What is the history of humanity? It may be that there is in the Katharmoi [The Purifications] a non-mythical or anti-mythical history of humanity and a form of philosophy of history. First the world, then the men who inhabit it, exist before there is anything like a "religion." She intervened at a certain point. Can we reconstruct the philosophy of this story? Man lived in peace with other creatures—if that is the primitive state we must reconstruct: a pure, non-conflicting goodness (philo-phrosýne) took the place of justice at first (dikaiosýne, with the same suffix –syne); this was before the murder.

Man was not conceived in violence. However, he becomes socially male by escaping a massacre triggered by the murder. [...] Coming out of the war of all against all, men were able to institute the symbolic act of sacrifice to appease the gods. It was about satisfying them to survive. It was already a "purification", but it was not the good one; Empedocles lashes out at her. The blood engendered the blood shed in the rite (see Heraclitus fr. 5: “they purify themselves in vain…”); in a more determined way, one would have to follow the opposite path, choose non-blood. It was the thesis, divine instead of religious, and the principle.

It is a second starting point, another origin; we can feel one, lament the other. The men had to fight to get rid of the animal, assisted by their demons, who become human. In this, as a universal consequence of murder, all men are in solidarity with the crime that made them truly men. The two poles, which were fixed in the history of the world, the divine and the negation of it in the form of a sacrifice —a sacrifice offered to men—, opened a new path to restoration.

Jean Bollack