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throughout human communities. Prohibitions and taboos are
    often ineffectual and misguided but they are not absurd, as many anthropologists have
    suggested; they are not rooted primarily in irrational fears, as psychoanalysts have suggested,
    since they bear on violence, on mimetic behavior, and on the potential objects of mimetic
    rivalry. Rituals confirm, I believe, that primitive societies are obsessed with the
    undifferentiation or conflictual reciprocity that must result from the spread of mimetic
    rivalry. The chaos, the absence of order, and the various disorders that prevail at the
    beginning of many myths must also be interpreted, I believe, in terms of mimetic rivalry; and
    so must the natural disasters such as plagues, great floods, or other mythical scourges that
    often include an element of conflict between mythical partners generally conceived as close
    relatives, brothers, or identical twins. These themes represent what mythology is unable to
    conceive rationally, the undifferentiated reciprocity of mimetic conflict.
    Many rituals begin with a mimetic free-for-all during which hierarchies disintegrate,
    prohibitions are transgressed, and all participants become each other's conflictual doubles or
    "twins." Mimetic rivalry is the common denominator, in my opinion, of what happens in
    seasonal festivals, of the so-called ordeal undergone by the future initiates in many initiation
    rituals, as well as of the social breakdown that may follow the death of the sacred king or
    accompany his enthronement and rejuvenation rituals. The violent demonstrations triggered
    in many communities by the death of a member must also be interpreted as mimetic
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    rivalry. All these rites amount to a theatrical reenactment of a mimetic crisis in which the
    differences that constitute the society are dissolved. Why should communities, at certain
    appointed times and also at times when a crisis threatens, mimic the very type of crisis they
    dread so much at all times -- that generalized mimetic conflict which prohibitions, in normal
    circumstances, are intended to prevent?
    The inability to find a satisfactory solution to the mystery of ritual has spelled the failure of
    religious anthropology. This failure is not diminished but compounded by the present
    tendency to deny it as failure, by denying the existence of the problem and minimizing the
    role of religion in all aspects of human culture.
    I believe that the key to the mystery lies in the decisive reordering that occurs at the end of
    the ritual performance, normally through the mediation of sacrifice. Sacrifice stands in the
    same relationship to the ritual crisis that precedes it as the death or expulsion of the hero to
    the undifferentiated chaos that prevails at the beginning of many myths. Real or symbolic,
    sacrifice is primarily a collective action of the entire community, which purifies itself of its
    own disorder through the unanimous immolation of a victim, but this can happen only at the
    paroxysm of the ritual crisis.
    I am aware that not all rituals fit that definition exactly, and I do not have enough time to show you that the apparent deviations can be brought back to the single common
    denominator of the sacrificial immolation. Why should religious communities believe they
    can be purged of their various ills and primarily of their internal violence through the
    immolation of a victim? In my opinion, this belief must be taken seriously, and the variations
    as well as the constants of sacrificial immolation suggests a real event behind blood sacrifice
    that takes place in all human communities, as a general rule, and that serves as a model for
    religious ritual. The religious communities try to remember that event in their mythologies,
    and they try to reproduce it in their sacrifices. Freud was right when he discovered that this
    model was a collective murder, but he was wrong, I believe, in his interpretation of that
    murder. The problem is made difficult by