The text below is an old draft of an excerpt from the book Catharses.

Today, the term scapegoat simply means an innocent victim. If we are asked to consider how a scapegoat thinks or feels, we are going to bring up their sense of indignation and injustice. However, the term scapegoat comes from an ancient Hebrew ritual of unloading the sins of the community onto an actual goat and then casting the goat into the wilderness to perish. If we go back to the dawn of civilization, the role of the goat was played by an actual human being. A community ridden with internal discord would channel all blame and aggression onto a single victim and collectively execute him. The act would restore peace. The victim became viewed as a conduit to the divine power that mysteriously brought discord and restored peace. Over time, the victim was kept alive for extended and then indefinite periods. Ultimately, this atoning sacrificial role evolved into the role of a living intermediary between the community and the divine. Sacrificial victims became kings.

“A king’s heart is unsearchable,” the Bible tells us. How about the hearts of designated sacrificial victims, the original kings? Despite the Bible’s claim, let us try to imagine what went on in the mind of a designated sacrificial victim as he lived his life in an archaic village, sanctified to God as an offering that will restore peace and blessings in case of a crisis. We may not get to the bottom of his heart, but we may be able to arrive at some tangential insights about it.

The key difference between the position of the victim and that of everyone else was that the victim was placed outside the endless rivalries spreading throughout the community. This was the direct consequence of the victim’s irrevocably sealed fate: he was to die soon. Whatever he would covet and contend with others, he was bound to lose it anyways. Whatever privileged status there was to hold, he was not going to hold it for much time. 

Yet his status was the most special, the most sacred status within the archaic community. Freedom from rivals and desires ought to have given the designated victim tremendous mental clarity. He had “shuffled off his mortal coil” before actually dying. Reached what Nietzsche called a state “beyond good and evil,” if you like.

Previously, we explored in detail René Girard’s postulate that kings originated as designated victims of human sacrifice whose execution had been delayed. Here we will argue that this also was the origin of creativity. If René Girard is right, and if mimetic conflict is the chief limitation of human potential, then it follows that the sacrificial victim in his unique position outside of mimetic conflict would be freed from this limitation. He may achieve a level of clairvoyance that would make him appear divine to those looking at him from the gutter of mimetic struggle, and thereby reinforce their belief that sacrifice is related to the divine. The designated sacrificial victim’s unique insights would make him a powerful creative force. To use one of the modern era’s most emotionally charged terms, he would be ideally positioned for genius. 

In their most fundamental roles, kings fulfilled two functions: they were judges, and they were military leaders. It is not difficult to see why merely becoming a king would make one a suitable judge. As a king, one has no rivals and thus has no incentive to take sides among any two parties of a lawsuit. As a military leader, the king, being above all rivalries, can command equal obedience from all members of a society and thus unite them in a struggle against an enemy. Thus, the genial capabilities of leaders may not stem merely from intrinsic talents, but also from their neutral positions. And beyond that, could it also be that, to the degree that a leader’s neutral position frees his mind of mimetic conflict, that it also unlocks his creative powers?

World religions almost without exception involve placing sages, prophets, monks, virgins, soothsayers, or shamans outside of mimetic struggle. To achieve a higher spiritual state, one has to become dead to the world, in the manner of a designated human sacrifice. To escape mimetic strife, these sublimated victims would go into physical isolation or commit to chastity. In all cases there was the idea of renouncing mimetic struggle with others to become free of desire and thereby focus one’s mind on higher truths. Buddhism is very explicit in denunciation of desire itself as a prerequisite for achieving nirvana, but it is far from being the sole religion or philosophy to preach renunciation of desire.

If we consider that the first sacrificial victim was the first person to experience the state outside of mimetic struggle, inadvertently though it may be, it follows that the sacrificial role was the origin of clairvoyance. Afterwards, all social roles that derive from the sacrificial role seek to imitate its death to the world as a means of entering an elevated spiritual state. Ancient prophets and oracles of all cultures, whether they were of Egyptian, Greek, Hebrew, or of any other, sought insight not from individuals but from divinity through individuals designated for communicating with the divine. Such individuals were invariably isolated from society and sanctified to gods, a position that betrays similarity to the origin of all sanctification - the archaic individual executed by his community to purge it of violence.

