But repetition is also tabooed, the emulative and the echoic, imitation, mimesis being likewise associated with peril, and according to Girard this is quite fundamental. In some primitive cultures twins are killed at birth. Mirrors too are often associated with danger; some cultures forbid the imitation of others, whether by gesture or the repetition of utterances; the doppelgänger has always put fear into people; many religions prohibit the depiction of their deity.
One might imagine that the fear of duplication, facsimile, imitation has to do with the notion of identity, the individual becoming lost in its image in the event that identity is unstable, open to the world, and susceptible to impregnation, but Girard believes the opposite to hold, that likeness represents a threat to the collective in that the act of violence cannot then be construed individually, related back to its perpetrator nor even associated with its results, being viewed not as a completed event, but instead, and to a much greater extent than in our own culture, in terms of process, seeing in it symmetry and likeness: two rivals facing off, between them an object, the bone of contention, and on either side of it they are alike. If not stopped, this likeness will be reproduced serially, in retaliations, representatives of the first taking vengeance on representatives of the second, and such violence, the violence of the blood feud, can go on through generations, the original conflict long since forgotten, consumed into the seriality.
In any small community such escalation is catastrophic, and it is its fundamental pattern, one against the other, that gives rise to duplication taboos, the manifest and mysterious fear of symmetry. Violence is imitative and repetitive. If taboos are an avoidance measure in this respect, sacrifice confronts it, not only by being its imitation and by recreating it serially in ritual, but also structurally, the sacrifice on the one side, the members of the community on the other, though not divided, the surrogate victim as scapegoat bearing the division, but collectively: the all against the one, which is then duly killed. And when it is done, only the all remains, a single, stable whole.
On the other hand, imitation may also be a desirable phenomenon in a culture, nearly all learning and development occurring by way of repetition and duplication, directly too in the imitation of role models, though never without some degree of ambivalence, since imitation of the one by the other is down to the one wanting what the other one has, and this, in Girard’s terminology mimetic desire, is no stable concept. When the final commandment of the Old Testament decrees that you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, his ox, or anything else that belongs to him, the reason is of course that doing so would be a source of conflict, two facing off over an object desired by both; where two individuals confront each other in a state of mimetic desire, the object becomes the one subject by virtue of the imitation or duplication, which brings about an imbalance in the relation, whether it be the depiction eclipsing the depicted, or vice versa. The association of imitation with power, or lack of power, and in essence with violence, is according to Girard the reason for Plato’s loathing of mimesis, the concept being unresolved in his writings, and he interprets the crisis of the we’s collapse into the I as seen in schizophrenia as the expression of a lack of ability to imitate the other, something society is rooted in, and this is what manifests itself in the occasionally grotesque, parodic exaggerations often displayed by schizophrenics.
Girard’s thinking concerning sacrifice and imitation is nonpsychological, seeking explanation not in the particular I, but in the collective, and construing violence as a structural entity. This aspect of violence has all but disappeared in our time, insofar as its containment has consisted of relating the act of violence itself, as well the emotions that give rise to it, to the individual in a system whereby the community steps in as soon as the trangressional act takes place, thereby regulating it and preventing its escalation, a fact that has led us to consider it in terms of the individual and accordingly made us blind to its collective aspect. But when any group emerges in society, placing value outside the individual and declining to identify with the authority of the state or with areas in which that power is weak, symmetrical, serial violence occurs once again; the Sicilian Mafia or the inner cities of the northeast of the United States are examples of environments in which the blood feud has recently been pivotal, and the gangs that populate the run-down areas of American cities gun each other down according to the same principle of retaliation. They destroy one another utterly, but the power of destruction lies not in their hands, it spirals out of control, and this was what primitive cultures sought to manage by their taboos and rituals, which nearly always ended in sacrifice. Their myths, and gradually their religions, were the expression of the collective, treating and concerning the whole, and as those cultures evolved, doing so in increasingly sophisticated ways. The Pentateuch, the Five Books of Moses, is the narrative of that evolution, from the emergence of man, the separation of culture from nature, to the establishment of a homogenous and civilized societal unit with laws, rules, forms of governance, and religion. What the sacrifice does is to establish differences in culture. Between life and death, animal and human, human and divine, but also differences within the human sphere, where the destructive power of likeness is separated out and dealt with by its transformation into unlikeness. The sacrificial offering is a language without words in which the unspoken is made manifest, not so much in order to be perceived as to be controlled, by being brought into existence. The sacrifice is a means of naming the unnameable, of giving form to the formless. The formless is likeness, there lies the point of departure of all creation narratives, including those of science. The first chapter of the Book of Genesis says, “And the earth was without form and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” The void is nothing, emptiness is nothing, darkness is likeness, the deep is the boundless, the Spirit of God is the universe, the waters the undifferentiated. Then, by its very predication, land is separated from sea, night from day, sun from moon. God said let there be light, and there was light. When everything in the material world was separated, the animals that swim in the sea, creep on the land, and fly through the sky were created.
