Bataille (1986), Part 1, chap.11,
"Christianity" and (1989), pp. 69–85 ().
The distinction elaborated here corresponds
essentially to that made by R. Gu�non, "Point de vue rituel et point de vue moral,"
chap.9 (1975).
Ren� Girard, Violence and the Sacred
(Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University Press, 1977), Des Choses Cach�es
depuis la Fondation du Monde (1978), Le Bouc Emissaire (1982), (both, Paris:
Grasset). Our fundamental objection to Girard is his manner of reducing all violations of
interdictions, especially those like royal incest in Africa, to his primordial violence,
which is but one aspect of transgressive sacrality.
See Kuiper (1979), pp. 213–22. For the origins of the hero of Greek tragedy
in the ritual scapegoat of archaic Greek religion, see J. P. Vernant and P. Vidal-Naquet, Mythe
et Trag�die en Gr�ce Ancienne, new ed. (Paris: F. Maspero, 1981), their arguments
being further developed from his own perspective by Girard, "Oedipus and the
Surrogate Victim" (1977).
Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of
Interpretations, Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential
Philosophy (Evanston: 1974).
See Gu�non, "Folie Apparente et Sagesse Cach�e,"
chap.27 (1975), where he gives parallels of assumed madness from the Christian and Islamic
traditions. ‘Mad’ (unmatta) forms of divinities like Bhairava and Gaea
seem rather to reflect transgressive practice in cult. The Pupatas were also obliged to
feign madness, which greatly contributed to their comicality, and the Vid�shaka as clown
also inevitably gives that impression at times.
It would be interesting to examine in this
light the problematic and controversial ‘initiation’ of the
adolescent Gu�non, who later contributed so much to the furthering of inter-religious
dialogue on a traditional, as opposed to modernistic, basis. In his own words, he became
Prince Rosy-Cross by leaning on Evil through the left-hand way and thanks to the black
power, "at the end of which luciferian initiation, Sama�l appeared, bearing the iron
scepter of the domain of death . . ." Jean Robin, Ren� Gu�non: Temoin de la
Tradition (Paris: Guy Tr�daniel, 1978), p.48ff. Cf. also Elliot R. Wolfson,
"Left Contained in the Right: A Study in Zoharic Hermeneutics," in AJS Review
11 (1986):27–52; and "Light through Darkness: The Ideal of Human Perfection in
the Zohar," in Harvard Theological Review 81:1 (1988):73–95.
L. Dumont (); see also Madeleine Biardeau, Hinduism: Anthropology of a
Civilization (Delhi, Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
TA 4.251b and 13.317b–319a, vol.8, KS
no. 47 (Bombay: 1926) with commentaries thereon. Exactly the same position can be found in
Ren�
Gu�non, "Contre le Melange des Formes Traditionnelles," Aper�us sur
l’Initiation, corrected edition (Paris: Editions Traditionnelles: 1977), p.51;
See Elizabeth Chalier-Visuvalingam,
"Connaissez-vous les juifs indiens?," in Les Nouvelles Cahiers 87
(1986-87):16-22; and "Communaut�s juives en Inde et � Singapour: diaspora en
Asie," in Dictionnaire Encyclop�dique du Juda�sme (Paris: Cerf, 1992).
Guy Deleury,
"Pluralisme Culturel et Libert� Religieuse," Le Mod�le Indou
(Paris: Hachette, 1978). This observation does not blind us to the fact that, with the
disintegration of the traditional system under the impact of modernism, it is the most
negative aspects of the caste-society, in the form of inter-caste rivalry, communalism and
sexual exploitation, that have come to the forefront with a sometimes unimaginable
brutality.
IPVV
3:91ff. This explicit subordination of logic to tradition, even while developing and
refining it in the service of the latter, is an explicit continuation of the position of
the famous grammarian-philosopher Bharthari in his defense of the Vedic traditions as
expounded in his V�kyapadya, eds. K. V. Abhyankar and V. P. Limaye, Univ. of Poona
Sanskrit and Prakrit Series, vol.2 (Poona: 1965), 1.30–43,136. My own guru,
Mah�mahop�dhy�ya �c�rya R�meshvara Jh�, who was steeped in the V�kyapadya,
never tired of repeating that the Pratyabhij�� was in many respects only a refinement of
this seminal work.
TA 4.251, also Gu�non
(1977) chap. 37 "Le Don des Langues"; see especially Elizabeth Ch.
Visuvalingam’s section on "Bhakti and Initiatic Hierarchies," in Criminal
Gods (), pp.167–70.
Prof.
