ESPECIFICACIONES TÉCNICAS

[Th e 1899 essay by Hubert and Mauss] still provides the best starting point from which sophisticated and possibly adequate theories of ritual can be derived. 1

Whether or not one accepts this grand claim (made by a senior and well-recog- nized Vedic scholar), the early study by Hubert and Mauss is widely regarded by students of sacrifi ce as a classic. However, like most classics, it does not yield all its riches on fi rst reading. Moreover, it needs to be situated within the life and thought of its authors, and it will be read and judged diff erently by those who come to it from diff erent points of view. Assessment is complicated by the joint authorship, but since the two authors collaborated over the course of a decade, and were close and lifelong friends, this source of diffi culty is less weighty than one might fear. Despite the alphabetic ordering of the authors’ names, I start with the better known of the two.

Marcel Mauss (1872–1950), nephew of the great Durkheim (1858–1917), was brought up in a Jewish family in Alsace. Aft er studying sociology with his uncle (then at Bordeaux), he moved to Paris to study philology, religious studies, and Indology, especially Sanskrit. Arguably his life’s work was as much inspired by the great Indologist and humanist Sylvain Lévi (also Jewish), as by Durkheim’s soci- ology. 2 _{Anyway, he helped Durkheim to found (in 1898) the important yearbook,}

the Année sociologique (henceforth Année ), and a few years later was appointed to teach on ‘Religions of Non-civilized Peoples’. Aft er Durkheim’s death, returning from the war, he struggled to develop the academic tradition that his uncle had founded. Having dominated French anthropology for twenty years, he retired at the start of the Second World War and could achieve little thereaft er. 3

1 _{Staal, Ritual , 150.}

2 _{Allen, ‘Mauss and India’.}

Though Mauss himself, notoriously, never published a single-author free-standing book, his bibliography runs to fifty-five pages in Fournier’s biography. Four posthumous volumes collect 2,500 pages of his anthro- pological writing and a fifth collects his political journalism (he was a moderate socialist, favouring the Cooperative Movement). In addition, his valuable Manual of Ethnography (1947) was compiled by a student from students’ lecture notes taken in the 1930s. Of all his texts the most cel- ebrated is undoubtedly his classic study, The Gift , which has come to be almost as widely read outside anthropology as within it. Mauss’ work (both lectures and writings) exercised considerable influence on such major post-war figures as Lévi-Strauss, Dumont, Dumézil, and Evans-Pritchard, and to judge from secondary literature and translations from the French, his reputation is still growing. Quite apart from the quality of his insights and the range of topics on which he wrote, his (at first sight) unsystematic cast of mind, allusive style, and fragmented production constitute both an invitation and a challenge to define and develop his ideas and relate them one to another.

Henri Hubert (1872–1927) was an equally enthusiastic follower of Durkheim, though he was neither related to him nor Jewish. A Parisian by birth and education, more self-disciplined than Mauss, he interested him- self in sociology, history, and archaeology, with special reference to pre- Christian Europe and West Asia. 4 _{He met Mauss in 1896 and was promptly}

enrolled in the team of contributors to the Année ; Mauss called him his professional twin ( jumeau de travail ). Their collaboration, which started with the 1899 essay on sacrifice (henceforth Sacrifice ), continued with a joint essay on magic in 1904, and two years later with an ‘Introduction to the Analysis of Certain Religious Phenomena’. 5 _{In 1909 they published}

together the Mélanges d’histoire des religions , which apart from the jointly- signed ‘Introduction’ and Sacrifice included two individually signed articles:  a second paper by Mauss on magic, and Hubert’s Time (his best known paper). 6 _{But whatever the signatures, the whole book was based on}

collaboration.

Th e ‘Introduction’ gains prominence from the position that Karady gave it in his edition of the Oeuvres —right at the start of the fi rst volume (entitled Th e Social Functions of the Sacred ). Unfortunately it remains untranslated, and the vagaries of translation history have fragmented the Mélanges , which the authors saw as essentially a single enterprise. But it was a single enter- prise within the Durkheimian project, and a few words are needed on this project.

