GEN490 In discussing the roots of war and human beings’ reflections upon killing in war, the seminal contributions of René Girard and Walter Burkert should be taken into consideration. Girard and Burkert seek to explain the “formative antecedents” (Burkert, 1987:212) of central aspects of human culture, which they perceive to be rooted in the act of killing, an act that is later ritualized, centralized, and repeated. For Burkert, the formative “dark event” (Burkert’s comments in Hammerton-Kelly: 120) is set in the hunt for animal meat. Burkert suggests that the drive to obtain meat in order to live is a basic and fundamental aspect of primitive humankind’s emergence as a species, a view for which he has been strongly criticized [See Burkert’s own comments (1987: 167) and Jonathan Z. Smith’s cogent critique (Hammerton– Kelly, 179, 202 –5)]. Humans, he suggests, suffer shock and guilt from shedding the blood of living beings (Burkert, 1983: 15 – 19, 21).  This guilt is resolved by the ritualization of the kill. Girard’s thesis suggests that the fundamental founding myth of human civilization is not grounded in the theme of breaching divine territoriality, played out in a narrative pattern of interdiction and disobedience as found in the tale of Adam and Eve (Genesis three) but in the theme of “mimetic violence” played out in the fratricidal pattern found in the tale of Cain and Abel (Genesis four). Girard writes that humans by their very nature desire to be like those they admire. The need to imitate entails desiring that which belongs to the other. This rivalry results in killing the other to obtain what is his or to supplant him. The victim’s relatives in turn kill the killer in vengeance, whose relatives then must take vengeance for him-all of which plants a chaotic and ceaselessly violent picture of what it is to be human. Girard suggests that, subconsciously, in order to break this cycle of deadly violence, the first humans found the alternative of scapegoating. (Girard; 1987: 121 – 29) He writes “men can never share peacefully the object they desire, but can share hatred.” The scapegoated victim destroyed by collective violence provides the outlet for and the escape from mimetically induced perpetual violence. (1987:128). NIDITCH 24