Your Ancestors and Mine Practiced Ritual Sacrifice. Why?
Margaret Mead's Trance and Dance in Bali as a Girardian Persecution Text
I was seventeen when I saw the weirdest thing in my life. It was in a rural town in Cebu, Philippines, celebrating its annual fiesta. One of my high school buddies was from there, and he invited the entire gang.
The fiesta culminated with performances at the town's "gymnasium," a well-lit basketball court with a roof but no walls. Some of my friends were in a rock band, and they were our contribution to the feast. They covered some Bob Marley songs, as one does in Cebu. They also played a song by the British techno-rock band Prodigy. This band had a dark, industrial, and almost satanic vibe in their music videos, and we thought we were badass for bringing their music to the barrio. Little did we know that we were about to see the real thing.
While the townsfolk were having supper on disposable paper plates, a muscular shirtless man wearing jeans and a crown of feathers entered the gym and started his performance in the middle of the basketball court. He gyrated like a macho dancer to "Dayang-Dayang," the improbable "ethnic" hit song whose origin is a mystery to this day. He then cradled a young chicken in his hands. He continued his dance with arms outstretched, as if writing invisible runes in the air with the chicken. At the climax of his performance, he bit off the poor chicken's head and smeared its blood on his torso.1
The townsfolk's reaction added to the weirdness. It was as if that gruesome performance was the most normal thing. I recently found out that they might be right, and I might be the weirdo. If we consider the vast history of humanity, it is only in this thin slice of modernity that bloody sacrificial rituals are absent or out of sight. We see ritual sacrifice performed by the founders of Rome in The Aeneid, the Jews in the Bible, the Aztecs in the records of the conquistadors, and Southeast Asians in 20th-century ethnographies.2
Explanations
That teenage memory resurfaced when I saw Margaret Mead's classic anthropology film, Trance and Dance in Bali, which was recorded in the 1930s and released in 1951. You can watch the entire 21 minutes of the film on the YouTube channel of the US Library of Congress. Nineteen minutes into the video, we see a Balinese man do exactly what the Cebuano macho dancer did minus the gyrating.
In anthropology, there are phenomena called "cultural universals." These are practices that appear in most if not all cultures, like marriage and gender roles. The common explanation is that these customs perform key roles in the functioning of society. Does this explanation also apply to the cultural universal of ritual sacrifice?
It also turns out that myths from all over the world have similar elements. This is really strange because prior to the modern era, there was no communication across most cultures. Even if humans have a common origin, why would similar elements persist across millennia of isolation? Wouldn't the more probable result be for cultures across the world to have wildly different stories? Scholars have proposed explanations to these similarities. Some of the most famous are from Claude Lévi-Strauss, Carl Jung, and Joseph Campbell.
Lévi-Strauss likened myths to language. Since the human vocal instrument is the same for the entire species, the sounds we inevitably invent for each language will be limited to those we can produce. This results in a limited palette of sounds. To Lévi-Strauss, the similar elements of myths are explained by the universal structure of human minds. Like language, the structure of human minds produces a limited palette of concepts, resulting in similar expressions in myths.
To Carl Jung, this universal palette for myths comes from the "collective unconscious." I don't understand it, so I will not attempt to explain it.
Joseph Campbell focused on the similarity of the narrative arc of these myths, which he famously called "the hero's journey." He theorized that myths tend to follow this template because they reflect the stages of psychological development and transformation that individuals undergo in their journey toward maturity.
I prefer René Girard's explanation. When I saw Trance and Dance in Bali, I was struck by how well it fits the pattern of Girard's scapegoat mechanism. Below, I present a Girardian exposition of the play. But first, let's go through key scenes in the film.
Trance and Dance in Bali
Here is Mead's introductory text at the opening of Trance and Dance in Bali.
In this play, the witch, angered by the king's refusal to marry her daughter, sends forth her disciples to spread the plague. The villagers wander the roads, trying to escape the plague. There is a struggle between the witch, in masked supernatural form, and the emissary of the king, who fails to kill her and is transformed into a dragon. The followers of the dragon are thrown into a deep trance by the witch, revived by the dragon into a somnambulistic state, and turn their krisses violently against themselves. The performance ends with ceremonies for bringing the actors out of trance.
The play starts by introducing the witch and her disciples. We are told of the motivation behind their eventual crimes. Mead narrates: "Beside her is her daughter, who had been rejected by the king of the country. In revenge for the slight of her daughter, she is now training her little novices to spread pestilence and death."
The play then depicts the suffering of the victims of the witch. Mead continues: "The next scene shows a pregnant woman among a group of people who have fled their plague-stricken village to wander the roads."
Mead: "This is the birth scene, where the pregnant woman, played by a man, gives birth to a child while the witches lurk about to steal the newborn child." The villagers help the woman give birth. The witch (who wears a mask and white dreadlocks) and her child (to her right) await the birth.
Mead: "A doll, which is stolen by the witch child, tossed in the air, killed, and returned dead to its mourning relatives. The villagers mourn for the dead child, putting on a theatrical display of grief."
