Tantrism and the Public City

We have discussed Tantrism as the esoteric individual and familial practices of upper-status families.^[29] Tantrism and the experience of and worship of the dangerous deities by noninitiates are intimately and reciprocally related, influencing each other. In the top-down perspective, Tantrism affects the larger city in many ways. The complex of activities in and centering on the Taleju temple represents the expansion of Taleju as the Malla king's Aga(n) God into the tutelary deity of the king's city. The Tantric puja s performed in Taleju, above all those done at the climax of the autumnal Mohani festival, are, in part, for the "good of the city," as well as for the king himself. There are also other Tantric puja s performed under certain threatening circumstances for the protection of the city as a whole. These are called chema puja , puja s done for "forgiveness" (chema derives from the Sanskrit "Ksama^[*] " in its sense as "pardon"), or more adequately, as Manandhar notes, "to restore the worshiper to a proper relationship to deity" (1976, p. 135). Chema pujas have been performed in the past, for example, because of epidemics of smallpox or cholera, prolonged droughts during the rice planting season, fires, and earth tremors with threatening earthquakes. The chema puja is addressed to the dangerous gods as a group. As we have noted, asking "forgiveness" of such gods is often associated with the idea that they may have been inadvertently offended, and therefore an act of redress may possibly placate them. Acajus, Josis, and Brah-

mans take part in these puja s, and offerings of prayer, music, meat, and alcohol are presented to the dangerous gods at their temples and shrines throughout the city. The food offerings are then distributed as prasada among the city's people to restore their relations with the gods and to protect them.^[30]

Many of the images of the public city, above all many of the images and actions of the annual cycle,^[31] are the outward expression of Tantric forms whose inner meaning is supposedly known only to initiates. The public images, ideas, and practices surrounding the dangerous deities have their own qualities, however, and have some uses that are in marked contrast to Tantrism. Tantrism uses those images in a quest for control and transcendence; the exoteric religion uses them (as does Tantrism) to symbolize aspects of Newar experience, but, in contrast to Tantrism, it uses them entirely for the purposes of social integration and control, not to escape it. We will deal with much of this in later chapters on the annual cycles, but we may here consider two central clusters of ideas in relation to the dangerous deities, ideas that are related to both the esoteric and exoteric aspects of the worship of the dangerous deities. These are the conceptions of the relations of Siva and Sakti, and the ideas about and practices of animal sacrifice.

Symbolic Complexes: Siva/Sakti

In our account of the mythology of the dangerous goddesses we discussed how the goddesses were emitted as a kind of force, sakti , by Siva and by the other male benign divinities. These saktis operated sometimes independently, sometimes coalesced into one supreme Goddess. This supreme Goddess is quite independent of the gods who in some accounts emit her or her component goddesses; in other accounts she is, in fact, prior to them as the ultimate supreme creative deity. The tradition that emphasizes the worship of the Goddess as the supreme deity is Saktism^[*] . Both historically and in the way they are made use of in Bhaktapur Saktism^[*] and Tantrism are "two intersecting but not coinciding circles" (Gupta, Hoens, and Goudriaan 1979, 6). Within Bhaktapur's Tantrism there is an important difference between the images, conceptions, and uses of the Goddess in herself, and the images, conception, and use of "Sakti." Sakti's use both in Bhaktapur's esoteric and exoteric doctrine is based on her relation to Siva—here once again the supreme deity, albeit at a problematic moment in his supremacy—at the

time of her emission from him, and the precursors and consequences of that act.

In Bhaktapur's imagery, Sakti has two implications that are quite different when seen in ordinary common-sense contexts, but which are related in the theory of Siva/Sakti. These conflicting implications and their resolutions generate shifting ways of viewing certain forms and events that contribute greatly to the aesthetics and mystery of Tantric conceptions and symbols. These two implications derive from ideas about sakti as power, on the one hand, and sakti as passive, receptive female sexuality, on the other.

