Roberto Calasso - Ardor

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If every act that happens in life is derived from a ritual gesture, then how can certain essential gestures that influence everything and are inextricably linked with everything, but have an unforeseeable and half-clandestine character, appear in the rite, how can they find a ceremonial position within it? The erotic gaze, for example, the exchange of glances between a man and a woman who do not know each other?

Movies, novels: these are the places where eyes meet, as part of a casual chain of events. But the Vedic ritualists, in their frenzy to include everything in the network of prescribed gestures, had even thought of this. There is a priest, the neṣṭṛ , whose main role was to escort and guide the sacrificer’s wife — the only woman present — onto the scene of the sacrifice. The wife of the sacrificer, though, had no complicated duties. Only two subtle, erotic gestures, which the neṣṭṛ supervised. Three times she exchanged glances with the udgātṛ , the “chanter.” That was enough for sexual union to take place, one of the many times it occurred during the rite. For the woman, at that moment, had thought: “You are Prajāpati, the male, he who gives the seed: place the seed in me!” Then she sat down and exposed her right thigh three times. Then three times, in silence, she poured over it the pannejanī water she had drawn that morning. Everyone was silent, all that could be heard was the gentle flow of water. Then she went back to hide herself in her tent.

At a certain point the sacrificer placed a bowl of ghee before his consort and told her to look at it. And so the woman “lowers her eyes to the sacrificial ghee.” Now — we are told—“the ghee is seed.” So what is happening, between the woman’s eye and the ghee, is “fertile intercourse.” At this moment the sacrificer’s wife betrays her husband on his own instructions. But if the husband didn’t ask her to look at the ghee, then his wife would be excluded from the sacrifice. There again, as soon as the wife looks at the ghee, their intercourse renders it impure, so the ghee has to be heated once again on the gārhapatya fire to remove its impurity before returning it to the āhavanīya fire. This is the formula that makes it possible to get around the difficulty: if the wife didn’t look at the ghee, the sacrifice would be flawed, in that she would be excluded from it; if she looked at it on the āhavanīya fire, the offering would be rendered irredeemably impure. She can therefore look at it, but only on the gārhapatya fire. The ritualist is there first and foremost to show how to get around these conflicts, to avoid these paralyzing alternatives.

From a whole range of details we are reminded that what is occurring during the sacrificial liturgy is also a sexual act. The sadas , “hut,” has many purposes during the ceremony, including that of accommodating the six dhiṣṇya fires of the officiants. But it is also a secret that has to be protected, since what it conceals is like intercourse between husband and wife — between the sacrificer and his wife. And “if a husband and wife are seen during intercourse, they immediately run away from each other, because they are doing something unbecoming.” There is only one point from which it is permissible to see what is going on in the sadas : from the door, “because the door is made by the gods.” Every other line of vision, every other angle of observation is illicit, like the act of a voyeur.

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The oblation is preceded by a cry, an invocation, the vaṣaṭ : “May Agni conduct you to the gods!” That cry is the orgasm. If the oblation were presented before the vaṣaṭ it would be like seed not shed into the vagina, the cry of orgasm would not coincide with ejaculation. And so “the oblation is made either at the same time as the vaṣaṭ or immediately after it has been uttered.”

The ejaculation, like immolation, can be regarded as the culmination of a process, but also marks its interruption, the beginning of a withdrawal from pleasure. If the pleasure is not interrupted, it would be as if the sacrificer were able to remain in his new body, intact, in the sky. But then he would have to leave his other body between the jaws of Agni and Soma, lifeless before the āhavanīya fire.

