ARTICLE The sacred unbound Insufficient rituals, excess life, and divine agency in rural Tamil Nadu Indira A RUMUGAM , National University of Singapore Dissonances between human expectations and actual experiences of sacred presence and actions—as materialized in unex- plained deaths, diseases, deadly possessions, and repudiated rituals—are sites where insubstantial sacralities are not only made real but also agentic. Refusing human attempts to relate to it through choreographed rituals and voluntary offerings, this sacred asserts its own agenda. To make inscrutable sacralities ethnographically accessible, I propose the twin pivots of (1) insatiability and (2) excess—attributes of presence, appetite, and attitude—which embody a repudiation of anthropocentric signification. Decentering human intentions and actions allows for the excavation of an uncanniness intrinsic to the sacred. This forces a confrontation with the limits of anthropological epistemologies, language, and authority. Privileging instances when the sacred eludes epistemological capture to assert its own irrepressible and enigmatic vitality, this article strives to—not explain away radical ontological differences but—make room for an uncanny metaphysics amid ethnographic theorizing. Keywords: divine agency, ritual insufficiency, insatiability, excess, uncanny At noon, on a Tuesday in 2007, Pushpa was cycling home after her computer classes. As she passed Velankuli pond, adjoining the Muniswarar Temple, she heard someone hail her. She looked around. There was no one. She heard her name again. But the surrounding fields were de- serted. Thoroughly alarmed, she hurried past. Once home, she shook with fever and writhed with stomach pains. Since local doctors could not diagnose her affliction, they rushed her to the city hospital. As their taxi passed Velankuli pond, Pushpa emitted a single scream and then fell silent. She stopped thrashing and lay still. Pushpa died. This tragedy preoccupied many in Vaduvur, 1 a large village of about 13,500 people in central Tamil Nadu, for weeks. Much too afraid, agricultural laborers refused to work in the nearby fields for several days. Those living nearby avoided the pond. A miasma of anxious specula- tions about Pushpa’s uncanny death prevailed. Several signs surrounding Pushpa’s demise were used to theorize its cause. Pushpa had been startled at noon. Minis, amoral fertility spirits, were known to hunt (vēttai) when the sun is at its zenith. Velankuli pond, near where Pushpa’s first symptoms occurred, is a well- known mini haunt. This pond abuts the temple where just five days before, a spectacular sacrificial worship had been performed for the Tamil Hindu folk deity, Muniswarar, whose ritual cult is intimately entwined with the minis. Even as they make attempts to appease the minis through ritually killing goats and roosters (and on other occasions, offering fish), villagers are aware that such appeals may not succeed. Pushpa’s was nei- ther the first nor the only death following a spectacular sacrifice to Muniswarar. Indeed, an uncanny death is part of the reverberations that follow Muniswarar’s rituals. Based on these correlations, Pushpa was deemed to have HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, volume 13, number 1, spring 2023. © 2023 The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved. Published by The University of Chicago Press for the Society for Ethnographic Theory. https://doi.org/10.1086/725206 1. This article is based on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork between 2006 and 2008 and subsequent visits in 2012 and 2017. Observations of the Mannaiyar lin- eage’s quinquennial sacrificial worship to Muniswarar were supplemented with participation in other lineages’ sacrificial worship to their own tutelary deities and ex- tended interviews with ritual priests, mediums, lineage headmen responsible for directing the worship’s logis- tics, and participants. 2023FHAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 13 (1): 53–67