She walks with him as a stranger, and at first she puts him to the test; fear and dread she brings upon him and tries him with her discipline . . . Then she comes back to bring him happiness and reveal her secrets to him.
(On Wisdom, Sirach 4)
Most human cultures have been known to deploy myths of sacrifice to scapegoat strangers. Holding certain aliens responsible for the ills of society, the scapegoaters proceed to isolate or eliminate them. This sacrificial strategy furnishes communities with a binding identity, that is, with the basic sense of who is included (us) and who is excluded (them). So the price to be paid for the construction of the happy tribe is often the ostracizing of some outsider: the immolation of the âotherâ on the altar of the âalienâ.
This scapegoating practice is evidenced in many different cultures, but I will focus my remarks here on the Western treatment of this phenomenon. More specifically, I will trace the genealogy of sacrificial purgation from ancient mythic and religious narratives up to recent controversies surrounding the whole practice of scapegoating. I will conclude by suggesting how the theme of the ritual scapegoat continues to preoccupy the contemporary cultural imaginary in such films as Apocalypse Now and the Alien series.
Genealogy of the scapegoat
Cultic practices of scapegoating are common in early Greco-Roman society. One thinks of Prometheus bound to his sacrificial rock, Dionysius dismembered by the Maeneds, Iphigenia exposed to the sword, Remus cut down by Romulus. By contrast, the whole notion of sacrifice was to assume highly problematic proportions in Judaeo-Christian thinking.
A formative text here is Leviticus 16. Entitled âThe great day of expiationâ, it describes an annual rite of purification by means of which the chosen people of God cleanse themselves through the expulsion of a âscapegoatâ, thereby setting themselves off from what is unholy. The passage most relevant for our purposes records a series of procedures revealed by Yahweh to Moses. Though a number of animals are involved in the sacrificial rite â lambs, bulls and goats â it is the last of these which particularly concern us. With a view to expiating his community of all sin, the sacrificial priest (in this instance, Mosesâ brother, Aaron) adorned himself in consecrated linen tunic before taking âtwo he-goats for a sacrifice for sinâ (Lev. 16, 5). Drawing lots, the priest then marked off one of the goats for Yahweh (the Holy one) and the other for Azazel (the Unholy one). The former he slaughtered, scattering its blood inside the curtain of the sanctuary as a ârite of expiation for the sanctuary for the uncleanness of the Israelitesâ (Lev. 16, 16). And before the altar of Yahweh he performed an act of similar expiation using the blood and horns of the goat: âHe will take some of . . . the goatâs blood and put it on the horns at the corners of the altar all around it . . . thus purifying it and setting it apartâ (Lev. 16, 19).
The ritual bloodletting of the first goat completed, the second sacrificial goat comes into play: the scapegoat proper. Here is the decisive account for our inquiry:
Aaron will then lay both his hands on the head (of the scapegoat) and over it confess all the guilt of the Israelites, all their acts of rebellion and all their sins. Having thus laid them on the goatâs head, he will send it out into the desert . . . and the goat will bear all their guilt away into some desolate place.
(Lev. 16, 20â2)
In this wise, the demarcation of pure from impure is realized; and it only remains for the sacrificial priest to return to the sanctuary, now purified, and engage in ritual ablutions, before going out again to his people and performing the final rite of burning the âfat of the sacrifice for sin on the altarâ (Lev. 16, 23). The text ends with the injunction from the Holy One himself, Yahweh, that this ârite of expiation will be performed for you to purify youâ on the tenth day of the seventh month of every year, an annual holy day of sabbatical prayer, fasting and purgation (Lev. 16, 30).
