Roberto Calasso - Ardor

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“Prajāpati was burning while he was creating the living beings here. From him, exhausted and overheated, Śrī, Splendor, came forth. She lay there, resplendent, glistening and trembling. The gods, seeing her so resplendent, glistening and trembling, fixed their minds upon her.

“They said to Prajāpati: ‘Let us kill her and take all this away from her.’ He said: ‘This Śrī is a woman and people do not kill a woman, but instead take everything from her and leave her alive.’”

Śrī, the splendor of the world, was the first to be robbed. She was a radiant young girl, who quivered in solitude, while eager eyes stared at her. Their first thought was to kill her. Straightaway they told her father. Prajāpati was dying. He was thinking of his own death. Creation had torn him from inside. And now his children had come asking his approval because they wanted to kill his last, his youngest daughter. Prajāpati knew anger and fury would have no effect on the gods. They were too greedy. They were, after all, beings without qualities, they still had to conquer charm and power. They were little different than street robbers, who were bound to turn up sooner or later, though people didn’t yet exist — not even bandits. So Prajāpati said: “Killing a woman is something you don’t do. But robbing her of all she has, right down to the thinnest anklet, that’s all right.” The gods followed the advice of their father, whom they already scorned — after all, he was the only being who knew anything. The gods knew only that they were the world’s parvenus. They left, persuaded by their father.

There were ten of them — nine male and one female. They surrounded Śrī and overpowered her. Each of her attackers had something particular they wanted to steal. Śrī was left abandoned, trembling more than ever. But she was still resplendent, since, for every shimmer of light they stripped from her, another appeared. And yet she was unaware of it. Desperate, humiliated, she too decided to ask her father’s advice. Prajāpati was still dying. Everything had happened as he had expected. Now he had to give his daughter the best advice. Śrī could never retrieve her superb ornaments by force. They would have laughed in her face. The kinder ones would have asked for something in exchange. So Prajāpati suggested the idea of sacrifice. In a desolate clearing she had to prepare a certain number of offerings. Modest, laid out on potsherds. But what else was there around? Brushwood and sand. Like a diligent girl in her home kitchen, Śrī prepared offerings to the ten beings who had attacked her. Humbly, she asked back various parts of herself, such as her Sovereignty and her Beautiful Form. The gods listened to her invocations in silence — and they admired her precision. Then, cautiously, they approached and accepted her poor offerings. Śrī could gradually dress herself once again in her glistening wrappings. But this did not deprive the gods of them. Each would continue to preside over those splendors — at least as long as other beings (humans, for example) continued, after Śrī, to present their offerings, ideally on a more lavish scale.

“In the beginning,” agre , the sacrifice, was a stratagem suggested by Prajāpati to his daughter as a response to the greediness of the gods. Human beings did not play a part in it until very much later — and then only as imitators of those events. The act preceding every act was one of violence, of prolonged pain, whose consequences were to be remedied, mitigated. “What appears, at the very moment it appears, is ready for robbery,” thought Prajāpati, who had been the first to suffer it himself, insofar as they had robbed him of himself without a second thought. The same had happened to his daughter. But, if the world wanted to exist, if it wanted to have a history and some kind of meaning, everything that had emerged from Prajāpati and had then disappeared like stolen goods had to be rediscovered and restored. A lengthy undertaking, as long as the world itself. For all to be well, other things — perhaps some water or a rice cake — had to be consumed, destroyed. The sacrifice was a task to be carried out every day. That was the task, the only task. Every action, every gesture would be a part of it. This was what Prajāpati thought, lying there abandoned.

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What happened to Prajāpati at the end of his thousand lonely and agonizing years? The Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa notes: “In regard to this, it is said in the Ṛgveda : ‘The labor that the gods look upon with favor is not in vain’: for in truth, for him who knows this, there is no laboring in vain and the gods look with favor on his every action.” This comment comes at the end of the account of the thousand years Prajāpati spent practicing tapas , while weighed down by Death. And it is an answer to the first doubt that worried the ritualists: is tapas effective? And will it always be effective? Prajāpati’s tapas was enough to create the world: but will the tapas of men in some way inherit its effectiveness? The answer is in the verse of the Ṛgveda : there is nothing automatic in the effectiveness of tapas , which is labor, an exemplary striving, but an effort that may also be pointless, insofar as nothing is effective unless the gods look on it with favor. At the same time, the gods cannot but look favorably on the efforts of “he who knows thus”: knowledge in some way compels the gods, forces them to look with everlasting favor on “he who knows thus.” The gods therefore fear the knowledge of men. In the face of knowledge, they know they cannot resist.

