/lit/ - Literature

who cares

But ritual sacrifice is almost universal, even Native Americans did it. Even if they all stemmed from a really, really, really old shared experience, the question would be "what makes this idea so appealing that it stuck around for so long in so many cultures?" and then that probably has more to do with why it exists than the original event.

>>11435969
the universe thrives on death and violence

>>11436086
No it doesn't.

>>11436086
Yes, but after some thought this would seem to give credence to his theory, and also why it required such a tremendous effort to overcome it.

>>11436097
nice meme

>>11435969
Or maybe they were actually sacrificing animals and offering them to gods.

I don't see why intellectuals are engaged in this sort of mythological reductionism- trying to explain behavior based in beliefs about the metaphysical in terms of beliefs about the physical. These actions were never based in the physical. It's a huge disservice to ancient people to reduce all their actions to material reasoning when they were actually connected to the metaphysical in a way modern intellectual can only dream of.

Other idiots like Peterson are engaged in the same thing- explaining deeply spiritual actions based in beliefs about the metaphysical in terms of the material. It's disgusting.

>>11436118
yeah, this, sacrifice was more the recognition of the economy of violence within nature than any real attempt to suppress or otherwise indulge in it, basic idea being it was "paying your dues" to a system that runs on death

>>11435969
>In his hypothesis, the ritual sacrifices acted out in archaic civilizations were reenactments of a prototypical sacrifice (a founding murder) which brought about a resolution to a preeminent conflict which threatened to surge into uncontrollable violence if it found no release.

No I think thats reaching. I think at its basest level the logic of sacrifices is "big sacrifice = big reward" nothing more to it than that starting point

>>11436118
>when they were actually connected to the metaphysical

>>11435969
It's useless to try to argue for or against that without having read his whole argumentation and at least some of his sources.

>>11436118
This. Stop reading René Girard and start reading René Guénon.

>>11435969
>every ritual of every civilization on planet earth is secretly about [my pet idea]. here's a faggy little diagram

will we ever be free of the pretentious bullshit of early anthropology?

>>11436165
Nope, luckily is very easy to just ignore them since none of their ideas matter

>>11436118
>mythological reductionism
>disgusting

>sacrificing animals for deity points
>metaphysical

Thanks, I'd rather read Frazer.

>>11436118
you're confusing the stories that accrued around the ritual with the origin of the ritual. ritual is neither a magical spell to spawn crops nor a service to the gods that really like smoke for some reason. the purpose is neither physical nor "methaphysical" but sociosymbolic. religious ritual is a language through which a society speaks about itself.

>>11436239
>rituals weren't metaphysical

read pic related

>>11436270
am i to understand that you sacrifice animals in your free time?

>>11436118
brainlet spotted

>>11436239
Holy shit, you've been brainwashed. This is very sad. I hope you come to. Do you think the whole of humanity was really so insincere that the entirely of their beliefs could be summed up as symbols related the society? I don't think so. I think they acted seriously and diligently on genuine beliefs that they had about the metaphysical (whether those beliefs were true or not doesn't matter).

Girardposter please come save this thread.

>>11436141
>>11436182
>>11436239
>>11436345
r/atheism awaits you

>>11436411
how do you understand girard this poorly

>>11436381
you are very confused. we're talking about the function of the ritual, not the sincerity of the beliefs attached to the ritual, which obviously postdate the ritual and its function. go read some greeks or something and see how they are simultaneously incredibly dedicated to the proper performance of ritual as the basic binding force of their society but also ambivalent about any of the "metaphysical" justifications of the ritual's existence, such as the almost comedic (or fully comedic when it's aristophanes speaking) notion of gods arbitrarily liking the smell of smoke. what is constant is the necessity of rituals like the swearing of oaths for the proper functioning of society, "serious and genuine" beliefs are entirely optional and openly mocked in many surviving works. why do you think plato laughed at the gods of homer but still wanted to execute atheists? because he understood the crucial role of ritual in establishing and maintaining the sociosymbolic order.

>>11436505
The remnants that we have are from the most intelligent men of those times, some of which didn't sincerely hold the metaphysical beliefs appropriate to the rituals; however, the common man no doubt did hold those beliefs. It's not wise to attribute beliefs of the whole based off the beliefs of the intellectuals around at the time.

