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have some support from late religious developments, in other words, when
    they try to elude or give trivial answers to the problem posed by the behavioral opposition
    between prohibitions and rituals. This is the wide road of modern interpretation, and it has
    turned out to be an impasse. We will not take that road, therefore, and we will face the
    contrast between ritual and prohibition in all its sharpness, not to espouse some
    psychoanalytical view, of course, but to perceive the true paradox of ritual -- which is the
    genesis and regeneration as well as degeneration of the cultural order through paroxystic
    disorder.
    Mythology and religious cults form systems of representation necessarily untrue to their own
    genesis. The episode of mimetic violence and reconciliation is always recollected and
    narrated, as well as reenacted, from the perspective of its beneficiaries, who are also its
    puppets. From the standpoint of the scapegoaters and their inheritors -- the religious
    community -- there is no such thing as scapegoating in our sense. A scapegoat effect that can
    be acknowledged as such by the scapegoaters is no longer effective, it is no longer a
    scapegoat effect . The victim must be perceived as truly responsible for the troubles that come to an end when it is collectively put to death. The community could not be at peace with itself
    once more if it doubted the victim's enormous capacity for evil. The belief in this same
    victim's enormous capacity for doing good is a direct consequence of that first belief. The
    peace seems to be restored as well as destroyed by the scapegoat himself.
    An arbitrary victim would not reconcile a disturbed community if its members realized they
    are the dupes of a mimetic effect. I must insist on this aspect because it is crucial and often
    misunderstood. The mythic systems of representation obliterate the scapegoating on which
    they are
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    founded, and they remain dependent on this obliteration. Scapegoating has never been
    conceived by anyone as an activity in which he himself participates and may still be
    participating even as he denounces the scapegoating of others. Such denunciation can even become a precondition of successful scapegoating in a world like ours, where knowledge of
    the phenomenon is on the rise and makes its grossest and most violent forms obsolete.
    Scapegoating can continue only if its victims are perceived primarily as scapegoaters.
    Traces of an act of collective scapegoating that has effectively reconciled a community are
    elusive since the phenomenon is necessarily recollected from the deluded standpoint it
    generates. At first sight, this situation seems discouraging, but in reality it is highly favorable
    to the demonstration of my thesis: features that characterize the deluded standpoint of the
    scapegoaters are easily ascertainable. Once they are ascertained, we can verify that they are
    really present in primitive mythology; they constitute the constants or near constants of that
    mythology, in contradistinction to the variables, which are quite significant as well but
    demand lengthier analysis. The victim cannot be perceived as innocent and impotent; he (or
    she, as the case may be) must be perceived if not necessarily as a culprit in our sense, at least
    as a creature truly responsible for all the disorders and ailments of the community, in other
    words for the mimetic crisis that has triggered the mimetic mechanism of scapegoating. We
    can verify, indeed, that the victim is usually presented in that fashion. He is viewed as
    subversive of the communal order and as a threat to the well-being of the society. His
    continued presence is therefore undesirable and it must be destroyed or driven away by other
    gods, perhaps, or by the community itself.
    The Oedipus myth does not tell us Oedipus is a mimetic scapegoat. Far from disproving my
    theory, this silence confirms it as long as it is surrounded by the telltale signs of scapegoating
    as, indeed,