Philosophy and the End of Sacrifice

Edited by

Peter Jackson [+–]

University of Stockholm

Peter Jackson is Professor at the department of History of Religions at
Stockholm University, Sweden. Jackson received his PhD in the History
of Religions from Uppsala University in 1999. He specializes in the
study of Indo-European religions, with a particular emphasis on ancient
Indian and Iranian religions, the religions of ancient Greece and Rome,
and Old Norse religion. He also works on more general theoretical and
conceptual concerns in the study of religion. His most recent book is
The Transformations of Helen: Indo-European Myth and the Roots of the Trojan
Cycle (2007).

Anna-Pya Sjödin [+–]

Mid-Sweden University

Anna-Pya Sjödin is Senior lecturer in the study of religions at Mid Sweden University, department of Humanities, affiliated researcher at Uppsala University, department of Linguistics and Philology. Sjödin received her PhD in Indology at Uppsala University 2007. Her research interests include Indian epistemology, ontology and the relationship between action (karma) and knowledge (veda/jñāna) in early and later Indian philosophical texts. Her dissertation “The happening of Tradition: Vallabha on Anumāna in Nyāyalīlavati” (2007) concerns medieval Hindu epistemology. More recently she has published on yogic cognition in Vaiśeṣika.

Series: The Study of Religion in a Global Context

Preliminaries

Prelims [+–] i-vi

Peter Jackson FREE

University of Stockholm

Introduction [+–] 1-10

Peter Jackson,Anna-Pya Sjödin FREE

University of Stockholm

Mid-Sweden University

This volume addresses the means and ends of sacrificial speculation by inviting a selected group of specialist in the fields of philosophy, history of religions, and indology to examine philosophical modes of sacrificial speculation — especially in Ancient India and Greece — and consider the commonalities of their historical raison d’être. Scholars have long observed, yet without presenting any transcultural grand theory on the matter, that sacrifice seems to end with (or even continue as) philosophy in both Ancient India and Greece. How are we to understand this important transformation that so profoundly changed the way we think of religion (and philosophy as opposed to religion) today? Some of the complex topics inviting closer examination in this regard are the interiorisation of ritual, ascetism and self-sacrifice, sacrifice and cosmogony, the figure of the philosopher-sage, transformations and technologies of the self, analogical reasoning, the philosophy of ritual, vegetarianism, and metempsychosis. The first section of the volume, “Historical and Comparative Approaches to Ritual Thought in Ancient India and Archaic Greece,” is devoted to changes in religious behaviour and the place of sacrifice in early Indian intellectual history. Instead of searching for origins and closures, the individual contributions rather attempt to map changes, and sometimes to catalogue the complexity in thinking and acting that comes to light in the early Indian material. What becomes clear then, instead of a simple one-way causality between thought and performance, is an ongoing transformation mediated by both intellectual activity and ritual reflexivity. Beginnings and ends in this sense never actually take place as clearly definable moments in time. The precarious act of historical and/or logical comparison can of course not be disregarded in this connection,because the terminology underlying one’s research is always confronted with the general problem of translation. The themes forming the backbone of the book’s midsection, “Ritual Thought in Late Antiquity,” are all grounded in textual sources from Late Antiquity, such as the Corpus Hermeticum, the Nag Hammadi texts, and the letters of Paul. As will become clear, however, they also point in quite different directions, both spatial and temporal, by evoking ancient Egyptian material, ethnographic comparanda and 20th century philosophy. The last section, “Repercussions of Sacrifice in Western Philosophy,” closes the historical circuit by addressing the continuation of sacrificial themes in contemporary continental philosophy.

I Historical and Comparative Approaches to Ritual Thought in Ancient India and Ancient Greece

1. The Principle of Equivalence and the Interiorization of Ritual: The “End” of Ritual? [+–] 15-31

Stephanie Jamison £17.50

University of California Los Angeles

Stephanie W. Jamison is Distinguished Professor of Asian Languages and
Cultures and of Indo-European Studies, University of California, Los
Angeles. Jamison was trained as a historical and Indo-European linguist
(PhD Yale 1977), but for many years she has concentrated on Indo-Iranian,
especially (Vedic) Sanskrit and Middle Indo-Aryan languages and
textual materials. She works also on literature and poetics, religion and
law, mythology and ritual, and gender studies in these languages, and
also holds an interest in comparative mythology and poetics, especially
with Greek materials. Jamison has recently published (with Joel P. Brereton)
a new complete English translation of the The Rigveda (Oxford University
Press, 2014).

