The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c14.s2.2

c14.s2.2

Still one might be tempted to view the episode where the royal sacrificer is acclaimed *brahmán* as the decisive junction of the temporal and the transcendent. But in the first place, not only the king but also the commoner is proclaimed a *brāhmaṇa*, a representative of the *bráhman*, at his consecration for the Soma sacrifice (*dīkṣā*). The king's brahman proclamation fails to distinguish him from his subject, and this brings us back again to the diffusion of power and authority. More serious, indeed decisive, is another point. Though the proclamation originally conferred connective sacrality in this and the other world on the king, it can now, in the reformed, “postaxial” ritual, only have meaning within the strictly limited time and place of the ritual. After its conclusion, about to leave the ritual enclosure, the sacrificer, whether king or commoner, returns to his normal, unchanged self in society: “Here I am just the one I am,” as he has to declare in his concluding mantra.⁴² Nothing has changed.