"Mythical-ritual societies are prisoners of a mimetic circle that they cannot escape since they are unable to identify it. This continues to be true today: all our ideas about humankind, all our philosophies, all our social sciences, all our psychological theories, etc. are fundamentally pagan because they are based on a blindness to the circularity of mimetic conflict and contagion. [...] To be a 'child of the devil' in the sense of the Gospel of John, as we have seen, is to be locked into a deceptive system of mimetic contagion that can only lead into systems of myth and ritual. Or, in our time, it leads into those more recent forms of idolatry, such as ideology or the cult of science."
I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams (New York: Orbis, 2001), pp. 149-151.
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