That said, I won't deny your point. I think it's a good one. I think our disagreement is less about the social function of rituals but more about the sincerity of their practitioners. I tend to think that more people sincerely held the beliefs than not. I also won't deny the metaphysical side to their actions not only as the source of their actions but also as a very real exchange they had with immaterial beings.

>>11436634
>the common man no doubt did hold those beliefs

why? the comedies of aristophanes mocked the gods openly during a mass religious festival with an audience of thousands. why did "the common man" not tear him limb from limb when he presented a story of some athenian schmucks dethroning zeus and threatening to gangrape the goddess of the rainbow? your characterization of "the common man" as incapable of basic human attitudes like cynicism or disbelief is baseless and patronizing.

>>11436689
Athens was already at that point an anti-traditional society without much faith, an overly intellectual and effeminate society much like our societies today (which was the reason Plato adored and venerated Sparta so much- they were the opposite in many respects). I'll grant that in Athens increasingly less people sincerely held those beliefs. Girard's point may very well apply to Athens and places like it where the rituals were done for social rather than metaphysical reasons. But once again, just like we shouldn't judge the common man based off the intellectuals, we shouldn't judge the world (or simply Greece for that matter) based off Athens. Other societies had much more robust traditions and more sincerity. No doubt in other Ancient societies mocking the gods would've gotten you killed very quickly. To this day it could still get you killed in some parts of the world (try cursing Allah in Mecca during the Hajj, for example).

>>11436086
Where do you think you get your daily nutrition from? Thin air?

>>11436896
Meant for >>11436097

>>11436743
Not him, but you are approching ancient polytheistic beliefs with an improper mentality. For most part, the gods, while not purely literal, weren't also metaphysical/abstract. This becomes even worse when you throw, later on, neoplatonic influences, rampant mystery cults, and the few pieces of information often being recorded by christian priests that often were hostile about the religions they were commenting on.

No Girard was wrong. Burkert (and Konrad Lorenz) was right; ritual sacrifices derive from hunter männerbunds as a method of demarcating mans transition from social ape, to killer ape, and then back to social ape. The hunting group takes on the aspect of the wolf by ritual to kill, and then returns to peaceable social man after the killing by apologising to the animal in a comedy of innocence derived ritual.

Rituals derive from the psychological needs of mans transition from vegetarian social ape to hunter-band killer human.

>>11435969
>>11438136
Both are speculative nonsense.

>>11438136
Rituals are a way of regulating mans aggression. Legitimising and turning on the agression for the hunt, and turning it off and reanathematising aggression after the hunt.

The big difference to Girard is to recognise the necessity and selective advantage of aggression for both hunting and war. Rituals are not merely a means to discharge aggression, but a method to turn on aggression when it is needed, and to turn it off afterwards.

>>11435969
>>11438166
>>11438136
Three gay and false theories that some retards pulled out of their assholes.

>>11436387
i saw this, but my brand of shitposting doesn't really seem to be required. the role of violence and sacrifice in religious tradition seems pretty much built into our DNA.

the more difficult question is not whether or not girard was right or wrong (protip: he was) but whether or not a reasonably/minimally violent civilization, but whether or not this can be achieved without a religious dimension in our thinking. and, of course, whether a world which slips into complete nihilism will not in the end necessitate precisely the kind of scapegoating he would have disdained.

the point is not to go full-blown jain monastic, but only to distinguish those forms of violence which obviously serve a cultural-symbolic function from those which are contingently necessary to survival. that imho is the real point and value of his work. premodern hunter-gatherer bands don't refute girard, and neither does a cop using a jiu-jitsu move to subdue a dangerous felon, or self-defense, or any number of other examples you might want to name. the question is more about the liturgical value of violence or sacrifice and the other psychological factors involved: attribution of shame, guilt, cosmic significance and so on. it's the ritualized inter-human violence that matters inasmuch as it serves cultural narratives, not a sort of infinite tail-chase about what metaphysically constitutes violence itself. fwiw.

his own ultimate goals and project are so minor they're virtually commonsensical, but this is what makes him an interesting thinker: he produced a concept.

A modern example of an aggression increasing ritual that Girard could not explain but Burket can. General Butt Naked and his mannerbund of Liberian crossdressing boy soldiers would sacrifice a small child before each battle. If sacrifice is a means to discharge, rather than to increase, aggression, why did they do it?

