Introduction

Abstract

This first section of the Handbook on Mimetic Theory and Religion addresses the question of the violence of our origins according to mimetic theory: the origin of religion, the origin of culture, and the origin of humankind. Mimetic theory argues that religion, or more precisely that the social process—the scapegoat mechanism—that is at the origin of religion, is also at the origin of culture and that it was this that began the process of hominization leading to modern homo sapiens sapiens.