http://payingattentiontothesky.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/satan.jpg?w=450&h=510
"Satan is a Hebrew term that means “the accuser.” The two terms — diabolos and satan — can be seen as the two complementary manifestations of the forces of delusion, despair, and violence. The diabolos sows discord by arousing mimetic passions and then exacerbating the social tensions and the psychological apprehensions that accompany such passions.
The diabolos produces all the psychosocial complications for which Rene Girard’s mimetic theory so ably accounts. The fundamental tool of the diabolos is what the author of the book of Wisdom called “the devil’s envy,” the mimetic incentives that generate the delusions and distractions of the social melodrama.
At the critical moment, when these passions have sown enough frenzy and reduced a society to pandemonium, the diabolos changes its modus operandi. The diabolos becomes the Satan. Suddenly, the accusing finger points, and a violent avalanche is set in motion, the end result of which is a pile of stones, a glorious memory, and the rudiments of yet another of the kingdoms of “this world.”
What Hamerton-Kelly calls the Generative Mimetic Scapegoating Mechanism — a synonym for diabolos/satan — “generates” such kingdoms, but if its spellbinding myths were ever shattered, “this generation” would have to account for all the blood it shed since the foundation of the world.
What the diabolos divides, satan unites, minus the victim that makes the union possible. It makes sense, then, to say that in the desert Jesus discovered that social division and social unanimity had the same source, and that it was demonic. By recognizing both the essential link between the diabolos and satan and the subtle difference in their roles, Jesus of the synoptic Gospels accomplished an unparalleled anthropological breakthrough, and much of his ministry can be understood in light of it."
More from an essay by Gil Bailie on who Satan, the devil and the Girardian theory that explains the violence they provoke in man here:
payingattentiontothesky.com/2010/02/15/diabolos-and-satan/
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