Cain, Romulus, Indra… The founding myths are peopled with murderous heroes. They provide keys to understanding the violence inherent in human beings.
On the left, Abel offers a lamb to God, whose hand is seen in the cloud, then blessing him. On the right, Cain offers a sheaf of wheat.
Could civilization have been built on murder? One might think so, so many stories run through all cultures of men and gods who are both benefactors of humanity and assassins. Let us also think of the enemy brothers Osiris and Seth in Egypt, or, in India, of Indra, the great god of Vedism, killing Vritra, demon of dryness and inertia. But it is the murder of Abel by Cain that has given rise, over the centuries, to the most varied interpretations. Let's listen to the story again, enlightened by the analyzes of the philologist Thomas Römer, who holds the chair of Biblical Environments at the Collège de France.
So the real sin is not knowing how to deal with violence
The sons of Adam and Eve, Cain, a farmer, and his younger son Abel, a shepherd, decide to make an offering to God:fruits of the earth for Cain, firstborn cattle for Abel. If Yahweh accepts the sacrifice of Abel, he does not regard that of Cain. He does not, however, reject the elder, for when the latter becomes angry, he speaks to him:"If you do not do well, at the door sin lies, and towards you is his desire, but you , dominate it." This is the first occurrence of the word sin in the Bible... which does not appear in the previous episode, called "original sin"! The real sin is therefore not knowing how to manage violence. For, the Bible continues, "Cain said to Abel his brother." :the text here bears a blank, a void that subsequent editors and translators will seek to fill in order to maintain a supposed logical coherence in the text. This blank suggests rather that Cain does not know how to speak to his brother, cannot communicate with him. For lack of words, he acts:"And as they were in the field, Cain slew Abel." We know the rest:to Cain who asks "Am I my brother's keeper?" , Yahweh replies that "The voice of your brother's blood cries out to me" . But now the fratricide understands that he has triggered the spiral of violence, and he is terrified:if someone finds him, he will be killed in turn. God, however, puts on him a sign in order to protect him. The violence is stopped, the first law is enacted, which could be stated as follows:"Thou shalt not kill him who has killed". According to Thomas Römer, murder would thus arise from the experience of the inequality inherent in life. But if Yahweh is linked with violence, he also offers ways to get out of it, especially by speaking. And to regulate violence is to maintain civilization, even if it remains constantly threatened.
Could civilization have been built on murder? One might think so, so many stories run through all cultures of men and gods who are both benefactors of humanity and assassins. Let us also think of the enemy brothers Osiris and Seth in Egypt, or, in India, of Indra, the great god of Vedism, killing Vritra, demon of dryness and inertia. But it is the murder of Abel by Cain that has given rise, over the centuries, to the most varied interpretations. Let's listen to the story again, enlightened by the analyzes of the philologist Thomas Römer, who holds the chair of Biblical Environments at the Collège de France.
So the real sin is not knowing how to deal with violence
The sons of Adam and Eve, Cain, a farmer, and his younger son Abel, a shepherd, decide to make an offering to God:fruits of the earth for Cain, firstborn cattle for Abel. If Yahweh accepts the sacrifice of Abel, he does not regard that of Cain. He does not, however, reject the elder, for when the latter becomes angry, he speaks to him:"If you do not do well, at the door sin lies, and towards you is his desire, but you , dominate it." This is the first occurrence of the word sin in the Bible... which does not appear in the previous episode, called "original sin"! The real sin is therefore not knowing how to manage violence. For, the Bible continues, "Cain said to Abel his brother." :the text here bears a blank, a void that subsequent editors and translators will seek to fill in order to maintain a supposed logical coherence in the text. This blank suggests rather that Cain does not know how to speak to his brother, cannot communicate with him. For lack of words, he acts:"And as they were in the field, Cain slew Abel." We know the rest:to Cain who asks "Am I my brother's keeper?" , Yahweh replies that "The voice of your brother's blood cries out to me" . But now the fratricide understands that he has triggered the spiral of violence, and he is terrified:if someone finds him, he will be killed in turn. God, however, puts on him a sign in order to protect him. The violence is stopped, the first law is enacted, which could be stated as follows:"Thou shalt not kill him who has killed". According to Thomas Römer, murder would thus arise from the experience of the inequality inherent in life. But if Yahweh is linked with violence, he also offers ways to get out of it, especially by speaking. And to regulate violence is to maintain civilization, even if it remains constantly threatened.
