René Girard, in his word I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, offers a revolutionary anthropological framework drawing on literature, psychology, history, and theology.[1] In his theory, he argues that mimetic desire spreads and intensifies exponentially, generating conflict amongst individuals and communities until their accumulated tensions are transferred onto a single victim. This convergence of violence onto a single target typically occurs without the participants recognizing the forces driving them. However, once the nature and dynamics of trauma are understood, it becomes clear that the Girardian single-victim mechanism is fundamentally driven by individual and collective inability to confront trauma, which communities resolve through projection, transferring their own weakness onto a scapegoat, whose expulsion temporarily stabilizes social order.
Mimetic Rivalry and Tension
The Girardian process begins when an individual begins coveting what belongs to another, whose enjoyment of it makes it desirable in the first place. The imitative property of such desire is precisely why Girard terms it “mimetic,” as the object is not desired on its own merits but mostly because someone else possesses it.[2] When acted upon, this desire generates rivalry, while letting the neighbour enjoy his possession in peace tends to extinguish it.[3] The individual thus faces a defining choice between accepting serenity or yielding to this mimetic desire. Choosing the latter transforms the neighbour into a competitor and, ultimately, an enemy. When individuals yield to mimetic desire, the result is a self-reinforcing cycle: imitation breeds rivalry, and rivalry breeds further imitation.[4] Strączek aptly describes this dynamic when he states that “at the heart of mimetic rivalry there is a double imperative then: the demand of the mediator is the command, ’imitate me’, but this message is coupled with a warning, ’do not imitate me’.”[5] In this way, the rival becomes both enemy and model, a fact which rarely, if ever, gets acknowledged.
Beneath mimetic rivalry lies a deep reality about the human person. The biblical account describes the entry of sin into the world, which brought death and severed man’s relationship with God, with others, and with himself. Living according to the principle of sin, the New Testament warns, produces “hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, and envy”[6]: the very description of mimetic rivalry and the violence it generates. This violence, in turn, leaves an inescapable emotional wound on the human person. Mimetic desire, paradoxically, is a response to this wound. Reineke notes that satisfying the desire can bring temporary relief while frustrating it further aggravates the wound.[7] However, rather than confronting the source of this wound, people usually turn outward, avoiding the inward gaze that is required for healing. She explains that “to confront violence in all its nakedness is to touch woundedness; however, that cannot be done without becoming lost to/in the wound entirely.”[8] The mimetic cycle runs on denial and defensiveness, and it is precisely this dynamic that Girard identifies as the main cause for interpersonal violence.
Mimetic rivalry is anything but static. This escalating dynamic is referred to the New Testament as “scandal” (Greek σκάνδαλον), a word which is also rendered in English translations of the Bible as “cause of sin,” “stumbling block,” or “offence.”[9] Girard observes that in this mimetic rivalry, each party becomes an obstacle to the other, and the tension generated by this dynamic causes the original source of the quarrel to recede from view while the hostility against the other intensifies.[10] As this cycle continues to develop, violence escalates and its targets begin to shift.
Mimetic Snowballing and the War of “All against All”
Mimetic rivalry possesses an absorptive quality. Left unchecked, individual scandals not only grow in intensity but draw smaller conflicts into their orbit, feeding off their energy.[11] The result is a collective violence, which Girard refers to as a “war of all against all.” This violence expands both in power and scope, threatening to disintegrate communities and ultimately society itself. Strączek observes that this collective violence erases the distinctions that normally differentiate human beings, reducing them to a “natural” state that only accelerates the violence further.[12] Participants do not recognize the mimetic forces driving the conflict; were they to do so, he argues, they would act to prevent the harm from being done.[13]
Trauma and the Shift to “All Against One”
If mimetic rivalry can snowball into a force that can destroy entire societies, what is able to contain it? One resolution the collective violence can take is a shift from the “war of all against all” to a “war of all against one.” By concentrating hostility onto a single target and annihilating it, social order is restored. Girard refers to this event as “Satan cast[ing] out Satan,”[14] where evil apparently defeats itself. Peace is recovered, or so it seems. In reality, however, the mechanism that produces this resolution involves many interacting factors, the underlying source of which must be examined.
