overemphasis on magic

[thompson at handel.jlc.net]

In response to Lars Goehler's questions & comments:

I have quoted these remarks from a "ritual specialist" from Senegal because
I think that they reflect an attitude that also can be found in the RV
[perhaps elsewhere in the tradition as well: I make no claims beyond the
early Vedic period, although Frits Staal's fieldwork suggests to me that
these remarks may still apply, even today; perhaps others can confirm or
deny this].  There are passages in the RV that express a similar sort of
skepticism or ambivalence, or perhaps a recognition  of their own [i.e.,
Vedic] language games.  I happen to think that the Vedic tradition is
remarkably self-reflexive when it comes to language, which is to say that
it is highly metalinguistic.  The passage suggests a certain attitude
toward the relationship between "saying" and "doing" [both are obligatory
--> nitya?].  "Believing" is of only secondary importance.  The tradition
requires a certain amount of pretending to believe, rather than belief
itself.  Staal talks about Vedic "orthopraxy" rather than "orthodoxy."  To
some Vedic RSis, I would suggest, it hardly mattered whether Indra existed,
or not.  Another consequence of this attitude is that their "satyá" doesn't
fully correspond to our "truth," as is well known.

On the other hand, the matter of authority was crucial in Vedic, as in the
MImAMsA texts. The satyakriyA is an act of authority, but acts of authority
come in many shapes and sizes.  On the one hand, there is something
conventional about satyakriyAs: one must perform them in the regular way
[they are rule-governed], like other performatives. On the other hand, the
satyakriyA seems to involve charisma that needs no external authorization
[cf. the classic example from Buddhist sources of the prostitute BindumatI,
who astounds the emperor Asoka & his retinue by sending the Ganges flowing
back upstream by means of her saccakiriyA].  In Vedic, the satyakriyA has a
great deal to do with "the priest-function", "the mystery of the ministry",
but it also revolves around an individual's act of self-assertion.  The
satyakriyA is an act by means of which one establishes one's authority.  As
an act it rests on the assumption that the act of speaking itself, if
performed solemnly, ritualistically, by a person with charisma, can
accomplish miraculous things.  In the Rgveda, the human artisans, the
Rbhus, become divine by means of a satyakriyA.

Briefly, I think I understand why Austin felt obliged to move from a
special theory of performatives to a general theory of illocutionary force.
For a critique of Austin-Searle taxonomies, see J. Katz "Propositional
Structure and Illocutionary Force: A Study of the Contribution of Sentence
Meaning to Speech Acts" [Harvard UP, 1980].

Finally, I am not against evolutionary concepts in general or in principle..
It is just that I agree with Houben that early efforts to contrast magic
and religion [e.g., the suggestion that the former was replaced by the
latter] seem outdated and appropriately abandoned.  I am grateful to Lars
Goehler for pointing out the vagueness of my previous posting and for
helping to clarify this point, among the others.

Sincerely,
George Thompson