What is the nature of this first picture of life?
“Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life,” it says. “And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl.”
The emphasis here is on quantity and movement: “abundantly,” “moveth,” “living creature,” the “moving creature.” Against this blind abundance of life stands the categorization of “after their kind,” but so unspecifically is life described, primarily in terms of its living abundance only, that its categorization becomes secondary, much like the rattling pots that enclose the living, crawling lobsters as they are lifted into a boat.
Then comes evening, and after it the morning of the sixth day, and God creates the animals of the land, and creates man, the male and the female. And to them he says, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have the dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”
While the message in his commandment is that man is superior to all other living creatures, and thereby separated from them, distinct and on his own, the parallels in the choice of words pull the human irresistibly toward that abundance of life: “Be fruitful,” it says, “and multiply, and replenish the earth,” in other words man is considered as a mass, surrounded by the other masses of life, characterized by their movements, life that moveth, teeming, creeping, crawling.
And God says:
Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon t
he earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so. And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.
The weight given to expansion is huge in this first chapter of the Old Testament, the idea of life extending out being presented as its fundamental condition. In this lies the notion of repetition, for what spreads is the same, life in its various forms, and it does so singly, the leaves of the deciduous tree that unfold every spring being the same leaf over and over again, as it does so together, the deciduous trees growing up in community, great forests extending ever deeper. Humanity is a part of this expansion, bound too by the imperative of multiplying and replenishing the earth, this being the very urge of life, to increase, and man is in this sense construed as life on the same level as all other living things.
But then something happens. In the second chapter of the Book of Genesis the narrative shifts from the remote to the near, and is no longer about the abstract universe, about the earth viewed generally, the sky viewed generally, life viewed generally, but about the particular place, this earth, this sky, the creation of these two particular people. Adam, whose name is associated with earth, and Eve, whose name is associated with life. Having breathed the breath of life into their nostrils, God places them in a garden, to the east, in Eden. And from the garden ran four named rivers: Pison, Gihon, Hiddekel, and Euphrates. After what happens there, when they eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and are banished, several names appear. Adam and Eve’s son Abel, who dies, and all the descendants of their son Cain: Enoch, Irad, Mehujael, Methusael, Lamech, Adah, Zillah, Jubal, Tabulcain, Naamah. Then come the descendants of the third son, Seth: Enos, Cainan, Mahalaleel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. In the lifetime of these four latter persons, all life on earth is destroyed in the Flood, and a new lineage begins. After Japheth, Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshech, Tiras, Ashkenaz, Riphath, Togarmah, Eishah, Tarshiss, Kittim, Dodanim. After Ham, Cush, Mizraim, Phut, Canaan, Seba, Havilah, Sabtah, Raamah, Sabtecha, Sheba, Dedan. After Shem, Elam, Ashur, Arphaxad, Lud, Aram, Uz, Hul, Gether, Mash, Salah, Eber, Peleg, Joktan, Almodad, Sheleph, Hazarmaveth, Jerah, Hadoram, Uzal, Diklah, Obal, Abimael, Sheba, Ophir, Havilah, Jobab. After Peleg, Reu, Serug, Nahor, Terah, Abram, Nahor, Haran.