Local characterizations of sakti often begin with nonesoteric statements about the nature and interdependence of form and function. Any living and vital or potentially effective entity has both a containing form and a potential or ongoing function. The function is the object's sakti or "power." The sakti of an eye is seeing; of a bell, ringing.^[32] When the object has lost its sakti , it is dead or powerless, it cannot function, and the eye becomes blind. In contrast, a function, sakti , that becomes disconnected from its form becomes diffuse and transformed in some peculiar way, in some cases uncanny, such as the sound of a bell that is not there. Siva/Sakti conceptions are a divinized version of this idea. Siva represents, at one point in a cyclical process, a living entity, a container with contained vitality; that is, he has his sakti within him. He is full of potential power. But in order to exercise power in the world (and not just social influence—we are at the edge of the non-moral arena of the dangerous deities here) he must emit his sakti , who now becomes Sakti, a divinity in herself. This emitted Sakti, often portrayed as a ray or an impersonal force, does actual "work" in the world, work that changes affairs through force, not by means of moral and social influence. Sakti is the power that is one of the goals of Tantric practice. But having emitted the power, Siva is now empty and dead. Siva without Sakti, the saying (based on a play on Sanskrit orthography) goes, is Sava, a corpse. The living Siva is male, but he contains a female principle within him. The dead (or weakened or exhausted) Siva is male, but now the female principle is external to him. He is incomplete. For his own sake and for that of society, it is essential to recapture the Sakti.^[33] Now a second step and a partial transformation of the imagery occurs here. Siva, the male principle, and Sakti, the female principle, can become reintegrated through the act of union of sexual intercourse—as well as through other and variously represented

unifications, which never lose their coital implications. For this purpose Siva may be represented as a phallus, a linga^[*] , and Sakti as a vagina, a yoni . But the phallus is active; the vagina is a passive receptacle, a container, in something like the way the form is the container for the force that gives it life. There has been a reversal in the signification of Siva and Sakti.

The Sukunda, an elaborately formed combined oil container and oil lamp used in major Hindu Newar rituals, consists of a semispherical container for oil to which is attached an oval or triangularly shaped shallow container, which is the oil lamp itself, and at whose apex a wick is placed. The oil container is the living Siva with his potential force, and both the burning wick and the triangular dish are Sakti, but in different ways. The burning wick is Sakti as energy; the triangular dish is Sakti as the sexual complement to the male, ready to restore his potential power. The oil from the container is put into the lamp dish as an act of union, and now the flame-Sakti can spring forth. Tantrism adds an emphasis on this vaginal and receptive Sakti as a consort in a sexualized act of union that is restitutive and which prepares the now enriched male for a new generation of power to the more general idea of the Sakti as Goddess and as an active and unrestrained (by civic order and morality) force in the world. Bhaktapur's religious, ritual, and festival imagery is replete with references to these ideas. Any pair of objects or events can be related to Siva and Sakti through one or the other of their interrelational meanings. Meat and alcohol presented to the dangerous deities are respectively Siva and Sakti: the flesh representing the embodied form and the alcoholic spirits, the vitalizing principle. A ritually presented grain of unhusked rice has Sakti as its potentially germinating kernel, Siva, as its husk. Dualisms of right and left, double lines (commonly used in marking out mandala^[*] s on the ground for Tantric puja s), overlapping pairs (or sets) of triangles, are used to represent the splitting and complementarity of form and function, male and female. Such opposities are symbolically brought together in festival and ritual enactments. The joining and collapsing of these oppositions is shown in visual imagery as a dot or point, a bindu , often placed in the center of the pairs or in a central position in a complex image (such as a dangerous god's face, where it may be placed at the bridge of the nose). The bindu represents unity in contrast to dualism—the beginning of phenomenological diversity—and it represents, among other things, the union of the separated Siva and Sakti into a revitalized and rebalanced albeit now problematically self-contained, Siva.

The oscillating meanings of the polarities of Siva and Sakti and their necessary eternal couplings, condensations, and separations are very powerful symbolic resources for representing personal and social dilemmas. At the personal level these are resonances of vital, self-contained, self-sufficient, omnipotential fullness on the one hand—so well represented in the classical imagery of Siva—versus the divisions that initiate a society and social identity on the other. These personal meanings also echo problems about the sexual other and the sexual act, problems that have special South Asian forms and emphases. On the social level, however, which is our present concern, the complex of Siva/Sakti ideas and practices represents a tension between moral order, the heavenly order of the gods, with its static eternal balance, and the periodic need to mobilize an amoral power, a socially unrestrained force that becomes problematic once its job is done (even while it is doing it) as it is socially unrestrained and dangerous. The question then becomes how to get that power back under control, back into the heavenly quietude again. The Tantric interpretations and enactments of Siva and Sakti represent and mimic all this.

