ABSTRACT
According to Jan C. Heesterman (1925–2014), Vedic texts contain traces of the origins of sacrifice in an actual life-and-death competition between warriors for certain goods. This ecstatic struggle, which included joyous feasting as well as violent combat, was however domesticated by the priestly liturgy of the Śrauta Sūtras as we have them and eventually reduced to the abstractions of Upaniṣadic philosophy. Quite apart from the question of how to prove this speculative reconstruction, which already has been called into question by scholars of the Vedas, is the question of where Heesterman derived certain presuppositions regarding ritual and narratives of origin and decline on which his reconstruction was based. I argue that some of these sources may be located in the history of European ideas, including not only Protestant polemics against ritual but also, more problematically, the idea that the primal Indo-German social organization was a band of ecstatic warriors who roamed and pillaged the countryside. The thesis of the ‘male band’ or Männerbund was developed at the beginning of the 20th century and was associated subsequently with the ideological reinforcement of National Socialism in Germany. Echoes of this thesis in the main theory of one of the leading Vedicists of the past generation illustrate that Indologists must do more to reflect on the genealogy of their own discipline.
