The Girard Reader (27 page)

having really occurred and therefore the victims being real.

The texts mystified by a faith in witchcraft reveal that their authors, and those who inspired

them, were, at the time of writing, in the state of anguish, indignation, and credulity most

conducive to the violent actions that they tell us were really committed.

In conjunction with the other themes of the text, the very theme that does make these authors unreliable as individuals, because it reveals a surrender to the spirit of the mob, makes them

especially good informants in regard to the effects of that same mob spirit, if the reported

effects are those which we know are likely to occur.

The skeptics will still not be satisfied, and they have a right not to be. This is well and good,

they will say; the probability that these texts speak the truth is quite high, but it still is no

more than a probability. It is not a certainty. To this one must answer that the objection would

be valid if there existed only one text of the type I am now discussing, or at the most a few.

As long as scapegoat-generated texts are few in number, a possibility remains that the tell-

tale arrangement of themes in these texts is purely fortuitous, a matter of chance, or some

kind of hoax, a deliberate forgery.

Since the probability can never turn itself into a certainty in the case of one individual text, of

no individual text can we assert with complete certainty that there is a real victim behind it.

But this is unimportant if the number of texts is large enough. The uncertainty turns into

complete certainty if the number of texts is large enough. And in the case of our medieval

texts it certainly is.

Because we have a large number of texts that report the murder of presumed witches as if

they were really guilty, we can say with absolute certainty that there was an epidemic of

witch-hunting at the end of the Middle Ages.

Our certainty is due to the fact that these texts are too similar in their themes and structures

and they originate in too many different places and at too many different times for them to be

the fruit of a chance assemblage of themes, or of gratuitous invention, or of a fabrication for

the purpose of faking a witchcraft epidemic that, in reality, would never have taken place.

With each individual text none of these hypotheses can be entirely discounted but, with all of

them together, they must be. Our individual doubts regarding each text do not add up to a

statistically significant

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doubt regarding the whole. It is statistically impossible that forgery, the poetic imagination,

or any other explication could satisfactorily account for the vast number of texts that contain

tell-tale signs of many so-called witches being scapegoated, and they contain such signs

because the authors themselves partake in the scapegoating and therefore write about the

victims in part falsely, insofar as they agree with the accusers, and in part truthfully, insofar

as they faithfully report what happened to these real victims. Being convinced that the

violence against them was justified, they had no motivation for hiding from each other or

from us the violence that these victims suffered.

The only rational hypothesis is that most of these texts reflect scapegoat phenomena triggered

by the last convulsions of magical thought at the end of the Middle Ages. Historians are not

"soft on the referent." They are one hundred percent right to regard these texts as trustworthy not, I repeat, as individual texts but in their mass, statistically.

No one, I believe, has ever observed this most remarkable ability of certain texts crammed full with nonsensical material, the sabbath of medieval witches, to give the lie to a major law

of interpretive prudence, the law that forces us to refrain from trying to extract from these

texts any reliable information about the possible events from which they sprang.

Is all this applicable to mythology as well? Our main question now is one of numbers. Are

there other myths composed of such themes arranged in such a fashion that they could be the

tell-tale signs of scapegoating? I answered that question at the very beginning of this essay

when I grouped the themes of foundational myths in five categories suggestive of

scapegoating, the five categories which our Venda myth nicely illustrates.

As I said before, I agree that the traces of scapegoating are often more confusing in myth than

in medieval texts of a similar stripe. I also agree as well that the lack of historical background

makes the extension of the historical decrypting to myths intimidating. But these obstacles

are obviously minor and the time has come to overcome them.

The structure of this myth is the standard one for etiological myths. This structural regularity

makes it difficult to doubt that the mechanism at work in medieval witch-hunting is not also

at work in all of them.

I have no time to multiply examples. As I always do, however, I will say a word about the

best known of all Greek myths, the Oedipus myth, in relation to our Venda myth.

At first glance, it would seem that our Venda myth is not closely related to the Oedipus myth,

but, as soon as the themes are grouped in the manner that I advocate, we can see that the two

myths are very close to each other. The Oedipus myth, too, glaringly exemplifies the crisis,

which here is a plague instead of a drought, the witchcraft accusation, the patricide and incest

that cause the plague, and the spontaneous

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conviction patter, the inability of the Thebans to question the story that incriminates Oedipus,

even though it involves a single culprit rather than the "many murderers of Laius."

The oracle is the voice of successful scapegoating. Its message is that the plague will be

cured if and when the Thebans expel from their midst the right victim, the individual about

whom they can all agree that he is the one who brought them the plague.

The message of the Venda myth is thematically different but not significantly so because it is

structurally identical. The drought will be cured when the community rids itself of the right

victim, the woman who supposedly brought it about by marrying a snake and then putting it

to flight. The key to the mythical enigma is none other than the extension to mythology of a

method which historians routinely use but which is not historical in the sense of relying on

historical knowledge. It is a purely internal analysis of the data which is no less applicable to

myths than to deluded accounts of persecution in our historical world and which will produce

the same certainty as it is applied to more and more myths.

