[<page 446>] Otherwise inadmissible in a religion based exclusively on the love of God, the valorized mythical figures of the criminal god, the projection of the murderous sacrificer as identified with his transcendent divinity, and of the demon devotee, the extrapolation of the same transgressive dîkSita as incarnated in the evil victim, are still indissolubly bound together in the ‘Christian’ figure of the (son of) God who sacrifices himself for our sins.³⁹ The transformation of the demon-devotee Bhairavanâtha, through his fatal violation of the virgin womb of the Mother-Goddess, into the criminal-god Bhairava, a transgressive itinerary that nevertheless provides the exemplary model for the popular pilgrimage instituted by the devout Zrîdhara at VaiSNo-Devî, reveals the essential identity of murderer and victim even within the context of a purified ‘religion of devotion’ (bhakti).⁴⁰ Likewise, the ‘confusion’ of MaNi and Malla and the conflation of their respective dying boons in the composite figure of MaNimal, with MaNi sometimes reduced to the horse of Malla, would have been possible only if the two were perceived as constituting a single demoniac essence. KhaNDobâ's acceptance of MaNi's white horse as his own vehicle and his accordance of public worship to the reformed demon within his temple-precincts, coupled with his assumption, as ‘destroyer of Malla’ or Malhârî/Mallâri, of the name of the unreformed demon, suggests a similar identification of the god and his demoniac victim. If KhaNDobâ provides goats as ‘offering’ (naivedya) to satisfy the still unreformed Malla's desire for human sacrifices and accepts that the demon's decapitated human head be placed under the threshold of the temple to be trodden by his devotees and himself, this could then be interpreted as a symbolic subterfuge divulging that it is KhaNDobâ himself who ultimately demands human sacrifice of his devotees as exemplified by the now goat-headed Malla.⁴¹

The untouchable Mâtanga, sacrificed for the foundation of KhaNDobâ's temple-fortress at his capital Jejuri and divinized into its guardian officer Yesvant Râo, is himself the Ziva he thereby establishes there and is able to cure bone fractures, like the medicine-man Rudra, only through the regenerative power of his fatal dîkSâ. Likewise, it is he himself whom the ‘demoniac’ (Bêtâla) Cevvi Reddi had to murder in the form of the untouchable Rêca in order to gain a treasure (and finally a kingdom), for he changed the ‘clan’ (gotra) name into Rêcerla in [447>] commemoration of his faithful servant's voluntary sacrifice. The indirect identification of even the purified vegetarian god with the carnivorous demon-devotee, completes the triangular dialectics of self-sacrifice whereby the purified devotee continues to offer himself in the form of the evil egoistic victim to himself as the transcendent god of bhakti, so that he may secure abundance in his worldly life. The confluence of sacrificial paradigms and shamanizing practices in folk-religion is most vividly underlined in their repeated encounter in the cult of the pastoral KhaNDobâ assimilated to the Brahmanical MârtaNDa-Bhairava: though himself denied direct vision of the god he worships so regularly in the temple, it is the Brahman who confirms the bhakti of the tribal by revealing that the mysterious and overpowering divine presence the latter had experienced in the solitude of the forest is indeed the god KhaNDobâ.⁴²

