Scapegoat: A History of Blaming Other People

Scapegoat: A History of Blaming Other People

by Charlie Campbell
Scapegoat: A History of Blaming Other People

Scapegoat: A History of Blaming Other People

by Charlie Campbell

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Overview

A “brief and vital account” of humanity’s long history of playing the blame game, from Adam and Eve to modern politics—“a relevant and timely subject” (The Daily Telegraph).
 
We may have come a long way from the days when a goat was symbolically saddled with all the iniquities of the children of Israel and driven into the wilderness, but has our desperate need to absolve ourselves by pinning the blame on someone else really changed all that much?
 
Charlie Campbell highlights the plight of all those others who have found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, illustrating how God needs the Devil as Sherlock Holmes needs Professor Moriarty or James Bond needs “Goldfinger.”
 
Scapegoat is a tale of human foolishness that exposes the anger and irrationality of blame-mongering while reminding readers of their own capacity for it. From medieval witch burning to reality TV, this is a brilliantly relevant and timely social history that looks at the obsession, mania, persecution, and injustice of scapegoating.
 
“A wry, entertaining study of the history of blame . . . Trenchantly sardonic.” —Kirkus Reviews

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781468300154
Publisher: ABRAMS, Inc.
Publication date: 05/15/2019
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 208
Sales rank: 894,964
File size: 468 KB
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Charlie Campbell was deputy editor of the Literary Review, where he ran the Bad Sex Fiction Prize among other things.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

THE WORD 'SCAPEGOAT'

'They were trying to use me as an escape goat.'

Jade Goody on Big Brother

The word 'scapegoat' was first used by William Tyndale, the translator of the Bible, in his 1530 edition. He coined it to describe a ritual from the Jewish Day of Atonement in Leviticus. In this two goats are sacrificed. The first is sacrificed to Yahweh, so that he might pardon Israel. This goat is a 'sin offering' and its sacrifice is an act of atonement by the people. Its remains are burned outside the community. The second goat is dedicated to Azazel, a god of the underworld. It is saddled with 'all the iniquities of the children of Israel, and all their transgressions in all their sins' by the high priest of Yahweh, and driven into the wilderness. The goat is led outside the village boundaries and left there. It cuts a sorrowful figure – as Holman Hunt showed in his painting 'The Scapegoat' – abandoned in a desolate landscape, with red tassels tied to its horns. When these have been bleached white by the sun, the sins are deemed to have been expiated. The congregation's sense of guilt is passed on and expelled from the community. It stays in the wilderness, which could be a special and powerful place for a shaman or prophet. But the desert, when entered unwillingly, is only a curse. And that is how Holman Hunt shows it.

Tyndale, it is interesting to note, met with a fate even worse than the goat's. He had sought to translate the Bible into English, and in doing so, to make scripture available to everyone through the new technology of printing with movable type. But this brought him into conflict with the Church at a time when translating the Bible from the Vulgate's fourth-century Latin was heresy. As it was, very few could read God's word, and congregations were dependent on their priests to decode scripture for them. Tyndale saw the clergy as too stupid, corrupt and dissolute to be entrusted with the salvation of others. He believed that only direct exposure to the word of God could bring about change, removing the Church as the link to the divine.

The Church's power was not founded on scripture; there is no mention in the Bible of the pope, nor does it set up any hierarchy for man to rule over man. But the clergy protected themselves from change by locking scripture behind this barrier of language. They justified this ban on translating the Bible by saying that laymen were too taken up with worldly affairs to keep the pure, quiet mind that was necessary for reading scripture. Tyndale hit back, saying, 'This weapon strikes themselves, for who is so tangled with worldly matters as the prelates.' He predicted that he would one day make it possible for a ploughboy to know more scripture than a scholar. His translation also allowed women to read the Bible, something that again upset traditionalists greatly.