M. Nagatomi illustrated the development of transgressive sacrality within Buddhism, to the
students taking my course on "Heresy and Religious Change" , through the
successive interpretations of the ‘mud-born’ (panka-ja) lotus as the
metaphor of perfection. The early Buddhists (Therav�da) insisted on its separation from
the mud; the Greater Vehicle or Mah�yana on its rootedness in the latter; while the
Vajray�na adepts came to realize that the lotus drew its nourishment from the filth at
the bottom.
My treatment
is based on the work of Meir Shahar, a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University, who
presented his research both at the CSWR Director’s seminars and at my course on
"Heresy and Religious Change" . It seems to me, however, that Ji-Gong—and
the Chinese popular religion that he embodies—should be understood not so much in
opposition to the three classical traditions of China but rather as a synthesis that is
irreducible to the tenets or ethos of any one of them. Cf. my remarks on banarasipan
below
The interpretations that follow are the gist of my ‘South Asian’
response at the cross-cultural panel on "The Contribution of Gary Ebersole's Ritual
Poetry and the Politics of Death in Early Japan [New Jersey: Princeton University
Press, 1989] to the Study of Religion," at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy
of Religions at Kansas City in November 1991. Ebersole's brilliant focus on the political
dimension of the founding imperial myths—as projections of political struggles with
Susano-o cast in the image of the violent usurper—makes him overlook the shamanic and
sacrificial dimension. Even the apparently ‘historical’ conflicts and murders
themselves have perhaps been reworked to reflect the (sacrificial paradigm of the) myth. I
thank Prof. Ebersole for his receptive response at the AAR, and for our productive
discussion of these questions during his subsequent lecture-visit to Harvard.
See
Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, "The Emperor of Japan as Deity (Kami), in Ethnology
XXX (3) (1991):199-215, and her talk at the CSWR (Oct. 30, 1991). I thank Prof.
Ohnuki-Tierney for her offprint, and her encouraging reception of my response to Ebersole
(above) and of the paradigm presented in the present paper. The identification of the
solar Emperor with (the death and rebirth of) rice is also found in the annual festival of
Pachali Bhairava which revolves around the renewal of Newar kingship. The
shaman-sacrificer was represented as regressing (through a substituted victim) into a
pot-womb filled with flowers sacred to the sun-god: this large pot (kasi) was one
used for storing rice-grain. See Chalier-Visuvalingam, "The King and the
Gardener" .
Makarius (1974). We however
find their exclusively magical interpretation of transgression and the exaggerated place
they accord to the violation of the blood-taboo quite unacceptable. Indeed, "the
ethnologists habitually treat as `primitive’ forms which are only degenerate to a
greater or less extent; and anyhow these forms are very often not really on as low a level
as might be supposed from the accounts that are given of them� . Indeed, where there is
degeneration, it is naturally the superior part of the doctrine, its metaphysical or
spiritual side, which disappears more or less completely; as a consequence, something that
was originally only secondary� inevitably assumes a preponderant importance. The
remainder, even if it persists still to some extent, may easily elude the observer from
outside, all the more so because that observer, being ignorant of the profound
significance of rites and symbols, is unable to recognize in them any elements belonging
to a superior order� and thinks that everything can be explained indifferently in terms
of magic," Ren� Gu�non, The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times,
transl. Lord Northbourne (1953; rpt. Baltimore: Penguin, 1972), p.216.
Maria
Daraki, Dionysos (Paris: Arthaud, 1985).
See Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai S�vi: The Mystical Messiah (Princeton
University Press, 1973) and The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York: Schocken,
1971). I thank Rabbi Rami Shapiro, the coordinator of our group-discussion on
"Spiritual Disciplines and Practices" at the Assembly, for reassuring all of us
about the vitality of Jewish ‘Tantricism’ and illustrating it with Hassidic
stories identifying God and the Serpent. Dr. Charles Mopsik, editor of the series Les
Dix Paroles with Verdier publications, has since supplied me with a wealth of
materials testifying to the essential dimension of Transgressive Sacrality in the
Jewish Tradition on which he is coediting a collective volume with Prof. Elliot R.
Wolfson and myself.
See, for example, the various papers—in
French and Spanish—of Fran�ois Delpech on Spanish folklore. I could also mention the
work of Prof. V. A. Kolve on The God-Denying Fool in Medieval Art which provides
striking parallels with the figure of the Vid�shaka.
Hyam
Maccoby, Revolution in Judaea: Jesus and the Jewish Resistance (London: Ocean
Books, 1973) relies on very precise symbolic correspondences between the Gospels and
Judaism, as then practiced, to argue that Jesus was originally a Jewish national hero. He
minimizes the violations of Christ, by adducing the relative ‘laxity’ of
(Hillel’s) Pharisaic law and the prior existence of such notations in the properly
Jewish conceptions of Messiah. He however stops short of interpreting Christianity itself
as a reformulated exteriorization of a preexisting ideology of transgression within
Judaism. The analogy of the Sabbatian movement, the course of its subsequent development,
would seem to justify my own thesis.
