Transgressive Sacrality of the Dîkshita

1. [454>] This article will appear in a longer version, with full sections on “The Perverse Humour of the Infantile Vidûshaka: Psychoanalysis, Criminal Law and Sacrificial Dharma” (discussing at length the Sanskrit drama, Mrcchakatikâ) and “The Infanticide Ankâlamman: The Termite-Mound of the Untouchable Cempatavars and the Royal Obstetrics in the Cremation-ground,” in Sunthar and Elizabeth Visuvalingam, Transgressive Sacrality in the Hindu Tradition, (= TSHT) TS Series vol.1 (Cambridge: Rudra Press, 1989). Materials on the Vidûshaka and the cult of Ankâlamman have been condensed for this volume due to lack of space.

2. For an elementary introduction to the subject, see my “Transgressive Sacrality in the Hindu Tradition: As a basis of inter-religious dialogue, the ethical problem it poses, and its symbolic communication through the buffoon of the Sanskrit drama,” originally presented to the Assembly of the World's Religions, 15-21 November 1985 (New York), before serving as the prospectus for the pilot-conference on this problematic within the 15th Annual Conference on South-Asia, Univ. of Wisconsin, 8 November 1986 (Madison). It is appearing in TSHT (see note 1) and also in Serbo-Croat in Kulture Istoka, 5, No.17 (Belgrade: July-September, 1988). I am indebted to Alf Hiltebeitel not only for having presided but also for resituating the proceedings of his own “Criminal gods and Demon devotees” conference within what I regard to be the more fundamental, global and immediate problem of Transgressive Sacrality.

3. Abhinavagupta, citing his relative Vâmanagupta, on the semblance of humor and of sorrow in Abhinavabhâratî (Abhinava’s monumental commentary on Bharata’s Nâtya Shâstra, the all-encompassing treatise on Indian dramaturgy).

4. For the continuity between Pâshupata and Kâpâlika praxis, see E. Visuvalingam's section in this volume on “The Transgressive Fifth Head of Brahmâ and the Pâshupata Ultimate Weapon” (esp. notes 16 and 60-62).

5. See M. Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1964), pp.xi, 15, 20, 23-32, 365n.

6. S. Kramrisch, The Presence of Shiva (Delhi: Oxford University Press. 1981), pp.159; see note 22 of E. Visuvalingam's rendering of “The Origin-Myth of Bhairava” in this volume.

7. [455>] For the distinction between ‘sacred’ and the repressed ‘profane’ laughter in Amerindian religion, see Lévi-Strauss, "Suppressed Laughter," in The Raw and the Cooked, Introduction to a Science of Mythology: vol.1 (1970; Penguin, 1986), pp.109, 120-132, which also provides evidence, overlooked by Lévi-Strauss himself, of not only comic behavior but also tickling serving as symbolic substitutes for transgression in mythology. Otherwise devalorized, (sacred) laughter is nevertheless credited, in myth 45, with the origin of language itself (p.123, cf. p.132).

8. L. Renou, Religions of Ancient India (London: Univ. of London Athlone Press, 1953), p.10, 18; also L'Inde fondamentale, ed. C. Malamoud (Paris: Hermann, 1978), pp.11-80.

9. See G. Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard,1948), and especially my treatment of the Gândharva musical symbolism in the Vidûshaka Maitreya and the criminal Shakâra in the Mrcchakatikâ (see note 1).

10. See L. Makarius, "Ritual Clowns and Symbolic Behavior," Diogenes no.69 (Spring 1970).

11. See M. Detienne, “Dionysos orphique et le bouilli rôti,” in Dionysos mis à mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1977), pp.163-217; also W. Burkert, Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1983), pp.89 note 29, 105, 119, 122-5, 177-8. Cf. J.C. Heesterman's key-note paper on "The Vedic origin of Vegetarianism," delivered to the 15th South-Asia Conference (see note 1) along with his contribution there to the Transgressive Sacrality seminar on "The Notion of Anthropophagy in Vedic Ritual" centered on the consumption of the Dionysian dîkshita reduced (nowadays) to a he-goat.

