On the morning of January 5, 1895, in the great courtyard of the École Militaire in Paris, an army stripped a man of everything it had given him. Alfred Dreyfus, a captain of artillery, stood at attention in the cold while a general read the sentence aloud. A drum roll opened the thing. Then an officer stepped forward and began to take him apart piece by piece, in front of the assembled regiments and a crowd of thousands pressed against the railings outside. The braid came off his sleeves. His buttons were cut from his coat. The red stripes were torn from his trousers, and the insignia of his rank was ripped away and thrown down into the mud of the parade ground. Last, the officer took Dreyfus’s sword, raised it, and broke it across his knee, and let the two halves fall at the man’s feet.
Dreyfus did not fall with the sword. He lifted his head and called out, loud enough for the ranks of soldiers and the crowd at the iron gates to hear him, that he was innocent, that he had been condemned for a crime he had not committed, that long live France and long live the army. The crowd answered him, and there was no doubt anywhere in it. It screamed for his death, and because Dreyfus was a Jew, a large part of it screamed that too, death to the Jew, again and again, while a French officer who happened to be innocent was walked in a slow circle so that every man present could look at the thing they had all agreed to hate.
They sent him across the ocean to a rock called Devil’s Island, off the coast of French Guiana, and kept him there alone. The evidence against him had been thin, and some of it was forged, and the men who knew this had decided that the honor of the army weighed more than the life of one captain. They had their traitor now. The country could rest.
I would like to be able to tell you that this is a French story from the 1890s, a matter of antisemitism and a cover-up and a famous newspaper article, and to leave it inside its own century. I cannot do that, because I have watched this ceremony before, in other costumes and other centuries, and once you have seen it clearly you start to see it everywhere.
The Same Ceremony, Older
Move back two and a half centuries, into the German prince-bishopric of Würzburg in the years around 1629. A town under strain, a run of failed harvests, a dead child, a hard winter, and the growing certainty that someone had caused all of it on purpose. A neighbor is accused, and put to torture, and the torture makes her name others, and those others are put to the torture in their turn. The fire is fed and fed. Under the prince-bishop Philipp Adolf von Ehrenberg, something on the order of nine hundred people went into the flames in the space of a few years, among them priests and town councilmen and small boys and girls of seven and eight, until the accusations had climbed so high and reached so wide that at one point a majority of those being burned were children. A machine built to protect the town had turned, and begun to eat the town.
Go back another three hundred years, to a Friday at dawn in October of 1307. The king of France, buried in debt to the Knights Templar and hungry for the wealth of their order, has every Templar in the country seized in a single coordinated sweep, and has tortured out of them a confession that they secretly kneel to a goat-headed idol. The idol is given a name, Baphomet. It never existed. Men died for worshipping it anyway, and the last Grand Master of the order, Jacques de Molay, was burned on an island in the Seine seven years later. The story goes that from the fire he summoned the king and the pope to answer for the crime before God within the year, and within the year both men were dead.
Older still, more than a thousand years before that, on a bad day in a Greek city. When plague or famine came, the city would take a man, often a poor man or a condemned one, and feed him at public expense, and walk him through the streets, and then drive him out past the walls with blows and with stones, so that he would carry the sickness of the whole city away on his own body. The Greeks had a word for this man. He was the pharmakos, and cities from Abdera in the north to Massilia in the west kept some form of the rite, and it was ordinary enough that the poet Hipponax could reach for the pharmakos as a plain insult and trust that every reader would follow him.
Further down, at the holiest day of the Hebrew year. Two goats are chosen. One is killed. Over the head of the second the high priest lays both his hands and confesses onto it the sins of the entire people, and then it is led out and driven off into the wilderness, to a place the text names only as Azazel, carrying away what no one else will carry. The rite was meant as mercy, a way to move the guilt of a whole people out of the camp without another human death, and that is the strange root of the thing, that its oldest orderly form was an attempt to do less harm. When the English translator William Tyndale came to this passage in the sixteenth century, he needed a word for the goat that departs, and he built one out of two others. He called it the scapegoat, and we have used his word every day since without once stopping to look at what stands inside it.
And at the bottom, on the Nile, the animal itself, before it is a criminal or a heretic or anything a court could name. In the temples of Egypt the ram was a god, the hidden power of the great city of Thebes, and at a city in the Delta the Greeks called Mendes he was worshipped as a soul of the dead, a black animal who carried the sun down through the darkness and rose with it again at dawn. The figure begins as something holy and terrible, a horned black beast standing at the door between the living and the dead, adored for centuries before anyone thought to load it with blame and send it out.
That is the whole descent, laid end to end. A god on the Nile becomes a rite in the desert becomes a man driven out of a Greek town becomes the Devil becomes a confession tortured out of the Templars becomes the witch in the fire becomes the officer in the courtyard. One shape, worn thinner and thinner across five thousand years, and it never fully wears through.