The message could not be clearer. The people of God remain holy by casting from their midst what is unholy, thus propitiating the Lord and removing all traces of evil from their community. By means of such purging they become one Holy Nation in the service of the Lord. Several things emerge from this passage. First, the goat is the animal figure which stands â and stands in â for evil. This association is not, of course, particular to Leviticus: it recurs throughout the Bible up to the sin-laden goats who serve as proverbial counterparts of sinless lambs in the New Testament, to the horned and bearded devils of medieval religious art (especially scenes of the Last Judgement, as we shall see below). In this sense, Leviticus could be said to mark the sublimation of human sacrifice into animal sacrifice â the human scapegoat of ancient pagan sacrifice, being replaced by a vicarious non-human one. Lambs too were sacrificial beasts, of course, in the Bible; but the unique role of the scapegoat is that it is invested with the internal malice of the community and then expelled into the wilderness, eradicating all peril of contagion.
The tradition of sacrificing animals as surrogates for humans runs from the story of Abraham and Isaac to the charged symbolism of Isaiah and the Crucifixion accounts. These recurring scenes are interpreted by some as signalling a progressive movement beyond the primitive rites of scapegoating. This reading of biblical and Christian revelation as a deeply anti-sacrificial and anti-scapegoating religion is one offered by contemporary commentators like Bultmann, Moltmann and Girard. And it is certainly the case that the Judaeo-Christian sublation of human into animal sacrifice means that one does not witness the same Dionysiac rites of human bloodletting in the biblical tradition that one finds, for example, in the myths of ancient Greek tragedy, where (as Nietzsche amongst others has shown) all too human figures like Dionysius, Pentheus and Oedipus bear the brunt of sacrificial purgation. In sum, this reading â to which we shall return below â argues that Judaeo-Christian revelation signals an ethical step beyond the old pagan rites of human blood sacrifice which sought to fuse with the immanent universe and propitiate mercurial gods.1
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But the matter is not so simple. Even if it is true that the biblical tradition transferred the scapegoating mechanism from humans to animals, this did not, I submit, prevent repeated reversals throughout history. Time after time, one witnesses the role of scapegoats reverting to human figures known variously as Canaanites, Gentiles, Jews, heretics, witches, infidels and â after the discovery of new continents by colonial empires â unregenerate âsavagesâ.2 This should hardly surprise us when we consider the way in which the sacrificial rites of expiation, powerfully laid down in Leviticus as âPerpetual Lawâ (Lev. 16: 29, 31), were later to find their way into the dramatic imaginary of Western religious culture. One thinks of the iconographic proliferation of demons and devils in medieval frescoes, murals, mosaics, paintings, illuminated manuscripts or liturgical furnishings. Here saints are tempted by satanic strangers. Holy prophets and priests are tortured by fiendish monsters. The unredeemed are ushered to their hellish fate by hirsute demoniacs going by such names as Lucifer, Beelzebub and Legion. Even the Messiah Himself is confronted by the Devil Himself. And in all these scenes, the demon figures are almost invariably attributed goatish characteristics (horns, thick hair, beard, snout, hooves).
Such inhuman features cannot, for all that, mask the fact that the demons are also at least half-human in appearance. The Florence Baptistery scene of the Last Judgment is a case in point. The octagonal mosaic, dating from 1260, is dominated by the struggle between the Christ the Pantocrator and a most unholy Lucifer who possesses the features of both a human being and a goat with serpents protruding from his goat-ears and buttocks. This dramatic portrayal of demonic monsters constitutes a veritable corpus maleficorum of late medieval iconography. Straddling a pool of fire, this Prince of Darkness reenacts the apocalyptic scene of lambs being separated from goats as hideous throngs of subdemons torture nearby sinners.
