Red: An Ethnographic Study of Cross-Pollination Between the Vedic and the Tantric (original) (raw)
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Eradicated with Blood: Text and Context of Animal Sacrifice in Tantric and Tantra-Influenced Rituals
International Journal of Hindu Studies, 2019
This essay discusses transformations in the ritual use of blood offerings from late medieval to contemporary Tantric and Tantra-influenced traditions. Specifically, it examines animal sacrifice and the use of animal blood or body parts in defensive and/or destructive Tantric uccāṭana rituals in historical text sources and in Tantra-influenced ojhāī practices (North Indian popular ritual practices of selfdefense and/or destruction that are widely perceived as Tantra affiliated) in contemporary religion. The essay argues that while uccāṭana-mainly because of its partly destructive character and demand for blood-was apparently never integrated into non-Tantric traditions in an unaltered form, it does serve as one of several roots for contemporary ojhāī rituals. Thus, a form of 'uccāṭana light' (including but not limited to blood offerings) has found its way into popular Hinduism.
Religions, 2017
In this paper, we shall examine how possession is understood in Assam, India. We are aware that the larger northeastern frontier of India retained indigenous practices, religious festivals, and beliefs in a plethora of exotic goddesses, rituals, which have continued unabated through modern times. This has resulted in cross-pollination between the Vedic or traditional Brahmanical or orthodox Hindu practices and the indigenous practices, which in turn has yielded a hybrid world of Śākta Tantra rituals and practices. In this paper, I examine how possession is understood in Assam, India. We are aware that the larger northeastern frontier of India retained indigenous practices, religious festivals, beliefs in a plethora of exotic goddesses, and rituals, which have continued into the present. This has resulted in cross-pollination between traditional Brahmanical or orthodox Hindu practices and indigenous practices, which in turn has yielded a hybrid world of Śākta Tantra rituals and practices. This article is based predominantly on fieldwork conducted over four years and secondary texts. During these years, I documented many sessions of " speaking to the dead " in the Tiwa Tribe. The Tiwa are a culturally rich tribal community in Assam, India. The Tiwa's intersection with mainstream Hindu religion, Śākta Tantra, is rather complex. I first will present a case study of a Mother Tantric who frequently co-creates communication between the living and the departed. Further, I will discuss how Mother Tantrics are seen as community leaders, akin to the religious authority of Brahmins in the Hindu funerary space. Then, I will draw similarities between the rituals performed by the Tiwas to the Deodhani festival in Kāmākhyā, an important ŚāktaTantra pīṭha, to highlight the fusion of mainstream Śākta Tantra with the indigenous practices and to show how aboriginal practices also borrow from conventional Hindu rituals. The interviews were conducted in Assamese and a dialect the Tiwas speak from the Tibeto-Burman language family. I used a translator for the interviews in the Tiwa language.
In order to investigate the history of the relationship between ritual practice in India and environmental changes, this article will examine two classical accounts of ritual practice and provide notes from field studies in the last three decades on similar rituals. The first part will examine a late first millennium text that assigns values to prescribed payments from much older texts. The second will examine certain conflicts in ritual performance seen in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, which reveal tensions and modifications in the rituals due to environmental change. The third part will provide a description of an animal sacrifice performed in 1995 and note actual payments from account ledgers gathered in the last three decades. A few conclusions on the nature of ritual and environmental change will close the article.
FROM VEDIC SACRIFICE TO VEDANTIC LIBERATION -INDIA'S SOCIO-SPIRITUAL JOURNEY
The course of India's socio-religious continuity has seen some major changes. One great change had been in the mode of Hindu worship: in transition from the fire-and-sacrifice ritual of yajñas to the practice of image worship. Available archaeological evidence from the Indus Valley sites may perhaps indicate some manner of overlap of the two cults. Thus, the 'fire altars', the pit of animal bones, the well-head and drain found at Kalibangān of the 2 nd or 3 rd millennium BC have been interpreted by modern archaeologists as a ritual centre for fire sacrifice. 1 But these seem to have been preceded by the even earlier (3 rd to 5 th millennium BC) terracotta figurines of mother goddesses found in most of the Indus sites. An even more striking relic of image worship in early Harappan times is the 'Paśupati' seal at Mohejo-daro, supposedly representing the proto-Śiva.
In most general terms, hathayoga involves the internalisation and embodied literalisation of the Vedic fire sacrifice. Reflecting on the place of sacrifice in anthropological theory, and on the way in which sacrifice structures the relationship between humans and gods in terms of gift obligations, this paper explores the theoretical implications of hathayoga's embodied literalisation of a profoundly symbolic act. Although similar to various forms of ascetic renunciation, hathayoga is unique, it will be argued, in being structured as the physiological antithesis of religious ritual. Self-realisation based on the internalised yajna sacrifice undermines the binary structure of the sacred and the profane and makes god irrelevant. This raises theoretical questions concerning the social significance of a ritual that is anti-social on a number of different levels.