The Invisible Path of Karma in a Himalayan Purificatory Rite

Abstract

Indic rites of purification aim to negate the law of karma by removing the residues of malignant past actions from their patrons. This principle is exemplified in the Kahika Mela, a rarely studied religious festival of the West Himalayan highlands (Himachal Pradesh, India), wherein a ritual specialist assumes karmic residues from large publics and then sacrificed to their presiding deity. British officials who had 'discovered' this purificatory rite at the turn of the twentieth century interpreted it as a variant of the universal 'scapegoat' rituals that were then being popularized by James Frazer and found it loosely connected to ancient Tantric practises. However, observing a recent performance of the ritual significantly complicated this view. This paper proposes a novel reading of the Kahika Mela through the prism of karmic transference. Tracing the path of karmas from participants to ritual specialist and beyond, it delineates the logic behind the rite, revealing that the culminating act of human sacrifice is, in fact, secondary to the mysterious force that impels its acceptance.

Encountering the Goddess in the Indian Himalaya: On the Contribution of Ethnographic Film to the Study of Religion

“…In addressing a region that was peripheral to the regulatory Rajput kingdoms that surrounded it and that is therefore poorly documented in historical sources, this article draws upon a substantial body of anthropological literature about Khas society and its traditions (Berreman [1963] 1999; Berti 2001Berti , 2009Halperin 2019;Luchesi 2018;Moran 2018Moran , 2019aSax 1991Sax , 2003Sax , 2009Sutherland 1998Sutherland , 2003. The abundant information that these studies hold about the Khas and their highly political form of civil religion provides the context for the investigation of popular belief in the goddess (śakti).…”

“…A couple of months later, we ultimately did find an alternative performance of the ritual that we were able to shoot (Harel and Moran 2018) and then analyze in a separate research article (Moran 2018).…”