“Through the cracks, as it were, of the closed ritual system,” Heesterman, in a compelling study à la Mauss (and Granet), has managed to glimpse the outline of a preclassical phase of Vedic sacrifice.³³⁹ His stereoscopic view makes it possible to separate and organize onto different levels the traces of the evolution of Vedic sacrifice, a wonderfully complex and articulated form, the archetype of all articulation. The liturgical cornerstone of the classical sacrifice is the relationship between the yajamāna—the “sacrificer,” who provides the offerings, gives his ritual fee (dakṣiṇā) to the officiants, and will collect the fruits of the sacrifice—and the brahmin, the supreme authority in the ceremony. It is a relationship of delicate and tortuous complementarity, of inextricable complicity, of hidden opposition, such as to warrant a place of its own among the hundred and one values of the genitive case listed by the grammarian Patañjali: the srauva (liturgical) value, which reminds us that “the sacrifice is unquestionably a relationship between mortals and immortals, between mortals and the dead, but it is also an interpersonal and social relationship between mortals themselves.”³⁴⁰ Behind this relationship can be glimpsed various aspects that Heesterman has linked to another, older image: that of deadly rivalry, since the dispute is about death. In the sacrificial giving there is a twofold gesture: a giving by the yajamāna to the Invisibles and a giving by the yajamāna to the visible brahmin, who assists him in the ceremony. And the brahmin receives two gifts from the yajamāna: the “wounded part of the sacrifice, the part of Rudra,” the point of the victim’s body that has received the mortal wound, as small as a berry; and the dakṣiṇā, which Bloomfield—following as always the picture of mean and eager priests—wanted to translate as baksheesh.³⁴¹ The yajamāna’s sacrificial gift to the brahmin is the prototype of the poisoned gift: it is a gift of that which is most dangerous, which contains the danger itself: death. And this is true not only for the “wounded part,” but for the dakṣiṇā, which is likened to the dismembered body of Prajāpati. The sacrificial benefactor, through his giving, is therefore primarily freeing himself of the daunting surplus of life, whose weight falls upon the brahmin. This gift is a challenge and a trap—and behind that gesture Heesterman outlines a different scenario: the sacrificial area is the area of a violent conflict and, at the same time, a table to which the guest is invited. Every sacrifice is an ordeal, an uncertain clash of forces, exposed to the breaths of heaven, ordered according to a cycle that knows two dramatic points of reversal: the two equinoxes. The person sacrificing shows how long he can remain in contact with the “part of Rudra” (a variant of the “accursed share”), and how he can rid himself of it. But as Mauss first recognized, it is crucial to know how to enter the sacrifice, but equally crucial to know how to leave it. The dakṣiṇā, this holy fee, “is the price to be paid for the profane body of the sacrificer to return to its owner,” to enable the yajamāna to return unharmed to ordinary life.³⁴² In it we recognize traces of the preclassical sacrifice as an appalling game of tag. In reconstructing the scenario of that phase of sacrifice, Heesterman radically alters our image of the brahmin: the purest of beings was therefore originally the opposite: he was the one who absorbed within him all impurity, accepting it as a gift passed to him from the impure yajamāna. The brahmin is “the bhiṣaj, the healer of the ritual, but this must originally have referred to the healing of death.³⁴³ Since the classical ritual does not admit of impurity but only of infractions against a correct execution of the ritual, the brahmin’s function was transformed into that of redressing ritual faults. In the preclassical system, then, his role was that of taking over death and impurity.”