Girard notes that the victim of accumulated mimetic violence is chosen “by the contagion itself; he or she is substituted for all the other victims that the crowd could have chosen if things had happened differently.”[15] These substitutions take place unconsciously, with the persecutors entirely unaware of the true reasons behind their selection of this particular victim, a degree of unconsciousness that Strączek identifies as a requirement of the scapegoating mechanism itself.[16] The invisible and seemingly spontaneous nature of this substitution gives the single-victim mechanism the appearance of randomness. Yet the victims are rarely arbitrary: foreigners, the disabled, the poor, and those who are abandoned or excluded tend to be disproportionately targeted. Are these groups of people vulnerable because they are expendable, or expendable because they are vulnerable? More specifically, one must ask whether unaddressed trauma lies at the root of this unconscious aversion to vulnerability. Could the impulse to purge these individuals or groups reflect an unconscious need to purge what they refuse to confront within themselves?
In his work The Body Keeps the Score Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, Dutch psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk defines trauma not simply as a significant adverse event in the past but as the imprint that experience leaves on the mind and body, shaping how a person lives in the present.[17] In this sense, vulnerability to trauma is universal. Virtually every person has faced adversity and felt the sting of mimetic rivalry in one form or another. Siblings compete for a parent’s attention; young people on social media measure themselves against others in an endless contest of attractiveness and success; colleagues fight for the same promotion; a publisher sends a cease-and-desist letter to suppress a competitor. Even though people may feel the painful events acutely, the mark it leaves goes unnoticed, and it is precisely this blindness to one’s own wounds that causes individuals to perpetuate the mimetic cycle. This process appears to operate entirely outside their awareness or control.[18]
When the wound left by a significant adverse event goes unidentified and unhealed, it does not simply lie dormant. Rather, it perpetuates itself. People discover in the mimetic cycle a convenient way to avoid confronting their own wounds, projecting their insecurities onto individuals or groups whose very existence triggers their vulnerability. It is easier to exclude others than to face one’s own feelings of abandonment. It is more comfortable to blame immigrants for rising crime or economic hardship than to honestly examine our failure to integrate them or our own contribution to the root causes of these problems. And it is more convenient to scapegoat the poor, whose struggles are more visible, than to question how the ultra-wealthy few are able to perpetuate grave injustices and bend systems of power to their benefit. Van der Kolk warns of the catastrophic long-term consequences of this collective denial, citing the aftermath of the First World War as a sobering historical illustration:
Denial of the consequences of trauma can wreak havoc with the social fabric of society. The refusal to face the damage caused by the war and the intolerance of “weakness” played an important role in the rise of fascism and militarism around the world in the 1930s. The extortionate war reparations of the Treaty of Versailles further humiliated an already disgraced Germany. German society, in turn, dealt ruthlessly with its own traumatized war veterans, who were treated as inferior creatures. This cascade of humiliations of the powerless set the stage for the ultimate debasement of human rights under the Nazi regime: the moral justification for the strong to vanquish the inferior—the rationale for the ensuing war.[19]
Girard draws on the ancient story of Apollonius of Tyana to illustrate how the single-victim mechanism has operated throughout history.[20] Apollonius was a pagan teacher of the second century AD whose story is recounted by the Greek biographer Philostratus. When the city of Ephesus found itself unable to contain a devastating plague despite exhausting every remedy possible, the Ephesians turned to Apollonius. He directed their attention to an old, blind beggar, declaring him to be a demon responsible for their affliction. At first, they were unwilling to take the life of a fellow human being. However, so persuasive was Apollonius that the crowd came to see the beggar transform before their eyes into a monstrous hound, which they then stoned to death. With that act, the plague ceased and social order was restored. Apollonius attributed the cure to Hercules, “the averting god.” What makes this account particularly striking for Girard is its transparency. Unlike most mythological narratives, it does not fully conceal the concrete act of violence at its centre, making visible the mechanism that so often remains hidden beneath layers of sacred or legendary language.
It is worth noting that the Ephesians did not make any moves against the beggar until Apollonius had successfully reframed him as a demon. This transformation of perception preceded the act of violence. Yet what this story still conceals is precisely what Jesus brings to light in the Gospel of John: the casting of the first stone.[21] That first stone carries singular weight in the single-victim mechanism because it is the most difficult act in the entire event. There is no prior example to follow or crowd momentum to carry one along. Myths consistently leave out this detail, keeping the origin of the violence hidden. Jesus, on the other hand, names it directly. In fact, His life and death laid bare the truth of the mimetic mechanism in a way that mythology never does, and in this way, He exposed what sacred narratives have always worked to conceal.