Between the extreme poles of the popular ‘shamanizing’ level of Tamil folk-religion, where the deity, who possesses his devotees, is injured or killed in a bloody sacrificial scenario, and the Brahmanical purity of the royal temple, where the transcendent undying god, worshipped according to the strict rules of the Âgamas, is ritually extricated from all violence, we are faced with the fanatical ‘love’ (anpu) of 24 Nâyanmârs who kill or injure themselves and/or their kin, as extensions of themselves, for the love of the manifestations of Ziva in his slaves or linga.⁴³ Though in the bhakti context based on a dualistic metaphysics, the Nâyanmâr's suicide appears to be vindicated in terms of his recognition of the Lord (only) in the Other and not in his own debased self, it is nevertheless through this very self-sacrifice that he attains union (sâyujyam) with Ziva, who has in reality already taken possession of him through anpu. Moreover the hagiographies themselves seem to provide symbolic equations that continue to identify the eager victim and his demanding god. His human bondage (pazutva) replaced by divine autonomy (shivatva) through the dîkSâ of Ziva's gracious look, the hunter Tinnanâr feels immediately impelled to defiling worship of the linga, and his self-sacrifice is equated with the deity's own self-mutilation. This Kannappa is after all an incarnation of Arjuna, mortally crushed in the Mahâbhârata by the tribal Kirâta-Ziva, with whom he is identified in the context of a symbolic dîkSâ.⁴⁴ Whereas Enâtinâta allows himself to be killed by his treacherous rival wearing Ziva's sacred ash on his forehead, Pukalccola Nâyanâr, by bearing the decapitated head of a Shaiva devotee in the golden pot on his own head during his self-immolation in the sacrificial fire, is as it were identifying himself with his own victim. Pukalccola had, after all, already offered himself [448>] as victim to his own sword at the hands of Eripatta Nâyanâr, dressed in the garb of Ziva, only to be faced with the disconcerting prospect of his executioner using it to cut his own throat instead. The Nâyanmâr's devout horror at killing Ziva in the form of his slaves has become the bhakti pretext for his own divinization through selfless suicide, the ritual model for which is ironically provided by the original self-sacrifice of the god himself.

Other scenarios seem to extrapolate tantricizing transgressive values onto a public setting where the underlying ritual patterns are now justifiable only in terms of a shocking but exemplary anpu. Thus Ciruttondar's sacrifice to the Bhairava-ascetic of his own cooked son, left untasted by the bhakti religion, has still all the flavor of Kâpâlika cannibalism. Vicâra Sharma's reward for his Bhairava-like Brahmanicide of his own father is to receive, as Candeshvara, the dangerous ‘residue’ (nirmâlya) from the temple-offerings to Ziva, whose problematic status is explicitly compared to the ambivalence of the transgressive Soma-dîkSita.⁴⁵ By slaughtering his next-of-kin to defend the privilege of the lecherous ash-smeared Brahman to cohabit with his own wife, Iyarpakai Nâyanâr's ‘immoral’ anpu only preserves the obscure ritual traditions amply depicted on Shaiva temple-walls elsewhere. The fundamental, and no doubt revealing, question that must be posed to the hagiography of Tamil bhakti, even independently of these selected episodes, is why the Nâyanmâr is able to recognize his Lord's omnipresence only in (those who bear) his overt ritual insignia. And more important for our problematic than the retention of the violent elements, common to both archaic Tamil culture and the Vedic blood-sacrifice, is that such impetuously transgressive outbursts of divine possession are understood not in opposition to the restrained socialized bhakti of the temples but rather, as emphasized by Arumuga Nâvalar, as the ripening, into an irresistible overflow of anpu, of prior scrupulous performance of Âgamic ritual service (caryâ/kriyâ). The same god who insists that his bhakta purify himself before entering his sacred presence within the temple also chides his exemplary devotee for being unable to immediately recognize Him when He assumes the profane impurity of the Untouchable.

Although Hindu bhakti does encompass and even re-interprets the sacrificial values of the still central Brahmanism which would have receded into the background, the crucial question is whether this transformation spells the subversion, surpassing or at least suspension of the archaic Vedic ideology, or rather achieves the generalization and triumph, at least on the symbolic level, of its constituting [449>] dialectics of transgressive sacrality.⁴⁶ If bhakti is no more than love of ‘God’ (Îshvara) clarified by ‘true knowledge’ (jñâna) of his relationship with the ‘soul’ (anu) and aesthetically reinforced by the variegated props of ‘ritual activity’ (kriyâ), why should it nevertheless stubbornly maintain the tension and even opposition between its pure and impure poles instead of eliminating them altogether? Why are, on the one hand, concerns with ritual purity so central to the nuclear temples of Brahmanical pilgrimage, as exemplified by Kâzî-Vizvanâtha, that untouchables are barred from participating fully in a supposedly universalistic devotional religion? On the other hand, why are supposedly reformed (kâval ‘guardian’) ‘demon devotees’ like Kâttavarâyan, who as Murugan is the all in all of Tamil bhakti, not allowed to surrender once and for all to the high-caste pure divinity but instead obliged to regularly reassert their ritual identity as ‘criminal gods’ in order to re-enact the archaic sacrificial scenario even without the manifest patronage of the Brahmans? And, in between, why should even the purified Shaiva Siddhânta venerate such transgressive Rudraic examples of bhakti which its apologists have to uneasily rationalize in terms of a paradoxically fanatical anpu?

