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and more fascinated by each other. Beyond a certain level of
    intensity they are totally absorbed and the disputed object becomes secondary, even
    irrelevant. judging from many rituals, their mutual fascination can reach the level of a
    hypnotic trance. That particular condition becomes the principal goal of certain religious
    practices under the name of possession.
    At this paroxystic level of mimetic rivalry, the element of mimicry is still around, more
    intense than ever. It has to focus on the only entities left in the picture, which are the
    antagonists themselves. This means that the selection of an antagonist depends on the
    mimetic factor rather that on previous developments. Transfers of antagonism must take
    place, therefore, for purely mimetic reasons. Mimetic attraction is bound to increase with the
    number of those who converge on one and the same antagonist. Sooner or later a snowball
    effect must occur that involves the entire group minus, of course, the one individual, or the
    few against whom all hostility focuses and who become the "scapegoats," in a sense
    analogous to but more extreme than our everyday sense of the word "scapegoat." Whereas
    mimetic appropriation is inevitably divisive, causing the contestants to fight over an object
    they cannot all appropriate together, mimetic antagonism is ultimately unitive, or rather
    reunitive since it provides the antagonists with an object they can really share, in the sense
    that they can all rush against that victim in order to destroy it or drive it away.
    If I am right, the contradiction between prohibitions and rituals is only apparent. The purpose
    of both is to spare the community another mimetic perturbation. In normal circumstances,
    this purpose is well served by the prohibitions. In abnormal circumstances, when a new crisis
    seems impending, the prohibitions are of no avail anymore. Once the contagion of mimetic
    violence is reintroduced into the community, it cannot be contained. The community, then,
    changes its tactic entirely. Instead of trying to roll back mimetic violence it tries to get rid of
    it by encouraging it and by bringing it to a climax that triggers the happy solution of ritual
    sacrifice with the help of a substitute victim. There is no difference of purpose between
    prohibitions and rituals. The behavior demanded by the first and the behavior demanded by
    the disorderly phase of ritual are in opposition, of course, but the mimetic reading makes this
    opposition intelligible. In the absence of this reading, anthropologists have either minimized
    the opposition or viewed it as an insoluble contradiction that ultimately confirmed their
    conception of religion as utter nonsense. Others, under the influence of psychoanalysis, have viewed the transgressive aspect of ritual, in regard to prohibitions,
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    as an end in itself, in keeping, of course, with the contemporary ethos and its predilection for
    disorder, at least among intellectuals who feel, perhaps, they do not have enough of it in their
    own lives.
    Religion is different, and the purpose of ritual is reconciliation and reordering through
    sacrifice. The current views of ritual as essentially transgressive are given a semblance of
    credibility by the fact that long before anthropologists and psychoanalysts showed up on the
    scene, the religious believers themselves had often lost touch with the unity of purpose of
    their various religious practices and begun to perceive the opposition between prohibitions
    and ritual as an unintelligible contradiction. And they normally tried to cope with this
    contradiction either by minimizing it and making their prohibitions less stringent as well as
    their rituals less disorderly or on the contrary by emphasizing and "maximizing" so to speak the opposition and turning their rites into the so-called festival that presents itself explicitly as
    a period of time in which the social rules and taboos of all kinds do not apply.
    Modern theorists