12. See D. Lorenzen in this volume and especially E. Visuvalingam's section in this volume on “The Kâpâlika-Bhairava: The Supreme Penance of the Criminal Dîkshita.”

13. See A. Sanderson, "Purity and Power among the Brahmans of Kashmir" in M. Carrithers et al eds., The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1986), pp.190-216; and "Mandala and Agamic Identity in the Trika of Kashmir," Mantras et Diagrammes Rituels dans l'Hindouisme (Paris: CNRS,1986) pp.169-214.

14. This is also the gist of J.-P. Vernant's treatment of “The Pure and the Impure,” in Myth and Society in Ancient Greece (Sussex: Harvester Press, and New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1980), pp.110-29.

15. See J. Parry, "Ghosts, Greed and Sin: The Occupational Identity of the Benares Funeral Priests," in Man (NS) 15 (1980), pp.88-111; "Sacrificial death and the necrophagous ascetic," in M. Bloch and J.P. Parry eds., Death and the Regeneration of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press,1982), and esp. E. Visuvalingam's section in this volume on "The Sin-Eating Bhairava: Death and Embryogony in Kâshî" (also note 116).

16. See J. Gonda, Notes on Brahman (Utrecht: J.L.Beyers,1950), pp.16-18, 57-61; and especially L. Renou (and L. Silburn), "Sur la notion bráhman" in L'Inde fondamentale, pp.83-116 (see note 8).

17. [456>] See L. Makarius, Le Sacré et la Violation des Interdits (Paris: Payot,1974), p.311; C. Lévi-Strauss, Anthropologie Structurale, vol.2 (Paris: Plon,1973), pp.32-34, and Le Regard Éloigné (Paris: Plon,1983), pp.301-18; with the criticisms of Makarius, Structuralisme ou Ethnologie: Pour une critique radicale de l'anthropologie de Lévi-Strauss (Paris: Anthropos,1973), pp.16-19. See esp. E. Visuvalingam, note 4 above.

18. See my Ph.D. thesis (1983) on Abhinavagupta's Bisociative Conception of Humor: Its Resonances in Indian Aesthetics, Transgressive Sacrality and Contemporary Indology (1988).

19. G. Bataille, L'érotisme (Paris: Éditions de Minuit,1957), p.204, subtitle of his chapter on "Sade et l'Homme Normal." See Rig-Veda X.129.4, discussed in F.B.J. Kuiper, Ancient Indian Cosmogony, ed. J. Irwin, (Delhi: Vikas, 1983), p.131, in terms of (peri- or) pre-natal psychoanalysis.

20. See the pioneering work of Prof. F.B.J. Kuiper, Varuna and Vidûshaka: On the Origin of the Sanskrit Drama (Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Co., 1979), pp.213-22, to whom I owe my initiation into the embryogonic foundations of Vedic religion. Also G. Dumézil, Flamen-Brahman (Paris: Geuthner,1935), pp.28-9, seeking to substantiate his argument that the purohita was originally the sacrificial substitute for the king as victim.

21. P.V. Kane, History of Dharmashâstra, 2nd ed., Govt. Oriental Series (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute), II (1974), p.1236; IV (1973),pp.91-2. For the impurity of the dîkshita bound in Varuna's noose (mekhalâ), see J.C. Heesterman, "Vrâtya and Sacrifice," Indo-Iranian Journal VI (1962) p.11-15.

22. H. Hubert and M. Mauss, "Essai sur la Nature et la Fonction du Sacrifice," (1899) reproduced in Marcel Mauss: Oeuvres, 1. les fonctions sociales du sacré (Paris: Minuit,1968), p.234; cf. also pp.225,note 145; 230ff., 302-5. See E. Visuvalingam, "The Kâpalika," (see note 12), note 28.