Stephanie Jamison’s contribution undertakes to think along with sacrifice and its performative and intellectual expressions. She thus challenges the view of interiorization as the resultant idea of an end of sacrifice as exterior performance. By clarifying these aspects Jamison points to instances of ritual speculation, for example the famous hymn of Puruṣa, the cosmic man, and the theme of interiorizing ritual in the earliest Vedic texts. The changes depicted apparently have more to do with what she labels “ritual inflation” rather than with the “death of ritual.” By describing the complex activity of equating and substituting the cosmic and the mundane, in both the early and later Vedic texts, she emphasizes the centrality of sacrifice within Indian intellectual endeavours, both past and present.

2.Ritual Interiorization and Abstract Action [+–] 33-44

Clemens Cavallin £17.50

University of Gothenburg

Clemens Cavallin is Senior Lecturer and Associate Head of Department for
Internationalization and Cooperation at the Department of Literature,
History of Ideas, and Religion at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
Cavallin’s research interests include Hinduism, Ritual theory and Catholic
Studies. His dissertation “The Efficacy of Sacrifice” (2002) focused on
Vedic sacrifices, while hissecond book, Ritualization and Human Interiority
(2013) concerns ritual theory. He is presently working on a biography
of the Canadian Catholic artist and author Michael O’Brien and on the
project “Religion on Campus: A Study of Views on Religion at Two Indian
Universities” which analyses the present situation of religious studies in
India.

Clemens Cavallin’s text takes as its point of departure the theme of interiorized ritual and its relation to changes in religious and ritual practices in early India, especially the tendency to shift focus towards the person or human being. He argues that such interiorizations of ritual practice and discourse need to be placed in a larger comparative context that is based on a theoretical model of ritualization and forms of interiorization. Cavallin employs a notion of abstract action, as formulated by Caroline Humphrey and James Laidlaw in their analysis of the Jain puja (1994). He develops a theory of the relationship between the abstraction of meaning (concepts) and of action (ritual acts) as they are connected to the religious principles of sacralization and personification.

3. Lord over this Whole World: Agency and Philosophy in Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad [+–] 45-62

Anna-Pya Sjödin £17.50

Mid-Sweden University

Anna-Pya Sjödin addresses the conceptualization of agency in Bṛhadāraṇyakopaniṣad by outlining the metaphors used in this text to capture notions of sacrificial and epistemological agency. At the same time as this Upaṇiṣadic text elaborates the then-emerging ideas of self (ātman) and the consequences of knowing thatself, it also carries impressions of discussions and speculations that were formulated within a culture of sacrificial ritual. Traces of the Upaṇiṣadic expressions are then shown to have a structural continuity in later systematic philosophy, a continuity expressed mostly in terms of epistemological agency and formulated within a discourse on the self as the acting and knowing subject.

4. “The End of Sacrifice” and the Absence of “Religion”: The Pecuiar Case of India [+–] 63-85

Gerald James Larson £17.50

Indiana University (Emeritus)

Gerald James Larson is Rabindranath Tagore Professor Emeritus of Indian Cultures and Civilization, Indiana University, Bloomington, and Professor Emeritus, Religious Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara. Larson is the author or editor of some 12 books and well over 100 scholarly articles on cross-cultural philosophy of religion, history of religions, classical Sanskrit and South Asian history and culture. Among the most
recent books are Religion and Personal Law in Secular India: A Call to Judgment
2002, and Volume XII of the Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies, co-edited with the late Dr. Ram Shankar Bhattacharya, entitled Yoga: India’s Philosophy of Meditation (2008)

Gerald James Larson’s paper discusses five principal questions posed in relation to the topic of the “end of sacrifice” and the emerging concept of “religion” in the Late Antiquity. The first two questions concern the use of the concepts of “religion,” “philosophy” and “theology,” and the apparent absence of their counterparts in the early Indian material. By outlining important notions in Indian thinking, Larson stresses the extent to which the worldviews between Mediterranean Europe and the Indian subcontinent differ. The third question concerns the possible naming of a second axial age that occurred around the first centuries CE in both of these cultural spheres. This could be postulated at least in terms of far-reaching changes taking place within their respective intellectual discourses. The two last points of discussion concern the need for rethinking and rectifying Jaspers’ notion of a first axial age and his notions of “religion,” “philosophy,” and “theology.”

5. The Crisis of Sacrifice [+–] 87-96

Peter Jackson £17.50

University of Stockholm

The final contribution to the first section also functions as a prelude to the next section. Peter Jackson compares early Greek and Indic examples of a sacrificial ideology. Its dynamics seem to result from these two similar sacrificial institutions, both of which were based on the contract between patrons and ritual specialists. He thereby attempts to emphasize the tension between a civic religiosity, celebrating and seeking to consolidate an existing community, and a sectarian religiosity seeking emancipation from the civic community. The latter mode of religiosity was characterized by voluntary ordeals of initiation and asceticism in a quest for values of a purportedly stable nature (truth, immortality, salvation, and so on).

