First posted 10 Oct 2003
Last modified 5 May 2017
SIPR
Calcutta 2004 Abstract
“Good” Violence versus “Bad” —
A Girardian analysis of King Janamejaya’s Snake Sacrifice
Barbara Mikolajewska
Warsaw University
in cooperation with
F.E.J. Linton
Wesleyan University
Author contact: (email
comments, inquiries)
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.