23. Kane, II, p.148,note 334; p.131,note 290; III (1973), p.612,note 1161; IV, p.11,note 22, where the bhrûna having performed the Soma sacrifices is ranked even higher than the Shrotriya.

24. The duration of which was reckoned from the dîkshanîya-ishti till even the end of the avabhrtha bath; Kane, I, pp.13, 18, 29, 96; III, p.527,note 970. In Shatapatha Brâhmana 1.4.5.13, Âtreyî is a menstruating woman identified with the goddess ‘Speech’ (Vâc) from whom Atri is elsewhere said to have originated, which brings us back a full circle to the eunuch-like Atreya jumbaka. On the mythical level, see E. Visuvalingam, "Bhairava," notes 67,76,77,87, in this volume.

25. Kane, IV, pp.93,note 218; 557-8. For the Iranian parallels to this sacrificial embryogony around the Sarasvatî as the terrestrial Milky Way, and the transposition of the Vedic astronomical coordinates onto the later Hindu sacred geography, see M. Witzel, "Sur le Chemin du Ciel," Bulletin d'Etudes Indiennes 2 (1984), pp.213-279. Another penance for Brahmanicide was the pilgrimage to see Râma's bridge (samudra-setu) to Lankâ (Kane IV, pp.55, 94), for the Brahman Râvana had mastered the four Vedas. See E. Visuvalingam's section (see note 15) in this volume.

26. [457>] Sigmund Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (1953; rpt. New York: Avon, 1965) is itself profoundly influenced and justified by the invocation of myth, folklore, proverbs, and jokes. See also T. Todorov, "La Rhétorique de Freud," in Théories du Symbole (Paris: Seuil, 1977), pp.285-321.

27. See D. Knipe's contribution to this volume, where the dead children are also represented by embryonic "ash-fruits" obtained from the snake-anthill temple and from potters. See E. Visuvalingam, notes 39,59,83-4,109, etc. in this volume, and especially the longer version of my article (see note 1) for further examples.

28. Rig-Veda X.72; see G.D. Sontheimer in this volume, the source, unless otherwise specified, to all further references to this cult. So striking are the symbolic correspondences between the cult of Mârtanda-Bhairava and our paradigmatic Ashvamedha, that even the Mrcchakatikâ, if not for the classical purification of the (untouchable) Brahman (Shûdraka) himself, could just as well be read as a manual of (not only Indian) tribal religion.

29. Heesterman, "Vrâtya" (see note 19) pp.20-33; and Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship and Society (Chicago and London: Chicago Univ. Press, 1985), pp.37-8, 42, 155 (Vidûshaka).

30. See E. Visuvalingam's section on "Mitra-Varuna and the niravasita Bhairava: the Royal Mahâbrâhmana" (also notes 66 and 131) in this volume.

31. Vladimir Propp, "Ritual Laughter in Folklore: A Propos of the Tale of the Princess who would not Laugh, Nesmejana," Theory and History of Folklore (Manchester: Univ. of Minnesota, 1984), pp.124-46, equates the interdiction of laughter with death and obligatory ritual laughter with life particularly rebirth. For Bataille's transgressive laughter as the mutual imbrication and equilibration of the pulsions of life and death, see D. Pérard, "Rire en majeur," in L'Interdit et la Transgression, ed R. Dorey et. al. (Paris: Dunod, 1983), pp.9-33. For "sardonic" laughter, see S. Reinach, "Le Rire Rituel," Cultes, Mythes, Religions, vol.IV (Paris: 1912), pp.109-29.

32. This (re-)interpretation of the Kâttavarâyan narrative is almost wholly based on the data provided by the contributions of Masilamani-Meyer and Shulman in this volume.

33. This mother-son hostility is also central to the Ankâlamman cult and its myths; see Eveline Meyer, Ankalaparamecuvari: A Goddess of Tamil Nadu, Her Myths and Cult, Beitrage zur Sudasienforschung, South Asian Institute, University of Heidelberg, 107 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1986), passim, and note 27 above.