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In the divine erotica, multiple seductions were frequent: Agni with the wives of the Saptarṣis or Soma with his sisters or Śiva once again with the wives of the Saptarṣis. Or Agni with the waters: “Agni once desired the waters: ‘May I couple with them,’ he thought. He coupled with them; and his seed became gold.” When Alberich pursues the Rhine Maidens to possess the gold from which to make the Ring, he searches for Agni’s seed, submerged there from remote times as a sign of the mutual penetration of opposites that makes life possible. “Gold’s bright eye” is there, “which now wakes, now sleeps,” writes Wagner in impeccably Vedic terms (Wellgunde in the Prelude of Das Rheingold ). To snatch the gold from the waters brings disaster since it returns the world to a state where its elements are separated and thus cannot be regenerated. Neither the waters nor the gold will ever manage to regain the radiance that is the hallmark of elusive and everlasting life.

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There is nothing more misleading than to think of the Ṛgveda as a work concerned only with sublime tone and enigmas, incapable of describing things directly. We also find irreverence toward the gods is already there, as well as every other trait later to be developed in Indian history. And no god is mocked and jeered more than Indra, the king of kings. In the tenth and last cycle of the Ṛgveda , which is also the one containing some of the loftiest enigmatic hymns, we find the hymn of Vṛṣākapi, the monkey-man. It is a hymn with multiple voices, divided between Indrāṇī (a sort of Mrs. Indra, who is given no name of her own), Indra himself, the monkey-man Vṛṣākapi, and his wife, Vṛṣākapāyī (a mirror image of Indrāṇī). It is not clear who the monkey-man is, nor to what extent he is an animal or a man. Perhaps he is a bastard son of Indra, produced with one of his concubines, whom his father keeps with him and protects. But the monkey-man shows disrespect (we don’t know in what way) to the mistress of the house (Indrāṇī), who takes it out on her husband. The tone of the scene is exactly like that of the commedia dell’arte —or even Neapolitan comedy in the style of Scarpetta or De Filippo. The trickster Vṛṣākapi could be Punch. The scene is a family row, packed with sexual innuendo and bawdiness. The wife of the king of kings, furious because Indra won’t intervene against the monkey-man, says to him: “No woman has a butt as fine as mine, no one fucks as well as me, no one grips tighter, no one can raise her thighs higher.” No surprise that the dour Leopold von Schroeder should confess that the hymn “contains passages so obscene that I hesitated long before including it in this collection.” Geldner resorts to euphemism in his translation. As for Renou, twice in this verse he resorts to ellipsis. So people of modern times, proud cultivators of low style, need have no worry. Even the Vedic seers were familiar with such language and used it when the situation arose. And they also understood the comic effect produced by the clash of conflicting tones. Throughout the hymn devoted to the pranks of the monkey-man every verse ends with the exclamation “ víśvasmād Índra úttaraḥ ,” “Indra über alles. ”

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In the Atharvaveda it is said that Earth “has black knees” like a child at play, but for another reason: because the flames have licked them, for Earth is “cloaked in fire.” And, if we close our eyes, how do we recognize Earth? From its scent. It is the same fragrance that marked the fortunes of the Genies and the Nymphs, the Gandharvas and the Apsaras. He who invokes Earth also wants to acquire that fragrance. It is a fragrance associated with far-off memories: “That scent of yours that has penetrated the lotus, the scent which the immortal gods carried with them to the marriage of Sūryā, O Earth, that primeval scent, let me be entirely perfumed by it.” The scent of Earth recalls one of the happiest moments in the lives of the gods: when Sūryā, daughter of the Sun, went to marry King Soma. The Earth’s scent did not envelop Sūryā alone, but all girlhood splendor: “That scent of yours which is in human beings, female and male, which is their fortune, their pleasure, that which is in horses, warriors, that in wild animals and elephants, the splendor, O Earth, which is in the young girl, bathe us in it, so that no one wishes us harm!” All subsequent marriages, ever after, were a pale copy of what took place on Sūryā and Soma’s wedding day. Even the hymn in the Ṛgveda that describes it begins by talking about Earth: “Earth is underpinned by Truth.” And how could Earth be ignored on such an occasion? The hymn tells us straightaway that Earth — here called Pṛthivī, the Vast—“is great” thanks only to soma , to this intoxicating plant. Earth, for us, would not be so immense without soma to help us perceive it.