If, as a present and living member of the community the victim brought death, and if, once dead, the victim brought life to the community, one will inevitably be led to believe that its ability to transcend the ordinary limits of the human in good and evil extends to life and death. If the victim possesses a life that is death and a death that is life, it must be that the basic facts of the human condition have no hold on the sacred. In this we witness the first outlines of religious transcendence. If the mimetic crisis and the founding murder are real events, and if in fact human communities are capable of periodically breaking apart and dissolving in mimetic violence, saving themselves finally, in extremis, by means of the surrogate victim, then religious systems—despite the transfigurations brought about by interpretations of the sacred—are based on a keen observation both of the kinds of behavior that lead human beings into violence and the of the strange process that puts an end to violence. These are generally the kinds of behavior that religious systems prohibit, and it is this process, roughly, that they reproduce in ritual. […] If the sacred are nothing other than the combination of banality and nonsense as it has been variously conceived from the Enlightenment to psychoanalysis, it would never have maintained the prodigious power it has held on humanity throughout the quasi-totality of its history. Its power derives from what it has said in real terms to human beings concerning what must and must not be done in a given cultural context, in order to preserve tolerable human relations within the community. The sacred is the sum of human assumptions resulting from collective transferences focused on a reconciliatory victim at the conclusion of a mimetic crisis. Far from being a leap into the irrational, the sacred constitutes the only hypothesis that makes sense for human beings as long as these transferences retain their power.