The Girard Reader (24 page)

The various kinds of victims seem predisposed to crimes that eliminate differences.

Religious, ethnic, or national minorities are never actually reproached for their difference, but

for not being as different as expected, and in the end for not differing at all. Foreigners are

incapable of respecting "real" differences; they are lacking in culture or in taste, as the case may be. They have difficulty in perceiving exactly what is different. The
barbaros
is not the

person who speaks a different language but the person who mixes the only truly significant

distinctions, those of the Greek language. In all the vocabulary of tribal or national prejudices

hatred is expressed, not for difference, but for its absence. It is not the other
nomos
that is seen in the other, but anomaly, nor is it another norm but abnormality; the disabled becomes

deformed; the foreigner becomes the
apatride
. It is not good to be a cosmopolitan in Russia.

Aliens imitate all the differences because they have none. The mechanisms of our ancestors

are reproduced unconsciously, from generation to generation, and, it is important to

recognize, often at a less lethal level than in the past. For instance today anti-Americanism pretends to "differ" from previous prejudices because it espouses all differences and rejects the uniquely American virus of uniformity.

We hear everywhere that "difference" is persecuted. This is the favorite statement of

contemporary pluralism, and it can be somewhat misleading in the present context.

Even in the most closed cultures men believe they are free and open to the universal; their

differential character makes the narrowest cultural fields seem inexhaustible from within.

Anything that compromises this illusion terrifies us and stirs up the immemorial tendency to

persecution. This tendency always takes the same direction; it is embodied by the same

stereotypes and always responds to the same threat. Despite what is said around us

persecutors are never obsessed by difference but rather by its unutterable contrary, the lack of

difference.

Stereotypes of persecution cannot be dissociated, and remarkably most languages do not

dissociate them. This is true of Latin and Greek, for example, and thus of French or English,

which forces us constantly

-116-

in our study of stereotypes to turn to words that are related: "crisis," "crime," "criteria,"

"critique," all share a common root in the Greek verb
krino
, which means not only to judge, distinguish, differentiate, but also to accuse and condemn a victim. Too much reliance should

not be placed on etymology, nor do I reason from that basis. But the phenomenon is so

constant it deserves to be mentioned. It implies an as yet concealed relationship between

collective persecutions and the culture as a whole. If such a relationship exists, it has never

been explained by any linguist, philosopher, or politician.

-117-

Chapter 9 Python and His Two Wives: An Exemplary

Scapegoat Myth

The myth of Python and his wives, which belongs to the Venda, a people of South Africa, is a

typical instance of a witchcraft persecution text. In this analysis of a Venda myth, which was

first published as an appendix to Richard J. Golsan ,
René Girard and Myth: An Introduction

( New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993), 151-79, Girard offers a more

extended version of the methodology presented in
The Scapegoat
. He holds that Python and

his wives may eventually be understood as an important piece of evidence for determining

the primary generative features of the original myths of the Psyche type, prior to their Greek

and German versions.

According to the mimetic theory, myths reflect a contagious process of disorder that

culminates with the death or expulsion of a victim.

The escalations of mimetic rivalry to which archaic societies are prone stir up all kinds of

disorders until their very intensity produces a unanimous polarization against a more or less

random victim. Mimetically carried away, the entire community joins in, and as a result, mutual suspicions are extinguished; peace returns.

The scapegoaters do not understand their own scapegoat mechanism and they project upon

their victim both their dissensions and their reconciliation. This is the double transference of

the sacred which appears as both a source of disorder and a source of order. Its mythical

embodiments are both malefactors and benefactors.

It follows from this that mythical heroes can never appear
as scapegoats
in their own myths.

Those who try to turn this absence of a
scapegoat theme
into an instant refutation of the

mimetic theory simply do not understand the
genetic
role of scapegoating in these texts.

I use the word "scapegoat" in the modern sense, of course, necessarily different from the

Leviticus ritual which it implicitly demystifies. No one

-118-

tries to indict scapegoaters on the basis of what they say about their own scapegoats. They

cannot be expected to beat their breasts and proclaim loudly: "Our victim is only a

scapegoat." When we suspect scapegoating we cannot verify our suspicion directly; we must

rely on indirect clues.Students of myth too must rely on indirect clues. In the myths easiest to

analyze, the ones upon which I have focused most attention, and will once again in this essay,

they are as follows:

1. A theme of disorder or undifferentiation, which does not always come first since it is

seen as a consequence of the scapegoat's misdeed, rather than as a cause. The

expressions of this theme may range from original chaos, or a catastrophe of cosmic

proportions, to almost any kind of disaster. It may be a plague epidemic, a fire, a flood, a

drought, a quarrel between relatives, preferably twin brothers. It may be any disturbance

or state of incompletion from which the community suffers. It may be other things as

well. They all express some mimetic disturbances in the community that generate the

myth. They may be symbolic, real, or simultaneously symbolic and real.

2. One particular individual stands convicted of some fault. It may be a heinous crime and

it may be a mere misdemeanor, even an accidental faux-pas. Regardless of how trivial or

dreadful the incriminating action is, its consequences are catastrophic: they are none

other than the state of chaos, crisis, or incompletion from which the community suffers.

The hero or heroine is really seen as the cause of the crisis. This is scapegoat projection.