The same restrictions apply in the case of myth as in the case of historical texts. It is only a

remote possibility but a possibility nevertheless that any particular text, our Venda myth for

instance, was invented by the native informants of the anthropologist who transmitted this

myth to us. Maybe they wanted to fool these anthropologists. Maybe the myth is an invention of the anthropologist themselves, as the fashionable contemporary suspicion demands,

because all anthropologists are colonialists, etc. Even if this were true, however, it would still

be impossible that not only our Venda myth, but the Oedipus myth, the Tikarau myth, the

Dogrib myth about the birth of mankind, and countless other myths would have been

fabricated for the purpose of fooling us. There are just too many myths of this type and the

only reasonable explanation for the traces of scapegoating they exhibit is that they truly

originate in actual scapegoating. Myths are the textual product of generative scapegoating. At

the level of the individual text, I repeat, it is impossible to eliminate all doubt, and I do not

claim that the "second wife" really exists or that any detail of our myth or this myth as a

whole truly reflects an actual episode of scapegoating. All I claim is that, statistically, there

must be real victims behind most myths with these types of themes, similarly arranged.

The overall nature of the themes and their arrangement is so similar to what we have in

countless other myths of the same type that the scapegoat mechanism, each time, must be the

cause of the recurrence. Without it nothing makes sense, with it everything does.

The mimetic theory does not say that the myth is a faithful representation of what happened.

It simply claims that the probability of a real

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victim behind such themes as we found in our myth, arranged in the manner that they are, is

very, very high.

Is it believable that the perpetual juxtaposition of a social scourge, a magical accusation, and

collective violence against the accused would
always
mean arbitrary persecution in our

society and
never
mean any such thing in the case of myth? If the answer is no, the mimetic

theory of myth deserves the serious hearing that it has never received.

Historians -- God bless them! -- have not given up on the referentiality of their texts. In their

search for hidden persecution, they implicitly if not explicitly realize that they can and must

transgress the law of contamination by the fantastic. No one has ever problematized this

transgression and the reason is clear. As long as it occurs within the confines of our own

historical world, its legitimacy is obvious and no one notices the remarkable anomaly that it

constitutes.

As soon as the same operation is performed outside our historical world, on a myth, its

audacity becomes apparent and the same interpreters who routinely accept the reality of the

victims in one domain refuse indignantly when I say that it must be there as well in the other.

They no longer recognize an interpretive operation that they would perform almost

unconsciously if it were presented to them in the usual domain.

If the operation is banal in one domain, it cannot be so inconceivable in the other that the

very attempt to introduce it there should be regarded as
a priori
impossible, even

reprehensible. To rule out the experiment I propose, which is what the critics of the mimetic

theory are really doing, cannot be a sound attitude for researchers to take.

It is a false prudence that condemns the mimetic theory of myth. It is not always true that one rotten apple spoils a whole barrel. Far from being spoiled, the potentially sound apples in our

myth are made paradoxically sounder by the proximity of the rotten apples.

The principle of the rotten apple should not be discarded lightly. All interpreters must assume

that it applies until they can be sure that this very same principle governs the genesis of the

text under examination or, in other words, that mimetic contagion must be responsible for the

very existence of our text. In mythology, "scapegoating" is both the event (mis) represented and the source of its distorted representation.

The Venda people wanted the second wife to die because they feared that, if they did not get

rid of her, the whole community might die. They were already thinking along the lines of the

rotten apple, and if we ourselves follow their example and declare the text incredible because

of the rotten apple in it, the incredible snake god, we will never discover its genesis. If we

deal with the text just as the scapegoaters dealt with their

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scapegoat, we will never realize that our interpretive prudence is really one more

scapegoating, a scapegoating outside the text that necessarily turns us into accomplices of the

scapegoating inside the text.

One should not conclude from the above that I simply advocate abrogating the law of

contamination by the unbelievable. This law is at the center of our insurance system against

interpretive overconfidence. Contrary to what hasty critics believe, I do not minimize this

threat.

Exceptions must be made only after careful investigation, when we are satisfied that

scapegoating and scapegoating alone accounts for every feature in the text under

examination, and for the arrangement of these features.

We must never relax our interpretive vigilance but we must not be so paralyzed by the fear of

sounding naïvely realistic and referential that we turn the fantastic dimension of myths into a

stumbling block. If we keep blindly applying the law of contamination by the unbelievable to

myth, as we have done for centuries, if we disregard the converging clues of a scapegoat

genesis, our understanding will never progress beyond a pure and simple reversal of the error

that dominates mythology.

We will go on congratulating one another for our wise skepticism, never noticing that the key

to foundational myths is within our reach and that it is the same generative scapegoating that

we already know how to detect in many historical texts.

A blanket dismissal of all possible connections between myth and the outside world,

indispensable though it was, no doubt, at an earlier stage of the interpretive process, makes us

blind to the scapegoating mechanisms that obviously dominate the myths and therefore

perpetuate their dominance.

The textual nihilism that now triumphs everywhere must be regarded as a last-ditch strategy

of scapegoating itself, always supremely competent when it comes to preventing its own

revelation.

The magical fear of magical contamination has been transferred from the existential to the textual level and it now dominates our relationship to the myth, so that the relationship of that