The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c10.21

c10.21

Sacrifice in its original agonistic sense, however, has not simply been rejected. Instead it has been fundamentally changed in form and content. What we know as Vedic sacrifice is not sacrifice *tout court*, to be put on a par with its normal, popular practice as we find it to the present day in India and elsewhere. To illustrate the difference, we may briefly look at the immolation of the victim, the point of maximal tension in sacrifice. Usually the victim is immolated by cutting off the head. This was originally also the case in Vedic sacrifice (or rather, in its preclassical predecessor), but the Vedic ritual texts expressly reject this procedure. Instead they prescribe that the victim be killed by suffocation outside the sacrificial enclosure proper.²⁷