Symbolic Complexes: Sacrifice

The dangerous deities are usually distinguished from the ordinary ones in that their proper worship (as the legend of Taleju, for example, emphasized) requires that they be offered alcoholic spirits and animal flesh, (see, for example, fig. 19) which would be forbidden and sinful as offerings to the ordinary gods. The use of animal sacrifice in contrast to vegetarian offerings to mark a division and contrast among gods and types of ritual did not apparently exist in Vedic religion, where (contrary to what most nonscholarly Newar Hindus seem now to believe) there were both animal and vegetable offerings. "Ultimately," as Madeleine Biardeau put it, "the 'putting to death' of cereals or plants was scarcely less violent than the murder of animal victims" (Biardeau and Malamoud 1976, 139 [our translation]). The Laws of Manu (V, 40 [i.e., section V, verse 40]) includes plants in its attempt to justify the "murder" of various creatures. "Herbs, trees, cattle, birds, and (other) animals that have been destroyed for sacrifices, receive [in rebirth] higher existences" (Bühler 1969, 175). Biardeau points out that the Smrti^[*] texts illustrate, however, a particular "embarrassment" in relation to the animal sacrifices, for animals were not to be eaten m non-sacrificial

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Figure 19.
Sacrifice of a young male goat to the goddess Bhagavati.

forms. Thus, according to Manu , (parentheses are Bühler's; Bühler 1969, p. 174; Manu V, 31, 32, 33):

"The consumption of meat (is befitting) for sacrifices," that is declared to be a rule made by the gods; but to persist (in using it) on other (occasions) is said to be a proceeding worthy of Rakshasas [malevolent demons].
He who eats meat when he honors the gods and . . . [ancestral spirits], commits no sin, whether he has bought it, or himself has killed (the animal). . . . A twice-born man who knows the law, must not eat meat except in conformity with the law; for if he has eaten it unlawfully, he will, unable to save himself, be eaten after death by his (victims).

Significantly, Brahmans are included among the meat eaters. "A Brahman must never eat animals unhallowed by Mantras; but obedient to the primeval law, he may eat it consecrated with Vedic text." Yet, with all these (and various other) attempts to distinguish sacrifice from murder duly made, the Laws state, "a man who, being duly engaged (to officiate or to dine at a sacred rite), refuses to eat meat, becomes after death an animal during twenty-one existences" (Manu V, 35, 36; Buhler^[*] 1969, 174f. [emphasis added]). Sanctions were sometimes needed to force people to participate in the animal sacrifice. These ancient issues have persisted in full force in Bhaktapur.

Biardeau notes that the division between animal and vegetarian sacrifice has in recent millennia become associated with a hierarchy of lower and higher practices, deities, and priests. As we noted in descriptions of other South Asian communities (chap. 8 and above) the vegetarian gods there are higher than the meat eating ones, and their priests, Brahmans, are, in turn, vegetarian and superior to the priests of the flesh-eating gods, whose priests typically belong to lower and nonvegetarian castes (Biardeau and Malamoud 1976, 140). Bhaktapur, of course, has suppressed the hierarchy of the dangerous and benign gods, and hesitates, in fact, to decide which might be higher.^[34] The suppression is an uneasy one. Newar Brahmans, as they did in the times reflected in Manu's laws, participate in blood sacrifice and eat sacrificially prepared meat. For them and for all the upper thar s, however, sacrifice and meat eating takes its meaning from the various violations of the ordinary dharma that they represent.

Animal sacrifice or an equivalent meat offering is the proper offering to dangerous gods—which in most cases means a goddess—and is required in upper-status Tantric worship to the Aga(n) God and to other Tantric deities. Sacrificial worship of the dangerous gods is optional for those without Tantric initiation, with one essential exception. Every

household in the city must offer a yearly animal sacrifice or meat offering to Bhagavati during the course of the household ceremonies during the harvest festival, Mohani. Most households, if they can afford to at all, perform sacrifices several times during the course of the year. This is done during important rites of passage, during the ad hoc occasions when a worship of a dangerous deity may seem advisable, and during certain of the annual festivals that are occasions for large, semiritualized family feasts.

