Sacrificial death and the necrophagous ascetic

Abstract

My aim in this paper is to outline two opposing ways in which the problems of temporality and man's mortality are handled within Hinduism. The first section focuses on the case of the householder. For him, I argue, the ‘good’ death is a sacrificial act which results not only in a re-creation of the deceased, but also in a regeneration of time and of the cosmos. In the second section I turn to a group of ascetics who are intimately associated with death, corpses and the cremation ground. By contrast with the householder, the somewhat macabre practice of the Aghori ascetic is directed at a suspension – rather than a renewal – of time, and is thus an attempt to escape from the recurrence of death implied by the endless cycle of rebirths. The singularity of his means to this end lies (as Eliade (1969:296) perceived) in a peculiarly material and literal play on the common Hindu theme of the combination of opposites; but both the end itself and its theological justification are – we shall find – expressed in thoroughly conventional language. Although the life of the householder and the life of the ascetic are oriented towards two different goals, both share in the same complex of interconnected assumptions about the relationship between life and death. As Shulman (1980:90) puts it: The Hindu universe is a closed circuit: nothing new can be produced except by destroying or transforming something else. […]

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