Tomb Culture

Tomb Culture June 23, 2016

In an essay on “The Evangelical Subversion of Myth,” René Girard examines Matthew 23:27, Jesus’s comparison of the Pharisees to whited sepulchers, and Jesus’s condemnation of the Pharisees who are sons of those who kill the prophets. On the last passage, Girard cleverly observes that the Pharisees’ effort to distance themselves from their prophet-murdering forefathers ends up re-enacting the same violence: “in order to demonstrate their noninvolvement in violence, their own intrinsic innocence, the sons condemn the fathers; the original murders had been committed with a similar intent. The murderers murdered their victims . . . in order not to perceive their own violence; this is the real significance of the scapegoat effect, which projects the violence of the community onto the victim. The sons, therefore, do exactly the same things as their fathers; they condemn them as murderers in order to achieve the same purpose as the murderers themselves, in order to obfuscate their own violence. The condemnation constitutes an act of violence that repeats and reproduces every feature of the physical murder, except for the physical death of a victim” (31-32).

Girard begins his treatment of the “whited sepulcher” passage by noting that “a tomb has two purposes,” one to honor the person and the other to “dispose of a corpse, to hide it from the survivors, to make the ugly and dangerous reality of corruption and death invisible and inaccessibly.” In this, the tomb stands in for “the entire process of human culture in its relation to the original victim. The inside and the outside of the tomb recall and reproduce the dual nature of the primitive sacra, the conjunction in them of violence and peace, of death and life, of disorder and order.” He doesn’t think this “homology” is accidental: “With the exception of tools, the most ancient traces of human culture are tombs, and tombs may well be the original monuments of humanity” (39).

Burial isn’t simply a practical necessity. It has to do with the collective victim, “already regarded with a prereligious mixture of terror and veneration.” Burial or entombment was a method of concealing the original victim: “The idea of the tomb does not come from the sacred; it may well be the first and essential manifestation of the sacred. The practice of religious burial suggests that there never was such a thing as natural death for early humans; all people who died were automatically assimilated to the sacralized victim.” Thus, Girard claims, “burial rites, all over the world, like all other rites, invariably amount to a reenactment of the mimetic crisis and scapegoat reconciliation. They include death and disintegration . . . but they end up with renewal.” Death came to have this sacred power “through the misunderstood scapegoat mechanism.” Religious burial occurs early because “religion is the mythological face of the misunderstood scapegoat mechanism” (40).

Thus the tomb is also the beginning of symbolization, of the displacement of the scapegoat into “the first symbolic monument of human culture.” The tomb, he says, isn’t metaphorical, but “the first symbolic metamorphosis of victimage” (40).


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