The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c4.s4.2

c4.s4.2

The turning point where the sacral nexus of conflict, violence, and death was cut through can perhaps best be characterized as an "axial breakthrough''.¹³ The once unitary world of agonistic sacrifice was definitively broken and thrown open by the rift between uncompromising transcendence and mundane reality. The axial breakthrough did not, however, restructure the world. It posed a transcendent order that, like the renouncer, turned its back on the world. Having no other meaning than its internal, "rational" order, it left the world to its age-old devices of magic and meaning, to ambivalence and conflict. The mundane sphere remained very much—in Max Weber's terms—an "enchanted" world. But the momentous difference was that the sacral nexus of sacrificial strife had lost its ultimate validity and legitimizing force. These now belonged exclusively to the transcendent order and consequently were taken out of the world. The shimmering potency of the sacred and the numinous was not eliminated but was vitally impaired by the glaring light of renunciatory transcendence—be it the transcendence of ritualism or of another, "heterodox," but no less demanding absolute order.