Mead: "The witches, witch child, and witch tease the mortals, to whom they are not yet quite visible... As they become visible, the mortals chase the witches... The witch child is caught and held by the hair, a demeaning gesture."
The next scene is at the temple gate. An emissary of the king attempts to kill the witch, but he fails. The witch wears a "white cloth in which a mother carries her baby." The girls who were trained by the witch now put on their masks. Mead: "These are the frightening witches into which the beautiful little girls of the ballet have been transformed." Like their leader, they also wear dreadlocks and sagging breasts.
The dragon then enters the play. Mead: "Here is the dragon arrived to confront her. As she represents death, he represents life. And they have a long altercation in ancient ecclesiastical Javanese while she holds him by his beard and scolds him."
The next scene shows a group of young men brandishing kris knives. They repeatedly attempt to kill the witch. They stab the witch, fail to kill her, and collapse. The fallen men go into a trance.
The dragon appears again and revives the men. Mead notes that it is followed by its "priest, who sprinkles the holy water over them." The men go into what Mead describes as a somnambulistic state. They continue dancing with their krisses.
A group of women, also wielding kris knives and doing the same dance, then arrive. Mead: "At a scream given by one of their number, they suddenly go into trance seizures... and with loosened hair, turn their krisses against themselves." The men likewise point their knives to themselves. Mead spends several minutes showing and commenting on the trance.
The film then cuts into a wall of text, similar to the introduction. It reads:
The theatrical part of the performance is over, as one by one, the trancers have fallen into rigid, limp or convulsive states of unconsciousness and been carried into the open temple courtyard, where they will be brought out of trance.
In the final part of the ritual, the men who played the witch and the dragon—also in a trance state—perform the sacrifice. Mead: "A chicken is brought, which is to be offered, by the priest of the dragon." The man who bites off the head of the chicken was the one who played the witch. He does so while in a state of trance. After the sacrifice, we are shown some footage as its performers gradually recover from their trance.
Mead closes the film with this interpretation: "The play is over, but it will begin again and again as the Balinese reenact the struggle between fear and death on the one hand and life-protecting ritual on the other."
Witches
In the first chapters of his 1982 book The Scapegoat, Girard uses text from Guillaume de Machaut, a 14th-century French poet and composer, to unveil the pattern he sees across records of times of crisis, especially of plagues. He saw this pattern in myths and works of literature.
We read them in Thucydides and Sophocles, in Lucretius, Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Defoe, Thomas Mann, Antonin Artaud, and many others.
Girard points out that myths related to sacrifice tend to be set during a crisis in society. Early in The Scapegoat, which he says is about "collective persecutions and their resonances," Girard writes,
By collective persecutions I mean acts of violence committed directly by a mob of murderers such as the persecution of the Jews during the Black Death. By collective resonances of persecutions I mean acts of violence, such as witch-hunts, that are legal in form but stimulated by the extremes of public opinion [...] The persecutions in which we are interested generally take place in times of crisis, which weaken normal institutions and favor mob formation.*
Let's look at the Balinese play through this lens.
If Girard is correct, the witches in this play must have been scapegoats, as we are now convinced their counterparts were in the witch hunts of pre-modern Europe and America. They are blamed for the plague and murdered for it. Since the tellers of myths are the murderers and their descendants, the story tends to accrue justifications for their murder.
The opening scene of the play establishes the guilt of the witches. They are given a motivation: vengeance for the daughter's rejection by the king. Like the Jews in Guillaume de Machaut's text they are also given magical powers. The European Jews can poison an entire populace, while the Balinese witches can cause a plague.
The persecution is further justified by the gravity of their crimes. This is one pattern that Girard noticed among these texts:
First there are violent crimes which choose as object those people whom it is most criminal to attack, either in the absolute sense or in reference to the individual committing the act: a king, a father, the symbol of supreme authority, and in biblical and modern societies the weakest and most defenseless, especially young children.*
Two atrocities are attributed to the witches. They plot vengeance against the king and they kill a newborn child.
Why is the witch accompanied by apprentices and a child, all of whom are also shown to commit crimes against the villagers? At some point, they become visible or transform into witches. If Girard is correct, this is a justification for the mob's scapegoating and murder not only of old women but also young girls and children.
Dragons
According to Girard, our modern tendency to side with victims of persecution (e.g., witches) originates from the perspective that stems from the sacred scriptures of the Jews and the Christians. This cultural innovation has now spread all over the world through "Western" modernity and globalization. Today, it seems like this mindset is innate to humanity. Yet, if we look at historical and anthropological records, we will see that the default mindset is to side with the strong and to tell stories from their perspective. The murder of the victim, like the Balinese witch, is always justified in sacrificial myths. In contrast, we are shown the viewpoint of the victim in Jewish sacred text. For instance, we meet Abel, the innocent victim of his brother Cain; Joseph ("the dreamer"), the innocent victim of his brothers' envy; and Uriah, the innocent victim of King David's twisted desire. In the Christian bible, we meet Jesus of Nazareth, the innocent victim sacrificed to keep the peace. Let’s use this lens to compare dragons.