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When Prajāpati was dismembered, the sequence of the scenes that took place varies between different sacred texts. With Agni, the firstborn son, who immediately wanted to devour his father, there was the irrepressible tension of the drama between father and son, reduced to its basic elements. All around, everything was empty and desolate. With the other children, the Devas, once again the scenes were fraught with drama, yet with a streak of comedy — and of macabre humor, if only in the picture of the children running away, anxious and furtive, clutching some fragment of their father’s body. But with the Gandharvas and the Apsaras, we enter phantasmagoria. Here, the painter called upon to celebrate the event might easily have been Fuseli. From Prajāpati’s aching limbs, the Gandharvas and the Apsaras came out in pairs, like a corps de ballet, models for all Genies and Nymphs. They held each other by the waist — they were the first couples. Nor did they worry about stealing some fragment of their father’s body. First of all, they were “perfume,” gandha , and “beauteous form.” This marked the beginning of erotica: “From then on, anyone who seeks out his companion desires sweet perfume and beauteous form.”

But the dying father was watching them and was already thinking how to capture them, how to reabsorb them into his own body, from which they had come. But this time there was no fight, nor even any bargaining, as had been the case with Agni, with the Devas, with the Asuras. This time everything took place as if in a Busby Berkeley routine. Prajāpati chose encirclement. And the weapon used for encircling Genies and Nymphs would be the chariot, soon to be packed, teeming, with those fickle, reckless beings. In turn, “this chariot is the yonder sun.” And in its light the soft bodies of the Apsaras became moths. In this way Prajāpati reclaimed those countless demonic beings who had left him, bound together in pairs.

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After creating living beings, Prajāpati had witnessed a cruel spectacle: “Varuṇa captured them [with his noose]; and, once captured by Varuṇa, they swelled up.” These hydropics had to be cured with varuṇapraghāsa oblations, one of which involved sprinkling karīra berries (from the caper family) on certain dishes of curded milk: “Then follows a cake on a potsherd for Ka; for, by that cake on a potsherd for Ka, Prajāpati granted happiness ( ka ) to the creatures, and so now the sacrificer grants happiness to the creatures by that cake on a potsherd. This is the reason there is a cake on a potsherd for Ka.” That cake on a potsherd served to indicate something that might otherwise have been overlooked. People had already realized that the mystery of identity didn’t lie in the gods, but in their Progenitor: Prajāpati. But now, beyond that name, which was more an appellative, another name was discovered, which was an interrogative pronoun: Ka, Who ? And beyond that? No other names were known. This was the indefinite, limitless outpouring that was the very nature of Prajāpati. A nature that made it necessary to move one step further than the gods. But in what direction? Little was known about Prajāpati, as regards his boundless immensity. And, of that little, what stood out was the suffering, the long torment of his dismembered and ulcerated body. What else? Pure desire — or desire developed in arduous, enervating tapas. He was thus to be approached with caution, as when someone is in pain. And here the unexpected was revealed: Ka also means happiness. So karīra berries were sprinkled on curds: to confer happiness on living creatures. This was surprising enough. He who was the image of agony became the path to happiness. But what was happiness? Prajāpati’s children, for example, seemed to know only hunger or flight. Yet now they discovered that concealed in their father was something else, the syllable ka in the karīra plant. How can one reach it? Prajāpati once answered the question with the precision of a surveyor: “However much you offer, that is my happiness.” Happiness appeared to be connected, firmly bound up with the offering. And the offering was first that brick construction in which Prajāpati’s body was reassembled. In fact: “Inasmuch as for him there was happiness ( ka ) in what was offered ( iṣṭa ), therefore they are bricks ( iṣṭakā ).” The word describing the bricks of the fire altar thus encapsulated within itself, with the most powerful link, that of one syllable with the next, the offering ( iṣṭi ) and happiness ( ka ). Thereby meaning “happiness in the offering.” The father’s phrase was a surprise that became etched on the memory of his children. From then onward they busied themselves, as never before, around the fire altar; they learned to lay out a composition of happy bricks , for they stubbornly sought to reassemble the lost identity of their father. Only in that way would they restore happiness to him, only in that way would happiness have descended upon them, through that cake laid out on a potsherd.