Eruptions of the Sacred in a South Indian Fishing Village

Abstract

Abstract Eliade invented the term ‘hierophany’ to refer to a physical manifestation of the sacred. For Eliade, all hierophanies are prefigurations of the one great manifestation, the incarnation of Christ. One can dispense with this limiting feature, and instead make use of Eliade’s more tractable theory—namely, that hierophanies are composite structures, made up of elements in contradiction with each other. Here, the hierophany to be examined is a ‘snake mound’ that suddenly appeared in a residential structure in Jalaripet, a fishing caste village in southeastern India. This article argues that the mound is a response to mutually exclusive kinship ideals, one focused on patrilineal solidarity in the form of fraternal unity and the other focuses on fraternal separation and the breakdown of patrilineal solidarity. The mound represents both ideals at a particular moment in the course of family development when the opposition between the two is most intense.