These questions must necessarily be resolved in the light of our understanding of the strategies and mechanisms through which Brahmanism succeeded in imposing itself on not only Tamil but Indian culture as a whole. The decisive consideration which derives from our analysis of the folk-cults above is that bhakti, far from pitting the impure ‘indigenous’ pole of Tamil religion against its pure ‘Brahmanized’ pole, continues on the contrary to hold them firmly together within the single all-embracing symbolic universe of the pre-classical sacrifice. The bloody obstetrics that the impure Cempatavar have so scrupulously preserved in the cremation-ground restores the vital primitive base to the Vedic dîkSâ-ideology whose profound social significance is revealed in the annual coronation by the Brahmans of the royal divinity in the ‘sanctum sanctorum’ (garbha-grha ‘womb-house’) of the Annâmalaiyâr temple.⁴⁷ And eager to gift away the whole kingdom with his throne, the ‘mad’ Kerala king Ceramân Perumâl, who understood the sacrificial language (kalarirr' arivâr) of all creation so well that he falls from his elephant prostrate at the lowly feet of the protesting ash-white washerman, is but the inseparable alter ego (kalantav unarvâl) of the Âdishaiva poet-saint Cuntarar, the princely Brahman on his celestial white elephant eager to reunite with Ziva like an errant calf with its mother.⁴⁸

The real conflict is therefore not between an ill-understood Brahmanical sacrifice mysteriously imposed from above on a royal [450>] bhakti surging spontaneously from some conveniently undefined ‘folk’ religion,⁴⁹ but rather between a de-sacralized profane world, opaque to all symbolic meaning, and its uncompromising rejection in favor of an other-worldly salvation as propounded especially by the heterodox renunciation of the Jainas and Buddhists. Whereas the Jaina epic, Jîvaka Cintâmani, offered Kulôttunga II a life of transient heroic and erotic adventures to be finally abandoned in quest of Nirvâna, Cêkkilâr converted his southern patron to the Shaiva mode of sanctifying his royal duties in life—and in death—through imitating the exemplary devotion of the Nâyanmârs. The MrcchakaTikâ's exaggeration of the renunciatory dimension of the brahminized yajamâna in the ambivalent figure of the chaste self-controlled Shâkya (i.e., Buddhist) mendicant,⁵⁰ accurately delineates the inner tensions of Buddhism in its Indian milieu. If the symbolic exchanges condensed in the iconic Biruthus could so easily legitimize the rise of a thieving Kallar caste into a Tondaimân dynasty of worshippers of the ‘Great Mother’ Brhadambâl, this is no doubt because the central narrative of the "taming of the wild elephant," where the cloak of death is also the embryonic sheath of rebirth, was sufficient, like the vajra-wielding Indra's Vrtrahatyâ, to sacralize the sum total of their profane sins into a transgressive royal obstetrics.⁵¹

