The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c11.20

c11.20

But the important achievement of the ritual system and indeed its purpose was that it took away ultimate legitimation from the violent and destructive contest for the goods of life and access to heaven. When the ritual does require the immolation of an animal victim, it is no longer decapitated at the sacrificial stake but bloodlessly suffocated in a separate shed outside the ritual area. Violence and death have been replaced with the ritual mistake to be corrected by ritual means.²⁴ The sacrificial battleground has been turned into a serene and perfectly ordered ritual emplacement. There, freed from the ties and contingencies of the world, the yajamāna strikes out in his own universe through the artifice of the ritual. But this artificial universe, for all its systematic control of even the smallest detail, is brittle and ephemeral. The price it must pay for the perfection of its order is divorce from the world. It can only be realized outside society and for the limited duration of the ritual. At the end the ritual emplacement is abandoned,²⁵ and the yajamāna goes home again to his place in society, "as the one he was before."