Roberto Calasso - Ardor

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Prajāpati is not only “he who finds that which is lost,” but he himself is also the first to be lost. His supernumerary essence is such that at any moment Prajāpati risks being too much. Creatures appear thanks to the superabundance that exists in Prajāpati, but — once their worlds are established — they soon tend to look only after themselves, forgetting their origin. Indeed, they no longer recognize him. It seems they have made Prajāpati suffer even this harsh humiliation. When Prajāpati had finished emanating beings, “he became emaciated. They didn’t recognize him then, since he was emaciated. He anointed his eyes and his limbs.” The last act of the now abandoned Progenitor. Prajāpati went back to being alone, as at the beginning, but now because he was unrecognizable. As he was anointing his eyes and limbs, gaunt and defenseless, Prajāpati was inventing makeup. He was doing these things because he wanted to be recognized again. Men and women would one day try to do the same: “When their eyes and limbs are anointed, they become beautiful: and others notice them.” This is the first éloge du maquillage , whose pathos and frivolity Baudelaire would appreciate.

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What is the horse? It is one of Prajāpati’s eyes that had swollen up and then fallen out. The Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa doesn’t hesitate for a moment over this statement (nothing is strange for the Vedic ritualist), indeed it moves on immediately to describe the enormous implications: “Prajāpati’s eye became swollen; it fell out: from it was produced the horse; and inasmuch as it swelled up ( aśvayat ), that is the origin of the horse ( aśva ). Through the sacrifice of the horse the gods restored it [the eye] to its place; and verily he who performs the horse sacrifice makes Prajāpati complete, and becomes complete himself: and this indeed is atonement for everything, the remedy for everything. With it the gods overcame all evil, they even overcame the killing of a brahmin with it; and he who performs the horse sacrifice overcomes all evil, overcomes the killing of a brahmin.”

The eye swells up because it wants to fall out. And it wants to fall out because it wants to meet another eye — and reflect itself in it. There is no sense producing the world unless there is first of all an eye that looks at it and, in so doing, absorbs Prajāpati in itself, in the same way that Prajāpati absorbs the world in his gaze. At this point Prajāpati and his eye-become-horse are equal and opposite powers, that contain in them (in their own pupil) the image of the other. Paradoxically, however, the horse-born-from-the-eye is whole, complete, but that is not so for Prajāpati, the Progenitor. The wounded orbit of the eye that has fallen out remains open. Prajāpati now wanted to create an eye that would watch him, but he wanted it within himself. It was the first time that any being wanted to make himself a duality of Self and I. For this to happen, the horse-eye had to be reinstated to its original place. The gods would take care of that with the horse sacrifice. The reinstatement of a fragment (the eye) had to be done through the killing of a whole being (the horse).

There is an immense variety of Vedic rites, but all — without a single exception — converge in one action: offering something in the fire. Whether it is milk or sap from a plant or an animal (according to certain texts, also from a human being), the final action is the same. For the Vedic ritualists, killing has not just to do with blood. For them — and they have persistently repeated it, time and again— every offering is a killing. Even the most basic of rites, the agnihotra , the libation of milk in the fire, renews the gesture of Prajāpati, who originally, when nature did not yet exist, offered his own eye to satisfy the hunger of his son Agni: “Prajāpati found nothing that he could sacrifice [to Agni]. He took his own eye and offered it in oblation saying: ‘Agni is the light, the light is Agni, svāhā .’” The eye is the most painful pars pro toto to be chosen by a suicidal god: Prajāpati. The procedures take on a whole variety of forms, the unshakable unity is to be found only in the act of offering in fire.

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Prajāpati not only had the privilege of being abandoned by his children, the beings whom he had just “emanated ( asṛjata ).” But he also managed to have himself canceled from history for centuries. When his name resurfaced in the pages of late nineteenth-century Western Indologists, their tone was often disparaging. And what appeared most irksome of all were the stories of Prajāpati’s self-emptying after the creation (it is strange that none of these scholars — often devoted Christians — recalled Paul’s description of Christ’s kénōsis : and yet the same word was used). Deussen found these stories “bizarre.” But A. B. Keith went further: he spoke of “stupid myths” with gruff impatience (“the details of these stupid myths are wholly irrelevant”). The idea of a creator who, worn out after his work, turns himself into a horse and hides his face underground for a year, while from his head sprouts a tree, aśvattha ( Ficus religiosa ), which in turn arouses speculation about the relationship between the horse, aśva , and the tree … well, all of this must have seemed too much for certain austere Western scholars. Where, then, would we draw the line between the great civilizations (such as India) and those primitive peoples for whom, by definition, anything is permissible?

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Creation, for Prajāpati, was not a single act, but a succession of acts. Continually obstructed, often unsuccessful. His exhausting series of creative actions is like the human attempt to put together a series of right gestures: the ritual. In ancient Rome, a ceremony could be repeated as many as thirty times if the gestures and words were not entirely right. For Prajāpati, the greatest obstacle was that of creating beings of a sexual nature. His first creatures could only take care of themselves. They appeared perfect, but soon disappeared (like President Schreber’s “fleeting-improvised-men”). But what was missing? Nipples. Those orifices from which food could be transmitted to other creatures — thus establishing the chain of living creatures. We know very little about the very first attempts, but from various indications they would appear to have been short-lived, as if there was a lack of substance. So the moment arrived when Prajāpati said to himself: “‘I want to create a firm foundation on which the creatures I will emanate shall establish themselves solidly rather than continuing to wander foolishly from place to place without any firm foundation.’ He produced this earthly world, the intermediate world, and the world yonder.” It wasn’t just a matter of obtaining creatures who could last, but of providing them with firm land on which to rest. The earth, the intermediate space, the celestial world were to be that setting, that background.

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Prajāpati’s drama took place without witnesses and continued for a long time, before even the arrival of the gods. It was an autistic drama, which saw no respite nor the consolation of an external viewpoint that could empathize or condemn — it didn’t matter which — but could at least play a part in what was happening. There was no way of distinguishing prodigies or disasters from mirages. And yet they were all that Prajāpati had. This had to be the source for what one day, after long reworking, would naïvely be called reality.

The ritualists soberly relate that: “While he [Prajāpati] was practicing tapas , lights rose up from those armpits of his: and those lights are those stars: there are as many stars as the pores of those armpits; and there are as many of those pores as the muhūrta , the hours, in a thousand years.” That was Prajāpati’s heroic period. He held his arms high, in the darkness, for that is the position of those who invoke and those who make offerings. That is the measure of everything: the measure of a Person with arms held high. Globes of light rose from his armpits and lodged themselves up in the vault of the sky. They designed patterns, gradually illuminating a scene that was still desolate and silent. The first change happened after a thousand years — a breeze. It was “that wind which, blowing, cleanses everything here; and that evil which it cleansed is this body.” The wind that blew after a thousand years of heat and stagnation was certainly a relief for Prajāpati. But we are not told how long it lasted nor whether it succeeded in eliminating — and not simply purifying — evil.