Religious Narrative as a Cover for Violence
Mythologies not only conceal the violence inherent in the single-victim mechanism but actively distract from it through the use of fantastical language. In Apollonius’ account, the Ephesians initially refused to stone the beggar when ordered to do so, and it was only when religious language intervened, with the beggar declared “an enemy of the gods”[22] and thus a pharmakos in Ancient Greek religious terms, that the crowd’s resistance dissolved and the concrete act of violence became possible. Religion, in this way, provides a means of diffusing mimetic rivalry through virtual or ritualized violence. As Girard observes, “When spectators are satiated with that violence that Aristotle calls ‘cathartic’ — whether real or imaginary it matters little — they all return peaceably to their homes to sleep the sleep of the just.”[23]
Girard identifies Satan as both the architect of myths and the foundation of the scapegoating mechanism embedded in the mimetic cycle. Once the scapegoat is expelled, the community experiences a sense of purification, as though the source of all their conflicts and divisions has been removed. He states that the very demons that caused the sickness supplied the cure,[24] and this paradox transforms the victim into a kind of divine benefactor in the eyes of the community. Psychologically speaking, however, what the community undergoes is a catharsis and a false restoration. This creates an appearance of healing achieved not through genuine transformation but through repression, religious bypassing, and the displacing of their own psychological negativity onto another.
The scapegoat mechanism sits at the intersection of a double transference between negative and positive mimesis. The negative mimesis is the violence generated by rivalry, which culminates either in collective antagonism or singular victimization. Out of this violence, however, positive mimesis emerges: the expelled victim becomes a symbol of the community’s reconciliation, and in this way the scapegoat is divinized. This pattern, Girard observes, appears across religious traditions worldwide, with the notable exception of Judaism, with its strict monotheism, and the Christian faith.
Founding Murder, Trauma, and Ritual
The elimination of the scapegoat brings at least a temporary restoration of the social order. The pharmakos has purified the community, and the crisis subsides. For Girard, this founding murder is not merely a historical accident but the very basis of culture itself, which he defines as “regulated system of distinctions in which the differences among individuals are used to establish their ‘identity’ and their mutual relationships.”[25] Culture, in other words, is built on a corpse. Girard further argues that most traditional mythologies rely on fable creation which has been generated by this underlying collective violence. Many societies erected on this foundation also practise ritual sacrifice as a means of cyclically reproducing the original murder of the scapegoat. In this way, ritual functions as a controlled outlet for violence, mimetically reenacting the founding murder and dispensing that violence through the symbolic killing of a victim.[26] This ritual prevents the outbreak of further uncontrolled conflict.
The unresolved trauma that produced the elimination of the scapegoat does not simply disappear. It is sublimated into the cultural fabric itself, giving rise to norms, distinctions, and boundaries that define community identity and regulate behaviour, determining what is acceptable and what is not to be tolerated. In this way, culture encodes a tribalistic, us-versus-them ethos that perpetuates the original wound across generations by transmitting intergenerational trauma through the very structures that hold society together.
Across cultures, traditional norms tend to reward grandiosity and self-assertion while penalizing humility and authenticity. These norms reinforce a clear divide between winners and losers: the wealthy and powerful on one side, and the working class on the other. Machismo, which took root in Latin American societies in the twentieth century, is a clear example of how working-class men felt the need to compensate for their lack of power and social standing through hypermasculinity.[27] Men were expected to dominate women and display aggressive behaviour as proof of strength. This points to a broader pattern in which vulnerability is suppressed and replaced by a cultural pretense of victory over weakness: a fable that conceals the wound rather than healing it.