The kind of animal sacrificed is optional. An egg is considered a minimal but proper sacrifice to a dangerous deity, and it is offered often by very poor families, using the same terminology for the offering as is applied to other animal sacrifice. The offering of the egg is in fact sometimes called khe(n) syaegu , "killing the egg." A poor family may restrict itself to using a mixture, samhae , which is also used by upper-status families in the course of Tantric puja s in addition to the actual climactic killing of an animal. Samhae is a mixture of black soybeans, ginger, beaten and fried rice, "puffed" or "popped" roasted rice, dried fish, and pieces of water buffalo meat. The dried fish are purchased in shops that also sell grain; the buffalo meat is obtained from the Nae butchers whose thar profession is the ritual killing of water buffaloes. The water buffalo was traditionally the only animal that the butcher killed and sold as the only alternative kind of meat to an animal sacrificed in a family puja . These buffaloes are always killed by the butcher in the course of a perfunctory ritual sacrifice, and this makes the eating of their meat by others the taking of what is gesturally at least a consecrated prasada .

Samhae or eggs may also be used by families at any social and economic level for perfunctory worship of one or another dangerous deity. However, the animal most commonly sacrificed in important household or Aga(n) House puja s by people who can possibly afford one is the male goat. Poorer people may use a rooster on the occasion when a goat would otherwise be sacrificed. Other animals are sacrificed in special occasions and settings. Water buffalo are the focus of sacrifice at the Taleju temple and by the Nine Durgas group, where they symbolize the buffalo demon vanquished by Devi in the Devi Mahatmya . At certain sacrificial ceremonies, pa(n)ca bali , five kinds of animals are sacrificed: water buffaloes, goats, roosters, drakes, and rams. A sixth kind of animal, the pig, is sacrificed in special and limited contexts by the men who incarnate the Nine Durga deities. A castrated male goat, called a khasi , sometimes regarded as a unique type of animal, is consid-

ered the ideal animal for sacrifice to Ganesa^[*] . Sacrificial animals are almost always male animals.^[35] There are some astrologically caused problems when the sacrifice of a female animal is required upon the advice of a Josi (astrologer), and there are Newar festivals in other communities in which female animals are reportedly sometimes sacrificed, but almost all sacrifice in Bhaktapur is of male animals.

The most generally used term for an animal sacrifice is bali , (from Sanskrit, meaning tax, tribute, offering) and in some contexts, bau , which is said to be a Newari derivation of bali . ("Bali " and "bau " are also used for nonmeat offerings in one restricted context, death ceremonies, where rice offerings to ancestors and to crows and dogs as representatives of Yama are so named. Daily offerings of rice to the deceased ancestors of a household are also called bali offerings.) The sacrificial animal is also sometimes referred to as a baha(n) (from Sanskrit vahana , the—most usually—animal vehicle of a god), and thus a sacrifice may be called a baha(n) puja.

As part of the attempt to distinguish sacrifice from murder ("Slaughtering for sacrifices is not slaughtering" [Manu V, 39]), the animal must indicate his assent to the sacrifice, so that he may (again echoing Manu) "receive a higher existence," and be freed of the bad karma that has caused him to be born as an animal.^[36] The sign is the shaking of the animal's head or body in certain ways.^[37] During the course of the dedication of the animal to the deity ritually pure water is sprinkled on it, often getting into the ear, which helps ensure the proper movement. Extremely rarely there are animals who are thought not to have assented and they are turned free to wander in the city, and must not be harmed. Throat cutting and death through the resulting exsanguination is considered the specifically Newar way of sacrificing. Rajopadhyaya Brahmans explain that the animal should have life in him to witness the sacrifice he is making as his gift to the deity, and this is not possible in sacrifice through decapitation. Non-Newar Nepalis who perform sacrifices do so by decapitating animals, and this is often referred to as one of the salient contrasts between Newars and others.^[38] Fowl are decapitated by the Newars, but in keeping with the way mammals are decapitated, with the cut starting at the throat rather than at the back of the neck. The stream of blood from the severed carotid arteries of the sacrificial animal is sprayed on the image of the deity.

