No theological speculation can blot out this scene. And this scene is not enough to blot out theological speculation, as Girard would like to do. On this, as often happens for the ultimate things, almost everything is said in a story by Chuang-tzu: “The priest of the sacrifice approached the fence in his ceremonial dress and spoke to the pigs as follows: ‘Why do you detest being taken to your death? I will fatten you up for three months; as for me, for ten days I will mortify myself and for three days I will fast.³⁰¹ Then white grass mats will be rolled out for you and your limbs will be laid on carved trays. What more do you want?’ Then he thought what the pigs would have preferred and he said: ‘They prefer to be fed on husks and bran and to remain in their sty.’ ”

Girard traces back, as far as its origins, the delirium that Western man first unleashes and then, with a credulous shudder, takes as being true: the autonomy of society, its claim to relate only to itself, to express everything in relation to itself—and therefore also to consider the victims sacrificed to the stars as mere sops for the stability of the group. For Girard, it is as though the sun, the moon, fire, plague, and wind existed only as a way of covering up some kind of social tension. This odd claim is the same as in Marx, who suggested that the water from the waterfall “has no value” since it is not produced by labor.³⁰² That assumption, that nothing existed before being put into place by the whim of thought, is the awkward, imperious Setzen of the mind. Happily, the world is not like this. And Girard carries out a violent extrapolation to get to the heart of the violence: its victim is silent nonhuman reality. But there is a sense, however, in which the world was like this: the sense in which that claim about society’s sovereign isolation, which would not be declared for several thousand years, appears to have existed, in latent form, from the very beginning. Girard assumes that in the beginning there was not death, but a murder—and more precisely, a lynching. But, before the lynching, there is hunger: “for hunger is death.”³⁰³ Death and murder are joined together in hunger. The impossibility of survival without eating, therefore without killing—since even cutting down a plant means killing—is the sentence delivered by Zeus in response to Prometheus’s sacrificial deceit: the gods, having been tricked, will have only the “white bones” and the smoke from the meat, while the humans, in choosing the succulent meat, will inherit hunger, and therefore death.³⁰⁴ This primordial event is the foundation of sacrifice, the inescapable ṛta. In offering the sacrifice, we accept—though behind the trick of substitution, which keeps us temporarily alive—that one day we will be devoured, if not by humans then by those gods who are the invisible guests at the banquet: “killing always means killed oneself.”³⁰⁵ This perfect superimposition of sacrifice onto a cosmic physiology is seen by Girard as a mere deceit, for he is not prepared to turn his attention away from social physiology for a single moment—and therefore he does not perceive the power of social physiology as so overwhelming, above all because it gradually appropriates the cosmic physiology until it entirely absorbs it within itself. But Girard’s passionate bias is most valuable: it reminds us that, from the beginning, sacrifice has also helped society to cast off the sacred, which would otherwise have paralyzed it. Following this single thread, we move smoothly from prehistory to today—and this might give the false impression that the key to the enigma, the missing building block, has been found. In fact, this only explains the sacrificial stratagem, the small shiny stone set in the throat of the t’ao t’ieh, the composite beast of the origins. From there, in a logical sequence, we head toward that day when it was thought that the danger of the sacred was no longer so deadly. There was a time when the consul Paulus Aemilius, with transparent Roman cynicism, stated that sacrifice was no longer needed to increase the fortunes of the Republic. It was now enough for these fortunes to remain unchanged, just as they were. The Romans themselves would take care to increase them. After this, all that remained was to forget the sacrifice. Everything, with time, becomes superstition—and thus, as Baudelaire wrote, “the depository of all truths.”³⁰⁶