The myth of Python and his wives, which belongs to the Venda, a people of South Africa, is a typical instance of a witchcraft persecution text. In this analysis of a Venda myth, which was first published as an appendix to Richard J. Golsan , René Girard and Myth: An Introduction ( New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1993), 151-79, Girard offers a more extended version of the methodology presented in The Scapegoat. He holds that Python and his wives may eventually be understood as an important piece of evidence for determining the primary generative features of the original myths of the Psyche type, prior to their Greek and German versions.
According to the mimetic theory, myths reflect a contagious process of disorder that culminates with the death or expulsion of a victim.
The escalations of mimetic rivalry to which archaic societies are prone stir up all kinds of disorders until their very intensity produces a unanimous polarization against a more or less
random victim. Mimetically carried away, the entire community joins in, and as a result, mutual suspicions are extinguished; peace returns.
The scapegoaters do not understand their own scapegoat mechanism and they project upon their victim both their dissensions and their reconciliation. This is the double transference of the sacred which appears as both a source of disorder and a source of order. Its mythical embodiments are both malefactors and benefactors.
It follows from this that mythical heroes can never appear as scapegoats in their own myths.
Those who try to turn this absence of a scapegoat theme into an instant refutation of the mimetic theory simply do not understand the genetic role of scapegoating in these texts.
I use the word "scapegoat" in the modern sense, of course, necessarily different from the Leviticus ritual which it implicitly demystifies. No one
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tries to indict scapegoaters on the basis of what they say about their own scapegoats. They cannot be expected to beat their breasts and proclaim loudly: "Our victim is only a
scapegoat." When we suspect scapegoating we cannot verify our suspicion directly; we must rely on indirect clues.Students of myth too must rely on indirect clues. In the myths easiest to analyze, the ones upon which I have focused most attention, and will once again in this essay, they are as follows:
1. A theme of disorder or undifferentiation, which does not always come first since it is seen as a consequence of the scapegoat's misdeed, rather than as a cause. The
expressions of this theme may range from original chaos, or a catastrophe of cosmic proportions, to almost any kind of disaster. It may be a plague epidemic, a fire, a flood, a drought, a quarrel between relatives, preferably twin brothers. It may be any disturbance or state of incompletion from which the community suffers. It may be other things as well. They all express some mimetic disturbances in the community that generate the myth. They may be symbolic, real, or simultaneously symbolic and real.
2. One particular individual stands convicted of some fault. It may be a heinous crime and it may be a mere misdemeanor, even an accidental faux-pas. Regardless of how trivial or dreadful the incriminating action is, its consequences are catastrophic: they are none other than the state of chaos, crisis, or incompletion from which the community suffers.
The hero or heroine is really seen as the cause of the crisis. This is scapegoat projection.
3. The identification of the scapegoat is often facilitated by what I call preferential signs of victimage. They are the very diverse characteristics or attributes that tend to arouse the hostility of a crowd against their possessors. They testify to the objective arbitrariness of the victim's selection. Mythical scapegoats are often physically, morally, or socially impaired; they may be strangers, cripples, outcasts, persons of very low or very high standing, etc. These signs do not constitute a separate theme and they may be completely absent.
4. The "culprit" is killed, expelled, or otherwise eliminated, either by the whole community acting like one man or by a single individual, one of the brothers, for instance, if brothers are involved. This is scapegoating stricto sensu, the violent deed, the fruit of the mimetic polarization triggered by the mimetic crisis.
5. As soon as the violence against the victim is consummated, peace returns; order is (re)generated. This, too, is projected onto the scapegoat who is revealed as a founding ancestor or a divinity. This is the second transference of the sacred.
For an illustration of such a myth and its mimetic analysis, I will now go to a very transparent example that belongs to the Venda, a people of South Africa. For the purpose of this
presentation I have amalgamated
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and slightly condensed the two versions reproduced by Luc de Heusch in his Le Roi ivre ou l'origine de l'état (Gallimard, 1972, 61-62):
Python, the water snake, had two wives. The first knew who he was but the second wife did not know and she was not supposed to know. In the middle of the night, she would wake up drenched. The first wife tried to protect her husband's secret but her rival was curious and, after a good deal of spying on him she discovered the truth. Then, all the rivers dried up. The only water left was in the lake at the bottom of which Python had taken refuge.
When they learned from the first wife the reason for Python's disappearance, the old men decided that a beer offering should be prepared. Divination revealed that Python desired the company of his second wife. While the men were playing the flute, the young woman entered the water, carrying the beer offering in a basket. As the music grew louder, she disappeared, and the rain began to fall; the rivers filled up and all the people rejoiced.
The woman designated as the second wife is indicted for scaring away a divine snake and thus causing a drought. The drought is the real and/or symbolic crisis and the fault that supposedly causes it is the scapegoat accusation. The victim dies by drowning in front of the assembled community, a typical scapegoat death.
