The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c11.22

c11.22

The rise of Vedic ritualism broke the coherence of the world and produced an irreparable rift which closely resembles Max Weber's postulate of the *Entzauberung*, or disenchantment of the world.²⁶ The tragic world of the warrior's sacrifice was certainly no Arcadia, but at least god and man were at one in the internecine strife for the goods of life. Even though the pitch of violence was raised to the breaking point, it was still one world held together by the nexus of sacrifice. Life and death were not irreconcilable but complementary, success and defeat not decisive but reversible, good and evil not absolute but ambivalent. Nothing is definitive and everything is liable to recall at the next round of sacrifice. In the epic, Bali, the defeated king of the asuras, can still tell the victorious god Indra that at the next turn there will again be the renewal of the battle between gods and asuras, "when the sun will be standing still in the middle." Indra, however, retorts that such a day will never arrive since the sun's course has been permanently fixed, the world definitively ordered.²⁷ The ever-renewed sacrificial hour of truth has lost its power to give meaning and coherence to the world. Instead, the world has been definitively split between the transcendent order of ritual and the unreformed sphere of social life.