Roberto Calasso - Ardor

“We owe them nothing. We did not ask to be born. They deserve no more from us than the rain deserves when it wets us or the sun deserves when it dries us.

“If we do have to invent incantations ‘to get them on our side’ we do not love them the better for that, or admire them the more! The account is equal between us. They to their ends. We to our ends.”

* * *

There is a debt that finds its way into every feeling of gratitude. If at some moment — as a sensation underlying every other — the pure fact of being alive gives rise to a sense of gratitude, that is enough to establish a relationship with an unnamed counterpart to whom that feeling is directed. And even to outline an obligation, which may arise in a whole variety of ways. One of these is the sacrifice.

Sacrifice brings together debt and desire. Opposing powers: one that invites giving, the other taking. Colliding, they produce destruction. More accurately: the destruction of a living being, even if it is just a plant. This destruction is the element that cannot be removed from the sacrifice. By accepting destruction, desire is saved from itself, through detachment.

* * *

Sacrifice is a game where things are never entirely what they are. The sacrificer is the victim, but he is never entirely so. As Malamoud writes: “The sacrificer seeks to show that he is the victim and at the same time that he is other than the victim.” When the victim is dismembered, Agni is called to bless it and at the same time to bless the sacrificer. But the ritualist immediately warns: “‘Uniting the blessings, not uniting the bodies.’ By this he means: ‘Unite the blessings but not the bodies’; for if he were to unite the bodies, Agni would burn the sacrificer.” In that case the sacrificer would die, whereas the sacrificer has to make his life longer and better. But the game is all the more perfect when this superimposition appears. The higher the risk, the better the sacred work.

This game in which each element, each entity that has a name, is and at the same time is not another entity, to which it is tied by a kinship, by a bond, by a connection, is the very game of Vedic thought. Every single step, every gesture described there, every formula is an application of it. But how can all this be translated into the language of the Westerner? Is there a word that at least resembles that game and can be used without awkward periphrases? There is such a word — and only one: analogy.

* * *

Apart from liturgy, apart from metaphysics, the sacrifice is a character. “The sacrifice … is not just a series of acts, it is also a structure, an organism.” Sometimes it appears as a fleeing antelope, sometimes we hear only its voice: “The sacrifice said: ‘I am afraid of nakedness.’ ‘What is it for you not to be naked?’ ‘That they spread sacrificial grass around me.’” We might ask why the sacrifice is afraid of nakedness, but we immediately feel it has good reason: there is something frightening about nakedness, all the more if it is the sacrifice itself that is naked, in other words something that in a certain way can only be naked, because it is performed in the open. The sacrificial grass, which the sacrifice invokes here, lessens the impact of the truth, of its unbearable intractability. But at the same time the sacrifice is “afraid of thirst”: it is afraid of drying up to the extent of being inert and therefore unable to act.

* * *

The sacrifice is an alternation of two gestures: scattering and gathering. The gods sucked the essence of the sacrifice, which for them was as sweet as honey. Then they scattered the shells with a pole. They didn’t want people to reach them. Happy with the “victory” they had gained through the sacrifice, they thought: “May this world of ours be unreachable by men!” Then the ṛṣis , the perennial counterpart of the gods, appeared and collected up the disiecta membra of the sacrifice. That “collect,” sambhṛ- , also means “prepare,” lay out the objects — the spoons, the wooden sword, the antelope hides, and other items that are the “equipment,” sambhārāh , for the sacrifice. The gathering up, on a desolate scene, of the empty shells of the sacrifice, to which the ṛṣis devote themselves, is also a refinement of the tools of the trade, an exercise in meter, a series of piano scales. That the sacrifice is an alternation, a combination, a superimposition of two gestures — scattering and gathering — also explains why it is inevitably and immediately conceived of as breathing, systole and diastole, alchemical solve et coagula.

* * *

The gods continued to sacrifice even after — thanks to it — they had conquered the sky. This might lead us to think that the sacrifice is the model for every action that is an end in itself, as someone will one day claim in relation to art. Every form of opus would then be an indirect descendant of sacrifice, which — in exactly the same way as alchemy — can claim to be effective only if it exceeds a certain degree of complexity. This is what Prajāpati taught people when he said that they could build the fire altar only by piling a certain number of bricks in a certain way. The right form was therefore a boon, revealed by that being whom the gods sought to reassemble. Prajāpati’s behavior to the gods was like that of a master craftsman with his apprentices. Here you are building too much, here too little. In this way you’ll never succeed. Even though the Vedic liturgists — and Prajāpati before them — never spoke about art, it was exactly that. When, at the opposite end of history, in places and times far removed from any form of liturgy, people began to talk about art in terms of an absolute , the memory of Prajāpati was once again revived — and in a way congenial to him, as if such memory were cloaked in a boundless cloud, nourished by what Bloy called “prophetic recklessness.” He was speaking about Lautréamont — one of the first to do so — and wrote: “The undisputable sign of the great poet is prophetic recklessness , the disturbing faculty of uttering words without precedent, regardless of people and times, of whose effect he himself is ignorant. This is the mysterious mark of the Holy Spirit on certain sacred or profane foreheads.”

* * *

One of the more tormenting paradoxes that the Vedic ritualists had to consider was this: “Those who presented oblations in former times touched the altar and the oblations in that moment, while they were sacrificing. Thus they became more guilty.” Meanwhile those who refused to sacrifice did not increase the burden of their guilt. This was intolerable. And so “unbelief took hold of men: ‘Those who sacrifice become more guilty and those who do not sacrifice become more prosperous.’”

This led to an extremely serious crisis: “No sacrificial food then came to the gods from the world.” Life itself was in danger of becoming extinct. It was Bṛhaspati, the chaplain to the gods, who suggested a solution to the problem by spreading a layer of darbha grass over the altar. And so, “thanks to the sacrificial grass the altar is appeased.” Life then resumed, but the episode was etched into the memory as one of the moments of great danger and uncertainty. Behind that episode was a nagging concern that would remain and that nothing — not even the darbha grass — could allay. This was the thought that the substance of the sacrifice — the oblation and the altar — is impregnated with contagious guilt. Sacrifice is above all the place where evil dwells — and from where it can infect those who come into contact with it. The brahmin, as can be seen from this passage, is the one who possesses sufficient strength to absorb the evil, transmitted through contact, in himself. A brahmin is he who, more than anyone else, boldly allows his body to be exposed to evil. Yet over the course of time the brahmin was to become the opposite: the one who most strictly observes the rules that prevent contact with impurity. Continuing along this path, anyone who avoided exposing themselves to evil could become a model of good, hence anyone who avoided performing sacrifices: the most undeserving, cowardly, insignificant beings. And so unbelief took root: through purity. But at this point communication broke down between gods and humans: an example of a stalemate from which the liturgy had to point the way out. How? By following the suggestion of Bṛhaspati, performing sacrifices once again, but spreading a layer of grass over the altar, like a cushion that prevented immediate contact with the guilt. This is one of the many sublime half measures by which the liturgy showed how to do something, and at the same time how not to do it. If this way out through gesture was not good enough, all that was left was logical impossibility, which paralyzes and prevents any further thought. The whole of Vedic India was an attempt to think further.