Roberto Calasso - Ardor

The question remains: how could the gods possibly think of leaving Rudra out of the sacrifice? And why did they want to leave him out? “They did not truly know him,” says the Mahābhārata , thus revealing what older texts had been silent about. Perhaps they did not know him because in Rudra there was an element resistant to knowledge, of pure intensity, prior to meaning. The gods, though, had based their work — the sacrifice — on the pervasiveness of knowledge itself, on its transparency. They left Rudra out because they rightly suspected that he would have undermined their enterprise from within. But certainly not because Rudra was extraneous or hostile to the sacrifice. When Rudra appeared in the north of the sky, striking terror, bow in hand, his hair tied at the back of his neck in a black shell, the other gods saw straightaway that his lethal weapon was made of the same substance as the first and the fourth type of sacrifice. They also saw that the string of his bow was made of the invocation vaṣaṭ , which is heard every day in the sacrifices.

This much we can gather, but none of the texts give the reason for Rudra’s initial exclusion. A reason, though, that will become much clearer when Rudra becomes Śiva in another eon and another story cycle, and the tale of his exclusion becomes the tale of Śiva’s exclusion by Dakṣa from the sacrifice: another event that the gods would seek to hide, since it describes their own defeat. And here a suspicion arises: that the sacrifice claims to be everything, but fails to be so. Every sacrifice leaves out or leaves behind something that may turn against it: its site, its residue.

Śiva is excluded by Dakṣa because he has offended the brahminic laws, twice showing disrespect: in taking away Dakṣa’s daughter Satī and, in a certain moment, not standing up in front of him. But at the same time Śiva cannot be regarded as being against the sacrifice. Nor can Rudra, who is called “king of the sacrifice” and “he who brings the sacrifice to its completion.” It would therefore seem that the sacrifice performed by the Devas conflicts with a further sacrifice, that of Rudra and of Śiva, which threatens to harm and cancel out the first — and it may perhaps be the sacrifice that happens in any case , that forms part of the cycle of life, of its breath, and can sweep away everything, even the gods. Invasive and ever-present, this sacrifice doesn’t follow an explicit doctrine, but is nevertheless performed. This happens all the time, whether we like it or not, just like the breath within us, which is a continual drawing in from the outside world and a continual expulsion into the outside world, even when it is not subject to yogic discipline. It can therefore be thought of as a continuous sacrifice, which coincides with life itself. When this form of sacrifice appears, there is no choice but to come to an agreement with it, to allow it its irreducible role. Only such a recognition enables the ordinary sacrifice of the gods to be done well , as is suggested by the term Sviṣṭakṛt, which is applied to this moment. In a certain way, then, the figure of Rudra and subsequently of Śiva, into whom he is transformed, is the most radical criticism of sacrifice to be found in the world of the gods. But it is a criticism that doesn’t destroy. Indeed, in the end it provides confirmation, further extending the field of sacrifice to cover everything, encapsulating within it all residue.

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Rudra’s name is to be avoided. Anyone forced to name him must immediately touch sacred water, for protection. Better to call him Vāstavya, ruler of place and of residue. Vāstu means both: place and residue. “A disconcerting semanticism,” noted Minard, eminent philologist. And yet there is just as much reason to be disconcerted over the Latin situs , which means site, place, but also powder, detritus, rust, mold, the bad smell built up over time. Situs implies that existence exudes a residue from the mere fact of being sited. There is something stale in existence, in that it has always been there. And this may produce a doubt that existence itself, that its site, are a residue, the detritus of a désastre obscur.

When oblations have been offered, something always remains. And, if nothing remains, the site itself of the oblations will remain, swept clean by the wind. Between order and the thing ordered, there is always a margin, a difference that is a residue: Rudra is there.

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Any kind of order involves eliminating a part of the original material. That part is the residue. What is to be done with it? It can be treated as the principal enemy of order, as the constant threat of a relapse to the status that existed before order. Or as something that, going beyond order, ensures the permanence of a contact with the continuum that preceded order itself. The soma that issues from the body of Vṛtra is the most precious thing that order can offer. And it is a memory of something that already existed before order, before Indra’s liberating attack.

What criteria can we use to compare two kinds of order? Two kinds of order can be considered as two formal systems. Alternatively we can look at them in relation to what surplus and residue they produce. To what degree do the two comparisons diverge? In the first case: we can evaluate the different extent, functionality, effectiveness of each kind of order, its capacity to remain consistent. Not much more can be said. To attribute a meaning to a formal system would be arbitrary. In the second case: we have to give a meaning to each kind of order, we have to evaluate it. But in relation to what? There ought then to be an order of reference that makes it possible to attribute meaning and quality to all other kinds of order. But this kind of order does not exist. Or at least: this is the condition in which the moderns found themselves, this is the situation in which they were obliged to think. But for Vedic men, surplus and residue were the prerequisites that made it possible to judge the kind of order that excluded them from it. And it could be world order itself, ṛta —or it could be any other kind of order undermined and disrupted by people unaware of what they are doing when dealing with surplus and residue.

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“The officiant recites the verses continually, without interruption: and so he makes the days and nights of the year continuous, and so the days and nights of the year alternate continually and without interruption. And in this way he leaves open no way of access to the spiteful rival; but he would indeed leave open a way of access if he recited the verses in a discontinuous way: he therefore recites them continuously, without interruption.” Here we see, with full immediacy, the Vedic officiant’s main anxiety: the fear of time being split, of the course of the day being suddenly interrupted, of the whole world irretrievably disintegrating. This fear is far deeper than the fear of death. Indeed, the fear of death is only a secondary — one might say modern — concern. Something else comes before it: a sense of impermanence that is so great, so acute, so tormenting as to make the continuity of time seem an improbable gift, and one that is always about to be taken away. And so it is vital to intervene immediately with the sacrifice, which can be defined as that which the officiant tends, extends. This tissue of indefinite matter (the sacrifice) has to be “tended,” tan -, so that something continuous is formed, with no breaks, no interruptions, no gaps into which the “spiteful rival” who is lying in wait might wheedle his way. It is something that, by reason of its elaborate construction, stands in opposition to the world — a place whose origin appears like a series of breaks, interruptions, fragments in which we may recognize the strips of Prajāpati’s dismembered body. To overwhelm the discontinuous: this is the purpose of the officiant. Overcoming death is only one of the many consequences. And so the first requirement is that the voice of the hotṛ is as taut as possible, with a continuous emission of sound. How does he take in breath? “If he were to take in breath in the middle of the verse, it would be harmful to the sacrifice.” It would be a defeat through discontinuity, like driving a wedge into the middle of the verse. To avoid it, the verses of the gāyatrī , the fundamental meter, have to be recited, one by one, without an intake of breath. This creates a tiny, impregnable cell of continuity in the boundless expanse of discontinuity. And so the gāyatrī meter one day became the bird Gāyatrī and had the strength to fly high into the sky to conquer Soma, that intoxicating and all-enveloping fluid in which the officiant recognized the supreme expansion of the continuum.