These names connect historical time with the mythic, illuminating as it were the darkness of history and forging a path directly into the moment of creation. The connection is real, if not factual, since there must be some particular point in time at which humanity emerged, and some particular place. Viewed in relation to the age of the earth, that time is not far from the present, some two hundred thousand years, somewhere in the region of ten thousand generations. It occurred on the African continent, where creatures resembling humans had already lived for millions of years, and for a time they must have lived alongside each other, perhaps until only forty thousand years ago. The first humans cannot have been many in number, a few small flocks at most, and they must have kept to the same places until some of them, about a hundred thousand years ago, began to wander, the species gradually spread across the globe.
When in the 1990s scientists began to identify and map our DNA, the paths these early humans wandered could suddenly be followed, deposited in our living bodies here in the present, an unfathomably long chain of inheritance enclosing us all in our history, or exposing us to the very depths of time: not only are we like them, in a sense we are them.
* * *
The emergence of the human being was a local occurrence, it took place in a certain geographical area; the idea of the Garden of Eden and man’s dispersion from it expresses no more than that. Some caves, plains, forests, some lakes or rivers.
By the time the narrative gets to Abram we are somewhere between historical time and the void of prehistory, and what emerges from Abram are the foundations of a family, a people, and a nation, governed by the will of a single God, who gradually bestows on them laws and statutory instruments, which is to say civilization and religion. The relation between the divine and the nondivine, between man and the world, and between individuals, is regulated within those systems. And the future is a promise of descendants, for God brings Abram forth and says to him, “Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them. So shall thy seed be.” And when Abram, who after his covenant with God becomes known as Abraham, is later instructed to sacrifice his only son, God intervenes with that same promise: “That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the seashore.”
* * *
The stars and the sand are the mass, the many, but the many are also alike. The promise of God does not apply to all people, it is not humanity as such that is to multiply so infinitely, but Abraham and his kin, which is to say a singular we, and this is what makes God’s words a promise and a utopia, since the expansion of a single family, a clan, a people, brings with it power and wealth. By virtue of sheer numbers, land may be conquered and empires won. The Bible’s negative representation of innumerableness consists in the swarms of grasshoppers, the great clouds of insects consuming all in their path, unstoppable and merciless.
This distinction between we and they is consistently of the greatest significance throughout the biblical narrative. The Old Testament can be seen as a story issuing out of the various tensions that distinction creates. All the men of Abraham’s family shall be circumcised, this being the sign of their belonging, their we, and in the covenant he enters into with God, the promise of their own land is the utopia the later stories seek, until it comes to fruition when before his death Moses sees the Promised Land, overflowing with milk and honey, and his people then cross the river to enter it. Until that point they have been slaves in Egypt, powerless, their lives in the hands of others, and in such a situation, possessing nothing of their own and without influence on their own days, not even on their own children, the only thing that keeps them together is their sense of particularity, the idea of their own, guaranteed to them by God, who is the one God.
The Egyptians murder all male children born to the Hebrews, but when Moses is born he is hidden in an ark among the bulrushes at the river, where he is found by Pharaoh’s daughter, who takes him as her own. Not only is he then able to live safely among the Egyptians, he also enjoys the foremost privileges as a member of a hallowed, godlike family, yet so strong is the bond to the people from whom he stems, the slaves, that he renounces all of this, not in any planned or calculated manner, but in an act of passion, his blood brought to the boil when he sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew; Moses kills the man, buries the body in the sand and flees the country, whereupon God appears before him and a new covenant is entered into. Led by Moses, the Hebrews escape from Egypt into the desert. There the laws and rituals by which they must abide are delivered to them. And they are counted.
