Sacrifice by René Girard

Author:René Girard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Michigan State University Press

Return to the God Soma

The disequilibrium, the mental confusion brought about by the mimetic crisis, facilitates sacrificial substitution, making it easier for members of the community to replace their mimetic rivals with the one destined to become a unanimous scapegoat. A certain drunkenness, therefore, a certain vertigo, is favorable to the success of sacrifice.

The authors of the Brahmanas have an intuitive sense for its conditions of possibility, for everything that facilitates the scapegoat mechanism. They know that sacrifice requires a loss of vigilance and lucidity if it is to produce the reconciling effect. This is indicated by the frequent recourse to hallucinogenic drugs and other means of reproducing the original frenzy, the perceptual havoc that facilitates sacrificial substitutions.

I spoke yesterday of the sacrificial beverage named soma. If scholars think it caused intoxication, it is because certain texts appear to support this hypothesis, and because trance-inducing procedures are widely used in sacrificial systems: participants smoke hemp, tobacco, etc; others spin round and round; yet others favor sexual excitation. These practices make the sacrificial substitutions more difficult for participants to see. The essential thing in sacrifice is to take one victim for another. Anything that diminishes the acuity of perception favors the success of sacrifice.

So let us return to the god Soma. The act of preparing the beverage is conceived as a sacrifice. But one cannot actually kill the god, since he is immortal. The act of sacrificing him, whatever its exact significance, is nevertheless a disagreeable, irritating experience for him. By sacrificing the god one is exposed to his reprisals.

Among the many individuals involved in preparing the sacred draught, the most imperiled were evidently those who crushed the stems of the soma to extract its sap, those properly called the sacrificers. What can be done to attenuate the danger? The texts suggest several highly revealing maneuvers. One advises the sacrificer to divert his attention from the god he is crushing, to think not of him but of someone else he would prefer to sacrifice if he had the choice. And the text here shows a revealing genius, probably involuntary but all the more striking if so:

When he deals the deathblow to Soma, he thinks of his enemy; in the absence of an enemy he aims his thoughts at a blade of grass.21

There is here, by all evidence, a full and complete revelation of the real function of sacrifice. It is no ordinary sacrifice, to be sure, but the sacrifice of a god. What the text recommends to the sacrificer to protect him from his victim is to think expressly of the one whom he truly desires to kill, the one whom he would perhaps kill if it were not forbidden.

Because the sacrificial victim is here deemed even more precious than the being for whom it is substituted, the ordinary sense of the substitution is inverted; by articulating this inversion the text reveals the real function of sacrifice. It is a strategy for preventing enemies from killing each other by furnishing them with alternative victims.

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