Roberto Calasso - Ardor

No wonder the gods, sons of Prajāpati, increasingly ignored their father, to the point of forgetting him. For a power to be exercised, it has to be based on certainty. And Prajāpati, though he was the one “whose commandments all the gods acknowledge,” had delegated the exercise of his sovereignty without raising any resistance. He had kept back for himself only the unknown, which was encapsulated in his name. An unknown that surrounded every certainty like an undrainable ocean lapping an island. For the administration of ordinary life, the preeminence of the unknown was a danger — and had to be obliterated. For the fathomless life of the mind — at the point where the mind reconnected with its origin, Prajāpati — it was the very breath of life. In the same way that Ka had been “the sole breath of the gods.”

* * *

Prajāpati: the creator god who is not entirely sure he exists. Prajāpati is the god who has no identity, who is the origin of all insoluble paradoxes. All identities arise from him, who himself has none. And so he takes a step back, or to one side, allowing the rush of mortal beings, ready to forget him, to carry on. But they will then return to him, to ask him the wherefore. And the wherefore can only be similar to what made them first emerge: a rite, a composition of elements, of forms, a temporary — the only — guarantee of existence. Compared with every monotheistic god, and with all other plural deities, Prajāpati is more intimate and more remote, more elusive and more familiar. Any reasoning person continually encounters him wherever speech and thought arise, wherever they dissolve away. That is Prajāpati.

The Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa returns on innumerable occasions to the scene that takes place “at the beginning,” when Prajāpati “desired.” And on most occasions we read that Prajāpati wanted to reproduce himself, wanted to know other beings apart from himself. But there is a passage where it says that Prajāpati had another desire: “May I exist, may I be generated.” The very first being to be unsure of his own existence was thus the Progenitor. And he had good reason, since Prajāpati was an amalgam of seven ṛṣis , those “seers” who, in turn, had been seven “vital breaths,” though incapable of existing alone. Prior to the drama of things generated there was the drama of that which feared it could not exist. This was what forever marked Prajāpati’s character and made him the most phantom-like, the most anxious, the most fragile of all creator gods. He never resembled a sovereign who elatedly surveys his dominions. He left that feeling to one of his sons, Indra — and he pitied him for it. He knew that, along with euphoria, and bound up with it, Indra would face mockery and retribution.

To gather the difference between Prajāpati and the gods, it is enough to murmur a ritual formula. The low voice is indistinct — and that indistinctness already brings us in contact with the nature of Prajāpati, which is precisely this: indistinct. By playing with meter, with names, with formulas, with murmurs, with silence, the sacrificer manages to move about among the various forms of the divine. But, even in the case of the most elementary gesture, he will have to reach that vast, mysterious level, that indistinctness where he encounters only Prajāpati — and himself.

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Unlike Elohim, Prajāpati does not have a hand in creation as a working craftsman, but is the process of creation itself: in it he is made and he is unmade. The further Prajāpati goes in creation, the more he is dismembered and exhausted. His view of what he does is never from the outside. He cannot look upon his work and say: “It is good.” As soon as he looks outward, he evokes another being, Vāc, the “second,” a column of water, which was a female, pouring between sky and earth. And immediately the two copulate. Prajāpati was so little external to his creation that, according to some texts, it was he himself who became impregnated: “With his mind he united with Vāc, Speech: he became pregnant with eight drops.” They became eight deities, the Vasus. Then he set them upon the earth. Copulation continued. Prajāpati was once again impregnated, by eleven drops. They became other deities, the Rudras. He then set them in the atmosphere. There was also a third copulation. And Prajāpati was impregnated by twelve drops. This time they were the Ādityas, the great gods of light: “He placed them in the sky.” Eight, eleven, twelve: thirty-one. Prajāpati was impregnated by another drop: the Viśvedevāḥ, All-the-gods. They had reached thirty-two. Only one was missing to complete the pantheon: Vāc herself, the thirty-third.

Prajāpati now began to uncouple himself from her. He was exhausted, he could feel his joints disconnecting. The vital breaths, the Saptarṣis, left him. And with them went the thirty-three deities, trooping off together. Prajāpati was alone once again, as at the beginning, when everything around him was void. He was no longer the only one, but the thirty-fourth, whom they would soon forget to include among the list of gods. And one day, far in the future, certain scholars would say that he was a late and bloodless abstraction, no more than a lucubration of the ritualists.

* * *

“In truth, here at the beginning was asat. To this they say: ‘What was this asat ?’ The ṛṣis : they were, at the beginning, the asat. And to this they say: ‘Who were these ṛṣis ?’ Now, the ṛṣis are the vital breaths. For before all this they, desiring this, wore themselves out ( riṣ- ) in toil and ardor, so they are called ṛṣis. ”

If asat is an inhabited place, it must certainly also exist , but in special ways. At the beginning it contains only vital breaths, which Indra manages to kindle ( indh- ). The name ṛṣi is derived from that ardor which is tapas ; the name Indra comes from the kindling of the vital breaths. Asat is therefore a place where at the beginning energy is burning. And so from the vital breaths were born “seven persons ( puruṣas ).” The first beings with bodily features were therefore the ṛṣis : the Saptarṣis, the original Seven Ṛṣis. But the Saptarṣis were immediately aware of their limited power. Generated by the vital breaths, they themselves could not procreate. Their first desire was therefore to act in concert, transforming themselves into a single person. This had to be their task: to compress themselves, condense themselves into one single body, occupying its various parts: “Two above the navel and two below the navel; one on the right side, one on the left side, one at the base.” There was now a body, but it had no head. Still they worked away. From each of them was extracted essence, sap, taste, rasa. And they concentrated it all into the same place, as if into a jar: that was the head. The person made up from the Seven Seers was now complete. And “that same person became Prajāpati.” This was how the Progenitor was created, he who generated everything, including the vital breaths, Indra, and the Saptarṣis who had laboriously created him.

Leaving aside the complications of mutual procreation, by which the Saptarṣis give form to Prajāpati, who in turn would generate them (a regular process in Vedic thought) and leaving aside any consideration of the sequence of time, it seems clear that asat is a place for something that seeks to manifest itself, that burns to manifest itself, but which is prevented from doing so. At the same time, all that forms part of “that which is,” sat , and above all Prajāpati, will owe its origin to asat , which goes back to that obscure period in which the Seven Seers wore themselves out developing an ardor, dedicating themselves to the first of all acts of asceticism, if the word is used once again to mean “exercise,” áskēsis. As for asat , more than nonbeing (in the sense of the mḕ ón in Parmenides), it appears to be closer to something one might call the “unmanifest.”