The sacrifice of the animal, most typically a male goat, comes (as we have seen in the description of the Tantric puja ) in the course of a puja sequence, and at one of the major climaxes of the sequence. The animal

itself is worshiped. Colored pigments and flowers are put on its head; people make gestures of respect to it; a special pasu mantra, a "beast" mantra , is said for it. The goat is told by the presiding priest or family worshiper that if it agrees it will be able to go to heaven. Sacred water, uncooked rice, and flowers are thrown on its body and head. People then wait for the sign of assent from the animal. A chicken, duck, or water buffalo (when killed by a butcher) must shake its head; a goat must shake its entire body as a sign of acceptance. A buffalo of special ritual importance (that is, all except those routinely but sacrificially killed to be sold as meat by butchers) must, like the goat, shake its body as a sign of acceptance. Although, as we have noted, the animal almost always eventually gives the assent sign, people must sometimes wait a while for it. Once the sign of assent ms given, the animal may now be killed. After the throat is slit and the blood allowed to spray over the god image "to give drink to the deity," the head of the animal is cut off and placed on a metal plate, a puja bha: , which is placed in front of the deity as a food offering. Flowers and colored pigment are taken from the deity and placed on the puja bha: which will, bearing the head, be brought to the feast that always follows the animal sacrifice. Parts of this head will be distributed to the senior members of the phuki in a formal hierarchical pattern as we will recount below. At the time of the sacrifice the various offerings made to the god image previously, flowers, colored pigment, and food offerings become splattered with blood. Some of them are taken and distributed among the worshipers as prasada , and among these the food offerings taken back as prasada are eaten by the worshipers. In a goat sacrifice the abdomen may be opened and a length of intestine taken out, then knotted at one end and blown into to inflate it. The other end is tied, and the image of the deity is now garlanded with this intestinal balloon.

The body of the animal is now prepared for butchering. Its hair may be singed. This is considered necessary in some contexts, in pitha puja s, for example, but optional in others where instead the skin may be treated with boiling water to facilitate the removal of hair. The animal is now to be butchered, usually at or near the place of its sacrifice in preparation for a feast.

Who does the actual killing? This question illustrates the tension between slaughter as a sin and sacrifice as a religious duty. The two thar s whose traditional responsibilities include the killing of animals for food—(and, traditionally, in the case of untouchable Po(n) also the execution of criminals)—are among the very lowest in Bhaktapur.^[39]

Fishing, the traditional source of the dried fish used in the samhae offerings, is one of the duties exclusively assigned to the Po(n)s, the untouchables. The Nae who kill the water buffaloes are also close to the bottom of the status system.

The ideal is for the chief worshiper to kill the sacrificial animal himself. For Aga(n) God puja s in the household or Aga(n) House the acting head of the household or representative of the phuki , whether he is king—or his contemporary Brahman surrogate in Taleju, the king's Aga(n) House—Brahman, or Josi, or any member of the upper thar s, must cut the throat of the sacrificial animals himself. In these cases it is not proper to delegate the sacrificial act to the Acaju, although that is done, as we have noted, in cases where no one in a group has the initiation, or is available to perform the sacrifice. In public settings, however, attended by people beyond the circle of initiates, the Acaju or one of the lowest thar s^[40] may do the killing, protecting the highest groups in the public arena from the possible stigma of slaughter. Middle and lower groups also do their own killing in family puja s, although the middle groups may use a member of the Jyapu Acaju, or "farmer Acaju" thar s on important or public occasions.

Sacrifice: The Hierarchical Division of the Head

The deities who receive sacrifice are for the most part those who are the tutelary deities of one or another of Bhaktapur's nested components—phuki, guthi , mandalic^[*] segment, city as a whole—and thus the sacrifice represents the members of the unit. The sacrifice, above all those done in the course of Tantric worship, are done in contexts emphasizing the "equality"—which for Bhaktapur means the collapsing of hierarchical distinctions-of the participating group^[*] . In the feast that follows phuki sacrifices large family groups are assembled. At the core is the patrilineal phuki group, but hatanata —the out-married daughters and their spouses and children and more distantly related kin—as well as family friends may also be invited. They all share in the sacrificial meal as guests of the phuki or household. However, within this communal egalitarian feast there is an important ceremonial fragment that recalls the male hierarchy of the phuki . This is the orderly distribution of segments of the head of the sacrificial animal.