This death is presented as a beer offering, a sacrificial rite that should fully appease the offended god since it simultaneously punishes the offender and returns his favorite wife to a loving husband. Since the drought ends as a result of her death, the victim partakes of the sacred. The insignificant troublemaker of the beginning has become the savior of the community, together with her beloved husband, Python, the water god. The double transference of the sacred is not defined explicitly but its presence is unmistakable.
The victim is a woman and also a second wife, hierarchically inferior to the first. These determinations can be regarded as preferential signs of victimage, not particularly
spectacular, to be sure, but we do not really need them. The identification of the scapegoat relies primarily on the idea that the drought is caused by the fantastic misconduct of the second wife with her fantastic husband, and on the fact that the drought is ended by her death.
My analysis will soon make it evident that these themes and their arrangement demand a real victim.
Insofar as it pertains to the internal peace of a community, unanimous scapegoating is self-fulfilling; it really concludes the crisis. The same cannot be true in regard to a drought. Do I assume that the death of a young woman can favorably influence a drought? Certainly not.
All we have to believe is that the victim died just before the natural end of the drought, assuming, once again, that the drought was a real one.
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We may suppose that the "beer offering" recorded in our myth was not the only one during the whole mimetic crisis in which this myth is rooted. If this mimetic crisis was not a purely internal phenomenon, if it was caused by a real drought, we can also suppose that the particular "beer offering" portrayed in it happened to coincide with the natural end of the drought. What generated the myth was the conjunction of the mimetic reconciliation against the scapegoat, plus the natural end of the drought. This chance timing made this particular episode of scapegoating a long-range success, memorable enough to generate a myth.
Most students of myth will reject out of hand the interpretation I have just outlined. Knowing that I regard the myth as the trace of an extratextual drama, a real scapegoat phenomenon, they will quit listening. The assertion that the victim must be real seems irresponsible. They see a theoretical impossibility to which I must be blind.
These critics dismiss my work a priori, without examining my demonstration. They are absolutely certain that I cannot be right. The failure of my interpretation is too obvious, they feel, to require a complete refutation.
This conviction relies essentially on the fantastic aspect of myth, which is seen as an
insurmountable obstacle to the realism, or referentiality, of my interpretation. In the present example, for instance, we have a divine snake, a water god that causes a drought because the excessive curiosity of his wife drives him into hiding. Even interpreters free from the
currently fashionable anti-referential bias will find it incredible that a text with such a nonsensical theme in it could ever become a source of extratextual information.
Two themes in our myth, the drought and the death by drowning, could possibly yield extratextual information but only in a nonfantastic context. Their potential in that respect seems nullified by the story of the divine snake which is inextricably entangled with the rest of the myth. "Tell me what company you keep and I will tell you who you are."
When I say that there must be a real victim behind our Venda myth, and other similar myths, I blatantly disregard, it seems, what everybody agrees must be the most basic principle of critical prudence. No text can be more reliable than the least reliable of its components. Let us call it the law of contamination by the unbelievable. Even interpreters unaffected by the interpretive nihilism of our time will see no possible compromise on this point. I certainly violate this law. But my reasons for doing so are legitimate. Critics will retort that there cannot be any legitimate reason for such a violation. They think that the law is absolute, that it suffers no exception. They are wrong.
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I am going to show that there are exceptions to the law of contamination by the fantastic, and everybody tacitly agrees that they are legitimate. I will then show that, even though they are not included among these exceptions, foundational myths should be.
The texts I have in mind are thematically and structurally similar to our Venda myths. They are stereotyped modalities of collective persecution and their interpretation rightfully violates the law of contamination by the unbelievable. They relate the violent actions performed by deluded persecutors, witch hunters for instance, and they believe that the women accused of witchcraft are truly guilty. They include unbelievable features, therefore, presented as solid evidence against the accused, bona fide truth.
In The Scapegoat I have shown that we interpret these medieval texts against their own superstitious and violent spirit, in a manner that closely parallels my interpretation of myth. 1.
In order to understand these texts we must realize that the authors mistake the unbelievable for the truth because they participate in the scapegoating of the victims. The French poet Guillaume de Machaut, for instance, believed that the Jews really contributed to the Black Death epidemic by poisoning the sources of drinking water and committing all sorts of crimes.
Even though these texts take at face value the fantastic material they contain, modern historians do not regard them as necessarily useless from the standpoint of objective information. They understand the reason for the author's credulity. They have no trouble detecting a magical accusation behind the fantastic theme and they realize that, dreadful as its consequences are, the author's blindness does not necessarily extend to all data in his text and does not invalidate the entire account, especially insofar as the other data relate to the violent consequences of scapegoating. If the author reports that the accused have been killed or otherwise punished, there is a good chance that, on this point at least, he is saying the truth.
