Unmasking the Powers
A sacrificial crisis derives its power and effectiveness from being masked or hidden. This power is prolonged through rituals – actions that reenact the crisis. The moment the sacrificial crisis is unmasked as a lie the power is lost.Rene Girard called stories that mask and prolong the original crisis, the myth. And he called stories […]
Founding Murder
Every “culture” is founded on certain rituals, institutions, prohibitions, taboos—things that, according to Girard, are all predicated on a founding murder. Cultural rituals, institutions, prohibitions, and taboos are all thing devised to manage the spread of violence and, in essence, to re-enact the founding murder that was the foundation of culture through rituals rather than […]
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 […]