34. See M. Biardeau in this volume.

35. See Meyer, Ankalaparamecuvari, pp.34-5: Ankâlamman made a net of all the divinities and a copper-boat so that her father, their mythic ancestor Malaiyaracan (Parvatarâjan) could kill the oppressive demons hiding as fish but, since the fish were jumping back into the sea, she was obliged to open her mouth as wide as the boat in order to swallow the fishes. The net, made with the rope of Yama's noose (= death) and whose top pulled together to trap the fishes [458>] is Vishnu's cakra (= womb), is clearly equated with Ankâlamman, whose "eyes" (kan) form its interstices. Though the fish, like the dîksita charged with evil, are Asuras or Râksasas, their assimilation to the fish-tailed Mînamaharsi also caught in the net underlines by contrast the positive function and valorization of the dîkshâ.

36. Vallâlarâjan likewise undergoes his violent embryogonic death so that the Trimûrti, incorporating the sacrificial dialectic, may become his slaves. Contrast the treatment of "the Demon Devotee" by D.D. Shulman, Tamil Temple Myths: Sacrifice and Divine Marriage in the South Indian Shaiva Tradition (New Jersey: Princeton University Press,1980), pp.317-21,131-37. See E. Visuvalingam, notes 68 and 132 in this volume.

37. See E. Visuvalingam's section on "The khatvânga-Bhairava: Executioner, Victim and Sacrificial Stake" in this volume.

38. Virgil, Aenid, VII, 312; Freud's motto for his Traumdeutung.

39. The incestuous and even parricide but royal Judas (or king of Syria called Jesus) who expiated by voluntarily substituting himself for Christ on the Cross, in certain Gnostic theories also adopted by Muslim commentators, completes this picture of "the king of kings" as a demon-devotee who dies to become a criminal god. Compare also the double (birth/marriage) incest sacralizing the medieval destiny of the legendary "Pope Gregory" after his (embryogonic?) expiation in a cave on an island in the middle of the ocean.

40. E. Visuvalingam, "Adepts of Bhairava in the Hindu Tradition" (in TSHT), also appearing in Serbo-Croat in Kulture Istoka, 5, No.17 (see notes 1 and 2). For more details see Erndl in this volume.

41. See Stanley and Sontheimer in this volume: also the latter's discussion in which the five sheep sacrificed to the anthill Mhaskobâ or Khandobâ are assimilated to voluntary human sacrifice, and representations of heads of rams and humans alternate under the sandals of Khandobâ. The Vîrashaiva saints of the Lingâyats, who nevertheless often served as his temple priests and even established temples for him, were therefore not altogether wrong in rationalizing that it was Siva, and not the demon (Siva‑) Mailâra, who actually killed Malla. Although (or rather because?) the Torah or Pentateuch formally forbids sacrifices to demons, Dr. Charles Mopsik (letter of 12/02/88) informs me that, during Kippur, the day of collective expiation, a goat is offered to the demoniac power which haunts the mountainous desert, Azazel, himself figured as a goat.

42. See G.D.Sontheimer, Birobâ, Mhaskobâ und Khandobâ: Ursprung, Geschichte und Umwelt von Pastoralen Gottheiten in Mahârâstra (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1976),pp.143-47, 246.

43. See Dennis Hudson in this volume.

44. [459>] See E. Visuvalingam in this volume on "The Royal Dîkshita: Arjuna's Penance and Indra's Brahmanicide" (esp. note 68). Hudson cites archaeological excavations near Kannappa's Kâlahasti mountain revealing bones around the Gudimallam lingam, offered to Siva "portrayed on the lingam as an animal sacrificer in the Vedic tradition."

