Cremation, Caste, and Cosmogony in Karmic Traditions.

purest in common sense is not always the most holy and
high ranking. The Aghoris are pure and holy, whereas
the Brahman Funeral priest is impure but still a
Brahman. “As vehicles of the immortal gods (immortal
in the sense of possessing the full life) the members of
the three excellent castes may not come into contact with
death” because such defilements will impair their full
life on which the life of the community depends (Hocart
1950:19). Thus, among the Tamils of Ceylon, the barber
is “like a priest on the cremation ground. The priest who
conducts ceremonies in the house does not go to the
cremation ground” (ibid:11). The Brahmins are priests of
immortal gods and can have nothing to do with death,
and low-caste people have to perform the rites the highcaste
priests will not touch. The barbers and washermen
are low caste, as Hocart argues, because of the pollution
involved in the funerals (ibid: 11-12). This is not the
case at Pashupatinath, or in Banaras where Funeral
priests – Mahabrahmans – conduct the rituals. The
Sudras have traditionally had the role of cremating the
dead, which they still do in Varanasi, whereas the
Mahabrahmans conduct the death rituals. Thus, the
distinction between Cremation Priest and Funeral Priest
is important. At Pashupatinath Brahmans work as both
Cremation and Funeral priests, whereas in Banaras the
former job is conducted by low-castes and the latter by
Brahmans. This seeming paradox has been explained in
different ways, and I will emphasise purity and pollution
through consumption of death as the key to
understanding the caste system. The rituals of the Vedic
Indian tradition are so complicated that they can only be
acquired by many years of learning. The elaborations
and complications of the rites have nevertheless not
altered the main aims, which are to increase the supply
of food and wealth to the people, ensure progeny, ward
off illness and untimely death, and to thwart enemies
(Hocart 1970a:62). The importance of rituals as a
reciprocal relationship between man and god, which
enables the god to maintain and preserve the cosmos by
the help and assistance from humans through their
sacrifices, is a very dangerous commitment both for
gods and humans. Ritual knowledge is also spiritual
knowledge, and the increase of sacred knowledge may
have lead to the change from Sudras to Brahmans
performing parts or all of the death rituals. Although
funerals are impure rituals, the social and cosmic
consequences and outcome of the cremations may
necessitate Brahmans as ritual specialists, and their
social and ritual commitment is to partake in the
cosmogony regardless of their own defilement as a
consequence.
The opposing principles of purity and pollution in
cosmic and cosmogenetic processes are approachable
from a comparative perspective. The king’s cremation is
the most important ritual in society. As a part of the
obsequies a Brahman priest has to consume a part of the
dead king’s body, and in so doing he becomes so highly
polluted and stigmatised that he is expelled from the
country. This is quite the contrary from the Aghoris who
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become holy men after rituals where they consume parts
of corpses and excrements. In other words, polluted
material can be used as a medium for becoming either
pure or polluted. This ambivalent character of the flesh
of corpses is a point of departure for analysing structural
principles in Hindu cosmogony. Various sacrificial
practices and types of interactions between man and God
require different types of human flesh. It is difficult to
maintain the traditional distinction between sacred and
profane from a sacrificial and cosmogenetic point of
view, because there is no neutral “profane” sphere.
Veena Das argues that the opposing poles are between
sacred and chaos. The sacred represents purity whereas
chaos is impurity, pollution or simply cosmic
imperfection. “Since the sacred cosmos emerges out of
chaos, man is continuously threatened by the lurking
world of chaos, meaninglessness and anomie” (Das
1990:130). Or in other words, ”purity” indicates
”completeness” and ”impurity” designates ”lack of
completeness” (Valeri 1985:33). The current time period
– Kali Yuga – is characterised by cosmic deterioration; it
is a time of chaos, greed, and selfishness. Chaos is
liminality, and logically the profane sphere is dangerous
(fig. 4.1):
Fig. 4.1. The sacred cosmos and the profane chaos.
Pure Impure
Sacred Profane
COSMOS CHAOS
Order Liminality
There is a continuous and ongoing struggle between
negative and positive cosmic forces. Sacrifice is a means
by which cosmos is created out of chaos. “The king is
said to have a portion of Vishnu in him and the ascetic
controls the social and cosmic through his tapa” (Das
1990:131). The Aghoris and the Funeral priests fulfil the
same cosmic role when they partake in the creation of
order and cosmos by consumption of sin and chaos. The
outcome of these two opposing practices is the same:
both the king and the Aghoris, and holy men in general,
preserve and create cosmos.
Flesh – katto, kings, and Aghoris
The Aghori sadhu becomes pure and holy by consuming
the most impure substances that exists on earth, whereas
the Brahman priest performing the katto-ritual becomes
so highly polluted by eating part of the king’s flesh that
he is expelled and banned from the country. The extreme
poison of the gift is evident in the alleged permanent
impurity of the Brahman priests who ate katto.
Consumption of divine purity may lead to pollution,
whereas consumption of impurity may lead to divinity
(fig. 4.2).