Biblical Demystification
While cultures throughout history have perpetuated the mimetic cycle and its single-victim mechanism, the Bible has consistently exposed and named this dynamic with clarity, tracing its origin, development, and conclusion. The fourth chapter of Genesis records the first murder as a direct consequence of mimetic rivalry: Cain could not bear that God accepted Abel’s offering and not his own. Later in Genesis, the story of Joseph offers a fuller illustration of the scapegoating mechanism. As an innocent man, he is betrayed by his brothers out of jealousy, sold into slavery, falsely accused, and imprisoned, until he is finally vindicated, raised to power, and reconciled with those who wronged him.[28] So serious and potentially destructive is the mimetic cycle that, from the time of Moses, the Decalogue addressed the problem of desire not once but twice, in the ninth and tenth commandments.[29]
It is in the book of Leviticus that the Bible reveals the very heart of the mechanism from which scapegoating takes its name. In chapter 16, God institutes a ritual in which the priest obtains two goats and presents them before the Lord, casting lots over them. This detail highlights the apparently random nature of the selection. The goat upon which the lot falls for Azazel is designated to be sent into the wilderness. The priest then lays both hands on the animal’s head, confesses over it the sins of the entirely community, and symbolically transfers them onto the goat before sending it away. Therefore, on the Day of Atonement, “the goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to a barren region.”[30]
The gospels of Matthew and Mark offer a vivid illustration of the single-victim mechanism in their account of the death of John the Baptist, the forerunner of Jesus Christ and, in many ways, his prophetic prototype. Widely revered among the people, John was eventually arrested by Herod after publicly denouncing his marriage to his brother’s wife as illicit. Mark’s account adds a telling detail. Herod was perplexed by John’s preaching yet found himself drawn to listen to him.[31] On his birthday, pleased by the dancing of Herodias’ daughter before his guests, Herod rashly promised to grant her any wish she desired; prompted by her mother, she asked for the head of John the Baptist. What could move a man who respected this prophet to consent to his execution? Mark notes that the king was “deeply grieved,”[32] yet he yielded, succumbing to the pressure of mimetic rivalry, forced to choose between preserving his image before his guests and the risk of appearing weak. John the Baptist became the scapegoat for Herod’s own sins, and his death resolved the tension that Herod lacked the courage to confront in himself.
The Triumph of the Cross
The analysis of this entire Girardian process leads us ultimately to the triumph of the cross, in which Jesus “disarmed the rulers and authorities and made a public example of them, triumphing over them in it.”[33] Girard argues that in the Passion, death, and resurrection of Christ, the mimetic cycle and the single-victim mechanism are not only fully exposed but definitively and irrevocably destroyed: “By depriving the victim mechanism of the darkness that must conceal it so it can continue to control human culture, the Cross shakes up the world.”[34] The very shape of the cross is telling. Its vertical and horizontal beams converging at a single centre reveal the way different and otherwise unrelated factions converged upon Jesus Christ. The Jewish religious authorities of his time sought to have this innocent man crucified because his presence exposed their hypocrisy; the Roman authorities, for their part, found in his execution a convenient way to defuse the tensions in the community and neutralize a threat to their imperial power, delivering him into their hands to preserve their own order.
By exposing the victim mechanism through the cross, the illusion that sustains its structure is shattered.[35] Isaiah 53, one of the Servant Songs whose fulfilment is found in Jesus Christ, captures both dimension of this event with striking precision. It firsts reflects the apparent victory of the single-victim mechanism when it states that “He took up our pain and bore our suffering, yet we considered him punished by God, stricken by him, and afflicted.”[36] However, it immediately displays the mechanism’s definite defeat: “But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.”[37] In Christ, the scapegoating mechanism is laid bare for what it truly is, and Satan is defeated by the very instrument he sought to use.
Girard argues that the grace flowing from the victory of the cross has left permanent marks on human society, producing an undeniable cultural impulse toward humility that finds its roots in the Christian faith.[38] In his Epistle to the Ephesians, the apostle Paul exhorts believers to put off the old self, which runs on mimetic rivalry, and to put on the new self, shaped by the victory of the cross and oriented toward true righteousness.[39] In psychological terms, this is a call for individuals and communities to not ignore or perpetuate personal and generational trauma but to bring them to the cross and allow genuine healing and renewal to take place. The transformative effect of this vision on human civilization is impossible to overstate. The influence of Christianity is visible across countless societies to this day, from the emergence of hospitals and universities, to, above all, a sustained concern for victims.
