Girard calls the transferring of blame onto the victim and then the transferring of credit for the new peace and prosperity "double transference." Now if the victim could cause all their troubles and yet also produce such peace and prosperity, he or she must be a different sort of being, a higher, more powerful sort. This is the birth of the gods. It was not a conscious process but began reflexively and developed and crystallized eventually into ritual representation of what had worked in the past. By the time the human ability to think critically had emerged in prophetic preaching or
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