There is no culture without a tomb and no tomb without a culture; in the end the tomb is the first and only cultural symbol. The above-ground tomb do… - René Girard

Some primitive societies avoid striking out at the true guilty party because it might awaken the spirit of vengeance. Channeling violence toward a sacrificial victim as if toward a lightning rod doubtless stops violence, but it's not very pretty.

"3. The Greek pharmakoi, singular pharmakos, refers to victims who were ritually beaten, driven out of cities, and killed, for example, by being forced over the edge of a precipice. The word pharmakos, designating a person who is selected as a ritual victim, is related to pharmakon, which means both "remedy" and "poison," depending on the context. In the story of the horrible miracle of Apollonius, the beggar is a pharmakos, a kind of ritual victim. Apollonius points to him as the demon causing the plague (he is the source of pollution or poison), but his lynching restores the well being of Ephesus (he becomes the remedy for the crisis). — Trans. 4."

no society before ours has taken aim at sacrificial mechanisms. So, what's revealed by all of this is the tenacity of those mechanisms. If you stamp them out here, they pop up again over there. The value of Foucault's work consists in having shown this. One day, he told me that “we shouldn't invent a philosophy of the victim.” I replied: “No, not a philosophy, I agree — a religion! But it already exists!” Foucault understood the very thing that optimistic rationalism didn't foresee: new forms of “victimization” are constantly emerging from the instruments that were intended to do away with them. It's his pessimism that separates us: unlike him, I think that historical processes have meaning and that we have to accept this, or else face utter despair. Today, after the end of ideologies, the only way to embrace this meaning is to rediscover religion. Of course, even as the victimary mechanism keeps being reborn, Christianity is always there to transform and subvert it, like a leavening agent — in the humanist rationalism of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, for example. When Voltaire defended Jean Calas, the persecuted Protestant, he was being more Christian than the Catholic priests who were against him. His mistake was to have had too much faith in his own perfection, to imagine that the correctness of his position was due to his own genius. He couldn't see how much he owed to the past that stretched out behind him. I respect tradition, but I'm not justifying History. MT