7. Narrative content.

The festival sequence talks about, so to say, social order and disorder. So do all the major festivals, but with significant differences in the aspect of order and disorder at issue, and in the sources of disorder and the means of rectification portrayed.

The central public enactment is the movement of the king, priests, charioteer-warriors, Jyapu and craftsmen, and Bhairava in one chariot and Bhadrakali^[*] and her attendants in another. The two chariots allow for an expression of one opposition. The movements of the first, the largest and most important chariot, makes use of the two halves of the city for another opposition directly representing the city and its divisions. The main actors in the hierarchical macrosocial system—including important representatives of the large middle-level and lower-middle-level groups—are gathered into the main chariot as a static unit and moved passively, in conjunction with Bhairava, in a movement along an interstitial axis from one "central" point to another. In the course of this journey they deviate to "show themselves" to the real space (existing in the everyday civic world, in contrast to the transcendent axis and points) of the two halves. This realization is accompanied by struggles between the halves which threaten disruption and danger. Disorder must be enacted so that the processes and forces that overcome it may, in their turn, be dramatically prepared for and meaningful. It must be remembered that in the chariot are real kings (at least they were in the Newar autonomous past), real chief Taleju Brahmans, and real representative citizens all exposed to real discomforts and dangers, to real risks. In the middle of their journey, that is, in the middle

of the festival sequence itself, they—in unison with the Bhadrakali^[*] chariot—are brought into contact with the other main symbolic cluster of the sequence, the Yasi(n) God, at the moment when cooperative efforts raise, again with some risk, and then, at the interstitial moment between two years, lower it to mark the beginning once again of a new solar year and the recommencement of annual time.

Biska: in its central public enactment represents the order that is automatically and ineluctably imposed on the possibility of civic disorder in the ritually ordered movement of traditional forms through time. The chariot does not move through any activity of the king and priests. Mild disorder and reestablishment of order, with the latter emphasized, happen to those witnesses.

The achievement of unity is pervasively represented in Biska: through sexual intercourse, with its reminder of the division that the two sexes represent. This action, in the case of Bhadrakali^[*] and Bhairava, reflects underlying anxieties, for it is not sure whether the encounter is in sexual union or in battle.

Although the male deity Bhairava takes precedence in the action of the festival, with Bhadrakali^[*] a faint presence in his shadow, the legends associated with Biska: make her the dominant figure. She is responsible for the site of the city, and Biska: is in some accounts her festival. She must capture Bhairava—or the part of him that was unable to escape—to keep him in the city. In contrast to the major dramatic enactments of the Devi cycle where the dominant female dangerous deities are on center stage, Biska: relegates the Goddess to the legends describing the state of things prior to the establishment of the ordered city. She is here a potentially ominous shadow at the edges of social order as the king and Bhairava survey their socially ordered city, a reminder that Bhaktapur's social order is only a precarious clearing in a larger, different space.

The stories gathered around the Yasi(n) God explore the danger to men and the society they are taken centrally to constitute of women—both as sexual beings and as inadequately controlled wives. The domestication of the princess^[59] is accomplished by a man, a prince, but through the absolutely necessary aid of Bhadrakali^[*] , who in the ambivalent use of dangerous deities both represents the same sorts of dangers as does the princess and can—and must—be used to bring them under control. But the transformation of the princess into an ordinary wife is—the fatal problems caused to the Tantric expert Sesar^[*] Acaju by his wife remind Bhaktapurians—a problem that will never be fully solved, no more than the unity of the city will be. But in the moments of resolu-

tion in the Biska: sequence, at the achievement of the lowering of the Yasi(n) God and the final momentary reconciliation of Bhairava and Bhadrakali^[*] , the problems somehow seem to be resolved. It will all need to be repeated yet again in each revolving year.

The emphasis in the stories that inform Biska: is on the legendary realm where the supernatural once made contact with Bhaktapur—at a particular moment of real historical time and at a point of earthly space—for the purposes of locating or ordering that city. The events of the legends happened only once, although they must be repeatedly memorialized. In Mohani the explanatory stories of the central narrative take place within a thoroughly transcendent and timeless mythic realm—with no relation to terrestrial time and space—where a battle is taking place in which the city must actively and magically participate each year, over and over again. The presence and force of the "supernatural" is quite different in the two structural focal festivals.