Part IV: Cultural Inversions
Not only great symbols like the serpent or the goddess are inverted. Everyday acts once steeped in sacredness have also been turned inside out.
Take wine. In ancient cultures it was more than drink – it was transformation. The Soma of the Vedas, pressed and offered in fire, was said to lift seers into vision. Dionysus in Greece brought ecstasy through the vine. Even in Christianity, wine is turned into blood, shared as covenant. And yet, in many strands of faith, wine became suspect, forbidden, or stripped of its ecstatic weight. What had been sacrament became sin.
Or dance. In temples across India, dance was offering – Bharatanatyam, Odissi, Kathak, each tracing devotion with the body. Krishna’s raas leela with the gopis is remembered not as frivolity but as cosmic joy. Yet in other settings, dance too became dangerous, a symbol of excess, even of moral decay. What was once praise was now reproach.
Even silence. The sages who sat in mauna knew silence not as emptiness but as presence. To be still was to touch something larger. But when silence is enforced by fear or command, it ceases to be sacred and becomes suppression. The same posture inverted from depth to denial.
And joy. Festivals, colours, music – they have always carried people out of the ordinary. But joy, too, has been suspect in some traditions: too loud, too bodily, too free. Better the solemn face than the laughing one.
These inversions remind us how fragile the sacred is when it brushes against power. What liberates can quickly be recoded as what must be controlled. Wine, dance, silence, joy – each shows us how easily a channel to the divine can be made suspect, or worse, forbidden.
Yet here too, the old meanings persist. Every time a lamp is lit at Diwali, every time a circle of dancers gathers for garba, every time silence is chosen rather than imposed, the sacred slips back through the cracks.
Postscripts:
Ritual Today
Wine is banned in one place, mass-produced in another. Dance is outlawed in some spaces, commodified in others. Silence is broken by endless noise, yet bought back in wellness retreats. Joy itself is packaged as product.
Rituals Remembered
In Kerala’s villages, toddy once flowed not as scandal but as harvest offering – poured out at festivals, shared as earth’s abundance. Only later did drink become taboo, a marker of vice. The same liquid that bound community was rebranded as poison.
Dance too has carried the mark of inversion. Temple dancers once embodied devotion – devadasis moving as living offerings before the deity. Over time, the dance was stripped of sanctity, its performers stigmatised, the art uprooted from temple to stage. What was once worship became spectacle, and often, shame.
Silence, in monastic traditions, was sacred discipline. Mauna was not emptiness but fertile ground. Yet in everyday culture, silence became associated with suppression – the silencing of women, the silencing of dissent, the silencing of children. Reverence for quiet was inverted into fear of speaking.
Even joy has not escaped suspicion. Bhakti poets once sang themselves into ecstasy, collapsing social hierarchies with their songs of love. Today, too much joy is still seen as dangerous – unruly, disruptive, unfit for order.
Yet rituals remember what we forget. Toddy still sweetens the tongue, dance still opens the body, silence still restores, joy still bursts through. No inversion is final.
We have not lost these rituals; we have only twisted them. And yet they persist, because they answer needs too deep to erase. The body will find its ways to move, the throat to sing, the heart to lift. The old festivals live on, even if they must change their names.