So, when Tyndale approached the Bishop of London seeking patronage for his translation, he did not meet with approval. The clergy were then the city's largest property owners and employers too. They effectively controlled the printing presses, and Tyndale was forced to travel to the Continent to find someone who would risk publishing his translation. His copies were smuggled into England and distributed covertly – and pirated by others. There was a lot of money to be made from this trade in illegal Bibles, though Tyndale sought none of it, living extremely modestly and relying on the patronage of merchants. Sixteen thousand copies of Tyndale's Bible were distributed in a country with a population of two and a half million, many of whom were illiterate (per capita, the equivalent of 326,400 copies today). It is a staggering number, though only a couple of copies survive today. Ownership of one was an act of heresy; not that this applied to the Church. The Bishop of London arranged for many copies to be bought, so they could be burned in public view. Even the most traditionally-minded baulked at this inconsistent approach to the written word of God.

Tyndale not only challenged the Church by allowing everyone to read scripture, he went one step further. His translation had one crucial difference from the Vulgate. He translated the Greek word 'TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII' as 'congregation' rather than 'church', so stripping the latter of their authority. He denied the Church's claim to have inherited leadership of the faith from St. Peter. Tyndale was steadily gathering enemies, most notably Thomas More, who became fixated with his heresy and wrote longingly of burning him. Ironically, Tyndale had translated passages in the Bible that would one day be used to condemn him: 'And the fyre shall trye every man's worke, what it is.' More and Tyndale wrote hundreds of thousands of words, railing endlessly against each other. Tynale was as elegant and expressive as ever, More less so (wearing a hair shirt and whipping oneself does not hone one's writing style). He accused Tyndale of fomenting unrest, going as far as to blame him for the Peasants' War in Germany (which had claimed over 70,000 lives), and describing him as a hell-hound. Tyndale was equally outspoken, writing of the Church: 'The parson sheareth, the vicar shaveth, the parish priest polleth, the friar scrapeth, and the pardoner pareth. We lack but a butcher to pull off the skin.'

Unsurprisingly, Tyndale was condemned as a heretic and blamed for the religious turmoil that was sweeping Europe. In some ways then, he was almost a scapegoat, a man on whom could be placed responsibility for the religious trauma that was happening. He was demonized and declared a heretic when in truth he represented traditional Christian values far more than the Church with whom he found himself in conflict. Really he was a symptom of the ills that organized religion was undergoing. The Church was arrogant and out of touch with the common man. Henry VIII put his sexual desire ahead of his kingly duty. Luther was leading a revolt against an upheaval of tradition on the Continent. But it was easier to pick on an outsider and hold him responsible.

Having spent many years lying low in Europe, Tyndale was eventually betrayed and captured in Antwerp in 1535. He was subjected to a degrading ritual in which he was stripped of his priestly dignity before being thrown into a cell. Through all of this, he impressed his gaolers with his decency and calm. One said that if he 'were not a good Christian man, they could not tell whom they might take to be one.' But his few supporters were unable to delay his undoing, and the following year he was strangled and burned at the stake. He left an enormous legacy, and his translation lives on in the King James Version of the Bible – 84 per cent of the New Testament is largely his work, as is 76 per cent of the Old Testament. And he opened the way for others; four translations of the Bible were published in the four years after his death, one of them being the official English version. The Christian faith owes much to Tyndale, as much as it does to any church leader. It is often the undoubted beauty of his writing that makes passages of the Bible so memorable, rather than the actual message the scripture carries. He and Shakespeare are two of the dominant figures in the English canon, and the word 'scapegoat' was just one of his many gifts to us.

CHAPTER 2

THE RITUAL SCAPEGOAT

Definition of a scapegoat: 'Any material object, animal, bird or person on whom the bad luck, diseases, misfortunes and sins of an individual or group are symbolically placed, and which is then turned loose, driven off with stones, cast into a river or the sea, etc, in the belief that it takes away with it all the evils placed upon it.'

