The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c4.s3.2

c4.s3.2

It is the cyclically recurring violence and destruction of the "battle of sacrifice" that appears to have led to the reform of the ritual, specifically, of the sacrificial contest itself. By removing the opposite party, the contest was eliminated. The immolation of the sacrificial victim was relegated outside the ritual enclosure. The sacrificial meal was broken up, and the awesome aspects of the myth that connects the meal with the immolation of Iḍā, daughter and wife of the human sacrificer's prototype, Manu, were replaced with the originally unrelated flood story.⁹ The enigmatic *bráhman* formulations that contained the insoluble mystery of life and death and constituted the weapons in the perilous verbal contest were replaced by the flat and perfectly unenigmatic *brāhmaṇa* identifications of ritual elements with elements of the macro- and microcosmos.¹⁰ Identification is indeed given as the new "weapon" that gave Prajāpati, the Lord of Life and prototype of the classical Vedic sacrificer, his decisive victory over his opponent, Death, thereby putting a definitive end to the sacrificial contest and inaugurating the reformed ritual.¹¹ The dismembered elements of the broken cycle of sacrificial violence with its ever-uncertain outcome were, through the artifice of identification, restructured into the fail-safe construct of the śrauta ritual. Henceforth the single sacrificer would stand unopposed by his rivals and unimpeded by his partners in his ritual enclosure, creating a transcendent world all his own and, for that reason, unrelated to society.