These texts reflect a mimetic polarization broadly similar to the one I think can also be deduced from the themes and structure of all myths of the type exemplified by our Venda myth.
Let us first find out a little more in detail how our myth responds to the possibility that, like the medieval texts, it might reflect a scapegoat mechanism triggered by a magical accusation.
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1. See chapters 7 and 8 of this Reader. -J.W.
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The longish first part of our myth is initially a little confusing, but as soon as we examine it from the standpoint of a witchcraft accusation, the confusion clears up.
The second wife is presented as the rival of the first. In reality, as her husband's favorite, she has no reason to be jealous or envious of anyone. The first wife, on the contrary, has a good reason to regard the second as a rival. The myth seems to espouse the viewpoint of the first wife in this affair. This is only one of the signs that designate the first wife as the accuser of the second.
To their husbands, second wives are usually more attractive than first wives, at least for a while. First wives have more authority, however, not only in their household, but with the community. They are in a good position to make life difficult for second wives, and even, it seems, to exact a dreadful vengeance for the humiliation of being supplanted by a younger woman. It is for a husband to decide which wife he chooses for the night. Just before the drama, the husband of our two wives, it seems, was spending all his nights with wife number two, and part of his days as well.
Wife number one was incensed. Being in charge during the day, she would try to prevent additional rendezvous between the two lovers. Apparently she was not very successful.
The situation perfectly accounts for the peculiarities of the accusation against the second wife. As a wife, she is just as legitimate as the first and she cannot be indicted simply for being her husband's favorite. Having no special rights to claim, the first wife must concoct a more arcane transgression, and she elaborated the myth of a divine status for her husband, of which she alone is supposed to be informed.
Even this most fantastic aspect of our myth must not be fiction in the sense that our literary critics demand. Their fabrication ex nihilo probably does not exist at all. The mimetic theory suggests an explanation for the divinity of the husband. It must go back to the mimetic rivalry between the wives which, as usual, magnifies the value of the disputed object so much that it seems divine. Imagination and imitation are one and the same thing.
The dreaded secret, we are told, could not be kept away from the second wife for long. She discovered the "truth" about her husband even though or perhaps because her rival was trying very hard to prevent that discovery.
This catastrophic disclosure too must be a mythical reading of the mimetic escalation that any rivalry tends to generate. The obstacles that the two women place in each other's path finally turn the husband into a divinity not only in the eyes of the most frustrated first wife, but in the eyes of the other as well, whose frustration must grow as a result of the first wife's behavior.
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the second wife finally surrenders to the spirit of the rivalry, the spirit of her rival.
Our myth sounds like a malevolent fantasizing of mimetic rivalry, triggered by a husband's preference for a younger wife, the twisted expression of a jealousy that finds the triumph of a rival intolerable.
The first part of our myth seems merely to repeat what the first wife told the elders about the origin of the drought. This means that first these elders and then the whole people
mimetically embraced these mad rantings, thus turning them into the truth of the myth, the sacred dogma of the entire tribe.
The second wife is too insignificant to be regarded as the direct and principal cause of the drought. She belongs in the "sorcerer's apprentice" category. She was too simple and flighty to realize that her pestering of the god -- what her enemy interprets as such -- could harm the whole community. Even a beloved favorite can abuse her privileges and make herself
obnoxious in the eyes of an easily offended divinity.
The first wife showed genius when she linked her rival to the drought. Or is it the
community's obsession that created that link? We cannot tell and it does not matter. All we need to remember is that everywhere in the world, even today, any natural or man-made disaster intensifies the appetite for victims and causes accusations to proliferate. Even in our world, when a crisis breaks out, accusations border on the magical and, regardless of the facts, politicians have to pay the price.
The myth says, of course, that the second wife's alleged indiscretion with her divine husband came first, not the drought. This is obvious nonsense, but in the light of our hypothesis,
highly significant nonsense. The mythical sequence is a scapegoat inspired reversal of cause and effect. The jealousy of the first wife has nothing to do with the drought but the drought provides the ideal terrain for it and it spreads like wildfire.
If our myth first seemed like a heterogeneous collection of themes, this impression is now entirely dissipated, replaced by something so coherent that the reality of the drama reflected in it becomes highly probable. Just as in the case of Machaut, or of medieval witch-hunting, we are led to believe that a real victim must have perished.
All the themes dovetail in such a way as to confirm the scapegoat interpretation of the whole text. What clinches the case is the very theme that made the myth look like inextricable nonsense when we first read it, the snake god. The role of this deity fits too perfectly with the rivalry of the two women, with the killing of the victim and finally with the end of the
drought, not to compel the reasonably attentive reader to perceive the scapegoat reading as the only commonsensical solution to the riddle of this text.
drought, not to compel the reasonably attentive reader to perceive the scapegoat reading as the only commonsensical solution to the riddle of this text.