The legend of St. George depicts a dragon well-known in Western Christian mythology. In this tale, the dragon terrorizes a town, demanding sacrifices. Just as the town is about to offer up a princess, St. George, a traveling knight, arrives and intervenes. He slays the dragon, leading the townspeople to embrace Christianity.
Compare this to the dragon in the Balinese play. It is the enemy of the evil witch. To Mead, the Balinese dragon represents life. In the play, we see it revive the mob that attempts to kill the witch. Its holy water brings the knife-wielding mob into a trance state and they continue with their attempts to kill the witch. Later, they direct their knives against themselves.
The dragon of St. George and the dragon of Bali are similar in one aspect: they both demand sacrifice. The difference is that the Balinese play is told by what Girard calls "naive persecutors" who "are unaware of what they are doing. Their conscience is too good to deceive their readers systematically, and they present things as they see them." The agents of the Balinese dragon must kill the witch because she is guilty.
Viewed through a Girardian lens, both dragons represent the scapegoat mechanism. It appears in myths all over the world because it was the solution that all societies found to the new dangers brought about by emerging cognitive abilities during our evolution toward humanity. Girard presents mimetic rivalry as one consequence of our abilities, which, in his model, stems from mimetic desire.
Girard observes how humans are the most mimetic of creatures. This leads us to desire people or things that can only belong to one or a few. This love triangle leads to an inevitable conflict between rivals. The violence between rivals spreads throughout society through mimesis as well. Murder is repaid with murder in an endless cycle of vengeance.
Girard presents the scapegoat mechanism as the instinct that evolved among human societies that survived this inevitable crisis: those that did not went extinct. As chaos threatens to destroy society, the mob picks an individual or a subgroup to blame for the crisis. The cycle of vengeance ends by directing all the violence towards these scapegoats. Society is united in its collective murder. No one is left among the scapegoats to take vengeance, so the cycle ends.
This crisis and its violent resolution happened countless times in the hidden past of all societies that survive today. The peace that resulted from this violence felt magical, so it became ritualized. Most societies substituted the sacrifice of humans with animals. Not all, though. This common origin created the similarities of myths of cultures as geographically dispersed as Bali and Europe. To Girard, this common origin of societies explains the universality of sacrifice and its relation to the sacred. The Balinese play speaks of something true: the dragon represents life, a life purchased with the collective murder of the scapegoat.
The sense of the sacred’s connection to ritual sacrifice also seems to be a cultural universal. The usual evolutionary explanation is that sacred sacrificial rituals somehow provide survival advantages, like social cohesion and making sense of the mysteries of existence. These sound a bit hand-wavy to me, and they do not really explain why all societies would end up with the same solution. If we had not known how sacrifice tends to be related to the sacred in archaic societies, the more sensible prediction would have been that solutions to social cohesion and meaning would vary a lot. This is what we see in the modern world. Girard provides the better explanation. Its mechanical inevitability fits the universality of sacrifice and the sacred.
Trance and Dance in Bali Enriching Girard's Theory
Girard used texts—from novels to myths to ethnographies—to formulate his theories. The medium limits the kinds of messages that can be transmitted in the telephone game that cultures play across millennia. For instance, Girard theorizes a time of chaos that results from a contagion of mimetic rivalry and violence, which triggers the scapegoat mechanism. But what does this actually look like? Though still metaphorical, the Balinese dancers stabbing themselves might be a more "high-definition" representation of this event compared to words on paper. Similarly, the essential role of trance in this Balinese persecution text might be the most faithful representation we have of the mental state of people within the chaos and the perpetrators of the collective murder.
I'd like to pursue two follow-up essays to this piece. The first will be an ethnography examining construction workers who persist in sacrificing chickens at the start of projects, despite receiving explicit instructions from owners and employers not to do so. This is probably the most common practice of ritual sacrifice in contemporary Philippines. The second is to look at more recent pogroms and see if there is anything trance-like in the behavior of the murderers. For instance, the 1994 Tutsi genocide in Rwanda or the 1998 massacre of the minority Chinese-Indonesians in Jakarta. If Girard is correct, the dragon continues to live in us and will awaken, hungry for blood, when chaos calls.
To non-Filipino readers: “macho dancer” means male stripper. To Filipino teenagers from an all-boys school, they are viewed as low-status males. There is a frequently parodied dance that is stereotypical of macho dancers (you can find “funny” videos on YouTube), and you can imagine how weird this mix of sex, violence, and earnest performance of a dance you are supposed to mock is to young men steeped in Filipino machismo.
I visited Barangay Agujo in Daanbantayan, Cebu, the town where this event happened, last April 1, 2024, and interviewed a group lounging in the local government office (barangay hall). It turns out the dance was not part of a local tradition but one of the performances of the town’s visiting “diaspora.” A lady named Guadalupe told me that the performer was part of the Agujo Metro Cebu Association (AMCA), a club of sorts for people from Agujo who moved to the city. Guadalupe interpreted the performance as “Igorot,” one of the “indigenous” groups in northern Philippines. She mentioned the names of two possible performers, but both are now deceased. AMCA, according to Guadalupe, is now defunct.
This is beautiful work!