Concern for Victims
Girard observes that “the essential thing in what goes now as human rights is an indirect acknowledgement of the fact that every individual or every group of individuals can become the ‘scapegoat’ of their own community.”[40] Because the cross strips the victim of the appearance of guilt, we have inherited a deep sense that victims may be unjustly persecuted. Moreover, we have developed an awareness that, without vigilance, anyone can be drawn into the scapegoating mechanism. Reineke takes this further, arguing that liberation from trauma does not come merely through acquiring knowledge about the originating event but through awakening to an urgent responsibility towards others and acting on it; for Reineke, intimacy, not rivalry, is the path to healing.[41] On a wider scale, we learn that it is not by setting communities against one another but by coming together, listening, finding common ground, and working toward the common good that societies can begin to heal the divisions that trauma leaves behind.
Conclusion
Unaddressed trauma lies at the heart of the Girardian single-victim mechanism. Unable to confront their own weaknesses, individuals and communities have projected their wounds onto a scapegoat whose expulsion has offered temporary relief. Yet when trauma is successfully identified, addressed, and confronted with the cross, it gives rise to a sense of responsibility for the other, for the wound is communal in nature, and so too must be the healing. In exposing the single principle behind tribalism and hostility across cultures, Girard’s theory does not merely diagnose the cycle but points toward a way out of it. Every generation, however, faces the same prerogative: to perpetuate the cycle or to further the healing by ensuring that the scapegoating mechanism no longer consumes the innocent to empower the guilty.
Bibliography
Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
Girard, René. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Markynoll: Orbis Books, 2001.
Reineke, Martha J. Intimate Domain: Desire, Trauma, and Mimetic Theory. East Lansing:
Michigan State University Press, 2014.
Strączek, Bogumił. “René Girard’s Concept of Mimetic Desire, Scapegoat Mechanism and
Biblical Demystification.” Seminare : Poszukiwania Naukowe 2014(35), no. nr 4
(2022): 47–56.
Valdez, L.A., E.C. Jaeger, D.O. Garcia, and D.M. Griffith. “Breaking Down Machismo:
Shifting Definitions and Embodiments of Latino Manhood in Middle-Aged Latino Men.” American Journal of Men’s Health 17, no. 5 (2023).
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Trauma. New York: Penguin Books, 2015.
[1] B. Strączek. “René Girard’s Concept of Mimetic Desire, Scapegoat Mechanism and Biblical Demystification.” Seminare : Poszukiwania Naukowe 2014(35), no. nr 4 (2022), 47.
[2] R. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2001, 9.
[3] Ibid., 10.
[4] Ibid.
[5] B. Strączek. “René Girard’s Concept of Mimetic Desire”, 49.
[6] Galatians 5:20-21
[7] M. J. Reineke, Intimate Domain: Desire, Trauma, and Mimetic Theory. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2014, 138.
[8] Ibid., 125.
[9] Matthew 13:41; 16:23; Galatians 5:11 in the New Revised Standard Version (Anglicised Catholic)
[10] R. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 22-23.
[11] Ibid., 23.
[12] B. Strączek. “René Girard’s Concept of Mimetic Desire”, 50.
[13] Ibid., 55.
[14] R. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, xii.
[15] Ibid., 24.
[16] B. Strączek. “René Girard’s Concept of Mimetic Desire”, 51.
[17] B. A. Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York: Penguin Books, 2015, 45
[18] C. Caruth, Unclaimed Experience. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, 2.
[19] B. A. Van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score, 277.
[20] R. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 49-50.
[21] John 8:7
[22] R. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 56.
[23] Ibid., 37.
[24] Ibid., 67.
[25] Ibid., 49.
[26] B. Strączek. “René Girard’s Concept of Mimetic Desire”, 52.
[27] Valdez, L.A., E.C. Jaeger, D.O. Garcia, and D.M. Griffith, “Breaking Down Machismo: Shifting Definitions and Embodiments of Latino Manhood in Middle-Aged Latino Men,” American Journal of Men’s Health 17, no. 5 (2023), 3.
[28] Genesis 37-50.
[29] Exodus 20:17
[30] Leviticus 16:22, NRSVACE.
[31] Mark 6:20
[32] Ibid., verse 26.
[33] Colossians 2:15, NRSVACE.
[34] R. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 142.
[35] Ibid., 147.
[36] Isaiah 53:5, NRSVACE.
[37] Ibid., verse 6.
[38] R. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 165.
[39] Ephesians 4:22-24
[40] R. Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 167-168.
[41] M. J. Reineke, Intimate Domain, 122, 138.
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Written by Louis Meléndez González
The author is a Puerto Rican writer based in Canada. He is also a canonist and founder of Suricata Ediciones.