The distribution of parts of the head is one of the customs that people in Bhaktapur consider to be specifically Newar, or at least specially important to the Newars.^[41] The parts of the head of the sacrificed animal are presented just before the fruit course (the arrangement of

courses in such feasts is always conventionally organized in detail), that is, toward the end of the feast. They are given and received in a non-solemn, informal, often joking manner, characteristic of the feast itself.

These hierarchically arranged portions are called siu (in Kathmandu Newari, si ). The particular parts of the head made use of and their hierarchical value varies in various communities and groups. For Bhaktapur, for most upper-level groups at least, the sequence of distribution from highest to lowest is as follows: right eye, left eye, right ear, left ear, nose, tongue, right mandible, and left mandible. Toffin gives for the predominantly Jyapu Newar village of Pyangaon the following sequence: right "muzzle," left "muzzle," right eye, left eye, right ear, left ear, right mandible, left mandible (1976, pp. 329-338; 1984, p. 104). Manandhar in his dictionary of Kathmandu Newari (1976) gives the sequence: right eye, left eye, right ear, left ear, nose (or muzzle), tongue (1976, p. 593). Reportedly, this sequence is not used in Bhaktapur. There are variations in the lowest parts of the status system in Bhaktapur. The Po(n)s, who usually eat pigs during their phuki feasts divide the pig up in the sequence snout, right eye, left eye, right ear, left ear, right mandible, left mandible—to which they add the tail, which in contrast to upper-level restriction of siu to males, is given to a woman, the ranking woman in the family.^[42] In some circumstances, particularly among lower levels, a chicken or a duck is used for a feast. Thus at the initiation of a member of the Jugi thar s in the learning of the thar 's traditional musical instrument, a chicken is divided. On this occasion the head is given to the guru , the right wing to the student's father, and the left wing to the student. Manandhar (1976, 593) gives the sequential order of distribution for a duck or a chicken as head, right wing, left wing, right leg, and left leg. All these sequences have some tendency to go from top down, or front to back, and always from right to left in the ranking of symmetrical parts. Upper-status Bhaktapur and Pyangaon, at least, divide their mammals into eight parts.

In the middle and upper levels in Bhaktapur the siu is presented in order to the eight highest members of the phuki group that is holding the feast. For upper-level and middle-level thar s, at least, the system of ranking among the phuki as symbolized by the siu division is arranged by age within a generation, rather than only by relative age. In other words, even if a member of an older generation is younger than a male in a descending generation, he has more status in the siu distribution system. If there has been an Acaju assisting the phuki at the sacrifice, he may be presented the fifth-ranked piece, the nose. The recipients of the

siu eat a mouthful of their portion. Sometimes one small piece of any of the portions of siu is taken and presented to a representation of the main deity to whom the sacrifice was presented. The remnants of the siu as well as other residues of the feast are brought, as we have noted, to the chwasa at the twa: crossroads after the feast by one of the household women.

Sacrifice: Human Sacrifice

People in Bhaktapur believe that human sacrifice was performed in Bhaktapur in the past and that it may still take place on certian occasions in remote Newar towns in the Kathmandu Valley. The chronicles contain scattered references to what seem to be actual, as well as rumored human sacrifices, in the past. Mary Slusser reviews some of these reports, remarking that "the late chronicles take . . . [human sacrifice] for granted in the Malla Period, and consider it an accepted Licchavi custom" (1982, vol. 1, p. 337), and adds that "the late chronicles offer several descriptions of human sacrifices that seem too specific and too graphic to be mere fantasy" (ibid., 338). As she sums it up, reflecting with her phrase "almost certainty" the kinds of rumors that persist in Bhaktapur about the distant reaches of the Valley, "Human sacrifice, a feature of blood sacrifice up to the very recent past, is almost certainly no longer practiced in Nepal" (ibid., 1, 217).

