Excerpts from:Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. Girard, Rene, with Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort (1987, originally published in French in 1978). Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

RG--83—Culture always develops as a tomb. The tomb is nothing but the first human monument to be raised over the surrogate victim, the first and most elemental and fundamental matrix of meaning.

There is no culture without a tomb and no tomb without culture; in the end the tomb is the first and only cultural symbol. The above-ground tomb does not have to be invented. It is the pile of stones in which the victim of unanimous stoning is buried. It is the first pyramid.

J.-M.O.: We might well consider funeral rites to be the first design and model of all subsequent culture.

RG--128—From the moment when knowledge of the mechanism (of sacrificial scapegoating), begins to spread, there can be no turning back. It is impossible to rehabilitate a sacrificial mechanism in the process of decomposition because growing awareness of these mechanisms is what decomposes them; an effort to interrupt or reverse the process can only be made at the cost of the knowledge being disseminated. This will always lead to an attempt to stifle this knowledge by violence; there will be an unsuccessful attempt to close the human community in on itself.

J.-M.O: 135—You mean to say, then, that the gradual emergence of the victimage mechanism has already dominated our history for some time and that this will accelerate its pace in the years to come.

RG--136—The completion of contemporary criticism coupled with the finally complete deconstruction of all religious and cultural mystification necessary corresponds to an ever greater privation of sacrificial resources.

134—G. L.: According to you, this world is entirely ordered by the diminishing efficacy of sacrifice, or, what amounts to the same thing, by an ever harsher and more revealing awareness of victimage mechanisms.

RG-163—Tombs exist to honor the dead, but also to hide them in so far as they are dead, to conceal the corpse and ensure that death as such is no longer visible. This act of concealment is essential.

165—Matthew 23, 27—Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like white-washed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. Deep within the individual, as within the religious and cultural systems that fashion the individual, something is hidden…It is invariably a corpse that as it rots spreads its ‘uncleanness’ everywhere.

Luke compares the Pharisees not just to tombs but to underground tombs, that is to say, invisible tombs—tombs that are perfect in a double sense, since they conceal not only death, but also their own existence as tombs.