Roberto Calasso - Ardor

How long must the sacrificial post be? Five cubits, it is stated, with a wealth of explanations: “For fivefold is the sacrifice and fivefold is the animal sacrificed and there are five seasons in the year.” That should be enough.

But following immediately after are the reasons — no less convincing — why it ought to be six cubits or eight or nine or eleven, twelve, thirteen, fifteen. An example of the brahminic luxuriance of correspondences, which immediately brings to mind something that cancels them out. And their incorrigible arbitrariness. A frequent mistake, which ignores the fact that certain sizes are ruled out: the post cannot be seven, ten, or fourteen cubits. Not everything is therefore equivalent. But the crucial passage is at the end, where there is a discussion about the possibility of the post not even being measured. The “immeasurable,” like the continuum, the implicit or the indistinct, is to be considered and respected, above all when it is a thunderbolt, if we remember that the first thunderbolt, that of Indra, was itself “immeasurable”—and thanks to its power the gods conquered everything. Here we see two fundamental impulses in brahminic thought brought together: the exasperating mania for exhaustive classification on the one hand; and the underlying willingness to recognize an immensity that overwhelms everything and can be felt everywhere.

* * *

We read at school and in science books that men were first hunters and gatherers, then herdsmen and tillers of the soil. Two stages that divide the history of humanity over hundreds of thousands of years, agriculture occupying by far the smaller part. But it would be enough to say that people lived in an initial phase with animals (killing them and being killed by them) and in a later phase on animals (through their domestication). They nevertheless had to kill animals, whether hunting them or butchering them. What changed was the relationship with the creatures they killed: consanguineous and kindred in the first phase, useful and submissive in the second.

Moreover, the description “hunting and gathering” conflates two distinct phases. Before being gatherers and hunters, people had to be gatherers and hunted. Certain kinds of predator were far better at hunting than humans were. The fangs of tigers or wolves were far more powerful than human hands. But this gray area of prehistory is lost in the description “hunting and gathering.” That was when, over a period of tens of thousands of years, the irreversible transition to hunting took place.

* * *

The Odyssey announces it from the sixth verse of the first book: Odysseus is he who remains alone. An anomalous situation, which required a whole poem to express it — and the whole of literature afterward, up to Kafka. No one in the Iliad remained alone. Even Achilles, the loner par excellence, was surrounded by many. As for Odysseus, he certainly hadn’t been looking for solitude — circumstances had brought it upon him. An irreparable rift causes him, one day, to become separated from his companions. It is one single episode, enough to divide his fate and his name from that of all the others forever: Odysseus is the only one who hasn’t fed upon the Sun’s herds of cattle.

Already in open sea, his ship was approaching the island of Thrinacia when Odysseus heard a mysterious sound: a distant and continuous rumble. He then understood: the sound came from the animals on that island which Circe and Tiresias had warned him to avoid. Guided by the two radiant daughters of Helios, Phaethusa and Lampetia, those animals—“seven herds of cattle and as many flocks of beautiful sheep / of fifty beasts each”—were the Sun’s herds. Each of them the substance of a parcel of time, one of the three hundred and fifty days of the lunar year. They were beings that “do not give birth / and never die.” They were everlasting life. Odysseus knew he should not have sailed so close to that animal sound. None of the many intelligent stratagems for which he would become famous went as far, none penetrated the ambulacra of divinity as much as his steadfast obedience to that mysterious prohibition. It is useless being clever unless you’re a theologian. And Odysseus, that day, was an outstanding theologian.

Not so his companions. Wracked by hunger, blinded by necessity (“all forms of death are abominable for wretched mortals / but the most miserable is death by hunger and through hunger to suffer fate,” said Eurylochus then to Odysseus’s companions), they surrounded and slaughtered the Sun’s herds. What then took place was a primordial wound that could never be healed. Life killed life. It was the first guilty act, from which all others followed. But men are never straightforward. They wanted to disguise their greed by staging a sacrifice, even without the right ingredients (libation wine, barley) for performing the ceremony. Food was no longer a secondary consequence of the sacrifice. On the contrary, the sacrifice was the pretext for devouring the food. And Odysseus’s companions, in fact, feasted for six days on the flesh of the slaughtered animals, “the finest of the Sun’s cows.” They had chosen them carefully — and far exceeded the extent of their hunger. They ate for the pleasure and sense of supremacy felt by those who eat dead flesh.

Yet it was not dead flesh. When they laid the skewers on the fire, they realized those pieces of flesh were moving, as if they were breathing. And above all, they gave out a deep, endless sound. No one else witnessed that scene of supreme horror. There was only one outside observer, the only one who watched and did not eat: Odysseus. It was then that their destinies broke apart forever. Odysseus had suddenly become the lone man (“I am one against many, and you force my hand,” he had said to his companions, heralds of the whole of humanity). He knew he would continue to live among those who kill life. But he would no longer have any fellow travelers. They would soon all be drowned. Odysseus’s only company then was the gleaming-eyed goddess, Athena.

* * *

Men today, who recoil from sacrifice, bow their heads when faced with the self-sacrifice of a god who creates the world (Prajāpati) or who saves it (Christ). Self-sacrifice is the very essence of the sublime, heroic gesture. Abnegation marks nobility of spirit.

But, apart from the gods, self-sacrifice is also practiced by the animals. There is much evidence, above all in central and eastern Asia, of animals who yield to the hunter to be killed. They are moved to pity by his hunger and offer themselves to his arrows. The supreme gesture belongs to gods and animals. Men can only imitate them.

The god at the origin of everything didn’t have a name but a title: Prajāpati, Lord of the Creatures. He discovered this when one of his sons, Indra, told him: “I want to be what you are.” Prajāpati asked him: “But who ( ka ) am I?” And Indra answered: “‘Exactly what you just said.’ So Prajāpati became Ka.”

Indra wanted his father’s “greatness” or, according to others, his “splendor.” And Prajāpati had no difficulty in divesting himself of it. So Indra became king of the gods, even though Prajāpati had been “the sole lord of creation.” But it was neither “greatness” nor “splendor” that made Prajāpati the “god alone above the gods,” a formula that smacks of incompatibility only for latter-day readers in the West. What Prajāpati could not renounce was something else: the unknown, the irreducible unknown. At the moment in which he knew he was Ka, Prajāpati became guarantor of the uncertainty involved in questioning. He guaranteed that it would always remain. If Ka didn’t exist, the world would be a sequence of questions and answers, at the end of which everything would be fixed once and for all — and the unknown could be erased from life. But since Prajāpati “is everything”—and Prajāpati is Ka — there is a question in every part of everything that finds an answer in the name of everything. And this in turn takes us back to the question, which opens onto the unknown. But this is not an unknown that is due to the inadequacy of the human intellect. It is unknown even for the god who includes it in his name. Divine omniscience does not extend to itself.