Similar to oracles receiving advice from gods, poets and philosophers of Classical Greece were said to receive their inspiration from Muses, who were goddesses. Here, the modern rationalist would dismiss the idea of Muses as yet another fanciful coverup of a phenomenon that the ancients didn’t understand. Yet, what if they understood it quite well? What if the story of the Muses bequeathing literary and artistic talents on humans was a recognition that genius originates from a sacrificial devotion of an individual to a god?

With Socrates, philosophy obtained a concrete, historical sacrificial victim. Socrates’ rationalistic new preaching, perhaps unique in all of the world at the time, was disruptive to the social ordering of his society. Socrates was the culmination of a spiritual force, later called Philosophy in the narrow sense (with a capital “P”), that had been debunking old deities and destroying old peace. Executed for destroying the old order, Socrates became the foundational victim of the new order of philosophers, who took Plato’s writings as their scripture, and who from the time of Socrates to the rise of Christianity represented what was essentially the national religion of the Greeks.

There is not a single archaic nor ancient myth that explains inventions and advances of humankind as anything other than creations of gods that were either gifted, though usually stolen, from them and passed down to mankind. These myths can be aligned with mimetic theory along several axes. For one, in order for humans to innovate, they must be at peace and cooperate. But all peace originates in the scapegoating mechanism, in which discord is blamed on one victim who in his death becomes a mysterious and divine bringer of peace. Thus, peace and resulting development are seen as gifts of gods. On another level, the actual person who created an invention, for example, perhaps the person who organized the first irrigation of fields, may have been an archaic king, who was sanctified as a sacrifice for the communal god and who was thereby identified with that god. As such, he could command collective obedience required for technological or any other “progress.” Peace-bringing divinity brings the harmony and serenity that leads to technological innovation.

Furthermore, the idea of stealing inventions from gods rather than receiving them as gracious gifts aligns with the morally ambivalent nature of sacrifice, as described by Girard in his book Violence and the Sacred. The ritual of sacrifice or sanctification was always violent, whether the sacred king himself ended up killed, or whether other humans or animals were, in later times, murdered in his place. The society would carry a sense of trespass on account of the bloodshed involved in the sacrificial process that produced progress. This sense of trespass was dissimulated in myth as theft.  

Some of the famous examples of sacrifice as unlocking a higher state, and even salvation, are to be found in the Bible. Abraham leaves his civilized home of Ur feeling that something is amiss. His society is the most developed in the world, but he has no faith in the religion of his ancestors and thinks that true divinity must be something different. Yet, he cannot quite understand nor articulate his notion. He has not seen the Promised Land yet. Nevertheless, he has faith. To receive the blessings of God, Abraham is asked to sacrifice his son Isaac. When God cancels the sacrifice and lets Isaac live, Isaac becomes a living human sacrifice, and in this state he and his descendants through him can receive divine revelation. 

The Christian Bible culminates in God himself becoming sacrifice. In the crucifixion of Jesus, there is an odd return to the archaic idea that the sacrificial victim is God, combined with a henceforth rejection of all other scapegoating mechanisms. There is the redemption of all victims. 

Saint Paul, in his Epistle to Romans, explicitly connects the state of being a living sacrifice with a higher state of mind:

 I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect. (Romans 12:1-2)

Regardless of one’s religious beliefs, in these biblical expositions, one can see great examples of a higher state being linked to the status of the sacrificial victim.

Though in modern times the explicit connection between sacrifice and genius has been lost, traces of it remain in the language we use. To be dedicated or devoted to a subject today means to work hard at it. Yet the origin of both of those terms is entirely religious: they mean to submit something as a sacrifice to a god. The word “genius” itself is a Latin term that originally signified a personal god who bestows on men productive power and acted as a type of guardian angel. Romans depicted these spirits as young men offering sacrifice, and they prayed to them.

It was only with the birth of the modern age that the allusion to gods faded and the concept of genius became entirely individualistic. Nevertheless, there remained renowned geniuses even in the modern era who were not only believers, but who believed specifically that their creative inspiration came from God. To give one famous example, Gauss, by many considered the greatest mathematician of all time, wrote the following explanation of how he finally solved a difficult problem: “Finally, two days ago, I succeeded—not on account of my hard efforts, but by the grace of the Lord.” His student, Bernhard Riemann, was no less explicitly devout.

