I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

by René Girard

In both cases everything stems from a mimetic crisis. Concerning the prophet, it is the crisis of the marriage of Herod to Herodias. John reproaches Herod for his illegal marriage to the wife of his brother; Herodias desires revenge but Herod protects John. To force his hand, at his birthday banquet Herodias stirs up the crowd of guests against her enemy. To whip up the mimetic contagion of this gathering and transform it into a bloody pack, Herodias resorts to the art that the Greeks took to be the most mimetic of all, the most apt at a sacrifice to motivate participants against the victim: dancing. Herodias has her own daughter dance. The dancer, manipulated by her mother, requests John's head as a reward, and the guests unanimously demand the head of John. The resemblances between this narrative and the Passion are remarkable and cannot be attributed to a kind of plagiarism. The two texts are not “doublets” of each other. Their details are quite different. It is their internal mimetic character that renders them similar, and this is represented in a manner as powerful and original in one case as in the other. At the anthropological level, therefore, the Passion is typical rather than unique: it illustrates the major event of the Gospel anthropology, namely, the victimary mechanism that appeases human communities and reestablishes, at least provisionally, their tranquility.