Note on this edition: this is an electronic version of the 1999 book ...

The Ancestry of the Demonic 45[…].” 79 Girard reads the scene from Mark along these lines as a story of collectiveguilt and ritualistic atonement. There is some evidence in the story tojustify this; the demons made the man run into wilderness and graveyards,even if the Gerasenes had repeatedly tried to fetter him. Girard notes onscapegoats how these “victims are the spontaneous agents of reconciliation,since, in the final paroxysm of mimeticism, they unite in opposition tothemselves those who were organized in opposition to each other by the effectsof a previous weaker mimeticism.” 80 Girard sees a close connection betweenlanguage and violence, and mimeticism is for him the original sourceof all man’s troubles; in this case, at least, mimetic logic seems to be atwork. 81 After all, the Gerasenes turn against Jesus after he has deprived themof their demons (and their livelihood in pigs, as well, but Girard does notput weight on that factor). The demonic Other is important for society, andJesus’ cure of the demoniac takes away their mimetic symbol of violence andchaotic limits – the functions that the possessed man had repeatedly performedin his madness.Another example of Christian possession narratives from a completelydifferent historical context serves further to emphasise the ambivalent functionsof demons. The possession epidemic in Loudun, France, began withthe possession of Jeanne des Agnes, an Ursuline nun, in 1633. The case isrelatively well documented and has received ample attention, in The Devilsof Loudun (1952) by Aldous Huxley, La possession de Loudun (1970) by Michelde Certeau, and in the analysis by Sarah E. Miller. Jeanne and her exorcistsbelieved her to have been possessed by seven different demons (Grésil,Aman, Asmodée, Leviathan, Balaam, Isaacaron, and Béhémot). In time, theentire convent of nuns became possessed, and one of the exorcising priestsbecame insane and died. Jeanne and the other nuns had had dreams of UrbanGrandier, and accused him of bewitching them and making them fall in lovewith him. Grandier was tried in court and burned at the stake. Jeanne’s spectaculardisorders, however, remained; she became victim of a supernaturalpregnancy, tried a self-inflicted Caesarean, but God himself stopped her. Afterthe demon Isaacaron was made to confess (with Jeanne’s mouth) the79 Leviticus 16:8-10. See Langton 1949/1982, 43-6.80 Girard 1982/1989, 165.81Girard writes of the need for a “monstrous double” as a fundamental elementneeded to enter the cultural order; “social coexistence would be impossible if no surrogatevictim existed, if violence persisted beyond a certain threshold and failed to betransmuted into culture. It is only at this point that the vicious circle of reciprocal violence,wholly destructive in nature, is replaced by the vicious circle of ritual violence,creative and protective in nature.” (Girard 1972/1989, 144.) – Another, less polemical,view on mimeticism is presented by Kathryn Hume in her Fantasy and Mimesis (1984);she proposes that literature is the product of two impulses, fantasy and mimesis. The desireto imitate with verisimilitude is as fundamental and common as is the opposite desireto “change givens and alter reality – out of boredom, play, vision, longing for somethinglacking, or need for metaphoric images that will bypass the audience’s verbal defenses.”This is what we identify as fantasy, but these impulses typically mix and coexist. (Hume1984, 20.)