[<page 434>] Archaic religion was universally centered on a deliberate, but carefully delimited, though often violent transgression which, in the founding mechanism of the sacrifice, even assumed the form of ritual(ized) murder. Having posed the problem as to whether the instincts that seek and find expression in these sacralized transgressions could possibly be eradicated in the course of human progress or “if it is a question on the contrary of a sovereign and irreducible part of man, [435>] but which would hide itself from his consciousness? if in a word it is a question of his heart ...?” (loc. cit.), Bataille himself is inclined to the latter view that, to use Indian terminology, the organized sát aspect of life is founded on the original but suppressed chaos ásat which, as the ultimate truth of man's humanity, must be given conscious but circumscribed expression within this very order itself.

The pre-classical Vedic ‘consecration’ (dîkSâ) charged the royal sacrificer of the world-conquering ‘Horse-Sacrifice’ (Azva-medha) with the impurity of death which he discharged during his final purificatory bath (avabhRtha) onto a deformed Brahman (jumbaka), from the Âtreya (‘descendent of the sage Atri’) clan, representing the evil aspect of the god VaruNa (-pâpa-rûpa), after which the scapegoat emerged from the mouth-deep water bearing the sins of not only the Brahmanized dîkSita but of the entire community from which he was permanently expelled.²⁰ This Brahman jumbaka, charged with the impurity of the village-outcastes (apa-grâmâh), is the very personification of Death and Brahmanicide. By his simultaneous emergence from the pool in order to allow other evil-doers to bathe away their sins, the Vedic dîkSita is himself assimilated to a Brahmanicide, for which reason alone even the later law-books recommend a real Brahman-slayer to purify himself by performing the royal Azvamedha.²¹ “The purifications that the sacrificer had to undergo after the sacrifice moreover resembled the expiation of the criminal,” and the sacrificial mechanisms revolving around the identification of the Soma-dîkSita, the victim and the divinity, ultimately offered the ‘sacrificer’ (yajamâna) the means of sacrificing himself to the divinity, but through the mediation of the victim with whom he was symbolically identified.²² The sacrificer was not only anointed at the same time as the sacrificial stake (yûpa) but actually took for some time the victim's place on the post which, though traversing the three cosmic levels, was measured to the dimensions of the sacrificer.

But the Brahman jumbaka immersed in the amniotic waters personified ‘bhrûNa-hatyâ,’ which means not only Brahmanicide but also feticide. For the bhrûNa is ambiguously both a Zrotriya (‘learned traditional Brahman’) initiated into the secrets of the Veda and an embryo before its sex can be determined, a linguistic precipitate of the sacrificial ideology that clearly reveals the embryogonic foundation of Vedic religion.²³ That Brahmanism overrides the caste-hierarchy, understood in the narrow sociological sense, is clear from the killing of even a ‘warrior’ (kSatriya) or ‘settler’ (vaizya) who has studied the Veda or has been initiated for the Soma-sacrifice being equated with Brahmanicide. The transgressive character of the embryonic regression resulting in the androgynous fusion of the male dîkSita and [436>] the maternal womb (‑psyche) is also suggested by the extension of the Brahmanicide punishments to one who has killed a pregnant or menstruating wife of a twice-born performing a Soma-sacrifice.²⁴ It is through his transgressive sacrality, symbolized by his Brahmanicide, that the dîkSita regresses into the embryonic realm of VaruNa to regain the rejuvenating potentialities of the hidden Agni-Soma. Conversely, the embryogonic exploitation of real Brahmanicide is reinforced by the prescription of the law-books that the ‘Brahman-slayer’ (brahma-han) should expiate himself by retracing the motherly Sarasvatî river upstream back to its hidden source. There, at the centre of the Vedic universe, towered the world-tree PlakSa Prâzravana, on reaching which the dîkSitas completing the Sârasvata ‘sacrifices’ (sattras) had to likewise undergo the avabhRtha bath.²⁵

