Roberto Calasso - Ardor

The answer is disconcerting when we think of the mild image, alien to any form of violence, that has been passed down to us: the saṃnyāsin originated from the puruṣamedha , the human sacrifice. Here almost all scholars prefer to stay on the safe side and suggest that this ceremony must have been described in the Brāhmaṇas and in the Sūtras only for completeness , in that it corresponded to the formal layout of the sacrifices, but was never practiced — or else practiced in earliest times but then abandoned. This is all possible, but it cannot be confirmed or denied with any certainty. What remains is a series of texts. And these texts describe puruṣamedha in the same way as various other kinds of sacrifice. But this is not proof that certain deeds took place. And it is plausible to raise a doubt over puruṣamedha in much the same way as we may doubt that certain other rites were celebrated, given their interminable duration and complexity. Yet here, as always, it is wise to follow the texts. It is the Kātyāyana Śrauta Sūtra , with its rugged concision, that reveals its points of connection. Above all: the puruṣamedha is modeled on the “horse sacrifice,” aśvamedha. And so, whereas the rules governing the latter are set out in two hundred and fourteen aphorisms, those on the puruṣamedha require only eighteen, as if it were a secondary variation (which is in turn duplicated immediately after in the sarvamedha , the “sacrifice of everything”). But far more significant are the differences. Anyone wanting to celebrate an aśvamedha has to be a king or have a “desire of the Whole”: it is the maximum expression of sovereignty. To celebrate a puruṣamedha it is enough to be a brahmin (or a kṣatriya ) and “desire excellence.” This already points us in the direction of the individual who is defined by his desire alone. Another indication comes from the requirement that the brahmin sacrificer has to give, as a ritual fee for the sacrifice, “all his possessions.” What then will happen to him, stripped of all his belongings after having sacrificed a man? The answer comes in the penultimate aphorism: “at the end of the traidhātavī iṣṭi [a certain kind of oblation, to be offered at the end of the sacrifice], the sacrificer assumes the two fires within himself, offers prayers to Sūrya, and, reciting an invocation [which is specified], goes off toward the forest without looking back, never to return again.” This is the moment where the figure of the renouncer emerges: when he takes his first step toward the forest, without looking back and knowing he will never return. In this instant, the brahmin cuts all links with his previous life. Never again will he have to celebrate the agnihotra at dawn and sunset, pouring milk on the fire, performing a hundred or so prescribed gestures, reciting formulas. Indeed, the renouncer no longer has to kindle and feed the sacrificial fires, since he will tend them within himself. Nor will he have to comply with countless obligations that make up his life as a brahmin. Now he will eat nothing but berries and roots when he finds them in the forest. His life will interfere only to a minimal extent with the course of nature. But what lies beneath all this? The celebration of a puruṣamedha , wanting a man to be killed in a sacrifice planned in order to establish the personal “excellence” of the sacrificer? We will never know whether this was ever carried out, even just once. Perhaps it was there only as a set of instructions, necessary for the formal completeness of the liturgical doctrine. But its significance still stands out in the text. And it is the supreme paradox of “nonviolence,” ahiṃsā.

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In the puruṣamedha the victims are chosen from all social classes, with no exceptions: there will be a brahmin, a warrior, a peasant — and lastly a śūdra.

The brahmin immediately recites the hymn to Puruṣa ( Ṛgveda , 10.90) while seated to the right of the victims tied to the sacrificial post. More than any other, this detail may explain why the name Puruṣa — and not Prajāpati — appears in the hymn: for puruṣa is the word that describes man as sacrificial victim, tied to the post in exactly the same way as Puruṣa was in primordial times. With delicate cruelty, this is what the hymn describes. Afterward, we read, the officiants “passed with burning embers around the victims, but they had not yet been immolated.”

This is when the miracle happens, corresponding to the voice of Yahweh’s angel who stops the hand of Abraham already raised over Isaac: “Then a voice said to him: ‘Puruṣa, do not put an end to these human victims ( puruṣapaśūn ): if you put an end to them, man would eat man.’ And so, as soon as the ember had been carried around them, he set them free and offered oblations to the same divinities [to whom he had already dedicated the human victims] and thereby gratified those divinities, who, thus gratified, gratified him with all objects of desire.”

No Kierkegaard, no Kafka has ever commented on this passage. But it would be no less difficult than the story of Abraham and Isaac. This time it is not one man, not the son of the sacrificer, but four men, chosen from the various classes of society and waiting to be killed. They have been tied to a post, alongside many animals tied to other posts and also waiting to be immolated. They have seen an officiant approach and walk around the post holding an ember. It is the most frightening moment: the announcement of the immolation. From that moment on, the victims can consider themselves already dead: strangled or suffocated. And then—“a voice” arrives. But how does it address the sacrificer? It calls him “Puruṣa” and asks him to save the puruṣas , the men who are about to be immolated. And Puruṣa, the primordial being whom the gods dismembered, had just been recalled in the recital of hymn 10.90. So the sacrificer, while he was preparing to immolate the four men, was Puruṣa himself whom the gods had immolated. This is why the voice turns to him calling him Puruṣa — and not by his own name.

But the ritualist offers no comment on this point. Unperturbed, he carries on describing the ritual acts that follow. It could be a ritual just like any other. Or does he perhaps not recognize the seriousness of what he has just described? It is always wrong to imagine such a thing when dealing with the authors of the Brāhmaṇas.

This is confirmed by the description of what happens at the end of the ceremony: “After having assumed the two fires within himself and after having celebrated the sun reciting the Uttara Nārāyaṇa litany, he [the sacrificer] shall go toward the forest without looking back; and that place is indeed far away from men.” If this description is — as it seems to be — the beginning of the transition to the state of vānaprastha , of he who withdraws into the forest, the step prior to the state of renouncer, this means that the first renunciation is in not sacrificing another person. Having carried this out, he can — indeed in a certain way he must — leave society, “without looking back.” If he is unable to do so, the ritualist immediately gives practical advice for anyone who wants to continue living in the village. But even for him there has been a break. Immediately after, with the usual abruptness, it is explained that the moment signals a watershed: “But in fact this sacrifice must not be imparted to everyone, for fear that it ends up being imparted to all and everyone, for the puruṣamedha is everything; but it must be imparted only to those who are known and to those who know the sacred texts and to whom they are dear, but not to everyone.”