The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c7.8

c7.8

Incongruous though this random collection, which could easily be expanded, may seem, the connecting idea is clear. The sacrifice is a cosmos which is violently broken up in order to be put together again. This is in accordance with the cyclical conception of the universe underlying the ritual literature—the constantly alternating movement between the two poles of disintegration and reintegration, death and birth, nether world and upper world¹⁴—an idea which found its clearest systematic expression in the building of the fire altar, conceived as the restoration of the disintegrated cosmic man. The pivotal point, however, is that death and disintegration have been eliminated. Abstraction enabled the ritualists—and this is the rationale and the achievement of the ritual system—to do away with the reality of death.¹⁵ Death has been rationalized away.