Funk and Wagnall's Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend

The ritual of the scapegoat goes back right to the beginning of mankind. Every early culture had ceremonies in which they removed sin from the community. These varied greatly, but one thing was constant – the idea that sin was a definite entity that could be transferred from being to being, or object, and that wrongdoing could be washed away. As a species, we're obsessed by purity. All belief systems are not just devices we use to make sense of the world, they allow us to hope that we can return to a state of innocence.

The ancients believed that spirits surrounded us, residing in plants, rocks and animals. The Romans had their sacred groves, while the Arabs thought the desert to be populated by the jinn. A widespread confusion between the physical and the mental led to a firm belief in the transmission of evil. In The Golden Bough Sir James Frazer describes many examples of this from all over the world. In the East Indian Islands, the inhabitants thought a malign spirit could be channeled into leaves which were held against the patient, then thrown away. In China, kites were used to spirit sickness away; in the Aleutian Islands it was weeds. In Indonesia, villagers built little boats to carry away their demons. In India they buried their sins in a jar, which any unwary passer-by could stumble upon, like an unwitting Pandora (there was little concern with what subsequently happened to the expelled evil). Iroquois Indians painted and decorated their oldest friends, before strangling them. In the Himalayas dogs were stoned to death to expiate sin; in Scotland the dogs merely got chased. In India and Egypt cows were the animal of choice. And so on. All of this is a logical step towards transferring evil to another human.

Human scapegoats came to be used more frequently in time. The animals that were sacrificed as scapegoats were usually of high value, but their human counterparts tended to be society's marginal figures – criminals or the disabled. Sometimes they could be priests, whose holy status protected them from this contact with evil. Or they could be actors who were paid for their duties and the risks they took on. These scapegoats were used either as part of a regular ceremony or in the aftermath of disaster. Some cultures had ceremonies in which the scapegoat was dressed in fine robes and led through the crowds as they cast their sins upon him. He would then be driven out of the village and stoned, or thrown into a river or off a cliff, thus carrying away all the people's ills.

There are countless instances of such rituals. Babylon's most important religious celebration was that of Akitu, celebrating the arrival of the new year (in our month of April). In this, the king was deposed and stripped of his insignia of office. He was then restored to his throne with a ritual which involved slapping him in the face until he wept. Afterwards a human scapegoat, usually a condemned criminal, was paraded through the streets, then thrown out of the city and killed, to signal the beginning of the new year. In Albania sacred slaves were kept in the Temple of the Moon. One who showed exceptional signs of inspiration and insanity was chained up for a year, anointed with oils, then speared to death. The sins of the people were then transferred to his corpse and the future foretold from the way it had fallen. In Tibet a man with his face painted half white and half black was proclaimed the King of Years. He sat in the market place every day while passers-by cast their sins onto him. Then he was driven out of the city to spend the next 12 months living in a cave. If he survived, he returned the next year and took on the same role. The Hebrews used scapegoats to deal with minor sins, though more serious transgressions – known as abominable sins – could not be dealt with like this; these included sodomy and having sex with one's wife and mother-in-law at the same time.

In Ancient Greece the scapegoat was known as the pharmakos and, as elsewhere, he performed a key role in society, cleansing it of a sense of wrongdoing after disaster. In Athens a number of outcasts were fed and housed at the city's expense. If disaster struck, two of them were sacrificed, one on behalf of the men, one for the women. The scapegoats were dressed in robes and were led around the city while prayers were uttered for the city's sins to fall on them. Then they were taken outside the city walls and stoned to death. Similar rituals happened elsewhere in Greece, involving others on the margins of society. The Leucadians threw a criminal into the sea each year, tying birds and feathers to him, as a sacrifice to Apollo. The Greeks of Asia Minor used dwarves and the deformed as their scapegoats. These unfortunates were fed, beaten ritually on the genitals to the sound of flute music, then burned to death. In the annual harvest festival of Thargelia two scapegoats were sacrificed, usually the ugliest men who could be found. They were led around with strings of figs hanging from their necks, before undergoing the usual genital-whipping, stoning and burning.

