Jackson/Philosophy and the End of Sacrifice, 1.The Principle of Equivalence

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.