One rainy afternoon in Vienna, Sigmund Freud thinks...
This attempt by the Bible to account for the sources of violence is an exception. In general, this is seen as present from all eternity. "The myths that tell of its origin seem extremely rare , confirms the anthropologist and prehistorian Jean-Loïc Le Quellec, director of research at the Institute of African Worlds (CNRS / Institute for Research on Development). On the contrary, it is usually the explanatory factor. What the myths sometimes illuminate is the first homicide, which usually follows an extraordinary incident that makes possible the existence of a murderer. They also report how a mythical war was founding, like the one that opposed Latins and Sabines until the installation of the latter on the site of the future Rome, or how an assassination explains the appearance of death:among the Kiwai d 'Oceania, for example, after a quarrel over a wife, her husband was killed; instead of throwing his corpse away to live in a new form, as was the custom, she buried him, causing permanent death. "
This rapprochement between murder and civilization is not only the result of ancient cultures. It underwent an extraordinary development… in Vienna, at the beginning of the 1910s. It all started on a rainy Saturday afternoon. Sigmund Freud is thinking. For some time now, he has been struck by the similarities between the terrible scenes his patients sometimes describe to him and the stories told by ethnologists about so-called savage tribes, which teem with murder, incest and cannibalism. Like the "primitive", the neurotic seems to believe in the magical power of words and things. Like the "savage" who reveres a totem, often an animal symbol of an ancestor, he both fears and respects the object of his phobia, which in both cases leads to behavior that is strange to say the least. But what could this totem be, and what is its function? asks Freud. And if he managed to determine it, could he refine his knowledge of the new territory he discovered, the unconscious?
After the promiscuity of the horde comes the time of families
A story then takes shape in the mind of the inventor of psychoanalysis:he imagines a primitive horde in which a violent, jealous father, a sort of living impulse who only listens to his desires, hunts his adolescent sons to restrict access to all women. One fine day, the brothers unite to slaughter it before devouring it during a feast. Eager to prevent a new tyranny, they then all give up taking the place of the father. Instead of the promiscuity of the horde comes the time of families, and with it the taboo of incest. In order to appease the feeling of guilt that gnaws at them and to try to reconcile, after the fact, their offended father, they set up a religion, totemism.
Both sacred and impure, "the totem commemorates the original murder while continuing to bring to life something of the function of that first father" , decrypts Clotilde Leguil, professor of psychoanalysis at the University of Paris 8. First religion, but also first law, first moral rules:each member of the clan, from now on, will have to seek a partner elsewhere than within those who claim of his own totem. The principle of exogamy is established. The guilt will be transmitted from generation to generation...
To build this myth which occupies only a few pages of the book published in 1912 under the title Totem and Taboo, "Freud starts from two sources , specifies Clotilde Leguil. The ethnologist Frazer who, at the end of the 19 e century, was interested in totemism and exogamy. And Darwin, the first to elaborate the hypothesis of a primitive horde similar to that of the great apes" .
In his book, Freud goes back and forth between ethnology and clinical psychoanalysis, between the psychic life of savages and that of neurotics. "This theme of the murder of the father is found in the two myths on which Freud relied to account for the articulation between drive and desire:that of the primitive horde, which relates to the birth of civilization. And that of Oedipus, which he borrows from Sophocles, and which he makes a paradigm for thinking about the constitution of desire at the level of each human being' , underlines the psychoanalyst.
The scapegoat, an innocent whose sacrifice brings the community together for a time
According to Freud, culture is therefore built on drive repression. "The prohibition of incest reflects the fact that civilization implies a form of renunciation of total enjoyment. It marks the passage from nature to culture, and therefore to hominization. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss will show in the Elementary forms of kinship, published in 1949, that it is the only universal rule" , recalls Clotilde Leguil. What is not done so easily:in each man, culture is constantly threatened by impulses which, repressed, rebound in the form of symptoms. The neurotic is thus, one might say, the living symptom of the impossible harmony between drive and civilisation.