45. See H. Brunner-Lachaux, "De la Consommation du Nirmâlya de Siva," Journal Asiatique (1970) 213-263.

46. Cf. A. Hiltebeitel, The Ritual of Battle: Krishna in the Mahâbhârata (Itaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1976), p.312>. Gomes da Silva, Pouvoir et Hiérarchie (Bruxelles: Université Libre de Bruxelles, in press) has been able to offer a highly successful interpretation of the cult of Jagannâtha in the light of a positive utilization of Biardeau's unraveling of the deep-structures of the Hindu mythico-ritual universe, especially of the Mahâbhârata, but in terms of a cyclic regenerative hierarchy founded on the nature/culture (other/self) opposition that does full justice to Dumézil's pioneering tri-functionalism even while conforming to an African model which makes no reference to bhakti. Though to a great extent these necessarily ambiguous structures admit both these and the transgressive perspectives, the crucial criteria for determining the fundamental model would lie in our interpretation of the various ‘irregular’ but insistently recurring details within the bhakti scenario but which bear no direct relevance to or even subtly subvert it. See E. Visuvalingam, note 30 above.

47. Both the Vallâlarâjan and the Brahminicide myths discussed in Meyer, Ankâlaparamecuvari, pp.12-14, 50-51, 126, 185-87, 197 for the former and pp.36-37, 161, 164-65, 178, 274 for the latter, refer back, directly or indirectly, to a former royal cult, far removed from the impure violence of the cremation ground, at the great Siva temple at the foot of the nearby Tiruvannâmalai, vestiges of which still persist in the ritual cycle. The Malayanûr version of the Vallâlan myth identifies him with the historical Hoysala Ballâla III who built one of the 9 gopurams of the Tiruvannâmalai temple in the first half of the 14th C. According to the Vallâlamakârâjan Carittiram of the Arunâcala-Purâna (Meyer, p.199; cf. Shulman, King and the Clown, pp.331-39), the younger queen of the childless but perfectly virtuous Vallâla had to substitute herself for a courtesan to embrace the Lingâyat-Shiva, who transformed himself into a child and promised, before disappearing, to perform Vallâlan's funerary rites and succeed him as his own son. The annual re-enthronement of Siva in the absence of a real human king is explicable only in terms of the sacrificial death/rebirth of the single royal divinity on the model of Jagannâtha at Puri, and suggests that the dîkshâ symbolism invested in the historical childless (Shiva‑) Ballâla has been split so as to translate his rebirth from the womb of his own queen into the birth of the so ardently desired son-Siva. See E. Visuvalingam on "Death and Embryogony," (esp. note 87) in this volume.

48. Shulman (see note 64), pp.246-256. For a comparative soteriology of dualistic Zaiva Siddhânta and non-dualistic Trika bhakti, see my [460>] contribution on "Are Tamil Temple Myths really Tamil: Brahmanical Sacrifice, Tamil Bhakti and Hindu Transgressive Sacrality," to the VIth World Tamil Conference-Seminar, Kuala Lumpur, 15-19 November 1987, which is also appearing in the volume referred to in note 1.

49. M. Biardeau, L'hindouisme: anthropologie d'une civilisation (Paris: Flammarion,1981), especially pp.93-101, is indispensable for a proper appreciation of the treatment of bhakti in this concluding paper. See A. Hiltebeitel, "Towards a Coherent Study of Hinduism," in Religious Studies Review vol.9, no.3 (July 1983), 206-211.

50. For the continuity between the classical sacrifice and heterodox renunciation, see J.C.Heesterman, "Brahmin: Ritual and Renouncer" (1964), Inner Conflict (see note 29), pp.26-44.

51. See J.P. Waghorne, "From Robber Baron to Royal Servant of God?: Gaining a Divine Body in South India." And "Cosmogony and Conception: A Query," in Kuiper, Ancient Indian Cosmogony, pp.90-137 (see note 19). See my treatment of chapters 2 and 8 of the Mrcchakatikâ in the unabridged version of this essay (see note 1).

