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If the author were Christian, he certainly would have been accused of slandering paganism. But Philostratus is a militant pagan, resolved to defend the religion of his ancestors. He obviously viewed the murder of the beggar as able to lift up the morale o...
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To describe the behavior of the Ephesians once the stoning begins, I am tempted to resort to a modern phrase: letting off steam.
abscess of fixation2
When their rage has been released, when the
abscess of fixation has played its role, the Ephesians discover they are cured of their epidemic.
By no means an unheard-of phenomenon, alien to what we know about the Greek world, the stoning of the beggar recalls certain religious facts that are specifically Greek, the sacrifices of people called pharmakoi.
The prestige of Apollonius is all the more sinister in that it may well have some basis in reality. The stoning passes for miraculous because it put an end to the complaints of the Ephesians. But you will say to me, "How could the murder of a beggar, no matter how unanimously committed, make a plague epidemic go away?"
Apollonius had intervened in the context of a bacterial plague, the stoning would not have had any effect on the "epidemic." The clever guru must have gauged the situation and known that the city was prey to internal tensions that could be discharged on what we now call a scapegoat. This fourth metaphor designates a substitute victim, some innocent substitute for the real antagonists. In the Life of Apollonius of Tyana, just prior to the miracle itself, there is a passage that confirms our conjecture.
EUSEBIUS OF CAESAREA was aware of the harm that the Life of Apollonius did to Christianity. Eusebius, the first great historian of the Church, friend
and collaborator of Constantine, composed a critique of this book, but modern readers will not find there what they are expecting. Eusebius sets out to show particularly that the miracles of Apollonius are not impressive at all.
To take the measure of the two spiritual masters on this point, we must compare the "miracle" manipulated by Apollonius with a text that has nothing of the miraculous, that of the woman whose stoning Jesus prevents: The scribes and the Pharisees brought before him a woman taken in adultery. Placing her in view of everyone, they said to Jesus, "Master, this woman was surprised in the act of adultery. Moses commanded us in the Law to stone such women. Now what do you say about it?" They
said this to set a trap for him, in order to be able to accuse him. But Jesus, bending down, started writing with his finger on the ground. As they were insistent, he drew up and said to them: "Let whoever is without sin among you cast the first stone at her!" And, bending down again, he once more began to write on the ground. When he said this, they withdrew one by one, beginning with the oldest. Jesus remained, alone with the woman, who was still there. Then, standing up again, he said to her, "Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?" "No one, Lord," she answered. "Neither do I
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All the action in the two texts pivots on a problem that the single sentence of Jesus makes explicit, whereas it is never clarified by Philostratus: the problem of the first stone.
"Whoever is without sin among you, let him cast at her the first stone." The modern reader, skeptical, suspects a purely rhetorical effect: the first stone is proverbial. Cast the stone, cast the first stone: this is one of those expressions that everyone repeats.
With a ridiculous grandiloquence he denounces the beggar as an "enemy of the gods." To make the violence possible, he must demonize the individual he has selected as victim. And finally the guru succeeds. He obtains what he desires: the first stone.
Why is it the most difficult to throw? Because it is the only one without a model.
Once the first stone is thrown, thanks to the encouragement of Apollonius, the second comes fairly fast, thanks to the example of the first; the third comes more quickly still because it has two models rather than one, and so on. As the models multiply, the rhythm of the stoning accelerates.
Saving the adulterous woman from being stoned, as Jesus does, means that he prevents the violent contagion from getting started. Another contagion in the reverse direction is set off, however, a contagion of nonviolence.
The texts help us better understand the dynamic of crowds that must be defined, not primarily by violence or by nonviolence, but by imitation, by contagious imitation.
The Law of Moses provides for stoning in the case of well-defined offenses. Moreover, because the Law fears false denunciations, to make these more difficult it requires the informants, a minimum of two, to cast the first two stones themselves.
He does this by appealing to the most humane aspect of the legal prescription, the aspect most foreign to the contagion of violence, which is the obligation of the two accusers to throw the first two stones. The Law deprives the accusers of a mimetic model.
if Jesus had not convinced the crowd, if the stoning had taken place, Jesus would have risked being stoned himself. Failing to save a victim threatened with collective lynching, being the only person at her side in face of the crowd, is to run the risk of suffering her fate also. This principle is found in all ancient societies.
If Jesus returned their looks, these angry men would not see his look as it really is but would transform it into a mirror of their own anger. Their own challenge, their own provocation, is what they would read in the look of Jesus, no matter how peaceable it really is, and they would feel provoked in return. The confrontation could no longer be avoided and would bring about what Jesus is trying to prevent, the stoning of the victim. Jesus avoids thus even the shadow of provocation.
The Cross is the equivalent of the Ephesus stoning. To say that Jesus identifies himself with all victims is to say that he identifies himself not only with the adulterous woman or the Suffering Servant but also with the beggar of Ephesus. Jesus is this poor wretch of a beggar.
