social institutional gamut of worship from the highest castes to the lowest,
teyyamnarratives and performances may also harbor within them a contesta-
tory and symbolically violent set of claims against traditional authority struc-
tures. There is thus a major strain of resistant religion that informs teyya ̄t.t.am,
in keeping with its largely subaltern performative province and community
organization. Some intellectuals identifying themselves with the Dalit resur-
gence have even recently enlisted teyyammyths as representative of their strug-
gles (Ayrookuzhiel 1996).
Related Traditions in the World of Teyyam: Tantra
and Mantrava ̄ dam
In the wider culture of this region, however, two earlier mentioned religious
complexes that span and link the caste order, cannot be severed from the context
ofteyya ̄t.t.am, or from each other. These are the traditions of Kerala’s tantric mode
of temple worship and that ofmantrava ̄dam. Kerala’s prominent Brahman caste,
the Nambu ̄ tiris, are avowedly tantric in terms of the rites by which they conduct
the installation and worship of temple images throughout Kerala. By tantric, I
mean in this context, that the Kerala priest relies on classic tantric teachings of
the psychophysical powers immanent in the human body, to first invoke the deity
of worship into his own body, and only then to transfer its power, through his
own metabolic life’s energy or breath (pra ̄n.a) into the fixed image in the temple’s
sanctum. As I have written at length elsewhere (Freeman 1998), it is not a great
stretch to posit that a long and complex historical relation underlies the promi-
nence of tantric worship as official Hinduism in Kerala – essentially involving a
mini-possession each time the god is invoked in daily worship – and the eminence
that overt possession, epitomized in teyya ̄t.t.am, as a dominant popular mode
of worship in south India has enjoyed over at least the past two millennia. The
paradigm of Brahmanical worship as essentially a muted form of possession thus
reflects, on the high end of the social scale, an historical mediation whose results
we also saw in the incorporation of a tantric rationale for the ritual acts ofteyyam
possession reviewed earlier, at the lower end of the spectrum.
Similarly, the whole complex of mantrava ̄dam, problematically rendered as
“sorcery” or “magic,” runs the gamut of the social hierarchy. In the Brahmani-
cal register, rites ofmantrava ̄damare essentially contingent and private rites of
controlling, marshalling, or exorcising various gods and demons through rites
of tantric worship that are closely cognate to those used in the temple, but with
generally temporary sites of invocation and various props and effigies for manip-
ulating sacred powers (Freeman 1999). In the traditionally low-caste register,
those castes who perform teyya ̄t.t.ampractice similar rites ofmantrava ̄damfor
similarly personal purposes, in which they additionally take on the costumed
forms of special teyyams to invoke and control these same divine and demonic
powers. Again this suggests a long period of historical interaction and synthe-
322 rich freeman