>>11438259
Most rituals and sacrifices legitimise and increasing violence. Girard is a cherrypicker.

>>11438313
you're exactly right, except that you're missing the point. it's not like he excludes the ultimate religion of brutality, torture and suffering - his own - from the equation. he prefers christianity because it explains the nature of the violence it practices and that essentially makes it what it is, not because it is somehow excluded from the others. if he sets christianity in a special category it is because it is the most excruciatingly brutal of all of religions, and that is to its credit.

girard is a boss because to him christianity btfo's the field: by comparison, everything else is LARPing violence in an attempt to cover up the founding murder. and however you do it, you fail. more understandably, perhaps, in premodern religions: far less so in the case of knowing, cynical, and brutal modernist forms. but it's all the same.

nietzsche saw this too, incidentally. but he drew different conclusions.

>How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

>>11435969
Myth historicism is the most pleb method of myth interpretation, and it's not even close.

He's good, but you must understand that his entire worldview is founded on Christianity, he's a sincere Christian. He even rejected Frazer's Golden Bough because it claimed the Crucifixion was derived from pagan religion.

The only escape from the circle of violence he theorises in his works is divine grace.

>>11438293
you don't think that girard might have raised an eyebrow at the reasoning that runs, 'look, if we're going to win this war, some children need to be sacrificed and ritually consumed by us for their magical powers?'

if the sacrifice objects - as we would imagine they probably would - and the response is [literally anything] this activates girard's trap card.

the entire war is what discharges the aggression, and will legitimate in turn every sacrifice along the way, but i think we can say that it discharges said aggression *aggressively,* and that is the point.

>>11438357
So now we can commit violence, all we have to do is ask God for forgiveness afterwards, and he atones for it with Calvary. We can have our violence and then literally eat the victim atoning for it afterwards (Eucharist.)

>>11438405
But it literally doesn't discharge aggression, it charges aggression. It's a pre-battle ritual to hype everyone up on blood and meth. Like drinkimg ephedrine soma, or singing the paen before a hoplite charge, or singing the anthems before a football game.

Ritual is about turning aggression on as well as turning it off, about recharging aggression as well as discharging it.

>>11438476
>So now we can commit violence, all we have to do is ask God for forgiveness afterwards, even zizek at his most hyperbolic would not sign off on this, and neither would girard. but welcome to the exciting world of ideology. if you massacre a village in eastern europe or wherever and afterwards convince yourself that god spoke to you in advance or forgave you afterwards, there's nothing a literary critic at stanford can really do about it, except to refuse to valorize it. you can ask god for forgiveness and tell yourself you've received it, but when it comes to justifying this conclusion you will probably have a hard time selling RG on it.

girard knows full well that the gospels alone cannot really *prevent* violence in the future from happening. it's why he refers to it as a contagion or a disease. wars escalate, and yet they do so because they are irrationally rational, or rationally irrational. that's why it's better not to have them break out in the first place. invariably they do. but that's also why he takes an interest in the causes of them and in particularly the retroactive judgments we make on or about them, and it is why he is not a hegelian, for example. i like hegel but girard's position on him makes sense.

>We can have our violence and then literally eat the victim atoning for it afterwards (Eucharist.)
okay, but we draw a distinction between eating a symbolic object - the Eucharist - and turning a human being into a symbolic object and then eating them, yes? i'm not even going to deny that the same process - symbolic objectification - is at work in both cases, but clearly there is a crucial difference here: one of these two things is a biscuit.

>>11438531
i understand what you're saying, i'm just trying to raise the concept of a distinction between sacrifice as the discharge of aggression as it is directed against the enemy, and sacrifice as scapegoating (consumption of the child). there are two interlinked notions of sacrifice here, but girard was open to both of these concepts, and in this case they will reciprocally determine each other. in order to win the war, there must be sacrifices; and we sacrifice in order to fulfill the higher purposes of the war.

there's also no necessary argument being made here against ritual in and of itself either. far from it. rituals are great. there are peaceful rituals no doubt, rituals for all kinds of things. ask pic rel. and indeed, conflict breaks out when ritual orders collapse. what patches things up again - not always, but in extremes - is collective violence, the interior workings of ideology and mimetic crowd rule. it happens 'naturally,' maybe more 'naturally' than anything. but it doesn't change what it is or the function that it serves.

rituals are fine in and of themselves. and there are even token forms of sacrifice that are possible - you can burn an effigy, for instance. these aren't things that would make the sun come out for girard, but you get the idea.

