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83 Priests and Kings, Oaths and Duels The king should rise early in the morning, attend respectfully to learned priests who have grown old in the study of the triple learning, and abide by their advice. —The Laws of Manu 7.37 Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest? —King Henry II ordering the death of St. Thomas à Becket I n the last chapter, we examined the rivalries outside (European scholars vs. Brahmin authors, France vs. England, philology vs. sociology) and inside (gods vs. demons) of the Brāhmaṇa narrative as received and interpreted by Girard. Now we will examine a new rivalry: that of the royal and military Kṣatriya class and the priestly Brahmin class, along with the sacrificial institutions of the oath and the duel through which that rivalry is mediated. In order to understand the relationship between the two functions represented by Kṣatriyas and Brahmins in ancient India, we will employ the theories of Georges Dumézil—like Lévi, another French thinker whose influence on Girard has been underappreciated. 84 The Head Beneath the Altar Dumézil’s compelling argument about the tripartite structure that underlies Indo-European religion and society gives us a firmer grounding on which to do comparative work with Indian, Greek, Iranian, and Scandinavian cultures, but I am even more interested in his early and abandoned theory of the *bhlagh(s)-men, the forgotten (or repressed) figure who serves as a sacrificial substitute for the king and who develops into the Brahmin (superior to the king) in the Vedic context. Even if the idea of the *bhlagh(s)men as ancestor of the Brahmin is too speculative, as Dumézil eventually thought it was, it still points toward an important facet of the Brahmin’s identity and finds echoes in certain myths. Examining the Kṣatriya-Brahmin rivalry in its human and divine iterations , I will propose that the Brahmin’s mastery of speech and the Kṣatriya’s mastery of force can be traced from the sacrificial enclosure all the way into the politico-legal structures that are the foundations of the ancient Indian worldview: the oath and the duel. To understand the implications of this genealogy, I will bring in the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, specifically his writings on the anthropogenic power of the oath and the figure of the homo sacer. Using the medievalist Henry Charles Lea’s 1866 work The Duel and the Oath as a starting point, I will argue that the duel and the oath both derive from an early stratum of Vedic ritual in which two sacrificers contended with one another instead of one sacrificer who enlisted a Brahmin priest to perform the ritual on his behalf. But, I will claim, when Brahmin ritualists abandoned the two-sacrificer model, they were left with the problem ofintegratingthenowsuperfluoussecondsacrificerintothenewritualsystem. This second sacrificer, transformed into the always-already defeated party, is the basis for what I have identified as the Indian wolf-warrior cycle, visible in fragmentary references to groups of heterodox ascetics like the Vrātyas, in myths of sacred kingship, and in the story of Śunaḥśepa, the sacrificial victim who miraculously escapes his fate and whose story will conclude this chapter. Mon semblable, mon frère! The things Girard appreciates in Hubert and Mauss’s Sacrifice essay are their argument that sacrifice is the origin of religion and their understanding of sacrifice as a “technique” (or perhaps a techne) visible in recognizable form Priests and Kings, Oaths and Duels 85 in different cultures.1 Girard gives the two sociologists a rather backhanded compliment in Violence and the Sacred when he marvels that “[their] failure to come to grips with the origin and function of sacrifice makes their accurate description of its operation even more remarkable.”2 We can now trace their line of inquiry into the violent heart of the sacred back to Mauss’s encounter with Lévi and the Sanskrit tradition in 1895. But what we have not yet seen is that the work of Lévi and Mauss also has a critical intersection with another thinker who had a profound influence on the French structuralist tradition with which Girard is in constant conversation—Georges Dumézil. Like Girard, Georges Dumézil was a “man of few ideas”3 and, like Girard, he was sometimes accused of reading myths...

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