessed that the Brahmanas' ultimate incoherence remained more plausible, in his eyes, than the coherence postulated by Sylvain Lévi.
I take the side of Sylvain Lévi in this debate. I think that the coherence of the Brahmanas is real, and that it is the same, in the last analysis, as that of all archaic sacrificial systems, though here it takes an original form because it is more developed, more intellectualized than elsewhere, and because the Brahmanas transcend themselves, as we shall see, in some later texts that radically criticize sacrifice.
Though not the same as Sylvain Lévi's, my interpretation of the Brahmanas—through his book—vindicates his confidence in the intellectual power of the great Vedic texts. It is therefore to the memory of this researcher that I dedicate the present work, as a token of admiration and gratitude.
The Rivalries of the Devas and the Asuras
What immediately disconcerts the modern reader when faced with the Brahmanas are the countless little narratives—never identical but always fairly similar, as far as I am able to judge—that are strewn throughout these works. They all deal with the same theme: the intense rivalry, ever renewed, between the Devas and the Asuras, that is, between gods and demons.
For lack of time, I shall not be able to say all I would like, nor fully defend what I shall say, and for this I apologize. To begin, I shall observe that, despite the absence of human beings from these little dramas, they have as much to do with humankind as with gods and demons. In this world humans, like the gods and demons, are created by sacrifice itself, which becomes a creator in the figure of Prajâpati, the greatest of all the gods. All Prajâpati's intelligent creatures are devoted to rivalries and therefore to sacrifice, for only sacrifice, as we shall see, is able to quell their rivalries.
To study these little dramas carefully we would require more numerous citations than those placed at our disposal by Sylvain Lévi, who was not, of course, able to translate them all. But if the samples he has chosen are representative, and I believe they must be, they reveal a number of essential things about Vedic sacrifice.
First, a leading example of these narratives:
The Devas and the Asuras born of Prajâpati were in contention [for the world]. Now the world was wavering like a lotus petal in the wind; it went now to the Devas, now to the Asuras. As it drew close to the Gods, they said: Come, let us consolidate this world, to make of it a place of rest; once it is strengthened and stable, let us establish there the fires [of sacrifice]. [Then let us offer a sacrifice] and let us prevent our rivals from having a share.... They [offered a sacrifice] and kept their rivals from having a share.
This world that oscillates like a lotus petal blown by the wind is not as deplorable as the nineteenth-century scholars claim; it is even rather pretty, is it not? But the authors of these books care little, apparently, about the aesthetic effect produced by their writings. What interests them are the rivalries, the most consistent feature of which is their obstinacy, both camps refusing any compromise.
Where does this intransigence come from? At first glance it seems to be the importance of what is at stake, the object of the rivalry, often something priceless, as in the present case. There is always an object that both the gods and demons hope to possess exclusively. It is often something as enormous, splendid, fantastic as the imagined antagonists themselves. Here it is the world; elsewhere it will be the sun, the moon, and so on. The gods and demons contend for all of creation.
The object is often impossible to divide, and for good reason, for what is at stake is in truth an abstraction rather than a real, material object. It is Vâc, for example, the Voice, or rather language that the Devas and the Asuras dispute; or it is the Year, signifying time. In a fair number of cases, however, the gods and demons dispute goods that appear easily divided, those that men, especially in Vedic India, bitterly dispute—cattle, for example. Actually here, too, division is impossible, for it is not a question of a few or even a great number of cattle but of cattle as such, the abstract idea of cattle.
It is never the same object twice in a row. Indeed, in each episode the Devas prevail over the Asuras thanks to a sacrifice, one they perform better than their rivals, and this ritual victory ensures their ownership of the disputed object. The further we go, the better we understand that the objects are of little importance. They are but pretexts for rivalry. Their acquisition by the gods, who are always victorious, means simply that the gods are advancing steadily in their patient march toward immortality and divinity in the classical sense, a status they did not at first possess. The demons, on the other hand, sink further and further into the demonic.
If the object is secondary, what is essential to these rivalries? Is it the bellicose temperament of the rivals, their ill humor? It is clear that neither the Devas nor the Asuras love peace. The gods—at least in the texts translated by Lévi—are even more grasping and aggressive than the demons. Together, they manage to revive their rivalry even under circumstances most favorable to its extinction.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sacrifice by René Girard Copyright © 2011 by René Girard. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface....................ix1 Sacrifice in the Vedic Tradition....................1
2 The Founding Myths of Vedic Sacrifice....................30
3 Sacrifice Revealed in the Biblical and Vedic Religions....................62
Notes....................97