Created 10 Oct 2003; last modified 14 June 2004.
SIPR Calcutta 2004 Abstract
“Good” Violence versus “Bad” —
A Girardian analysis of King Janamejaya’s Snake Sacrifice
Barbara Mikolajewska
Warsaw University
E-mail: bmikolajewska @ usa.net
in cooperation with
F.E.J. Linton
Wesleyan University
If we try to understand the significance of the vindictive
curse cast upon the Sacrificial Fire by the vengeful sage Bhrgu,
and of its consequences — if we seek to grasp the meaning of
the circumstances surrounding the birth of the great bird Garuda,
his struggle against his snake siblings, his successful quest for
the divine Soma, and his conflict and ultimate accommodation with
Indra — and if we examine the vicious Snake Sacrifice of King
Janamejaya, how these prior events led up to it, and how it is
surprisingly aborted — we find ourselves in the presence of
metaphors and imagery whose content is not easy to grasp.
We shall argue, following the well-developed complex of insights
that René Girard has developed in his extensive studies on
violence and the sacred, that everywhere their focus is on the
differentiation of “bad” violence from “good,” and on the
necessity to block the “bad” violence of uncontrolled reprisal
(which Girard’s mimetic theory describes as part of a mimetic
cycle of desire, rivalry, revenge, and retribution) by means of
the controlled “good” violence of sacred ritual sacrifice — which,
alas, despite religion’s meticulous care to distinguish the good
from the bad, can all too easily degenerate, thanks to the mimetic
mechanism Girard has uncovered, into “bad” violence all over again.
See the full text of the work
outlined above.