See Ali Asani, "The Khojas of
Indo-Pakistan: The Quest for an Islamic Identity," in Journal Institute of Muslim
Minority Affairs 8:31-41. The manner in which the ‘laxity’ of certain Sufi
orders, like the Chishti, facilitated Indo-Islamic acculturation was the subject of Prof.
Asani’s talk at my course on "Heresy and Religious Change" .
A
preliminary exploration of the semiotics of transgression in the Jewish tradition has been
submitted in the form of a comparative analysis of the contributions of
Chalier-Visuvalingam and Charles Mopsik to Between Jerusalem and Banaras . I
thank Prof. Moshe Idel for his sympathetic pre-publication discussion of my treatment of
diverse Jewish materials—particularly the question of incest, on which he is
contributing a paper to Transgressive Sacrality in the Jewish Tradition —in the light of the paradigm
presented in the present paper.
"However, the unity of human
experience (which L�vi-Strauss recognizes when he speaks of the social, intellectual,
anatomic, meteorological, spatial, temporal, economic, and political ’codes’)
is, in the view of those telling myths, invariably constituted by an experience of the
sacred whose appearance is recounted in myth. It is this singularly important
characteristic of myth which remains unengaged." Lawrence E. Sullivan,
"L�vi-Strauss, Mythologic and South American Religions," in Robert L. Moore and
Frank E. Reynolds, eds., Anthropology and the Study of Religion (Chicago: Center
for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1984), pp.147–176. Unfortunately,
"scholars are fascinated more by the way in which he effects a unity of their western
disciplines and of the discursive thought forms in which they have a large stake than by
the fate of South American myth at his hands. In his hands, linguistic structuralism
integrates the scattered western disciplines and ideologies into a synthetic vision of the
world even while it dismantles mythic thought" (ibid., pp.163,162).
For the dialectical tension between the (nomadic) "egalitarian
anarchist" and (settled) "expansionist monarchic" ideals, see Jon D.
Levenson, Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible (San Francisco: Harper and
Row, 1985. It seems to me that this polarization has been a productive one, with each
ideal paradoxically contributing towards the realization of its opposite. The apparent
contradiction is resolved when the figures of both ‘king’ (David) and
‘prophet’ are recognized as symbolic ciphers for the single human ideal of
spiritual-cum-political autonomy. The Licchavi kings, who were renowned in India at the
time of the Buddha for their fierce attachment to Vedic ‘republican’ values,
later appear at the dawn of Nepali history as a dynasty of benevolent (generally Hindu)
monarchs, who were equally committed in their patronage of the Buddhist sangha,
which still incorporated the ‘egalitarian’ ideal. Cf. "Between Veda and
Tantra" , and also my remarks below on ‘hierarchy’ ().
A more
systematic critique of Turner’s related concepts of ‘liminality’ and
‘communitas’ may be found in my introductory section on "Transgressive
Sacrality and the Processual Approach to Religious Tradition," to Between Mecca
and Banaras . The ‘popular’ culture of Banaras (banarasipan) that
once united all its citizens—brahmin and untouchable, rich and poor, Hindu and
Muslim—is shown to be derivable in ‘Geertzian’ fashion from the
specifically Hindu religious structures, with their complex interplay of hierarchy and
transgression, invested in the sacred city. The monograph also demonstrates how such a
‘hierarchical’ mode of ‘civic’ communitas could and did organize
itself, as an organic totality, against colonial encroachment on its shared values. See my
paper on "Hindu-Muslim Relations in Colonial Banaras: From the La-Bhair� Riots of
1809 to the ‘Gandhian’ Civil Disobedience of 1811," which is due to appear
in Modern Asian Studies.
Victor
Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (New York: Cornell
University Press, 1977), p.128. Ronald F. Thiemann, "The Future of an Illusion: An
Inquiry into the Contrast between Theological and Religious Studies," and
"Towards the Integrated Study of Religion: A Case for the University Divinity
School," makes a convincing case for greater overtures to religious traditions and
modes of life, that have till now been marginalized by the establishment. Both papers were
distributed, prior to Dean Thiemann’s address , in the context of the recent debates
regarding the future direction of the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard.
I was particularly struck by the ‘transgressive’ notations accompanying both the
implementation of the new vision of the Center and, especially, the
‘insurrection’ of the existing student community. Perhaps all that remains is
for us to preach what we have already begun to practice!