Sunday, October 25, 2009

The Scimitar - Primitive Sacred

An aspect of René Girard's concept of the primitive sacred involves the acquisition of certifiable sacrificial victims. The sacred needs victims to re-stoke the flames of what Robert Hamerton-Kelly calls the "Generative Mimetic Scapegoating Mechanism" at its heart.

Therefore, the primitive sacred needs trip-wires so as to alert its religionists that "they've got one!" like
this.

The gods of the primitive sacred - regardless of all talk of "monotheism" - reflect a similar and recurring need: the need for victims. Girard's three primary characteristics of the sacred carry essential tasks to keep the victimary cult at the center of such conventional culture strong and able to maintain social and psychological cohesion. These three characteristics are ritual, myth, and prohibition.

Ritual re-enacts the founding slaying of the deity-troublemaker who "rescued" the people when they were engaged in the "war of all against all" (Hobbs). By his death, they became a people. To keep the chaos and tumult from returning, a priesthood establish a ritual that replays this victimary origin of culture.

Myth is the subterfuge that lends the once violent mob a self-justifying, self-congratulatory story that keeps them from seeing the actual, structural innocence of their original victim - as well as their on-going ritualized victims' innocence. We "had to" sacrifice him (her, them); it was our "sacred duty."

Prohibitions provide the "trip-wires" that show us who has "trammeled" upon the deity's will and, thus, provide us with a necessary cache of victims, should a dissolution of our cultural cohesion call for a sacrifice to surcharge it.

The point is, the Scimitar has all the ingredients of the primitive sacred in a viral and quite active way in the world today. And regardless of its claims of "monotheism", its structure is at-one with all pagan "primitive sacred" religions.

2 comments:

Mike O'Malley said...

Clear and concise, your essay caused my thought to wander to one of Thomas Sowell's many excelent books.

When you wrote "Myth is the subterfuge that lends the once violent mob a self-justifying, self-congratulatory story that keeps them from seeing the actual, structural innocence of their original victim" I couldn't help recall Dr. Sowell's characterization, in The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy, of enlightened Progressive elitists as self-justifying and self-congratulatory. I've often thought of elitist American "Liberalism" as a device for "cheap grace". Perhaps it is also includes an instinctive struggle to return to the "Old Religion"?

Athos said...

Mike, the right as well as the left is capable of engaging in the primitive sacred. Perhaps the only thing that conservative have going on their behalf is a suspicion of even their fellow conservatives that is a remainder of the Doctrine of Original Sin.

Chesterton had no illusions about Big Business proponents or Big Government proponents.

For a fine explication of all this, try to get Bailie to send you a tape series he did once called, "The Dionysian Revival - Liberation into Savagery." Randi Coleman-Reese might still have it sitting around somewhere. I once put it into fiction in a strange novel called The Dionysus Mandate. You can get a copy for a song, plus shipping. Cheers/blessings