Satan
Satan is the principle that drives discord, chaos, and confusion among humans. Satan is the embodiment and incarnation of mimetic rivalry and violence, the force behind conflict and conflict that operates through mimetic rivalries and the scapegoating mechanism. Whether you view “Satan” in the traditional, incarnate way like a ‘devil with horns’ or in a […]
Sacrificial Crisis
Also known as a mimetic crisis or state of chaos, a sacrificial crisis is a point at which mimesis has spread in a community to the point of diminishing or eliminating essential differences among people. The sacrificial crisis necessitates that difference has to be re-established through sacrifice. The types of differences that could be eliminated […]
Sacrifice
Sacrifice is literally the “making sacred” (sacer facere) of a victim of violent unanimity, the victim who is the effective substitute for the violence of all and whose unanimous destruction ensures social concord. The substitution of animals for human victims only replicates the original substitutive mechanism, while clearly reflecting the need for victims whose destruction […]
Sacred
Names what archaic religion considers as both beneficent and terrible, being the name for what both protects the community from without and threatens it from within. The sacred is good to respect at a distance, and to ritually and reverently propitiate in quest of its protection; it is terrible in its proximity, being imagined as […]
Religion
Religion may have its etymological roots in Latin Religare, to bind up or tie together, as a community is united by its devotion to a divinity which it fails to see as the victim of its unanimous, sacrificial violence. Often described as an ensemble of beliefs and practices that organize a culture, religion consists chiefly of […]
Myth
Myth is a narrative that contemporary parlance rightly alleges to be untrue. As we learn from the study of archaic religions, all myths narrate cultural origins as issuing from a supernatural intervention, the action of a sacred being, a divinity which is to be worshipped and propitiated by ritual sacrifice. For mimetic theory, this god […]
Mimetic
Therefore, is preferred to its Latinate synonym, “imitative,” in describing human relations, since the latter term most often implies an awareness and conscious choice to copy others’ behavior. This is rarely the case except in consumer fashion and advertising and in financial speculation; it is never the case for the human infant who learns by […]
Metaphysical Desire
A desire not to possess what another person, the model, possesses (or wants to possess) but to be the model. Metaphysical desire is the type of mimetic desire that has moved beyond acquisitive desire—the desire to acquire something that a model wants—to metaphysical desire—the desire to be who the model is. This desire is a […]
Mediation
Points to the fact that between any human subject and its object of desire, there is a mediator or model who designates the object– person, place, or thing–as desirable, attractive. When the model is beyond the reach of the subject, either because of unassailable priority in history or in stable hierarchical order, we have external […]
Apocalyptic
See apocalypse. Apocalyptic events bring about the destruction of the world and of humanity. In Girard’s mimetic theory, apocalyptic things happen as the result of human violence—specifically, the mimetic cycle which starts with Mimetic Desire, gives way to Mimetic Rivalry, leads to collisions, and eventually is resolved through either war (violence) or the scapegoat mechanism […]