Moses and Monotheism and the Mahābhārata

Chapter 6 draws from Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, which posits that religious traditions, like neuroses, must be studied not only through their conscious self-presentations but also through trauma they have undergone that survives in unconscious memory traces and can return from repression. It is posited that the Mahābhārata recalls the trauma faced by a rural village and forest-based Brahmanism during India’s second urbanization, about which the epic tells its central apocalyptic myth of the unburdening of the goddess Earth from demon-inspired overpopulation. It also looks at the Mahābhārata via its putative author Vyāsa, taking him as a figure through whom to study the text’s literary experimentations. It views Vedic allusive humor as the way epic poets give play to repressed sexual themes. Freud’s 1905 Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious is a source for understanding the epic’s allusive tendentious hostile and sexual jokes about the “exposure” of women.