>>11438569
whoops. sorry about that greentext.

>>11438569
The sacrifice and consumption of Christ is better than any possible animal or human sacrifice because it is God being sacrificed and eaten. And that same ultimate sacrifice and consumption is repeated each Mass for all to partake in as a repeatable event.

I agree with most of Girard's theory on Calvary, but I don't find his anthropology tenable. Ritual and sacrifice is more than discharge and atonement.

>>11438608
>The sacrifice and consumption of Christ is better than any possible animal or human sacrifice because it is God being sacrificed and eaten. And that same ultimate sacrifice and consumption is repeated each Mass for all to partake in as a repeatable event.

right. so in one sense this is an even more symbolically extreme form of violence, and yet at the same time, it's there for this complicated (if not completely mystifying) reason. but i don't think we have any real bone of contention here.

>I agree with most of Girard's theory on Calvary, but I don't find his anthropology tenable. Ritual and sacrifice is more than discharge and atonement.

yeah, i mean, there are problems with any structuralist theory, and girard's philosophical/cultural anthropology is basically that. it's very much like freud, in a sense, a kind of historical psychoanalysis written by a catholic. that girard could do more than this One Trick - that he had things to say about literature, politics, et al, but all of it tied into this - helps, but no doubt there is more going on than that. there are a lot of things other than discharge and atonement.

the point is for me at least that once the ritual includes violent sacrifice, either directed at a member of the community for these cosmological reasons, or as preparation for more violence elsewhere, and so on, we wind up looking at all those other things as implicated in this larger event. not every form of ritual requires sacrifice, and not every sacrifice requires ritual (or again, needs to be human, or glue up the social fabric, or whatever). there is no need to be hysterical about this, but human bloodshed - when it happens - necessitates the closer look at things.

and i mean there are legit questions about girard's theory to be raised as well. are the jews not scapegoated by the christians? it's a valid question. and huge amounts of violence have been explicitly committed in the name of the church as well, lots of other things. the icelanders were presumably able to keep a lid on things by way of the Althing w/o needing the church to tell them what to do. all of this is germane. anything involving human psychology is going to exceed structural accounts.

castlevania art b/c i don't know, vampires or some shit.

>>11438665
>>11438665
I'm not convinced scapegoating is a significant purpose of ritual sacrifice other than in the general sense of utility, of using an animal or thing to achieve a ritual or theurgic purpose; which is rarely atonement. Sacrifice and ritual is almost always an appeasement to the gods, a payment to the gods for some service, or a participation in the gods of god-work/theurgy.

Hence the ritual to recharge violence is to become divinly violent and take into your being a supernatural violence. Or the Greek Magical Papyri is to cast a love spell or a curse and make a payment sacrifice to the gods for the work they'll perform.

Scapegoating rituals seem very particular and the attempt to force them as a model for ritual generally is hamfisted.

>>11438858
ok, but the general sense of utility is the point. cosmic maintenance seen hermeneutically isn't unreasonable, it's perfectly reasonable. except for the part where the guy dies and the rain god does not exist (or simply refused to return the favor that day). again, we can make distinctions here and we can certainly scale them as well. not every sacrifice requires scapegoating, and not every scapegoating necessarily involves sacrifice. where these do coincide you have the main event we are talking about: the culture-binding, reifying symbolic act.

so nobody's trying to make them the model for ritual in the general sense. i indicated as much in my previous post. as you say, there are acts of magic that can be performed that may be more or less harmless. there's lots of other things. i'm not out to burn any witches myself. but, to carry the metaphor, the point holds there as well: a witch-burning can also be a purgative event.

suppose you believe that burning a candle in prayer to whatever thing or force you wish to channel is necessary. it's not 'scapegoating' to burn the candle. to call it 'sacrifice' muddies the waters a bit much, although that technically would be what it is, in a sense. but this is a different kind of phenomenon than what would have motivated girard. to borrow from zizek, and to make it super-simple, in the place of ideology you have the scapegoat.

so again, nobody's saying that every ritual is a scapegoating ritual. but the ones that are, are. you even raised another kind of interesting question: what about rituals where you make yourself the victim? things like fasting, or whatever kind of purgative ordeal you might want to subject yourself to. girard himself might not be too interested in these, but they're certainly interesting psychological phenomena, and hardly malign.