René Girard in his essay The First Stone compares the Biblical story of Jesus preventing a stoning of an adulterous woman to a second-century account of a stoning of a pharmakos in the city of Ephesus among pagan Greeks. Pharmakos was a person, often an outsider such as a beggar, slave, criminal, or a sick or disabled individual, whom it was a custom to execute collectively by stoning or throwing off a cliff, or sometimes simply expelling from the city, in times of plague or trouble. The term pharmakos is cognate with pharmacy, and it carries the connotation of both a cure and a poison that restores health through its expulsion or catharsis. 

In the story, Greek writer Philostratus recounts how a famous spiritual leader of the day, Apollonius of Tyana, cured a plague in the city by identifying a beggar as the demon in disguise that has brought the plague and incites the crowd to stone him to death. At first, the beggar appears to be blind. When Apollonius points to the beggar as an “enemy of the gods” and begins enticing the crowd to stone him, the beggar begs for mercy. When the crowd begins to stone him,

“… the beggar who had seemed to blink and be blind, gave them all a sudden glance and showed that his eyes were full of fire. Then the Ephesians recognized that he was a Daimon, and they stoned him so thoroughly that their stones were heaped into a great cairn around him.”

Girard interprets this text masterfully as a powerful example of the scapegoating mechanism. There is an interesting detail in how, upon becoming resigned to his fate, the beggar’s eyes were “full of fire”. Girard interprets this as terror. Yet, to the crowd, the fire is suggestive of a supernatural, demonic force. It may be that Philostratus, who was a renowned writer, was pointing out something more subtle and something more significant. The condemned man, facing certain death and finally shedding off this mortal mimetic struggle, is awakened to some higher state of consciousness, from which he perceives the blindness and violence that underpin human affairs. The mob, which fancies itself as uncovering the true nature of the devil before stoning him, has in fact itself been uncovered by the victim at the moment right before his death.

There are countless examples in modern times of individuals who claim that their brush with death was the event that transformed their lives and inspired them to whatever great achievement made them famous. Dostoyevsky is perhaps the most famous example among great novelists. He was sentenced to execution by firing squad and pardoned at the last moment. Throughout the rest of his life, he identified his experience as transformational. Countless celebrities survived horrible car crashes or violent attacks and then harnessed that experience in their work. Many times, people are driven by a death in the family, and that death becomes a type of sacrificial victim whom they decide to honour in their own life. Others are not transformed by death, but by the related experience of abandonment. Here too, there is a displacement from the community and therefore a displacement from mimetic struggle, and the person is made into a type of sacrificial victim who sees the world from the outside, and who is thereby able to perceive things others cannot.

At the center of modern myth is the idea that man is autonomous. His most fundamental nature, thoughts and desires stem from his authentic self. The influences one person has on another tend to be negative and involve deception or exploitation. Thus, the modern social system looks to create a social contract that seeks to minimize one person’s intrusion on another’s life, and thereby maximize everyone’s freedom. Such a world view cannot view genius as anything but an emanation from a person’s innate self, a motor acting upon the object that is society.

Yet what we are arguing is that genius is structural: it arises from a person’s unique position in society. What does that mean? One obviously structural state is that of being rich. One is considered rich only if one has much more money than most of the people surrounding him. Moreover, the state of being rich puts the person in a social center; in his great command of wealth, the rich man becomes an employer, a leader, and a commander of economic activity. 

The archaic sacrificial victim plays a central role within a community. Fear, wrath, envy and desire of the community are channelled onto him. If he can tame those forces and live, the sacrificial victim appears to the community as a divine peacemaker and solver of puzzles. Think Oedipus solving the riddle of the Sphinx, or St. George slaying the dragon. In more modern times, creative genius may be an evolution of the primeval sacrificial role. He too is placed in the center of a problem. He absorbs the questions of the community and produces a solution. The solution is not an imitation of anyone within the community, but appears to come from outside, from the divine. Creative output constitutes a communication between the community and the divine through the person of genius. The gifts of genius are divine gifts not to isolated individuals, but to a community for whom the gifts fulfill practical and spiritual needs.

The modern controversy around the nature of the human intelligence quotient, the IQ, has tended to settle on a compromise that it is about half nature and half nurture. In arguing that genius is structural we do not need to take sides in the IQ debate. Whether the raw intellectual ability as measured by IQ is inherited or acquired, it will not lead to socially significant productivity of the person unless the person is placed in a sacrificial role. If they are not in that role, then no matter the mechanical properties of their brain, they are just another citizen locked in the general mimetic struggle in which they admire, imitate, envy, and ultimately resent their fellows. The kid with the high IQ but no perceived sacrificial role will be bullied in high school. Indeed, the act of bullying itself may be the act of ostracizing (casting out) that ultimately produces a sacrificial scapegoat. When someone is called a genius but not perceived to be in a sacrificial role, we can often detect undertones of resentment in the compliment.