In Bhaktapur's civic symbolic enactments the idea of human sacrifice is associated predominantly with the legends and dramatic performances of the Nine Durgas (chap. 15). There are some historical accounts, as we will see in that chapter, indicating that their performances in the past in Bhaktapur once included real human sacrifices. The details of their contemporary performances clearly show that the blood sacrifice of an animal deflects the rage of the Goddess m her most terrifying form from those humans or ineffectual minor deities who have offended her. The idea of the animal sacrifice as surrogate for human sacrifice is overt in still other contexts. In discussion of spirits and dangerous gods it is sometimes said that the dangerous force wants a human death (perhaps manifested in the illness of an individual) and that some substitution, often an animal sacrifice, must be made to save the individual. It is said that an animal sacrifice must be made to a newly constructed house; otherwise it may take a sacrifice itself and someone in the house will die. Similarly, if a truck owned by some Newar family is not given a sacrifice during the Mohani festival, it may cause an accident, again taking the sacrifice for itself. The close relation of ani-

mal sacrifice and threats to humans is experienced by some, at the least, individuals in their late childhood in a deeply felt way. We will return to such personal interpretations and responses in the excursion that follows on the significance of sacrifice in Bhaktapur.

Sacrifice: Aspects of Its Significance in Bhaktapur

Sacrifice in Bhaktapur, as the foregoing sections suggest, has the characteristics that have made one or another variation of sacrifice a powerful and useful social resource, one that "has been found in the earliest known forms of worship and in all parts of the world" (R. Faherty 1974, 128). There is an offering of animals and once, probably, humans to a divine being; that offering is equivocal, as it risks being interpreted as murder; the sacrificial animal is in part a representative of and surrogate for humans, as a human sacrifice would have been a surrogate for other humans; and the life—or death—offered to the gods is in part taken back in a transformed state and shared in a communal meal by the sacrificer and the members of the social group he represents.

It is not our purpose here to attempt to relate these forms to the large literature attempting to explain the social, psychological, and historical functions and "origins" of sacrifice, much of it originating in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century social and psychological theory. We will here emphasize certain aspects of it that are highlighted in Bhaktapur's uses and in the responses and interpretations of some, at least, of its people. These considerations are in anticipation of later discussions of how some of the central symbolic forms and symbolic enactments of the annual festival cycle build on the implications of sacrifice to help bind individuals into the city's symbolically constituted mesocosm.

Blood sacrifice in Bhaktapur might be regarded as an extremely immoral act transformed by a powerful context, a "religious" one of a special kind. The immorality and, therefore, the power represented in transformation is greatly enhanced by the Hindu doctrine of reincarnation, which renders animals in this and other contexts of understanding morally continuous with humans. Not only the killing of animals, which is relegated to the lowest-status thar s, but even the eating of meat from animals unless they are sacrificial offerings is contrary to the ordinary dharma . Against the background of such understanding sacrifice in Bhaktapur is the antinomial act in which all levels of society participate, in distinction to those acts that exclusively characterize upper-

status Tantric puja s. The transformation produced by the context is equivocal; there is a conflict with not only "common sense" but also the tenets of "ordinary religion," a conflict within the realm of faith itself. The possibility of a characterization of sacrifice as murder is always there. Much of the significance of blood sacrifice derives from this. Peripheral people in Bhaktapur's society, adolescents, and members of lower thar s, as well as Nepalese outsiders—including vocal Buddhist reformers—are skeptically aware that the apparent transformation of murder into sacrifice may be only self-serving hypocrisy, motivated in such skeptical interpretations by "superstition" in the quest for a good meal.

The location in Bhaktapur of some, at least, of the skepticism in the minds of older children or younger adolescents is particularly significant. As one informant, a member of a shopkeeper family, put it: "at first when we were young we used to feel afraid." (Why?)^[43] "Killing is not good. Killing causes something to happen in your mind." (What?) "It is a kind of cruelty. Someone is doing something cruel to the animal and he may do something cruel to me. Every man is also like an animal. A man can kill with a knife. That's why I used to feel troubled. But afterward I got used to the religion and to all kinds of sacrifice. "He was about twelve years old when he began to "get used to" sacrifice. I [R. L.] then ask him what other feelings he had about sacrifice before that time. "The religious books were about peace and about not killing anything, not harming anything. But they [the adults] break all the customs of religion, or the reality of religion, and they kill the animals, they sacrifice the animals for their own satisfaction only, in order to eat the animal, that is why they sacrifice. I used to say that it is not really for the god, the god never told us to kill anybody. I used to say so at that time."