Whereas the sexualized embryonic regression is generally relived in the form of a maternal incest, the violent death undergone by the androgynized dîkSita in his own womb is also experienced as an infanticide and/or matricide, the whole complex of ideas being symbolically projected in highly condensed mythico-ritual scenarios to which the closest parallel are the rhetorical figures of the enigmatic dream.²⁶ The brahmán-priest, who embodies this inner embryonic state in the outer sacrificial drama, comes to be himself identified with the mother, and the “traumatic” rebirth of the yajamâna (‘sacrificer’) as a Brahman from the womb of bráhman is assimilated to a matricidal Brahmanicide, the equation of mother and Brahman being especially codified in the cultural institution of the inviolability of the sacred cow. Vîrabhadra, who decapitated the sacrificer DakSa-Prajâpati, not only assumes a ‘universal’ (vizva-rûpa) form to behead the ‘demoniac’ king Vallâlarâjan in the Ankâlamman cycle of myths but is himself identified with the child-Ziva (IruLappan) dismembered in the (surrogate) womb of the queen by his mother, the goddess herself. Indeed, in his Andhra cult centering on the termite-mound, that is still celebrated in Rajahmundry also during the dîkSâ-like obscurity of pan-Hindu Mahâzivarâtri (‘Great Night of Ziva’) festival, there is likewise a nightly funerary procession where the marchers impersonating this Bhairava-like deity are possessed rather by real children who have died an early and untimely death.²⁷

The pastoral Gollas themselves traditionally unite their “bandit-king” Mallanna with his companion and equal, the purohita-like “Sanganna, the son of Brahmans of the Vizvâmitra Gotra,” and even identify the two through the simultaneity of their births. KhaNDobâ bore the transgressive sword, donated by the Brahman general of Malhârgad [437>] fort, of the purohita's son Azvatthâman, to be offered, in the form of five lambs, the voluntary sacrifice of the ‘five heroes’ (pañca-vîra) made to Mailâr, no different from the five children demanded by Mhaskobâ. Mallanna regains his kingdom by marrying a Brahman girl Ratnângî in order to consummate his embryogonic worship of the termite-mound, where this outcaste 7th son discovered Pârvatî's golden nose-ring which, identified with the pastoral wealth of sheep, is simultaneously the Soma in the form of boiled milk and the Agni stolen from the (Brahma-) râkshasa/î of confused sex, whose skull is transformed into a bowl for gruel. The definition, in the Deccan folk-cult, of true bhakti (‘devotion’) as the feeding of MârtaNDa-Bhairava in the form of a Brahman, readily transformed like the pastoral Vâghya into a vicious dog his theriomorph, reflects the ‘Brahmanization’ of tribal shamanism through identifying Mallanna's naked canine brother, the yûpa-like single-footed (ekapâda) Bhairava found in the primordial mound, with the Vedic solar (superfluous) 8th (= 7 + 1) son still-born (mRta + anda) for progeny and death from the womb of Aditi the universal Mother.²⁸

The Âtreyas, like the VasiSThas, were highly prized for the office of ‘royal chaplain’ (purohita), whose image becomes caricaturably fused with that of the scapegoat jumbaka in the deformed Brahman VidûSaka (‘clown’) who, through his transgressive traits, is as it were his own Brahmanicide. One of the functions of the purohita, devalued in the eyes of the orthodox Zrotriya Brahmans, consisted in taking over the impurity of his essentially untouchable royal patron, whose universalization through the dîkSâ is expressed through the mythical motif of Indra's decapitation of his demoniac purohita Vizvarûpa.²⁹ Whereas Bhairava is Indra-like in his Brahmanicide, and the Kapiñjala, the VidûSaka in the "sanskrit" play Karpûramañjarî, derives his name from Vizvarûpa's decapitated Soma-drinking head, transformed into a partridge (kapiñjala), the names of Tantric texts like Triziro-bhairava (‘Three-Headed Bhairava’), apparently coined on the image of the gluttonous three-headed Vizvarûpa, not only indicate the identity of sacrificer and victim but also suggest that these ‘non-Vedic’ doctrines were formulated in those esoteric circles where Brahman, king and Untouchable could come together in the not merely symbolic figure of the royal MahâbrâhmaNa.³⁰ Sacred, as opposed to profane, laughter should rather be interpreted as the manifestation of death-in-life; and the profane laughter that was expected to greet and echo the VidûSaka's own ‘exaggerated’ laughter (atihâsya) unconsciously participates in the paradoxical dialectic of the ‘sardonic’ laughter, obligatorily indulged in by the victim and/or by the sacrificers on his behalf.³¹ [438>]