By asserting its own uniqueness as a mode of spiritual experience in the post-axial crisis of an Indianizing Aryan tradition faced with the challenge of indigenous tribal and Dravidian cultures from without and renunciatory ideals from within, Hindu bhakti seems to have not only served as the vehicle of sacrificial values but also generalized them quite independently of the material reality of the Vedic sacrifice whose complicated technicalities were monopolized by the Brahmans. More than being merely a diluted substitute of the Shrauta (‘high’ Vedic) sacrifice for non-Brahmans in an increasingly commercialized society menaced by secularization, the emotionalism of bhakti in its own paradoxical way revivifies the purified abstract symbolism of the classical ritual by restoring that archaic transgressive dimension of the sacred, divulged only in cryptic suppressed fashion in its Âgamic nuclear temples, but preserved so faithfully in tantricized folk-religion especially by the otherwise excluded lowest castes. But the paradox of bhakti, whose sociological function is definable as the unceasing yet never wholly successful effort to sacralize life-in-the-world by infusing it with the transcendence of the absolute, is that it tolerates the violation of sacralizing interdictions, if at all, only through the ‘remissive’ attitude⁵² of a cruelly merciful (karunâ/krpâ) God, who thereby [451>] effectively disguises the disquieting mysterium tremendum et fascinans of his own sinister essence.⁵³ The shocking excesses of a still exemplary bhakti (re‑) assume their full transgressive significance only when perceived through the intersecting theistic worlds of a binding public ritualism modeled on the purified Mîmâmsâ and of an underground flagrantly Tantricizing antinomianism held together, especially in the nuclear temple of pilgrimage, by the shared sacralizing symbolic universe of Hindu mythology.⁵⁴ The classical reform which (all but) eliminated the impure violent dimension from the agonistic Vedic sacrifice and exaggerated the pure pole to the point of transforming even the transgressive dîkSâ into a preliminary purification of the individualized ‘sacrificer’ (yajamâna) into a temporary Brahman,⁵⁵ has been compensated for by the reworking of the original transgressive ideology and much of the accompanying symbolism into the Tantric systems developing through the influx of vast amounts of pre-Vedic, Dravidian⁵⁶ and even aboriginal elements. This consistent strategy, whereby the Brahmanical tradition succeeded in assimilating (not only) the Indian universe without surrendering the continuity of Hindu identity with its roots in the Vedic revelation, has been possible only because the ‘primordial sacrifice’ (âdi-yâga) is itself largely the formal codification and ritual dramatization of an inner lived ‘shamanizing’ experience of transgressive sacrality so central to the religious life of so-called ‘primitive’ societies, and systematically conserved in the pre-classical dîkSita.⁵⁷ Transgression is able to dialectically surpass its (profane) opposition to (de-sacralized) interdiction and present itself as the fulfillment of the latter, only when both poles reveal their complementary nature within a shared symbolic system (la symbolique) of transcendence that defines the Sacred.⁵⁸

Regeneratively turned upon itself through the symbolic, where not explicit, identification of devotee, divinity and victim within the hierarchic and regional tensions of a classical Hinduism transfigured by the ‘pacific’ ideals (ahimsâ) of Indian renunciation, the primordial violence of man has been, in the cohesive homogeneity of an expansionist Islam submissive to a wholly transcendent divine will, rather directed outwards through the disciplined warrior-band whose proselytizing zeal is revealed in an unmatchable readiness to kill and be killed.⁵⁹ The martyred (shahîd) Muslim warrior (ghâzî) has thereby admirably lent himself to assimilation into the Hindu folk-cult of the deified dead beside not only the heroic Bir (Pir) Babas, but also the ‘tombs’ (samâdhis) of ascetics, the privileged Brahms and the widowed Satîs, so much so that even the invading Muslim slaughterer Ghâzî Miyãn's Bahraich tomb, replicated in other North Indian centers, is worshipped [452>] by both Muslim and Hindu pilgrims, especially the Doms of Banaras⁶⁰ specializing in the ‘human sacrifice’ of the death ritual. “Imprinted with blood-red sandal-paste all over the victimized body of the ascetic Brahman hero, the extended hand’ (MrcchakaTikâ, X.5), so characteristic of the Satî, carried in Muharram processions or topping (with five finger-pegs) the primordial earthen mounds of household shrines from the Punjab to Bengal, easily represented the Shiite quintet of Muhammad, Fatimah, Ali, Hasan and Husain and/or the Vedic ‘five tribes’ (pañca-janâh = the Pândavas married to Pâñcâli) to the Indo-Islamic Panchpiriyas. Worshipped by not only Lingâyats and Jains, but also Muslims, the ‘tribal’ KhaNDobâ, called Mallu or Ajmat Khân (or Rautrây), has a Muslim wife and kotvâl and appears as a Pathân on horseback. After corrupting their traditions, Mallana alias Malkhân even converts the Muslim "devotes (bhaktas) of Ziva" in Mecca, by replenishing a dried well with water and producing golden turmeric powder beside it at the end of twelve years through the matricidal slaughter of a black cow, and finally escapes by jumping with the “gold” needed for his marriage into mother Gangâ, whose outstretched hand is cut off by his Muslim pursuers (for the Pîrla PaNDuga festival?). The symbolic projection of the transgressive dîkSâ embryogony onto the hostile presence of the carnivorous Muslim neighbor, thereby assimilated to a Hindu king or even North Indian Brahman, is also recognizable, within the popular bhakti context, in Muttâl Râvuttan's abortive sacrifice of his own pregnant sister to the vegetarian Tamil Draupadî whom she so resembled, at the suggestion of the dark Kâlî-like Goddess herself, in order to be relegated the place corresponding to the ‘pacified’ butcher Zâmitr in the Vedic sacrifice.⁶¹

