Mimetic Rivalry
Second-stage mimesis in which mimetic desire has progressed to unhealthy rivalry—someone takes a model from within their own world or social sphere (I call this world “Freshmanistan”) and covertly competes with them for the same objects of desire, often through negative imitation.
Violence
Violence in mimetic theory is not a discrete event or even an external action. Violence is the consequence of a relationship—always a relationship—and never a “lone-wolf” or “random act”. While the victims may be random, the violence is always the result of a mimetic process that unfolds with its own scandals, conflict, and resentment long […]
Scapegoat
A person, group, or thing that a community chooses—through a mimetically-driven process— to expel or eliminate in the midst of a mimetic crisis in order to bring about a resolution. The scapegoat absorbs all of the mimetic tension and violence, which had previously been undirected and chaotic, onto itself.
Scandal
From the Greek word skandalon, a scandal is a stumbling block—something which is an obstacle to the fulfillment of a person’s desire. In mimetic theory, the model of desire is always a scandal. The model, by its very nature, blocks the way to possessing the object. Because it’s the model who mediates the objects of […]
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 […]