In a totally secular society, such as France at the end of the nineteenth century, with its pompous instituteurs of free thinking, eager to demolish Gothic chapels and establish secular morality, the insight of Émile Durkheim was inevitable: that the religious is the social. No one before him, or in any other place, could have formulated with that peremptory sternness, with that École Normale zest, an axiom that implies the total reabsorption of the cloud of divinity into the Great Animal of Plato and Simone Weil. Durkheim came from a family of rabbis—he is a dry Jew, who never went back into the water after the crossing of the Red Sea. The sea, for him, does not exist—society has absorbed it. On the other hand, the brightest anthropologists of his school, Marcel Mauss and Marcel Granet, were wonderfully damp. The “total social facts” they described, sometimes with visionary precision, were the first proper portrayals of ancient societies as places in which cosmic exchanges took place. “Alors que tout est en nuances …,” “Everything being a question of nuances …,” was the secret motto of Mauss—and of Granet. While J. G. Frazer, in another cabinet on the other side of the English Channel, was clothing human origins with a grand series of “ready-made suits” (Dumézil), Mauss was weighing every detail of the etiquette of people he would never see with the same obsessive and insatiable eye that Saint-Simon had for court etiquette.

The conclusions eventually reached by Mauss and Granet go contrary to those put forward by Durkheim. But Durkheim’s axiom—“the religious is the social”—is one of those false principles that reveal a looming truth. Only another kind of genius, that of René Girard, would succeed in pushing the analysis as far as the savage end that Durkheim had not foreseen in his axiom. Girard is one of the last surviving “hedgehogs,” to use the term that Isaiah Berlin had subtly drawn from the verse of Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” The “one big thing” that Girard knows has a name: scapegoat. For Girard, all theological speculations about sacrifice, that whole part of the sacrificial conundrum that does not lead straight to the scapegoat, are priestly attempts to hide the terrible truth. Thus he accepts, though with heroic intelligence, the West’s meanest game—that of “demystifying,” “demythifying,” “demasking,” before being initiated into the mystery of the mask. But if his sarcasm and his fury do no harm to the Vedic sages, they reach modern anthropologists with appropriate vehemence. It is not the Vedas that are unmasked here, but the euphemistic corporate circumlocutions used by science to cover up continual murder, perpetual bloodshed. Anthropologists have become devoted to social functionality and seem more and more to display a prudery akin to those Victorians who did all they could to avoid any reference to feet and legs. Girard repeatedly hurls at them “Molière’s immortal words: ‘Ah! in what gallant terms these things are put.’ ”²⁹⁵