Because in each human being is replayed this original drama, what Freud signifies with the story of Oedipus. "For an individual to become a subject, he must encounter a 'no', a limit to the drive:it is from the no which states the prohibition of incest that the child can access his own desire" , explains Clotilde Leguil. The "no" of the father means that total enjoyment is forever impossible.
Here then was launched an idea destined to experience great success, driven by the importance assumed by psychoanalysis in the 20 e century. For the anthropologist Maurice Godelier, director of studies at the École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, this myth, however, is "slightly suspect of being a little too modeled, biased by the great paradigms of culture Judeo-Christian", general and insurmountable guilt and the social contract. According to him, "it is not the murder of the father […], which metaphorically sums up the human condition, it is the necessary sacrifice of something in human sexuality" . Because generalized sexuality is a threat to cooperation. And it is thanks to the energy withdrawn from sexuality that man can produce the society he needs to live.
"Lévi-Strauss bases the rule of prohibition of incest and exogamy not on the valorization of murder, violence and impulses, but on the fact that men have decided to exchange women, to find an agreement" , explains Salvatore D'Onofrio, professor of anthropology at the University of Palermo.
The beautiful story of Freud also seems indefensible to Marylène Patou-Mathis, director of research at the CNRS. According to her, many works show that it is not violence but empathy, even altruism, which would be the catalyst for hominization. Freud's thesis fits too well with the myth of a supposedly violent prehistoric man. "This supposed primordial violence so dear to René Girard is a myth" , she adds.
Because in the second half of the 20 e century, René Girard, professor at Stanford University (United States), will take up the motif of the founding murder, while freeing it from any psychoanalytical interpretation. He starts from a fact that he thinks is universal, "mimetic rivalry" :one desires someone or something only because another desires it… which leads to a rivalry in which the object of desire itself ends up being forgotten. If there is indeed a murder at the foundation of all culture, he stated in 1972 in Violence and the Sacred , it is because this violence of rivals, exacerbated, spreads, by contagion, to the whole social group. To solve this "mimetic crisis" , societies always resort to the same mechanism, that of the scapegoat:an innocent individual, whose only blemish is sometimes to be lame, stuttering, foreign... will be sacrificed by the crowd, and his death will reunite, for a time, the community. Following this, rites, that is to say moments of planned and controlled violence, will be organized on a fixed date to update, in an attenuated form, this phenomenon which saved or founded the community. Leading to the formation of a religion and the first institutions. René Girard will end up seeing in the Bible the unveiling of this victim mechanism:instead of adopting, like the ancient religions, the point of view of the persecutor and taking the fault of the victim at face value, it recognizes the innocence of this one, especially of Christ.
The thinker sought to support his hypothesis through science. The discovery of mirror neurons, for example, confirmed his thesis of the primacy of imitation in human life. These neurons, which would also exist in humans, are activated in monkeys when they see a fellow creature performing an action, as if they were performing it themselves. In another field, that of archaeology, the Stanford professor interpreted the hunting scenes and the decoration of the houses of one of the oldest cities in the world, Çatal Höyuk, in Anatolia, occupied from the 8 e at 6 th millennium, like the commemoration of a founding murder.
"René Girard's ideas are interesting, but he had to force the text of the Bible to adapt it to his theory" , point Salvatore D'Onofrio. "Freud's thesis and that of Girard, these two 'stories like that' to use the psychoanalyst's word, are extremely improbable in view of what prehistory and anthropology teach us , assures Jean-Loïc Le Quellec. What their success with the educated public shows is rather that they function as veritable contemporary myths. " It is so true that by questioning the human condition, man cannot elude the question of violence, that of others... and his own.
This article is from the magazine Sciences et Avenir Hors-série n°194 "Crimes et Châtiments" dated July-August 2018.