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it is. The myth reflects the standpoint of the scapegoaters, who really believe their
    victim to be responsible for the plague in their midst, and they connect that responsibility
    with anti-natural acts, horrendous transgressions that signify the total destruction of the social
    order. All the themes of the story suggest we must be dealing with the type of delusion that
    has always surrounded and still surrounds victimage by mobs on the rampage. In the Middle
    Ages, for instance, when the Jews were accused of spreading the plague during the period of
    the Black Death, they were also accused of unnatural crimes à la Oedipus.
    The most interesting question is: Why are we able to see through this type of delusion in
    some instances, and unable in others, especially in the case of that vast corpus of mysterious
    récits we call mythology? Why are the greatest specialists in the field still fooled by themes which historians of the Western world have long ago recognized as indicative of perse-
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    cution in their own areas of research? Historians are working in areas with which they feel
    more at ease and are more knowledgeable because they are culturally closer, but this is part
    of the story; it may account for the tortuous nature of our progress toward a greater
    understanding of persecution everywhere but not for the progress itself. So-called primitive
    or archaic people are fooled by their own myths as much or even more than by the myths of
    others. The amazing thing about us is not that so many are still fooled but that many are not
    and that suspicion, as a whole, is on the increase. Our sterility as creators of myth must not be
    deplored because it is one and the same with our inability to transfigure our victims, with our
    growing ability, therefore, to see through the collective delusions of scapegoating. This
    ability has grown enormously in the last centuries and, in my opinion, it is still growing. The
    recognition of mimetic victimage as the major "referent" behind mythology is about to occur,
    and it will be only one more step in an advance that began a long time ago and that is not yet over.
    The views I am now expressing seem paradoxical because purely formal, structural, and
    nonreferential readings are now in vogue, but this state of affairs is only the most visible and
    limited consequence of a development which had to take place before the mimetic victimage
    hypothesis could appear, and it is the radical critique of all efforts so far to ground mythology
    in psychosocial phenomena. The current vogue is short-sighted only in its failure to realize
    that mythological systems as a whole may be amenable to an entirely new type of hypothesis
    regarding their ultimate origin. These structuralists and poststructuralists who describe my
    hypothesis as theoretically regressive have not fully assessed its nature and its significance.
    If a society's growing awareness of victimage effects and the weakening of these effects are
    correlated, the phenomena we are dealing with are ruled by something like an "uncertainty
    principle." As our knowledge of them increases, they tend, if not to disappear, at least to
    become marginalized, and that is the reason why some people object to my thesis on the
    grounds that victimage phenomena are not effective enough to account for the religious
    practices and beliefs of primitive people. This is true, indeed, of the victimage phenomena we
    ourselves can observe. At the root of primitive religion, phenomena must be postulated that
    are analogous to but not identical with those still taking place around us. If phenomena
    completely identical with those we must postulate were still present among us, they would
    still generate primitive religion and could not be scientifically observed; they would appear to
    us only in the transfigured and unrecognizable shape of religion.
    Victimage is still present among us, of course, but in degenerate forms that do not produce
    the type of mythical