Due to the individualistic spirit of modern times, there’s an increasing belief that genius can be disconnected from sacrifice. One interesting example of the disconnect seems to be modern high-IQ societies. These are an odd type of communities of pharmakoi who, feeling cast out of the general society, find each other and establish a community of their own. Yet, if genius is a social role mediating between the community and the divine, then a society of geniuses, much like a society of rich people, is a contradiction in terms. A proper genius takes on the burdens of society and, thanks to his access to a specialized deity, gifts them a solution. Without social burdens to carry for the others, geniuses in the Mensa society are left to inane pursuits of solving crossword puzzles and playing chess, and to generating their own internal mimetic conflicts that themselves will require a genius to solve. 

The modern romantic myth likes to imagine genius as a hero who dwells alone somewhere on high. He conceives salvific ideas in solitude and then out of sheer altruism descends into the community to gift them. It is easy to argue against this notion when it comes to political leaders or trendsetters because it is obvious that mastery of such geniuses derives from them keeping a close relationship with the crowd. But I believe that any type of creativity involves a powerful connection to a community, even the purest forms of scientific discovery. 

There is a popular misconception that modern scientific geniuses were isolated oddballs who crashed like comets into the scientific community and “disrupted” it. A close reading of the biography of such individuals, such as Newton or Einstein, does bear witness to a certain isolation. However, this isolation is neither arbitrary nor absolute; it is the isolation of the sacrificial victim. He steps out of the circle of the community, but only to end up in its center. In this position, he absorbs all ideas and aggregates them into a breakthrough. Breakthroughs of all thinkers, including those of René Girard, always have a feel of a great synthesis of many existing ideas. Geniuses step outside the mimetic conflict, but they remain powerful mirrors of the community’s spirit.

When evaluating how unique was his contribution to science, Isaac Newton famously replied: “If I had seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.”  Einstein, who was reputed for his absent-mindedness, believed that exchange of ideas is essential to discovery (can’t find the quote on the internet; it’s buried somewhere deep under a vast mountain of the more romantic Einstein quotes). Einstein started his career in a Swiss patent office where, before embarking on his own ideas, he spent his days absorbing the ideas of others.

In modern times, a genius does not assume his sacrificial role through an actual ritual involving prayers or slaughter of animals, of course. The anointing of the victim takes a much more dissimulated form. A child may be persuaded or convinced of a calling to take on a burden of some community from an early age, and mentally prepared for that role by his parents or teachers. If, growing up, his talents prove him equal to the task, he would drift towards a social position, perhaps a public office or a profession, in which he takes upon himself to solve the community’s grand riddle and become its prophet. The community may be a scientific or an artistic community; it may be a militant or a political one. 

The process of anointing of a genius happens before the recognition of his achievement. When genius first announces himself, the community reacts aggressively. It slings ridicule and shame at the individual in a manner parallel to acts of humiliation involved in archaic scapegoating rituals. Here, I can’t help but thinking of Joseph telling his grandiose dreams to his brothers, who end up selling him into slaver. Once the individual passes that ordeal, if he does pass it, he is crowned and treated with honour. He becomes commissioned as the genius of the community, as ancient Romans would understand genius as a spirit associated with a home, a clan, or a mountain.

If the community is not there, then what is a genius? What do we call a person with grand ideas of which no one has any use? He is a lost spirit living in a void, detached from any particular location or community. They say that the line between a genius and a madman is thin. Well, here is the line: it is the line separating community and the outer darkness.

Genius is therefore created through the community looking up to him. Also, the community draws on genius, at least until the point in time when the genius can no longer resolve the community’s ontological problems. At that point, it is time to finally carry out the sacrificial act. The genius of yesterday becomes the oppressive authority of today, and needs to be torn down - or if you are a Bacchanalian, to be torn apart and feasted upon. 

Now that we have established the sacrificial psyche of genius, it would be interesting to also explore the psyche of the devotee. We can discuss the nature of external mediation of genius and the peace and inspiration that it generates, but we can also talk about the problems with the infantilisation that it produces. Let’s explore that topic another time.

Read more in the book Catharses.