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 spiritual way, as a force of disintegration and distortions, the Satanic principle shares one principle: it always divides and causes confusion, agitation, anxiety, and angst rather than peace. Look out for it.
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 or diminished in a sacrificial crisis might include differences between the sacred and the profane, the permitted and the prohibited, the inside and the outside of a culture, sexual differences, and many more. The sacrificial crisis usually calls for a re-enactment of the founding crisis in the culture—the founding murder.
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 will not occasion reprisals from those nearest them.
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 the unearthly cause of natural calamities: plague, drought, famine. Ritual propitiation does not allay these scourges, but scrupulous attention, variation and refinement of ritual techniques may advance technologies, affording possibilities of pre-scientific induction in metallurgy, agriculture, and animal husbandry.
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 prohibitions regarding objects dangerous to desire, of rituals that carefully reenact violent disorder and perform reverence for sacred origins, and of myths that recount origins while disguising the foundational role of the scapegoat victim.
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 is a mystified transformation of the victim of uncontrolled violence, when the rivalry of all against all streamlines into the violence of all against one, resulting in concord, in harmonious action. Myth hides the communal violence that leads to the unanimous destruction of a victim, which is retrospectively viewed as a god for the unified order which its unanimous destruction occasions.
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 miming and matching gestures and sounds from adult models. Mimesis is much less conscious and deliberate than we imagine in our adult behavior with one another.
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 sickness unto death, in the words of Kierkegaard, because there is no solution to it. The subject can never be the model. He longs for a being that is not his own. Metaphysical desire, then, is the desire to be someone who we are not. It is a fatal attraction, a desire for something that is ultimately impossible to bring to fulfillment.
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 mediation: the subject and the rival cannot come into conflict. If this model inhabits the same social world as the subject as an equal, we have internal mediation, in which subject and model interact in ways that can lead to rivalry and ultimately to conflict when they desire the very same object.
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 (all against one).