Forward, Into Our Own Time
The ceremony did not stop when we started calling ourselves modern. In 1966 the leadership of the largest country on earth turned the machine loose on its own citizens. Mao’s Cultural Revolution named its enemies the Five Black Categories, marked them, and set a whole generation of the young to purify the nation by casting out the marked, and the country nearly tore itself apart in the doing. In the spring of 1994, in a small nation in central Africa, a government and a radio station spent months teaching a majority to see a minority as vermin, and then, across roughly a hundred days, some eight hundred thousand people were killed by their own neighbors with farm tools and clubs, because a population had been persuaded that its suffering wore one particular face.
You do not have to travel abroad or into the past to find it running. The manufactured enemy, the moral panic that wants a monster before it has found a crime, the campaign that gathers a crowd by handing it someone to hate, the patient machinery of watching that fixes on a marked kind of person and follows them from place to place, all of it is the same program executing under newer names, on faster hardware, with the volume turned up. The animal is current equipment, still in service, still doing the job it first did on the Nile.
I do not think most of us are cruel. That is the part that took me the longest to accept. The people in the courtyard and the village square were, in the main, ordinary people who loved their children and feared for their crops and wanted to feel safe, and the machine works because it does not require monsters to run it. It asks for a frightened group, a hard season, and a body within reach. Every one of us has stood in that crowd at some size, in an office or a family or a nation, and felt the pull of it, the clean relief of having someone to hold responsible. Learning the shape of the thing is close to the only defense there is.
The Machine
There is a name for what I have been describing, and a man who gave his life to it. The French thinker René Girard argued that this is one mechanism, and that it sits underneath human culture the way footings sit under a house. It begins, he said, in wanting. We learn what to want by watching one another, and we come to want the same things, and wanting the same things sets us against each other, and that rivalry spreads through a group until it threatens to pull the whole structure to pieces. At the last moment the group finds its way out. It fixes on one, some person or family or class that it can agree to blame, and it pours the entire storm of its rivalry onto that one, and drives it out.
The terrible genius of the mechanism is that it works, and that the people running it cannot see themselves running it. To the crowd, the victim is guilty. The crowd screams in real conviction, and that conviction has to be genuine and shared, or the magic does not take. The violence stops. A group that was flying apart a moment earlier stands suddenly together in the quiet after the expulsion. Because that quiet is real, the group remembers the casting-out as a rescue, and it never once examines the plain fact that the victim was chosen for being within reach rather than for being guilty. So the group waits, and the pressure gathers again, and when the next bad season arrives it knows what to do, and to whom.
That is why the ceremony is so hard to kill. Better information does not touch it, because it was never an error in the first place. It hands a frightened community the one thing that community wants, which is relief, and it hands it over on schedule, and the only cost is a life that everyone has already agreed does not count. A bargain that good does not go out of business. It changes its letterhead and opens again in the morning.
The Ones Who Turned
The ceremony is old and it is strong, and it would be easy to end an essay like this one certain that the machine always wins, and I will not end it there, because the record is also full of people who jammed the machine with their own hands.
Go back once more to that courtyard in Paris. A novelist named Émile Zola looked at the broken sword and the innocent man on the rock and refused to look away. In January of 1898 he published an open letter that opened with two words, I accuse, and then named the officers and the forgeries and the lie, one after another, across the front page of a national newspaper. It cost him. He was convicted of libel and left the country to keep his freedom. The affair split France in two for a decade, family against family and town against town, and the fight to free one innocent man became a fight over what kind of country France intended to be. Still, the letter did the thing that letters are not supposed to be able to do. It cracked the case open, the forgeries came apart under the light, and Alfred Dreyfus, after his years on the rock, was brought home, cleared, and given back the uniform he had gone on loving through all of it.
He is not alone in the record. The judge who sat at the Salem witch trials and then, years afterward, stood in a Boston meetinghouse with his head bowed while his own confession of guilt was read aloud to the congregation has a name, and it was Samuel Sewall. The priest who heard the tortured confess in the German trials, who understood that torture will make any human being say anything at all, and who wrote the book that helped bring the burnings to their end has a name, and it was Friedrich Spee. Nearly every account we possess of a witch panic exists because someone, in the end, decided the whole thing had been madness and set it down on paper. The machine runs on people, and that is the entire source of its power, and it also breaks on people, on the one who steps out of the crowd and plants himself in front of the person the crowd has chosen and says, not this one, not today.
That is the part worth carrying out of all of it. The mechanism is ancient and it is still installed, in the courtyard and the village and the timeline, and it runs on a decision that a human being makes, which means it can be refused by a human being who sees it coming and knows its name.
The Length of It
I followed this animal for a long time, across five thousand years and a dozen civilizations, because I needed to know whether it was one thing wearing many faces or many things that only looked alike. It is one thing. The following became a book, and the book is called The Black Ram: The Single Beast Behind the Sacrifice, the Heresy, and the Purge, and What the Cast-Out Can Still Do. It is out now from David Boles Books, in paperback and for the Kindle, and there is a free reading edition on my site for anyone who wants to walk the full length of the argument without paying a cent, because a few arguments should not have to stand behind a price. What you have just read is the short version of it. The animal is still out there, at the edge of every frightened town and every anxious nation, and the next time a crowd gathers to break a man’s sword and scream for his death, I would like a few more people in the square to know the ceremony for what it is.
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