Mary Renault's novel The Praise Singer (1978) depicts a scene where the citizens of Ephesos select the pharmakos, faced with the barbarian army of Medes outside their walls. They chose a swindler and paraded him naked through the town.

They stripped him, and put the ritual offering-cakes in his hands, having to tie them there because he shook so, and led him out to the gate. There they beat him as the rite prescribes, on his tenderest parts till he screamed aloud. Then everyone fell on him as they chose, to purge their offences which he carried for them, and drove him along with sticks and cudgels till he fell. I don't know if he was dead when they came to throw him on the bonfire.

The Romans were a little more civilized than their neighbours but had similar purification rituals. Every March a man dressed in skins and representing Old Mars was led through the streets of Rome. He was then beaten with white rods and driven out of the city as a way of ushering out the old year and welcoming in the new, in the hope of a good harvest. The Romans also had the festival of Saturnalia, which was a period of general licence. Masters would serve their slaves and all manner of things were permitted, from excessive drinking and dancing to sex. Afterwards one individual would be punished, lifting guilt from the others.

The ancients believed that human sin could be purged through rituals. They developed them to appease the gods, who watched over everything. The rituals were a way of sending a message to the heavens to atone for the sins of a community and avert punishment. In this climate of utter ignorance of how natural events happened it was believed that plagues, famines and the like were a divine judgement. And so these ceremonies for removing sin and sickness were usually conducted at times of severe seasonal change when mortality rose – at the beginning or end of winter or during the monsoon. These rituals allayed the people's fear of infertility, both that relating to childbirth and the harvest.

This method of removing sin has evolved over the centuries. What was once an ancient expiatory ritual, aimed at deflecting the wrath of the gods and cleansing a society, has mutated into a method by which rulers can channel the anger of their subjects away from themselves and onto some poor unfortunate. Over time the term scapegoat has come to refer to any group or individual on whom falls the outpouring of anger and blame following disaster. There are essentially two types of modern or post-ritual scapegoats: those created unconsciously, as an expression of our rage and incomprehension, in whose guilt everyone believes; and those created as a conscious act, by those seeking to deflect blame away from themselves. The unconscious ones came first, and existed the moment disaster struck. But in time it became a conscious process – as conscious as the ancient rituals, but lacking the sense of theatre and the acknowledgement that the victim was just that, a victim.

The 'sin-eater' is perhaps the only continuation of these ancient rituals. In the Middle Ages a practice emerged for the transferring of the sins of the dead. At funerals, sin-eaters were paid to take on the sins of those who had recently died to aid their progression to heaven and save them from purgatory. They sat next to the corpse, and food and drink were passed over it to them. By eating and drinking it, they appropriated the sins of the deceased. Understandably, it was not a sought-after job, and the rest of the time sin-eaters were treated no better than lepers. The practice was widespread in Britain, particularly in Wales and the Hebrides, and instances of it were recorded as late as the nineteenth century. The last known sin-eater, Richard Munslow, died in 1906. He was a Shropshire farmer, and from all accounts was not the unfortunate figure normally associated with the role.

(Continues…)


Excerpted from "Scapegoat"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Charlie Campbell.
Excerpted by permission of Abrams Books.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Table of Contents

Copyright,
Prologue,
Introduction,
The Word 'Scapegoat',
The Ritual Scapegoat,
The King and the Scapegoat,
The Christian Scapegoat,
Christ the Scapegoat,
The Jewish Scapegoat,
The Sexual Scapegoat,
The Literal Scapegoat,
The Communist Scapegoat,
The Financial Scapegoat,
The Medical Scapegoat,
The Conspiracy Theory,
Alfred Dreyfus,
The Psychology of Scapegoating,
Conclusion,
Notes,
Select Bibliography,
Acknowledgements,

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"As Mr. Campbell observes in this brief and entertaining book, there might not always be a cure for what ails humanity, but there's always a culprit." —Wall Street Journal

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