3. The identification of the scapegoat is often facilitated by what I call preferential signs of

victimage. They are the very diverse characteristics or attributes that tend to arouse the

hostility of a crowd against their possessors. They testify to the objective arbitrariness of

the victim's selection. Mythical scapegoats are often physically, morally, or socially

impaired; they may be strangers, cripples, outcasts, persons of very low or very high

standing, etc. These signs do not constitute a separate theme and they may be completely

absent.

4. The "culprit" is killed, expelled, or otherwise eliminated, either by the whole community acting like one man or by a single individual, one of the brothers, for instance, if brothers

are involved. This is scapegoating
stricto sensu
, the violent deed, the fruit of the mimetic

polarization triggered by the mimetic crisis.

5. As soon as the violence against the victim is consummated, peace returns; order is

(re)generated. This, too, is projected onto the scapegoat who is revealed as a founding

ancestor or a divinity. This is the second transference of the sacred.

For an illustration of such a myth and its mimetic analysis, I will now go to a very transparent example that belongs to the Venda, a people of South Africa. For the purpose of this

presentation I have amalgamated

-119-

and slightly condensed the two versions reproduced by Luc de Heusch in his
Le Roi ivre ou

l'origine de l'état
(Gallimard, 1972, 61-62):

Python, the water snake, had two wives. The first knew who he was but the second wife did

not know and she was not supposed to know. In the middle of the night, she would wake up

drenched. The first wife tried to protect her husband's secret but her rival was curious and,

after a good deal of spying on him she discovered the truth. Then, all the rivers dried up. The

only water left was in the lake at the bottom of which Python had taken refuge.

When they learned from the first wife the reason for Python's disappearance, the old men

decided that a beer offering should be prepared. Divination revealed that Python desired the

company of his second wife. While the men were playing the flute, the young woman entered

the water, carrying the beer offering in a basket. As the music grew louder, she disappeared,

and the rain began to fall; the rivers filled up and all the people rejoiced.

The woman designated as the
second wife
is indicted for scaring away a divine snake and

thus causing a drought. The drought is the real and/or symbolic crisis and the fault that

supposedly causes it is the scapegoat accusation. The victim dies by drowning in front of the

assembled community, a typical scapegoat death.

This death is presented as a
beer offering
, a sacrificial rite that should fully appease the

offended god since it simultaneously punishes the offender and returns his favorite wife to a

loving husband. Since the drought ends as a result of her death, the victim partakes of the

sacred. The insignificant troublemaker of the beginning has become the savior of the

community, together with her beloved husband, Python, the water god. The double

transference of the sacred is not defined explicitly but its presence is unmistakable.

The victim is a woman and also a second wife, hierarchically inferior to the first. These

determinations can be regarded as preferential signs of victimage, not particularly

spectacular, to be sure, but we do not really need them. The identification of the scapegoat

relies primarily on the idea that the drought is caused by the fantastic misconduct of the

second wife with her fantastic husband, and on the fact that the drought is ended by her death.

My analysis will soon make it evident that these themes and their arrangement
demand
a real

victim.

Insofar as it pertains to the internal peace of a community, unanimous scapegoating is self-

fulfilling; it really concludes the crisis. The same cannot be true in regard to a drought. Do I

assume that the death of a young woman can favorably influence a drought? Certainly not.

All we have to believe is that the victim died just before the natural end of the drought,

assuming, once again, that the drought was a real one.

-120-

We may suppose that the "beer offering" recorded in our myth was not the only one during the whole mimetic crisis in which this myth is rooted. If this mimetic crisis was not a purely

internal phenomenon, if it was caused by a real drought, we can also suppose that the

particular "beer offering" portrayed in it happened to coincide with the natural end of the

drought. What generated the myth was the conjunction of the mimetic reconciliation against

the scapegoat, plus the natural end of the drought. This chance timing made this particular

episode of scapegoating a long-range success, memorable enough to generate a myth.

Most students of myth will reject out of hand the interpretation I have just outlined. Knowing

that I regard the myth as the trace of an extratextual drama, a real scapegoat phenomenon,

they will quit listening. The assertion that the victim must be real seems irresponsible. They

see a theoretical impossibility to which I must be blind.

These critics dismiss my work a priori, without examining my demonstration. They are

absolutely certain that I cannot be right. The failure of my interpretation is too obvious, they

feel, to require a complete refutation.

This conviction relies essentially on the fantastic aspect of myth, which is seen as an

insurmountable obstacle to the realism, or referentiality, of my interpretation. In the present

example, for instance, we have a divine snake, a water god that causes a drought because the

excessive curiosity of his wife drives him into hiding. Even interpreters free from the

currently fashionable anti-referential bias will find it incredible that a text with such a

nonsensical theme in it could ever become a source of extratextual information.

Two themes in our myth, the drought and the death by drowning, could
possibly
yield

extratextual information but only in a nonfantastic context. Their potential in that respect

seems nullified by the story of the divine snake which is inextricably entangled with the rest

of the myth. "Tell me what company you keep and I will tell you who you are."

When I say that there must be a real victim behind our Venda myth, and other similar myths,

I blatantly disregard, it seems, what everybody agrees must be the most basic principle of

critical prudence. No text can be more reliable than the least reliable of its components. Let

us call it the
law of contamination by the unbelievable
. Even interpreters unaffected by the