52. By (conditionally) suspending the interdiction, "remission" only deprives the corresponding violation of its transgressive significance which necessarily presupposes the unconditional operation of the taboo. See P. Rieff, "Towards a theory of culture: with special reference to the psychoanalytic case," in T.J. Nossiter et al eds., Imagination and Precision in the Social Sciences: Essays in Memory of Peter Nettl (New York: Humanities Press,1972), pp.97-108; and "By what authority? Post-Freudian reflections on the repression of the repressive as modern culture," in J.P. Diggins & M.E. Kann eds., The Problem of Authority in America (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press,1981), pp.225-55.

53. See Makarius, Le Sacré (see note 17) pp.332-7, esp. p.341 note 21, on Rudolf Otto's Das Heilige.

54. See Biardeau, L'hindouisme (see note 49), pp.135-171 for the complex relations between bhakti, aesthetics and transgression.

55. See Heesterman, "Brahman" (see note 50); "Vedic Sacrifice and Transcendence" (pp.81-94); "Ritual, Revelation and the Axial Age" (95-107); in Inner Conflict (see note 29); and "Vrâtya" (see note 21) pp.18-20.

56. See D.D. Shulman, Tamil Temple Myths, who "sees no great divide between North and South, and the parallels with the ancient, including even Vedic, patterns are often very striking," South Indian Myth and Poetry (note 64), p.9.

57. Heesterman, "Vrâtya" (see note 21), p.36,note 103; and especially E. Visuvalingam in this volume on "The `tribalizing' Ekapâda-Bhairava and Anuttara in Trika Metaphysics."

58. The essential contribution of Mircea Eliade's ‘phenomenology of religion’ is the rejection of all attempts by the ‘human sciences’ to reduce the Sacred to anthropology, psychoanalysis or even linguistics, these counter-sciences which have converged so admirably in the ‘archaeology of Man’ reduced to his Other by Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (London: Tavistock; [461>] New York: Pantheon, 1973).

59. See G. Bataille, La Part Maudite (Paris: Minuit,1967),p.127; and Theories de Religion (Paris: Gallimard,1973),pp.78-80, 87-88, for the relation between sacrifice and war in general.

60. The "conflation" (e.g., Jogi Bir) of Brahman, ascetic, heroic, feminine (satî) and even Muslim traditions in D.M. Coccari's contribution to this volume could be more readily seen as a diffraction at the popular level of the transgressive dîkshâ. See E. Visuvalingam in this volume on "The Sin-Eating Bhairava: Death and Embryogony in Kâshî."

61. See Coccari, Sontheimer, Hiltebeitel and E. Visuvalingam (note 101 on Ghâzî Miyâ) in this volume. For the projection of the transgressive dimension of Athenian sacrificial ideology onto her Other, the rival sister-city of Thebes, see P. Vidal-Naquet, "Oedipe entre deux cités: Essai sur l'Oedipe à Colonne," in J.-P. Vernant & P.V-Naquet, Mythe et Tragédie II (Paris: la Découverte, 1986), pp.175-211.

62. See Hyam Maccoby, The Sacred Executioner: Human Sacrifice and the Legacy of Guilt (Thames and Hudson, 1982), pp.35-39, and passim for further examples of sacrificial ideology in the Old Testament. Also Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York, 1971), p.198. For Azazel, cf. note 41 above on the identity of KhaNDobâ and the goat-headed Malla.

63.Further details on Cain and the scapegoat, missing in Maccoby, were also provided by Dr. Charles Mopsik, to whom I express my gratitude for our regular discussions during the Parisian summer of 1988. For Isaac, see Paul B. Fenton, "Le pénitent: Ismaël dans la tradition juive," in Israel Face aux Nations: Figures Juives d'Autrui (= Pardès, 7/1988), pp. 50, 56 note 4. For sacred laughter, see note 31 above.

64. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Pantheon, London: Allen Lane;1977).