The Girard Reader by René Girard Read Free Book Online

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