4 _{Isambert, ‘Introduction’; Hubert, Time (with selective bibliography 97–100).}

5 _{Mauss, Oeuvres , vol. 1, 3–39.}

1. RELIGIOUS PHENOMENA

Durkheim’s purpose was to change the map of learning. He wanted to establish sociologie (including what is now social anthropology) as a serious academic discipline, distinct from (in particular) philosophy, psychology, and history. Two years aft er his thesis ( Division of Labour , 1893), he presented his mani- festo. 7 _{Th e new discipline was to be a science of social facts, that is, of social}

phenomena viewed objectively. Like other sciences, it needed to classify the phenomena it studied, organizing them into carefully defi ned taxa. No scholar could cover the whole fi eld in detail, and Durkheim proposed that Mauss spe- cialize in religious facts—which accorded with the nephew’s own preferences. 8

He deliberately avoided the term ‘religion’.

Th at Hubert and Mauss shared Durkheim’s theoretical position is clear not only from Sacrifi ce but also from the encyclopaedia article that Mauss wrote with another Année colleague in 1901, and from the ‘Introduction’ that Hubert contributed in 1904 to a manual for students of History of Religions. 9 _Above

all, then, their study will view sacrifi ce as a social fact, one that conforms to the accounts they give of what makes a phenomenon a social one. Th us sacrifi ce will be studied as manifesting the specifi c traditions of specifi c societies, and not the proclivities of a generalized human nature—an approach that would belong to psychology. As to what makes a social fact a religious one, the key to their thinking lies in the word ‘sacred’, as we shall see in more detail later. Defi nitions of religion along the lines of belief in spiritual beings, gods, or the Absolute were unsatisfactory. Th eir shortcomings included underemphasis on behaviour and the awkward fi t with a religion like Th eravada Buddhism, in which gods are of secondary signifi cance.

As is shown by the title and contents of Mélanges , Hubert and Mauss included magic among religious phenomena, albeit in a subordinate position. In his Manual Mauss formulates the matter as follows:

Just as aesthetics is defi ned by the notion of beauty, techniques by technical effi - cacy, just as economics is defi ned by the notion of value and law by the notion of property, religious or magico-religious phenomena are defi ned by the notion of the

sacred . 10

In the fi rst instance this applied to religious facts in the strict or narrow sense. Religion in the broader sense embraced magic and divination, and around this broader realm lay a halo of folklore or popular beliefs, sometimes labelled superstitions. 7 _{Durkheim,  Rules .} 8 _{Mauss, ‘Self-portrait’, 35.}

9 _{Fauconnet/Mauss, Sociology ; Hubert ‘Introduction’ (on which, see Mauss, O euvres , vol.}

1, 46).

Th is concentric schema was only one of various ways recognized by Durkheimians to classify the religious phenomena in a society. Another was according to the way the phenomena relate to social structure, that is, to the groups or categories that make up a society. A fundamental distinction, more useful for our purposes, was between rites or practices on the one hand, and myths or representations on the other—behaviour versus cognition, as we might now say. Th ese too could be subdivided. Among the practices, positive rites like sacrifi ce contrasted with negative rites or ritual prohibitions—expres- sions that Mauss preferred to ‘taboos’; and among the positive rites, oral ritual contrasted with manual ritual (‘manual’ as in ‘manual work’, which involves physical or bodily actions not necessarily confi ned to the hands).

Th is last distinction is particularly relevant to Sacrifi ce . While Mauss was working on it, he was also working on his thesis, which was to be on prayer. In 1911 he circulated privately the fi rst quarter of the work, 11 _{but he never}

completed it. However, we know what he planned from the account of his academic work which he prepared in 1930 for his (successful) candidacy for a position at the Collège de France. He was originally intending to treat Vedic oral literature in the second volume. 12 _{Th is explains why Sacrifi ce concen-}

trates on manual ritual and de-emphasizes the verbal presentation of victim to deity. It explicitly omits discussion of invitations to the gods, hymns, the description of the victim, and the statement of the results expected from the ritual. 13

Other background assumptions of the Durkheimian school can be left until aft er the presentation of the argument of Sacrifi ce . My précis tries to extract what is most relevant in the present context.

