Sacred marriage in the study of religion: A perspective from India on a concept that grew out of the ancient near east

Current scholarly understandings of ‘sacred marriage’ are seriously impaired by work that focuses on ancient cultures, primarily in the Near East, but also in Greece. Even when ‘diffusionism’, ‘patternism’, and an apparent preoccupation with rituals presumed sexual are all factored out, modern scholars offer little new because they appeal to rituals never witnessed and to fragmentary texts which we can only hope had some connection to ritual. Focusing on an extant ritual tradition in India with a 200-year-old festival and an explicitly associated text from the 13th century , Harman suggests that here, at least, sacred marriage is an elaborate, ritual statement of kinship responsibilities and obligations reestablished each year among deities and between deities and selected human beings.