The Head Beneath the Altar: Hindu Mythology and the Critique of Sacrifice

Rivalries

43 Rivalries Our world believes in the spontaneity of desire, especially our human sciences, ever faithful to the optimism of the Enlightenment. This, in my opinion, is the principal reason for the hostility of the nineteenth century Indianists toward the Brahmanas, and of the established sciences toward mimetic theory. —René Girard, Sacrifice The general character of these works is marked by shallow and insipid grandiloquence, by priestly conceit, and antiquarian pedantry. These works deserve to be studied as the physician studies the twaddle of idiots, and the raving of madmen. —F. Max Müller, A History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature so Far as It Illustrates the Primitive Religion of the Brahmans R ivalry is at the center of Girard’s work. Some would say that rivalry also characterizes Girard’s relationship to the rest of the academy. It also plays a central role in the mythology of the Brāhmaṇas, in which the gods and the demons are locked in a continuous struggle for supremacy. 44 The Head Beneath the Altar In this chapter we will focus on the issue of rivalry as we follow two parallel narratives, one historical and one mythological. Both of these narratives lead to Girard’s engagement with the Brāhmaṇas, whose reviled status he clearly sees as analogous to that of his own work. First we will look at the Sanskrit texts themselves and their reception in German and British Indology and, later, in the work of Sylvain Lévi and Girard. Then we will examine the rivalries that shaped the development of mimetic theory, beginning with the French-British conflict that serves as the background for Indology in France. We will continue on to the strained relationship between philologists like Lévi and sociologists like Émile Durkheim in the burgeoning field of the study of religion at the fin de siècle and see how Girard’s project is a product of this rivalry. Then we will turn to the Vedas and Brāhmaṇas themselves and begin to look at the mimetic rivalry of the gods and the demons and the emergence of the divine king Indra out of this struggle. From there we will shift to the rivalry of the waning Vedic god Indra and the rising sectarian god Viṣṇu and how this mythological conflict relates to the changing status of the sacrifice in classical India. At the end it will be clear how Girard’s turn to the Brāhmaṇas, specifically as they appear through the lens of Lévi’s work, closes the circle on his intellectual project and gives us a new perspective on mimetic theory’s place among the theories of religion. Scapegoated Texts: The Place of the Bra ˉhman ˙ as in the Study of Hinduism When European scholars first discovered the Brāhmaṇas they reacted with a rather surprising amount of disgust and derision.1 According to F. Max Müller they were “twaddle, and what is worse, theological twaddle.”2 Another Sanskritist, Arthur A. MacDonnell, dismissed the Brāhmaṇas as “an aggregate of shallow and pedantic discussions, full of sacerdotal conceits, and fanciful, or even absurd, identifications.”3 William Dwight Whitney, whose 1885 work The Roots, Verb-forms and Primary Derivatives of the Sanskrit Language is still an indispensable resource for students of Sanskrit, wrote of them, “Here we have one of the aberrations of the human mind. . . . Their Rivalries 45 tedious inanity . . . will soon satiate, if it does not disgust, the general reader.”4 Even Julius Eggeling, whose unsurpassed diligence and scholarship resulted in a monumental five-volume translation with notes of the most famous of the Brāhmaṇas, the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa of the White branch of the Yajur Veda, is dismissive of its significance: In the whole range of literature few works are probably less calculated to excite the interest of any outside the very limited number of specialists, than the ancient theological writings of the Hindus, known by the name of Brâhmanas. For wearisome prolixity of exposition, characterised by dogmatic assertion and a flimsy symbolism rather than by serious reasoning , these works are perhaps not equaled anywhere; unless, indeed, it be by the speculative vapourings of the Gnostics, than which, in the opinion of the learned translators of Irenæus, “nothing more absurd has probably ever been imagined by rational beings.”5 Eggeling joins all the other detractors of the Brāhmaṇas in taking...