2. THE ARGUMENT OF ‘SACRIFICE: ITS NATURE AND FUNCTIONS’

Introduction . Th e authors plan to put forward a provisional hypothesis that builds on recent work but goes beyond it. For Tylor, sacrifi ce was originally a gift to supernatural beings, given in the hope of a return, but subsequently it became a homage to them (return not expected), and thereaft er self-denial and renunciation. Such an approach is generally accepted by ordinary folk and is part of the whole picture, but Tylor’s position hardly amounted to a theory. Robertson Smith, writing of the Semitic world, put the emphasis on the con- sumption of animal victims, whose sacredness derived from totemism. He

11 _{Mauss, Prayer .} 12 _{Mauss, Self-portrait , 38.} 13 _{Hubert/Mauss, Sacrifi ce , 126, n. 182.}

knew that sacredness can be ambiguous—valued or devalued, and in the sec- ond case the victim could be destroyed without being consumed. Frazer drew attention to sacrifi ces of rather than to gods, and connected them to seasonal agrarian cults (in the fi rst edition of his Golden Bough ).

Th ese British writers are severely criticized. Th ey allocated their emphases arbitrarily, took for granted a link between sacrifi ce and totemism, confl ated diff erent types of sacrifi ce, and derived one type from another without ade- quate historical evidence. Another fault of method was to accumulate data hugger-mugger, rather than studying particular societies in depth. Sacrifi ce would focus primarily on the Vedas and the Bible (especially the Pentateuch), where the ritual was presented by the practitioners themselves at length and in their own language. Neither Greco-Roman nor ethnographic data were of comparable depth, though they are introduced occasionally.

1. Defi nition and Unity of the Sacrifi cial System . Th ough ‘sacrifi ce’ and ‘consecration’ are etymologically linked, their meanings overlap only in part. Every sacrifi ce includes consecration of an off ering, but consecrations also occur outside of sacrifi ce. A distinction may be needed between, on the one hand, the sacrifi er, an individual or collectivity, who benefi ts from the eff ects of the ritual, and on the other, the sacrifi cer, who actually performs it (perhaps for pay). Th e benefi t may radiate from the sacrifi er to other entities, whether material (a house or fi eld) or immaterial (an oath or alliance). Th e thing con- secrated stands between the earthly benefi ciaries and the deity. Th ough some consecrated off erings (ex-votos, fi rstlings) are similarly placed, the rituals in which they occur are not naturally labelled ‘sacrifi ces’; the off ering needs to be destroyed. On the other hand, whether it is animal or vegetable is not crucial. Hebrew, Greek, and Vedic rituals assimilate the two.

In this way the authors arrive at their preliminary or external defi nition. (As throughout the chapter, although I cite pages of the English versions, I sometimes retouch the published translations.) Sacrifi ce is a religious act which, via the con- secration of a victim, modifi es the condition of the moral person who performs it or of certain objects in which that person is interested. Th e word ‘victim’ refl ects their remark about destruction; ‘moral person’ covers collectivities as well as individu- als; the person and object together can be thought of as the ‘benefi ciaries’.

To defi ne sacrifi ce is to grant a certain unity to a phenomenon that can vary enormously. Th e combination of unity and variety is illustrated by the neat indigenous typology of Vedic rituals and the less neat Hebrew one.

2. Th e Scheme of Sacrifi ce. Th e account will be based primarily on Vedic animal sacrifi ce, and will only make secondary use of other Vedic sacrifi ces (which are vegetarian) or of comparisons from outside India. It falls into three sections—entry, victim, 14 _{and exit. What starts as profane must fi rst be}

14 _{Helpfully distinguished by Karady (Mauss, Oeuvres , vol. 1 , 630–631) and Halls, the middle}

consecrated or purifi ed. Th is applies to sacrifi er, sacrifi cer, the place where the ritual is held, and the ritual apparatus. Vedic sacrifi ce takes place not in a tem- ple but on a specially prepared patch of ground, and it is to be performed in a special state of mind characterized by confi dence or faith. Of the apparatus the most sacred items are the altar (dug out, not built up) and the adjacent sacrifi - cial post, with which the sacrifi er is identifi ed.

Th e victim is carefully selected, pacifi ed verbally and consecrated progres- sively, but cannot simply be deifi ed since it has to link the sacred with the sac- rifi er; victim and sacrifi er fuse. Th e immolation, a sort of sacrilege or murder, frees the divine principle in the victim (i.e. its life), but leaves behind a carcase. Th is too has two possible destinations. It can be attributed to benefi cent gods (or, as a scapegoat, to malefi cent demons), or to humans, who typically con- sume it. Vedic iḍā refers to a special portion of meat for priests and sacrifi er, but also (Sanskrit scripts lack capital letters) to I ḍ ā, a goddess of abundance who is invoked into the meat. Th is is ‘a veritable transubstantiation’, compara- ble to what happens in the Christian mass. Overall, the sacrality concentrated in the victim is released to supernaturals and to humans.