II Ritual Transformations in Late Antiquity

6. The End of Sacrifice Revisited [+–] 99-121

Guy G. Stroumsa £17.50

University of Oxford (Emeritus)

Guy Stroumsa is Emeritus Professor at the University of Oxford. Stroumsa
was the first Professor of the Study of the Abrahamic Religions at Oxford
University and Professorial Fellow at LMH from 2009 to 2013. Before that
he was Martin Buber Professor of Comparative Religions at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem. Professor Stroumsa is a prolific writer with a wide
range of expertise in the Abrahamic traditions and has also made important
contributions to the Study of Religion in general as a human phenomenon.
Among his recent publications we find Le rire du Christ et
autres essais sur le christianisme antique 2006 and A New Science: The
Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (2010).

Besides rehearsing and developing some already familiar topics in this chapter, Stroumsa takes the opportunity to critically ponder the recent scholarly revitalization of Karl Jaspers’ concept of an Axial Age (Achsenzeit). This trend is particularly visible in the late Robert Bellah’s ambitious delineation of the early development of the world’s religious traditions in Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (2011).

7. The All as logikê thusia:The Egyptian Prehistory of a Hermetic Idea [+–] 123-142

Jørgen Podemann Sørensen £17.50

University of Copenhagen

Jørgen Podemann Sørensen is Associate professor in history of religions,
University of Copenhagen, Department of Cross-cultural and Regional
Studies. Podemann-Sørensen was educated as a historian of religions
specialized in ancient Egyptian religion at the Universities of Aarhus
and Copenhagen (promoted 1979). His primary fields of interest are the
religions of Antiquity, especially ancient Egyptian religion and its contribution
to the Gnostic and Hermetic currents of Late Antiquity and the
comparative study of ritual. He has recently (2013) published a handbook
on ancient Egyptian religious literature (with sample translations)
and a book on the comparative study of ritual, both in Danish.

Jørgen Podemann Sørensen explores how sacrifice, in its capacity as a necessary subspecies of ritual, has informed both modern theories of religion, and the speculative responses of its indigenous performers. He does this by instigating a specific sacrificial logic. He compares the ethnographically documented bear ceremonialism among the Ainu of Hokkaido with the ancient Egyptian sacrifice of the goddess Maat. These examples serve to bring the radicalized Hermetic idea of spiritual sacrifice into the broader context of sacrificial speculation. He thereby demonstrates how the radicalized idea of sacrifice always depends on its more traditional mode, even when the latter may appear to have come to an end.

8. No End to Sacrifice in Hermetism [+–] 143-166

Christian H. Bull £17.50

University of Oslo

Christian Bull is a post-doctoral researcher for the project NEWCONT (New Contexts for Old Texts: Unorthodox Texts and Monastic Manuscript Culture in Fourth- and Fifth-Century Egypt) at the University of Oslo, Faculty of Theology. The project is funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Community’s Seventh Framework
Programme (FP7/2007–2013) / ERC Grant Agreement no. 283741. Bull received his PhD 2014 in religious studies with his thesis “The Tradition of Hermes: The Egyptian Priestly Figure as a Teacher of Hellenized Wisdom.” His research interests are ancient religions, Egyptian religions, early Christianity, Gnosticism and theory of the study of religions. He
has published on Hermetism, most recently in Secrecy in the Nag Hammadi
Collection and Other Ancient Literature: Ideas and Practices (2012), co-edited with L. I. Lied and J. D. Turner.

In a similar vein to the preceeding chapter, and likewise proceeding from the Corpus Hermeticum, Christian Bull follows a recent scholarly development in the evaluation of the Hermetic treatises as appendages of a real cultic community. Bull insists on rectifying the notion of the Hermetic spiritual and spoken exercises as dismissals of material sacrifice. Unlike the intentions of traditional Graeco-Roman animal sacrifice to increase the prosperity of land and lineage, the concept of material sacrifice in ancient Egypt was distinctly tied to a concept of piety and cosmic order. This notion responds well with the ideals of both Jewish and Hermetic communities in Late Antiquity.

9. Beyond Righteousness and Transgression: Reading the Gospel of Truth and the Gospel of Judas from an Acosmic Perspective [+–] 167-195

Jörgen Magnusson £17.50

Mid Sweden University and Uppsala University

Jörgen Magnusson is Associate professor in the study of religions at Mid
Sweden university, department of humanities and of the history of religions
at Uppsala University. Magnusson received his PhD in history of
religions at Uppsala University 2007. His main focus has been on early
Judaism and Christianity, and especially in their Gnostic forms, elucidated,
for example, in his dissertation Rethinking the Gospel of truth: a
Study of its Eastern Valentinian setting 2007. In addition, he has published
on the historical Jesus and Manichaeism. He is presently working on a
number of analyses of The Gospel of Truth from Nag Hammadi.