Giottoâs thirteenth-century mosiac in Florence, and many other depictions of devils which followed it in Pisa, Padua and San Gimignano, are even less indirect in their allusions to humans. They cover a wide variety of âundesirablesâ considered damned under the Holy Roman Empire: heretics (Arius and the Simoniacs); infidels (Mahomet and Averroes); sodomites (skewered by furry goatish devils); transsexuals (in the Pisa and San Gimignano portraits of hell Lucifer is depicted with both the horns, beard and hairy chest of a goat-man and a vagina expelling hideous offspring); seducers (phallic-horned he-goats); temptresses (usually serpentine bodies with the face of Eve, as in Ucelloâs Original Sin in the Convent of Santa Maria Novella in Florence); and Jews (portrayed as membranous goat-bat fiends âwho hate daylight and love shadowsâ).3 As Lorenzo Lorenzi puts it in his study of demons in religious art: âGoatsâ horns in Christian symbolism represent the iniquitous sin that is transformed into impotenceâ (Psalm 75; Revelation 12: 3).4 But in addition to representing the homo selvaticus, enslaved to lascivious and bestial instincts, this symbolism also served as iconographic material for anti-Semitic scapegoating. Writing of the portrait of Limbo by Andrea Bonaiuto in the Spanish Chapel in Florence (1366â8), Lorenzi observes
All the devils have animalsâ faces and brutish expressions, reflecting their evil natures and their eternal separation from Paradise, the place of all loveliness. Their hairy pelts, beards and goatish horns represent the principal attributes of that animal â the goat â which because of its complaining was perceived as being far from divine grace, unlike the lamb who patiently accepted the terrible sacrifice; the devil-goat therefore represents the Jewish people, who rejected the Messiah.5
The fact that the most horrific demon in the tableau is painted yellow â the colour of Jews â compounds the association.
In most of these images the diabolic creatures conjoin features of the human head and face with bestial or reptilian characteristics. In her Introduction to Devils in Art, Maria Dal Pogetto claims that each of such portraits can be read as a microcosm of the collective unconscious, combining a whole set of religious and cultural mutations. Foremost among these were the three traditional images of the scapegoat in (1) Leviticus (outlined above), (2) the serpent of the Fall of Adam and Eve, and (3) Satan (from the Hebrew he-satan, meaning the âenemyâ or âaccuserâ, one who brings disunity, conflict and temptation). In the Old Testament, the Satanic figure could even play the role of prosecutor in the heavenly court, citing charges against individuals and tempting God himself â as in the Book of Job. In Christian tradition, Satan was reinterpreted in terms of the snake in the Garden of Eden and the terrifying beasts of the Apocalypse. The devil was thus partially âbestializedâ at the same time as he became more âpersonalizedâ in the form of whatever particular heretic or dissenter threatened the unity of Christendom at the time.
In this manner, the demonic was located within the heretical movements of Christendom as well as in the diabolical infidel without (e.g. during the Crusades).
In the Christian tradition, he-Satan, the adversary, is no longer a common noun but becomes the personal name of that being who seeks by every means to damage mankind, impede salvation, and transfer to the spirit world the corruption already present in the body. The assaults of the Devil in the early centuries of the Church led to . . . persecutions, to the rise of Gnosticism (which posited a devil who had created matter and was coeternal with the Good and in constant conflict with it), and to the great Trinitarian and Christological heresies.6
Augustine tried to resolve these heretical controversies by declaring that whatever is has been created by God and is therefore good, which means that the demonic is logically consigned to the non-being of evil. But devils did not always conform to Augustinian ontology. More often than not, the demonic would continue to blur such boundaries until what is became contaminated with what-is-not.
The monsters that adorn the tableaux of late medieval and Renaissance art may thus be seen as carrying this double status of the demonic as insider and outsider, a hybrid creature at once animal and anthropological, a fiend fallen into the deepest abyss of hell yet capable of holding forth in the Heavenly Tribunals of the Most High. Indeed the idea of the demon as adversarial mirror-image of God is succinctly captured in Danteâs portrait of the Devilâs head with three faces (Divine Comedy, Canto 34): a startling image intended as an antithetical parody of the triune God (Inferno III). It is also present in the juxtaposing of the evil monster, Rahab, and the divine Lion of Judah, on the sacristy lavabo of the Church of San Lorenzo in Florence, the font where the priest washed his hands of impurities befor...