Finally the exit phase reverses the entry, returning everything to the profane world and atoning for any ritual errors.

3, 4. Variations from the Abstract Scheme. In an initiation or ordination the aim may be to sacralize a being that starts off as profane. Th e entry rites are then emphasized, the exit ones minimized, and sacrality passes from victim to sacrifi er. Conversely, the aim may be to desacralize. Since the sacred can be bad or negative as well as good, the starting point may be an undesired level of sacrality, which needs to be eliminated or expelled. Religious thought tends to associate illness, death, and sin with the bad sacred, so such rituals can be therapeutic or expiatory. But they can also be held for the Hebrew nazir , to release him from his period of extreme purity; and they can be held for things rather than persons. Th e sacred quality of a harvest may be concentrated in the fi rstlings, whose sacrifi ce frees up the remainder for ordinary consump- tion. Th e ambiguity of the sacred explains the similarities between sorts of desacralizing rituals that may seem fundamentally opposed, as well as between sacralizing and desacralizing rituals (nowadays sometimes contrasted as con- junctive and disjunctive).

If one source of variety among the rituals is the diff erence between sacrali- zation and desacralization, another is the variety of benefi ciaries. If the ben- efi ciary is an individual, he may be ‘reborn’ and take on a new name, or gain post-mortem benefi ts, while a collectivity may gain socially or politically. If the benefi ciary is a thing, as in an ‘objective sacrifi ce’, the entry and exit rites are minimized, and the emphasis of the middle phase is on creating a spirit, for instance the guardian spirit of a new house. Agrarian rituals are particularly complex since the farmer needs not only to expel a potentially angry spirit (so as to desacralize the harvest), but also to recreate or resurrect it with a view

to future fertility. Moreover, other purposes and meanings are oft en amalga- mated, so that the ritual contains an expiatory or scapegoat element.

5. Sacrifi ce of the God. Th is is among the most evolved forms of the sacrifi - cial complex. Mannhardt and Frazer connected it with agrarian rituals but with- out emphasizing the role of mythology in the connection. A corn spirit tends to be barely individualized—little more than a sheaf of corn—until it is named and given an animal or human incarnation, together with a myth of sacrifi cial apotheosis. Th e development from victim to god was helped by the annual rep- etition of the ritual, one year’s victim being identifi ed with next year’s.

Where the ritual has a god who is also the victim, myth oft en has a god (or his priest) whose death founds the cult. Sometimes the god himself is split, producing two opponents in a great theomachy (Marduk versus Tiamat, etc.), one or both of whom dies. Th e opponents’ original unity explains their mutual resemblance.

Myth acts back on ritual, taking the god far from his agricultural origins. But the repetitive rhythms of nature mean that the myth includes rebirth as well as death. Sometimes a second sort of split occurs, reintroducing the vic- tim–god duality, making the victim into either a gift or an evil enemy. Th is analysis applies to the particularly elaborate Vedic sacrifi ces of soma or Soma, king of plants, to Soma. If certain gods are born from sacrifi ce, all of them are sustained by the nourishment it provides; so sacrifi ce becomes cosmogonic, as in the case of Purus ̣ a. But the initial defeat of cosmic chaos/moral evil may need repetition, and the original sacrifi ce of the God therefore is perpetuated in regular cultic sacrifi ces. Th e latter is still the case in Christianity. Th e conse- crations, the concentration of sacrality in the bread and wine and its dispersal among the congregation, the rhythm of expiation and communion, bring the mass astonishingly close to agrarian sacrifi ce.

6. Conclusion . Despite the variety of abstract types of sacrifi ce and the multiple functions served by a particular ritual, the underlying procedure has enough unity to allow of defi nition. ‘ [It] consists in establishing communication between the sacred and profane worlds through the mediation of a victim—that is, of something destroyed in the course of the ceremony .’

Contra Robertson Smith, the victim does not enter the ritual already sacred; it needs to be consecrated. Th e procedure can equally well sacralize or desa- cralize; it sets in motion sacred forces. An intermediary is necessary because the sacred is dangerous to the sacrifi er. Every sacrifi ce contains an element of redemption, of liberation from threat, and aft er their dealings with the sacred humans have to operate in the profane world. From the other side, the gods