In the Beginning Was the Word: Mimesis, Violence, and the Origin of Language

Anyone who has given much thought to narratives of human origins, including the earliest mythical ones, will have been struck by the massive proliferation of research and theory bearing on this subject over the past century. Best of all, the Enlightenment vision of "consilience" in the sciences seems for the first time to be realizable: neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists are now, more than ever, comparing notes with semioticians, psychologists and anthropologists, so that any theory of origins will necessarily be interdisciplinary. This book presents a unified theory of origins based principally on René Girard's mimetic theory while drawing as well from research in primatology and theories of religion, consciousness, language origins, and crowd dynamics. It purports to explain how mimesis, aggression, and desire converged to produce symbolic communication, which in turn possibilized ritual, rules prohibitions/obligations), and myth—the three pillars of the sacred and of human culture as a totality. Finally, it asks some hard questions about where history is taking us and whether we can evolve quickly enough to survive our origins.