Surrogate Absorption of Contaminants—Both Dirty and Clean

We have discussed the idea of the surrogate accumulation of pollution as a service to others as a priestly function in chapter 10. Surrogation has two distinct aspects. First, there is the performance of an essential act—the purification of a house after death, the execution of a criminal, the moving of feces from latrines out of the city—which would be uncongenial or status-threatening in one way or another to the higher-status people who use their status to avoid and delegate the action. However, lower-status people not only are delegated status-depressing actions, which then maintain their own lowered statuses, but in some services are clearly doing something else; they absorb into themselves a contaminant, freeing others from it. The idea of helpful surrogate absorption is widespread in Bhaktapur. What is absorbed is often a dangerous but not necessarily impure (in the sense of dirty) substance.

Thus animals placed "under" the house (on the cheli ) in Bhaktapur are said (according to Vogt [1977, 94]) to help protect the inhabitants of a house by contracting diseases that otherwise would affect the human inhabitants of the house. A piece of iron is sometimes used to draw dangerous spirits to it—for example, from the body of a bride who is to be newly introduced into a household. The special uses of the lowest thar s to absorb and draw to themselves the portentous dangers signaled by an eclipse or those inherent in the clothes and funeral objects of the dead involves the accumulation of more than "impurity." When the untouchable Po(n) begs, as he is traditionally required to do, for gifts from others following an eclipse, and, as he does on some other occasions of astrological trouble, he takes on not their status-threatening dirty impurity but their health or economically threatening astrologically produced "bad luck." In this and the other examples of the surrogate absorption of a dangerous substance, there is the implication of a limited quantity which can be moved from one locus to another.^[14] The idea of flow of quantitatively limited powerful substances is found in the idea of sakti in Bhaktapur's religion of the dangerous deities. Thus when Siva's power or sakti flows into his Goddess consort, he is emptied of it, and left as a corpse.

The idea of pollution—in the sense of dirty pollution—as a substance that flows, that has quantitative aspects, that can often be avoided, and that can be deflected and absorbed into others is thus a subcase of a larger category. The inverse idea of partaking of the substance of superiors through eating the prasada of deities and the cipa of superiors is in this larger group. So is the complex of ideas and feelings centering on dangerous and unpleasant substances other than dirty, status-affecting pollutants. Many of the ideas, feelings, and experiential resonances connected with this nondirty dangerous class are associated with another set of moral issues—danger, punishment, evil, sin, guilt, and fear—rather than those centrally germane to the purity complex. These nondirty transferable substances are also closely related to the world of power and magic, which in a sense lies under and at the edges of the ordinary world expressed and stabilized through purity.