"Abscess of fixation" is a term that emerged in medical practice. An abscess is a wound festering with bacteria; an "abscess of fixation" is created artificially in order to purge the body of its impurities.
The protagonist in the old myths is the entire community transformed into a violent mob. They believe that an isolated individual threatens them, a person who is often a foreigner, and they spontaneously massacre the visitor. This type of violence is found in classical Greece, in the sinister cult of Dionysos. The attackers rush as one upon their victim. The collective hysteria is such that they literally behave like beasts of prey. They manage to dismember this victim, tear him apart with their hands, with their nails, with their teeth, as if anger or fear made their physical power ten times
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This process characterizes myths in general. The same human groups that expel and massacre individuals on whom suspicions fall switch over to adoring them when they find they are calm and reconciled. What reconciles them, to repeat, is
nothing else than projecting on the victim all their fears in the beginning and subsequently all their hopes once they become reconciled.
To make this description of the monster more respectable, Philostratus has him vomit foaming saliva "like rabid dogs," but this transformation is scarcely impressive or convincing; it is too transparent to conceal the sad truth.
The victims who arouse the most terror in the first phase arouse the most relief and harmony in the second.
In Philostratus's religious imagination the great god Pan is not completely dead. It is not by accident that this god of violent mobs is the symbol of classic mythology. From his name comes
our word "panic."' This god has not lost all his power of enchantment over the author of the Life of Apollonius.
if it is recognized that Satan is the absence of being.
Satan is mimetic contagion as its most secret power, the creation of the false gods out of the
midst of which Christianity emerged. To speak of the mimetic cycle in terms of Satan enables the Gospels to say or to suggest many things about the religions perceived by Christianity as false, deceptive, and illusory that they could not say in the language of scandal, the reconciling power of unanimous violence.
The peoples of the world do not invent their gods. They deify their victims. What prevents researchers from discovering this truth is their refusal to grasp the real violence behind the texts that represent it. The refusal of the real is the number one dogma of our time. ...
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The escapades of Zeus and his fellow gods are supposedly only "weak shadows of their divine grandeur." In reality the "wild pranks" are the traces of crimes similar to those of Oedipus and other divinized scapegoats: parricide, incest, bestial fornication, and other horrible crimes. All of these are accusations typical of witch-hunts, with which primitive mobs are permanently obsessed, as are modern crowds seeking to find victims. The "wild pranks" are essential to the primitive phenomenon of divinity.
The historians continue to affirm the actual existence of the victims massacred by medieval mobs: lepers, Jews, foreigners, women, those who are disabled, marginal persons of every sort. We would be not only naive but guilty if we tried to deny the reality of these victims under the pretext that all such "stories" are obviously "imaginary," that in any case the "truth" as such does not exist, etc.
THE STONING at Ephesus is of great interest because it demolishes the overly rigid distinctions of those who would prefer to imprison reality in well-defined categories. Linguistic structuralism avoids focusing upon texts like the one written by Philostratus, and for good reason. Philostratus steps over too many barriers that are now
?????
viewed as insuperable. Behind the discontinuity of language, our "missing link" makes visible a real continuity, bearing a real intelligibility, which cannot be locked up in the watertight compartments of ancient and modern classifiers. The famous linguistic methods are much appreciated nowadays because they replace the search for truth with structuralist word games.
The beggar picked by Apollonius recalls the kind of homeless per-sons whom Athens and the great Greek cities fed at their expense in order to make use of them as pharmakoi when the appointed time arrived, that is, collectively to assassinate them why back away before the proper term? during the Thargelia and other Dionysian festivals. Before stoning these poor wretches, the torturers some-times struck or whipped their sexual organs and in general made them submit to a full round of ritual torture.
In the early days or months that followed this deliverance, it is likely that a great euphoria prevailed. But sadly this blessed period never lasted.
We thus understand why those offering sacrifice, almost universally, saw their sacrifices as awesome acts. They realized that the only "good violence," the violence that ends violence rather than intensifies it, is unanimous violence. They also realized that the motive force of unanimity is mimetic contagion, which increases in intensity and becomes more and more dangerous as long as it does not achieve unanimity. This is the source of the idea, universal in origin, that ritual activity is extremely dangerous.
Psychologists and psychoanalysts have fallaciously construed this concern for exactness as "neuroses," "phantasms," and other "complexes" with which they are infatuated. To a certain type of modern mind it seems obvious that religion is based on psychological illness.
we must discover the real action
that the people offering sacrifice reproduced: the violence that is reconciling because it ...
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A great mass of evidence, theoretical, textual, and archeological, suggests that in the beginnings of humanity the sacrificial victims were human. With the passing of time animals more and more re-placed humans, but almost everywhere human communities viewed animal victims as less efficacious than human victims. In cases of extreme danger, in classical Greece, for instance, there was a reversion to human victims. If we can believe Plutarch, on the eve of the battle of Salamis Themistocles had Persian prisoners sacrificed because of pressure from the crowd. Is this so different from the miracle
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