think of it in a freudian sense. there's normal unhappiness, and then there's existential torment, trauma, neurosis. in those places where the analysand is obviously hysterically triggered by something or fucked-up to the point of phobia, something is definitely beyond the pale. the point is the same with girardian stuff, although there is a twist to it: cultures can *normalize* violent responses or acts in very powerful ways. it's why girard is so interesting to think about: he calls into question the foundations upon which norms are created, he has this whole other perspective. we have ways of naturalizing collective violence and finding reasons to do what we do. partly it's natural, partly it's human all-too-human. back in the day you were permitted to kill a few helots as part of your training. it made great soldiers, true, but there's still something not quite right about it.

>>11438918
>where these do coincide you have the main event we are talking about: the culture-binding, reifying symbolic act.
I have trouble buying it. It's an overly neurotic conception of mankind.

I agree rituals and sacrifices are of importance. But scapegoating isn't fundamental to sacrifice or ritual, and even the scapegoating in Calvary is of secondary importance to the theurgic purpose of the sacrifice: so that men can become God-like by participating in the consumption of the sacrifical victim.

>>11436505
Haven't read Girard. But was just reading about how ancient people made gods in their stones by dedicating themselves to the proper performance of a ritual that was a blessing and an acknowledgement of that gods existence. I'm curious about the origins of metaphysical reasoning.

>>11435969
Imagine spending your life on this nonsense.

I'm starting to think the intellectualising types of persons are the actual stupid ones who don't understand anything. Concerning, as I would come under the category.

>>11436118
If you want a general approach to understanding these things, then you should look through the lens of relationships. 'Primitive' humans perceive the world in terms of their most baser higher faculty, that is, socialising and relationship-crafting (as well as more complex things like in-group, filial ties, and social coalitions). It is immediate and intuitive. It's where things like animism come from. It's a pretty reasonable view of the world if nothing else has shifted your mentality. You don't have a mechanistic view, so it's natural to perceive the world in terms of what you do understand and coalesce with (human beings/relationships). It's also very practical. Treating things as entities with personalities and continuous existences is arguably a superior mode for the everyday, as in today's world we already boil things down into bleached versions of these terms, naturally.

Peoples of old had gods, spirits, and the like, they were personalities with their own mind and motives, and had relationships with humans (or in some cases it may be mostly/wholly one-way). That's all it ever was. Many later humans can't deal with this due to a wider mentality that incorporates ideas/systems beyond our social faculties and unaffected intuition (and the resultant lineage of beliefs/ideas). So, they come up with bullshit to completely change the nature of these figures and ideas, to make them more palatable. Relationships and nuanced beliefs are deeper and more meaningful than some obscurantist mystical bullshit that acts like a half-faith, avoiding confrontation and sincerity. Avoiding setting anything in stone, remaining merely as an ascendant promise that subversively goads you in whilst lacking anything being an intriguing, pretty shell. False depth. They are only rotting their own spirituality with their elaborate fictions.

>>11435969
yes, he was right. read campbell.

>>11436130
You can recognize it without sacrificing anything. The simplest solution is the truth: they sacrificed things to please gods they literally believed in. There's nothing profound in it. It's primitive.

>>11435969
He seems like a spiritually crippled rationalist from what I've seen. The other René G is preferable

>>11435969
Was this guy a psychoanalist? Because that sounds like psychoanalist pseudery.

>>11439191
>nothing profound in it
>it's primitive

recognizing your place in the natural order is not "primitive", only capitalistcucks who think they're somehow exempt from the rules of the planet they're raping think this

you don't have the slightest concept of what life was like back then

>>11440457
Again: why does this realisation imply the necessity of sacrifice? Why not just realise this without killing an animal or another man, if they were so wise? The ritual aspect of it is primitive, sorry if that makes you angry.

This is why Christianity is superior.

>>11436153
This, the fact that Girard is semi-obscure and writes in an intelligent way makes people think he is hot shit and they don't realize he is pushing a quasi-freudian reductionalist analysis.

ritualistic sacrifice is a communal relief valve. spilling blood on an altar is probably more effective when the people actually believe in some kind of deity. the secular globohomo version of ritual sacrifice is to ostracize some dumb white broad in all major news outlets for calling the cops on innocent black people, as a way of placating the multiculti gods