I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

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it and cannot represent it precisely because they are based on it,
because the victim mechanism is their generating principle. These
texts are the myths.
The exegetes are dupes of the modern bias of concluding too
quickly that texts dealing with collective violence are violent texts
whose violence we have the duty to denounce. Under the influ-
ence of the Nietzsche tradition (see chapter 14), our bias tends to
function on the principle of "no smoke without fire." This is as mys-
tifying as can be in the subject concerning us here. The exegetes
treat the Judeo-Christian revelation as a kind of Freudian or Niet-
zschean symptom in the sense of the "slave morality." They see the
revelation of the victim mechanism as the leveling effect of social
resentment, for example. They never wonder whether by chance
this revelation may be justified.
Only wherever it is not represented can mimetic snowballing play
a generative role due to the very fact that it is not represented, that
it misunderstands itself. As soon as mimetic contagion has taken
over the community, its members are possessed by it. Violent con-
tagion speaks for them; mimetic violence pronounces the guilt of
the victim and the innocence of the persecutors. The community
no longer speaks; the speaker is rather the one the Gospels name as
the accuser, Satan.
Pseudoscientific exegetes don't see that the biblical basis of Ju-
daism and Christianity transmits the first revelatory and liberating
representations regarding violence. Violence has always existed, but
until the biblical revelation it remained concealed in the infra-
structure of mythology. Under the influence of Nietzsche and Freud,
our contemporaries go and find in these texts, whose referentiality
is denied without the least proof, various indications of a "persecu-
tion complex" with which Judaism and Christianity as a whole are
alleged to be afflicted. Mythology, on the other hand, is held to be
exempt from this complex.
The proof that all this is absurd is the superb indifference, the
regal contempt, that mythology shows toward any suggestion of
possible violence of the strong against the weak, of those in the
majority against the minority, of the healthy against the ill, of the
normal against the abnormal, of the native against the foreigners,
and so on.
Modern confidence in the myths is even stranger in our day when
our contemporaries are terribly suspicious regarding their own soci-
ety. They see hidden victims everywhere except where they really
are, in the myths that they never look at with a critical eye.
Contemporary thinkers, still under Nietzschean influence, have
the habit of seeing the myths as kindly texts, sympathetic, cheer-
ful, and lively. Mythology is regarded as superior in every way to
the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, which are dominated, not by
a legitimate concern for justice and truth, but by morbid suspi-
cion. Most intellectuals in the present world seem to adopt this
perspective. What sells this view is the apparent absence of un-
just violence in the myths or the aesthetic transformation of violent
deeds. By contrast, the Jewish and Christian Scriptures come across
as so obsessed with persecutions that their relationship to them must
at least suggest their own guilt. To grasp this misunderstanding in
its enormity, we must see it in light of a case of unjust condem-
nation of a victim. My example is the famous Dreyfus case, an
affair so thoroughly clarified that it now eliminates any possibility of
misunderstanding.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Cap-
tain Dreyfus, condemned for a crime he had not committed, was
serving his sentence, there were, on one side, the "anti-Dreyfus"
people, who were numerous and perfectly serene and satisfied, for
they had their collective victim, and they congratulated themselves
on seeing him justly punished. On the other side were the defenders
of Dreyfus, very, very few at first. For a long time people viewed them
as obvious traitors or professional malcontents, always occupied with
chewing over all sorts of grievances and suspicions whose real basis
no one around them could see. Critics looked for the motives of
their behavior in personal morbidity or political prejudices.
In fact, anti-Dreyfusism was a true myth, a false accusation that
the accusers confused with truth. Mimetic contagion maintained a