The splitting of the ever imminent Jewish messiah into a martyred ben-Joseph and a triumphant ben-David itself reflects the identity of executioner and victim in the archaic sacrifice to be reinstituted in the temple of Jerusalem at the end of the exile. After being dipped in the blood of the sacrificial bird, which was then used in the purification of the leper (Leviticus 14:7), the other bird was set free as if still bearing the guilt of the murder. Their roles differentiated by lot only on Kippur, i.e. on the actual day of collective expiation (Leviticus 16), the two goats, one killed "for the Lord" and the other banished into the desert as "scapegoat" for the demon Azazel ('ez + azal = "goat who escaped'), likewise suggest the sacrificial identity of victim and murderer. For both goats were consecrated with a replica of the golden crown worn by the high priest. The "crimson tongue" of thread binding together the cedar-wood and the hyssop (Mishnah, Parah 3:11), the highest and [453>] lowest limits of the vegetable kingdom, which was dipped into the blood of the sacrificed bird (14:6), was also tied between the horns of both the slaughtered goat and the scapegoat (Mishnah), whose death by being thrown over a cliff had the purificatory effect of immediately whitening a similar red thread hung in the porch of the temple (late apocryphal tradition). A brush of hyssop was used for daubing the lintels of the doors of the Israelites with blood from the sacrificed lamb during the tenth plague in Egypt (Exodus 12:22); and the same implement was also cast by the officiating priest into the midst of the burning red cow, whose ashes served to purify (Numbers 19:6) and with whom the Sabbataians later identified the secret of the messiah himself.⁶²  Esoteric commentaries not only attribute to the banished Cain the authentic sacrifice, denied to his innocent brother, with whom he is sometimes identified, but even elevate this archetype of the “sacred executioner” to the rank of the archangel Metatron. And the only significant reference to (sacred) laughter in the Bible is in the meaning (yishaq "he will laugh") of Isaac, to be sacrificed to the merciful God of Abraham, a privilege that is claimed instead for the likewise “laughing” (Genesis XXI:9 mesahheq) Ismaël by the Islamic version of the founding myth, to be historically realized in the Shiite figure of the martyred Ali.⁶³

In the shrunken incarceral world of homo oeconomicus,⁶⁴ increasingly menaced by the ‘reactionary’ Puritanism of divine fundamentalist fury on the one hand and the ‘revolutionary’ permissiveness of demoniac anarchist egalitarianism on the other, and where the universal God of Love (bhakti) is posthumously impeached for violations of the rights of Man even while human Justice stands exposed as the naked instrument of legalized violence, what immortal amnesty can India's ‘criminal gods’ offer to the fast multiplying race of disinherited terrorists, these intransigent ‘demon devotees’ who are the modern exemplars of the primordial sacrifice in their readiness to gamble away their own lives, and those of others, for a sacred cause that is not even their own? Can we still hear the wrathful prophetic Judgment of the omniscient wholly Other⁶⁵ imperiously trying to make itself heard through the verbose humanist rhetoric of the bourgeois ventriloquist Narcissus, heroically monologuing with the dumb royal Clown in his gilded Oriental mirror,⁶⁶ to be richly rewarded for the hilarious mercenary labor by a multinational Mammonic tribe of enterprising moneylenders just grasping at homeless Abel's Fool-sceptre?⁶⁷ “Jewish history is familiar to us for its dualities: two groups of people who came together to form the nation, two kingdoms into which this nation fell apart, two gods’ names in the documentary sources of the Bible. To [454>] these we add two fresh ones: the foundation of two religions—the first repressed by the second but nevertheless later emerging victoriously behind it—and two religious founders, who are both called by the name of Moses and whose personalities we have to distinguish from each other.”⁶⁸ Through the inner conflict of Indian tradition, the profane duplicity of Orientalist discourse is forced to rediscover its own inescapable unconscious inheritance, violently repressed in the founding monotheistic opposition of the one universal imperialist God to his colonized satanic Other, of Man's dialectical essence still enshrined in primitive dualism.⁶⁹