I<\/span>n an essay on \u201cThe Evangelical Subversion of Myth,\u201d Ren\u00e9 Girard examines Matthew 23:27, Jesus\u2019s comparison of the Pharisees to whited sepulchers, and Jesus\u2019s condemnation of the Pharisees who are sons of those who kill the prophets. On the last passage, Girard cleverly observes that the Pharisees\u2019 effort to distance themselves from their prophet-murdering forefathers ends up re-enacting the same violence: \u201cin 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\u201d (31-32).<\/p>\n Girard begins his treatment of the \u201cwhited sepulcher\u201d passage by noting that \u201ca tomb has two purposes,\u201d one to honor the person and the other to \u201cdispose of a corpse, to hide it from the survivors, to make the ugly and dangerous reality of corruption and death invisible and inaccessibly.\u201d In this, the tomb stands in for \u201cthe 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<\/em>, the conjunction in them of violence and peace, of death and life, of disorder and order.\u201d He doesn\u2019t think this \u201chomology\u201d is accidental: \u201cWith the exception of tools, the most ancient traces of human culture are tombs, and tombs may well be the original monuments of humanity\u201d (39).<\/p>\n Burial isn\u2019t simply a practical necessity. It has to do with the collective victim, \u201calready regarded with a prereligious mixture of terror and veneration.\u201d Burial or entombment was a method of concealing the original victim: \u201cThe 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.\u201d Thus, Girard claims, \u201cburial 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.\u201d Death came to have this sacred power \u201cthrough the misunderstood scapegoat mechanism.\u201d Religious burial occurs early because \u201creligion is the mythological face of the misunderstood scapegoat mechanism\u201d (40).<\/p>\n Thus the tomb is also the beginning of symbolization, of the displacement of the scapegoat into \u201cthe first symbolic monument of human culture.\u201d The tomb, he says, isn\u2019t metaphorical, but \u201cthe first symbolic metamorphosis of victimage\u201d (40).<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In an essay on \u201cThe Evangelical Subversion of Myth,\u201d Ren\u00e9 Girard examines Matthew 23:27, Jesus\u2019s comparison of the Pharisees to whited sepulchers, and Jesus\u2019s condemnation of the Pharisees who are sons of those who kill the prophets. On the last passage, Girard cleverly observes that the Pharisees\u2019 effort to distance themselves from their prophet-murdering forefathers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1596,1388],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-burial","category-rene-girard"],"yoast_head":"\n