Roberto Calasso - Ardor

The fact that manas was there before everything became separated between manifest and unmanifest gives the mind an ontological privilege over every other element. The world may even be infinite, but it will not succeed in canceling out the entity that has always watched over it. There again, the picture of a cosmos totally devoid of consciousness is something that many assume but no one has ever succeeded in portraying. And yet that would be the most radical positivist view: wasn’t the mind supposed to be an epiphenomenon ? If consciousness has to be something that belongs only to the higher functions (as they used to be called), what happened before those functions were formed? A sort of unsullied naturalness must have existed. But natural in relation to what? And what if consciousness is something that emerges at some point, like birds and insects, as evolutionism — that sturdy branch sprouting from the tree of positivism — would have it? What then would earlier history have been? A long story of massacres between automatons, assuming we can be sure that automatons have no consciousness.

There again, the fact of mind being present even before the separation between manifest and unmanifest instills a peculiar weakness in it. And the same would be true for the other hypothesis, that the mind is indeed born from the unmanifest: “That unmanifest, which was alone, then became mind, saying: I want to be.” It is true that others would never have given it such preeminence, since manas is nevertheless the first being to be emitted from nonexistence, but at the same time its proximity to the beginning still makes the mind doubt its own existence. On the one hand, manas fears its own insubstantiality, its return into asat ; on the other, the mind is tempted to see everything as an hallucination, since everything actually sprang forth from mind. This insuperable uncertainty, the anxiety peculiar to mind, was transmitted to Prajāpati, the god closest to the mind, the only one of whom it is said that he is the mind: “Prajāpati is, so to speak, mind”; “mind is Prajāpati.”

The world can function without any reference to mind, in the same way that the gods will carry on with their tangled exploits without needing to refer to Prajāpati. It once happened that Prajāpati himself missed his turn while he was dividing up the portions of the sacrifice among the gods. He was the first to behave as if he himself didn’t count. The mind, in fact, can easily convince itself that it doesn’t exist. Born before existence, it is continually tempted to consider itself nonexistent. And in a way its existence is never complete, as it is always mixed up with something that was there before anything else. That is enough to place it in doubt.

* * *

Manasā , “mentally,” “with the mind,” is a word that appears 116 times in the Ṛgveda. There is nothing similar in the founding text of any other ancient civilization. It is as though the Vedic people had developed a peculiar lucidity and an obsession toward that phenomenon they called manas , “mind,” which imposed itself on them as something evident, with a force unknown elsewhere.

* * *

The first couple, from which all other couples are descended, could only have been formed by Mind and Speech, Vāc (the Latin vox ). Mind is Prajāpati — and the first oblation goes in fact to him; Speech is the gods. So the second oblation goes to Indra, king of the gods. These two powers belong to two different levels of being, but to demonstrate their effectiveness they have to unite, to be yoked together , with appropriate devices. By themselves, Mind and Speech are powerless — or at least insufficient to transport the offering to the gods. The horse of the mind must allow itself to be harnessed with speech, with meter: otherwise it will be lost.

But how will the action of the two powers be perceived, moment by moment, in the ritual? “When this is performed in a murmur, mind transports the sacrifice to the gods and, when this is performed aloud, speech transports the sacrifice to the gods.” It will therefore be in the ceaseless alternation between murmuring (or silence) and clear, distinct speech that we may perceive the combined action of Mind and Speech, like a perpetual oscillation between two levels, both present if what we do is to be effective.

Yet it is not enough to establish what are the two powers that can alone bear the oblation to the gods. The ritualists loved detail and lists of equivalents. They were not content to establish a polarity, as Western metaphysicians would one day do. So where do we begin? With ladles and spoons. Manas , the male element (a slight strain on linguistic interpretation is needed in this speculation, since manas is neutral), is equivalent to the “ladle,” sruva (masculine noun), and with it carries out “the libation that is the root of the sacrifice”; whereas vāc , the female element, is equivalent to the spoon with a spout, sruc (a feminine noun), and with it offers “the libation that is the head of the sacrifice.” Silence also belongs to mind, since “undefined is the mind and undefined is that which takes place in silence.” Mind is equivalent to the sitting position, speech to the standing position.

The most difficult point is the search for a balance between Mind and Speech. These two beings are not of equal power. Mind is “far more unlimited.” When, together, they become the yoke for the horse of the oblation, the imbalance is apparent. The yoke leans to the heavier part, that of the mind. So it will not be effective, and will skew the movement. So a supplementary plank must be inserted on the side of speech, to balance the weight. This supplementary plank is a sublime metaphysical device — and the oblation succeeds in reaching the gods only thanks to it. The reason for it helps us to understand why speech is never complete, but always flawed or made up of other factors, compromised by its flimsiness — or, in any case, its lack of weight.

* * *

Relations between Mind and Speech were always difficult and fraught. They sometimes clashed like two warriors — or two lovers. Each wished to do better than the other. “Mind said: ‘I am surely better than you, for you say nothing that I don’t understand; and since you imitate what I have done and follow in my wake, I am surely better than you.’

“Speech said: ‘I am surely better than you, for I communicate what you know, I make it understood.’

“They appealed to Prajāpati for him to decide. He decided in favor of Mind and said [to Speech]: ‘Mind is indeed better than you, for you imitate what Mind has done and you follow in his wake’; and in truth he who imitates what his better has done and follows in his wake is inferior.

“Then Speech, having been contradicted, was upset and miscarried. She, Speech, then said to Prajāpati: ‘May I never be your oblation-bearer, I who have been rejected by you.’ So whatever thing is celebrated in the sacrifice for Prajāpati, is celebrated quietly; for Speech was no longer the oblation-bearer for Prajāpati.”

The dispute between Mind and Speech over supremacy is reminiscent of what would happen in Greece between the spoken and written word. And perhaps in this sliding of levels lies an insuperable difference between Greece and India: in Greece, Speech, Logos, takes the place held in India by Mind, Manas. Otherwise, the points of dispute are the same. What in India is accused of being secondary, imitative, and derivative (Speech) in Greece becomes the force that directs the same accusations against the written word. In Greece, all that happens takes place within speech. In India, it originates in something that precedes speech: Mind. In the same way that the Devas gradually forgot Prajāpati, though only after a long period when they sought his help, particularly when they had to fight their elder brothers, the Asuras, so too the Olympians regarded themselves from the very beginning as the ultimate reality, relegating the exploits of Cronos and his “twisted mind” to the dark and cruel history of their beginnings, even though he had given his measures and order to the cosmos.