But then he grew up and he came to realize the "religious truth" about sacrifice. That is he had to make, as Kierkegaard ([1843] 1954) put it, a "leap into faith," a commitment to counterintuitive propositions, to the "absurdities" that mark membership in a "community of faith."^[44]

The conflicts of meanings of sacrifice within the ordinary dharmic ethical system with the system of meanings and values of the worship of the dangerous deities means that the issues will be overt and conscious, that alternatives will be visible (i.e., to kill or not to kill), and that a choice is possible. The possibility of rejecting an adherence, on one or another level, to the symbolic forms is essential for the meaning of sac-

rifice, especially when the thing to be chosen or rejected involves a risk. Choice implies that for symbols of social importance (1) adherence must be motivated and (2) the act or state of adherence, being in some sense optional, means something in itself.

The acceptance of the religious interpretation that converts murder into sacrifice is not only a significant commitment to a system of doctrine; it is in part motivated by the powerful personal significance of animal sacrifice. The man we have just quoted has said, "someone is doing something cruel to the animal, and he may do something cruel to me. Every man is also like an animal." This overt association of not only "men" and "animals" but of one's self and the sacrificial animal is common in people's reflections on their thoughts and feelings about sacrifice when they were young. Another informant, a member of a high Chathar thar , said that when he was a child "I had pity for the goat, and I felt some sort of uneasiness which came into my mind. What if I were killed and given as sacrifice in that way, what would happen to me. That was the kind of feeling that came to my mind. If I were, you know, given as a sacrifice, you know, with my head turned up like that and a knife blade being put on my throat [he laughs] what would happen? That was the kind of feeling I had you know, a kind of gooseflesh, you know what that is, I can't express it. I used to have that kind of feeling, but these days I don't." Echoes of early understandings persist, although usually less clearly articulated in other adults. Thus, according to a man from the very low Jugi thar "we love the sacrificial animals like our own sons and daughters, because we brought them up and fed them and gave them drink."

These remarks show empathy for and identification with the animal as sacrificial victim. They also suggest a double psychological movement as individuals mature and fully enter the society, a movement that for boys roughly corresponds to their Kaeta Puja s, their initiation into their respective thars . The "leap into faith," the coming to "understand," the acceptance of the system of marked symbols as having its own legitimate reality, is motivated in part by a solidarity with adults, and hence the community, and that solidarity is aided, urged, by a sort of forced choice between an identification with the community of sacrificers and an identification with its sacrificial victims. One must not only accept the community's "ideology" but must also participate in sacrificial acts, and thus by implication in the whole mesocosmic symbolic system that they represent and protect. People are tempted by all kinds of oppositions to the full moral life of the city—memories of their

own childhood, the life of the lower thar s, and the freedom of the hill people. But these are also dirty, chaotic, animal-like. Sacrifice acts as a kind of continuing rite of passage, which emphasizes commitment to the costly order of household, phuki , and city. As we will see in chapter 15, the ritual performances of the Nine Durgas make the social implications of sacrifice quite clear—the wrath of the Goddess in her most destructive representation as Mahakali is aroused by violations of respect due to her by an inferior, that is, by a violation of the fundamental hierarchical social order. She threatens the hapless violator, and can be appeased only by the substitution of an animal, a cock, whose head she tears off and whose blood she drinks.

After their leading male member kills the animal, the corporate group eats it. This common and much discussed aspect of sacrifice has evoked various explanations—such as shared guilt and the absorption of the substance of the representative "totemic" animal—to explain the solidarity that presumably results from this. The Newar feast is a joyful event, usually associated with drinking as well as meat eating in a further participation in the Goddess's realm. The atmosphere of the feast is joyous and communal, a mild sociable softening of the proprieties of hierarchical order and of ordinary dietary restraints. The communal feast humanizes and socializes further the sorts of procedures which Tantrism performs as esoteric rituals. The act of sacrifice is modulated down into a dinner party. The ritual murder (which in some societies might be in the realm of mysteries, of black magic, of evil, of Satan) is conveniently and typically captured by the city and transformed and given a paradoxical propriety in the realm of the dangerous deities and their worship.