* * *
That laws are delivered to them is by no means surprising, this being a narrative of foundation, but counting and stating their own number is conspicuous indeed. One could conceive of it as some kind of bookkeeping exercise, an archaic urge to account completely for the situation at hand, where their number must have played a significant role given that they were in the desert at the time, in a landscape where food and drink must have been scarce, and because they were about to invade another land and the number of soldiers at their disposal would be one of the most important factors in determining the outcome. Nonetheless, the preciseness of the number stated seems odd, such exact detail occurring only seldom in the Scriptures, which elsewhere can report a people’s suffering through centuries or the destruction of a city in only a single sentence.
The only other place where the text displays such exactness, allowing not a detail to escape, is in the listing of the laws and rituals the priests are to perform. But the laws are universal, immutable, and meant to apply through all time; the Hebrews’ number is the opposite, capturing an inconst
ant entity at a certain point in time, applicable only to them, in that place, when Moses gathers the Israelites in the Sinai Desert. They are many, though not in the way the stars or the grains of sand at the shore are many; in total they number 603,550 able-bodied men spanning twelve tribes and with the following distribution:
The tribe of Reuben: forty and six thousand and five hundred.
The tribe of Simeon: fifty and nine thousand and three hundred.
The tribe of Gad: forty and five thousand and six hundred and fifty.
The tribe of Judah: threescore and fourteen thousand and six hundred.
The tribe of Issachar: fifty and four thousand and four hundred.
The tribe of Zebulun: fifty and seven thousand and four hundred.
The tribe of Ephraim: forty thousand five hundred.
The tribe of Manasseh: thirty and two thousand and two hundred.
The tribe of Benjamin: thirty and five thousand and four hundred.
The tribe of Dan: threescore and two thousand and seven hundred.
The tribe of Aser: forty and one thousand and five hundred.
The tribe of Naphtali: fifty and three thousand and four hundred.
Seen from the outside, as when later they conquer the new land, killing everything in their path, they are a faceless horde, but seen from within, all are bound to the familiar in lines of descent going back through families and through history, which in sum comprise the people.
* * *
Reading this ancient text today, perhaps the most remarkable aspect is the way the foundation of the religious merges into the social, as if they were two sides of the same coin. For the number’s freezing of the multitude in time is just one aspect of this, what the number represents is another, and it is this that joins number and law together. The number stands open to the boundless, the uncontrollable, the identityless, the infinity of sand and stars; the names constrain and control in the identity of the name, the face of the language. Similarly, the law constrains and controls action; killing is forbidden, being a trangression of life, lying is forbidden, being a transgression of truth, adultery is forbidden, being a transgression of marriage. The punishment is expulsion from life, which is to say death, or, if the transgression is deemed to be minor, a sacrifice in place of death. And the boundary that emerges in this, which separates this people and their existence from all that is holy, is the most important of all, testified to by the text’s richness of detail in describing the various rituals, the exactness required when the priests step into the hallowed space and dash blood on the sacrificial stone or burn animals or corn or oil. The sacrifice is not merely a reminder of the price of transgression, is not merely a symbolic act, but is in itself a price, in the way the ox whose head is severed is not merely a symbol of life and blood, but is in itself life and blood. That the language of the Old Testament is so specific, so proximate to physical reality and the events that take place within it, to body rather than spirit, is undoubtedly an aspect of the same thing. What is to be found beyond the holy, the boundless and infinite, is also nameless, indefinite, its identity construed by a verb, which is to say action or movement. I am what I am. The image of the nameless human is a grain of sand or a star, the loss of identity in the mass merely ostensible, for the number of stars or the number of grains of sand is not infinite, but finite, and only from a distance are they the same, seen up close each grain of sand is different, each star unique. They may be counted, and they may be named. The image of the nameless God, however, is infinite and identical, for it is fire. Its manifestations are always the same – to name an instance of fire would seem meaningless, to name a grain of sand would not – and yet each is different. Fire cannot be counted, cannot be named, cannot be delimited; doused in one place, it will burn in another. The stars and the grains of sand express the idea of the one and the all, the individual and the mass, whereas fire establishes identity between the two, the one being simultaneously the one and the all. Beyond the boundaries of law and ritual stands the boundless God, beyond the name stands boundless biological life, only concerted effort can prevent us from disappearing into or being consumed by its depths.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 79