"The reader will have recognized in this tale a number of familiar themes. All the people in the myth either disfigure others, demand that others disfigure themselves, try in vain to disfigure others, or actually disfigure themselves--all of which amounts ultimately to the same thing. One cannot exert violence without submitting to it: that is the law of reciprocity.
[...]
In the relationship between the two cousins the woman initially has the upper hand. She incarnates beauty, the man ugliness; she is free of desire, while he is caught in its thrall. The relationship is then reversed. Differences cancel each other out; a symmetry is constantly generated, invisible in each synchronic moment taken separately but visible in the accumulation of successive moments.
This is what constitutes the non-difference of the sacrificial crisis, a truth forever inaccessible to the two partners who live out the relationship in the form of alternating differences. The symmetry of the overall picture is reflected in the two sides of the face, each scarred in turn. The same details are reiterated throughout the story (until the conclusion), but never simultaneously.
Between the two cousins and Chief Pestilence's tribesmen there is the same relationship as that between the protagonists of Oedipus the King and the Theban plague victims. The only way to avoid contagion is to turn a deaf ear to the appeals of the enemy brothers.
On the level of the tribesmen--that is, the collectivity--the myth speaks objectively. It does what we ourselves did in our opening chapters: it 'shortcircuits' the alternating differences. It does so with good reason, for this difference only ends in similarity. The reciprocal mutation takes the direct form of a loss of differences, a 'becoming the same' at the hands of those whom violence has already made identical. When we note that this process consists of turning men into doubles as well as into monsters, it is clear that we are dealing here with a sacrificial crisis.
Mutilation symbolizes the working of the crisis in dramatic fashion. Clearly, it must be viewed both as the creation of fearfully deformed beings and as the elimination of all distinguishing characteristics, all the salient features of these beings. The process imposes uniformity and eliminates differences, but it never succeeds in establishing harmony.
In the image of monstrous mutilation the procedures of reciprocal violence are expressed in such a powerfully condensed form that they appear bizarre, indecipherable, and 'mythic.'"
-René Girard, Violence and the Sacred
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