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.