Today's (technically yesterday's) post:
Girard's theories seem ... overblown, to me. The nature, frequency and circumstances of eventual abolition of human sacrifice are highly variable between cultures, and one of the more common and longest-surviving forms—the funerary sacrifice, where slaves, retainers, wives or concubines of a sufficiently prominent man were killed at his funeral—seems to me to have little to do with conflict (mimetic or otherwise). (Or if it did, why isn't it even more common?)