Jögen Magnusson opens his case with a summary of the scholarly controversies surrounding the concept of “Gnosticism” in the wake of the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices in 1945. He then proceeds to compare the understanding of Gnostic mythology in a recent addition to the data set, the so-called Gospel of Judas (first made publicly accessible in 2006), as well as in one of the most studied texts in the Nag Hammadi corpus, the so-called Gospel of Truth. Magnusson identifies important points of dissent in the two treatises that provide different, yet distinctively Gnostic views regarding the sacrificial death of Jesus.

10. Sacrificial Subjectivity: Faith and Interiorization of Cultic Practice in the Pauline Letters [+–] 197-218

Hans Ruin £17.50

Södertörn University

Hans Ruin is Professor in Philosophy, Södertörn University, Sweden and director of the research program Time, Memory, Representation. Ruin’s areas of research include phenomenology, hermeneutics, deconstruction, theory of history and philosophy of religion. Recent publications are a collection of essays on Heidegger, Frihet, ändlighet, historicitet. essäer om Heideggers filosofi (2013) and the co-edited volumes “Ambiguity of the Sacred: Phenomenology, Aesthetics, Politics” (2012). The present text was written with the support of Axel och Margaret Ax:son Johnsons Stiftelse.

Against the backdrop of anti-pagan Christian imperial policies during the 4th century, Hans Ruin draws attention to the core of the Christian canon: the letters of Paul. While taking its lead from Stroumsa’s overall interpretative scheme concerning the transformation and internalization of sacrifice during and after the time of Christ, as essentially a transformation within Jewish culture itself, the analysis differs when it comes to the specific role and meaning of the Pauline letters. These canonical documents for Christianity, notably Romans, Hebrews, and First Corinthians, are interpreted as decisive expressions of precisely this inner critical transformation of Jewish spiritual culture in the direction of an internalized sacrifice. They also became the cornerstone for the emergence of a new “sacrificial subjectivity.” The analysis critically engages with Hegel’s understanding of Christianity, and also revokes Foucualt’s and Hadot’s work on the ancient culture of care for the self. Finally it acknowledges the work of Derrida, thus building a bridge to the last section of the book.

III Repercussions of Sacrifice in Western Philosophy

11. Philosophical Sacrifice [+–] 221-229

Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback £17.50

Södertörn University

Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback is Professor of Philosphy at Södertörn University, Sweden. Cavalcante Schuback has been Associate Professor at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) in Brazil. Her field of research is continental philosophy, with focus on phenomenology, hermeneutics, German Idealism, and hermeneutical readings of ancient philosophy. Her latest monographs are Att tänka i skisser: essäer om bildens
filosofi & filosofins bilder (2011), Being with the without (2013) and Dis-orientations. Philosophy, Literature and the Lost Grounds of Modernity (2015).

This final chapter closes the historical circuit by addressing the continuation of sacrificial themes in contemporary continental philosophy. Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback’s point of departure is the relation between philosophy and sacrifice in Jean-Luc Nancy’s readings of the philosophy of sacrifice as proposed by Georges Bataille in the 1940s. In showing how Bataille’s philosophy of sacrifice accomplishes rather than overcomes the philosophical sacrifice of the singular for the sake of the universal, Nancy argues for a suspension of the philosophical concept of sacrifice and addresses the idea of an open offering of singular finite being. In question here is not the end of sacrifice, nor the sacrifice for ends, but the unsacrificeable finite offering of existence.

End Matter

Index [+–] 231-237

Peter Jackson FREE

University of Stockholm

Reviews

Philosophy and the End of Sacrifice is interesting and thought-provoking. It does not uncritically accept the claim of an early common-era "axial age" but definitely finds something new and important appearing or consolidating and spreading in that age. ...it also provides another challenge to the dominant Girardian theory of sacrifice ... .
Anthropology Review Database

The End of Sacrifice is an engaging book. The chapters are learned and well-written, and often dialogue with each other — at least with some help from the reader, who in the process is stimulated towards more nuanced thinking about rituals of sacrifice. The contributors present strong arguments against simplifying these complex and dynamic rituals.
Numen

.

Books and Journals in Humanities, Social Science and Performing Arts

Philosophy and the End of Sacrifice

Disengaging Ritual in Ancient India, Greece and Beyond

Peter Jackson [+–]

University of Stockholm

Anna-Pya Sjödin [+–]

Mid-Sweden University

Table of Contents

Reviews

Related Journal

Related Interest

Search Equinox

Subjects