Unlike heterodoxy, which publicly questions and challenges the authority of the mother-religion, the adepts of transgressive sacrality often paradoxically play the role of champions of orthodox religion in the public life of their respective communities. In fact, transgressive sacrality cannot operate without the existence of such binding and powerful taboos, and often presents itself as an esoteric form of the mother-religion, the latter serving as the exoteric prerequisite and recruiting ground for it. Instead it lays claim to a superior degree and second order of spirituality derived precisely from the violation of socio-religious interdictions, the general validity and binding force is not at all questioned by the transgressor. “Transgressive sacrality” within a religious tradition, though violating the interdictions and observances of the tradition in question, it does not seek to replace the latter.
As Bhairava-incarnate, Abhinavagupta’s praxis of transgressive sacrality offers a more adequate framework for understanding the still Christian project formulated by Rabelais through the Abbey of Theleme: "Do what thou wilt!" Age-old festivals parodying and profaning ecclesiastical rites held in the vicinity of and with the implicit sanction of the Church were officiated by the lower clergy. Even while cultivating a superior and exclusive literate world, the medieval elites had fully participated in the unseemly carnivalesque laughter. Through Rabelais the unschooled obscene clamor of the primordial folk found unvarnished expression in early Renaissance literature. The medieval Christian 2 dispensation revolved around the opposition, alternation and complementarity between the stern, ascetic, otherworldly spiritual ideal of the Church and the periodic extended license of the popular carnival that rejuvenated this world of piety by rendering it topsy-turvy. Transgressive laughter is best understood through the principle of ‘freedom’ (svātantrya), the central concern of Rabelais, Bakhtin and Abhinavagupta.
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