THE BIBLE, “CREATION,” AND MIMETIC THEORY

would like to propose and defend three theses that are related to the main theme of creation. First thesis. Although the idea of creation ex nihilo seems to have been sug-gested by the Bible to some philosophers, it is not a religious theory but a philosophical one. In the book of Genesis, there is no creation in the proper sense of the word. For biblical thought, as for the savage mind, the world is not created, but only put in order by gods or spirits; and, for both of them, this ordering action consists in dividing or separating1 from each other things that already existed (or were potentially present) but were mixed and confused in a primitive chaos, or linked to each other as the organs of an original sacrificial victim: the Purusha (in Vedic religion), the goddess Sedna (among the Inuit people), the larvae (in Aboriginal Australian religion), and so on. In the light of Girardian theory, this means that there are two kinds of cos-mic myths: those that describe (in mythical or ritual terms, of course) th