Roberto Calasso - Ardor

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During his endless vicissitudes, Prajāpati seemed sometimes to ignore what he himself had done. After having generated the worlds of men and gods, he happened to look upon them as if they were something strange and unknown:

“Prajāpati desired: ‘Would that I might conquer the two worlds, the world of the gods and the world of men.’ He saw the animals, the domestic and the wild ones. He took them and by means of them took possession of the two worlds: by means of the tame animals he took possession of this world and by means of the wild animals he took possession of the other world: for this world is the world of men and that other is the world of the gods. And so, when he takes the tame animals, with them he takes possession of this world and when he takes the wild animals, with them he takes possession of the other world.

“Were he to complete the sacrifice with the domestic animals, the roads would converge, the villages would have boundaries close to each other, and there would be no bears, men-tigers, thieves, assassins, and rogues in the forests. Were he to complete the sacrifice with the wild animals the roads would diverge, the villages would have boundaries far from each other and there would be bears, men-tigers, thieves, assassins, and rogues in the forests.

“As to this they say: ‘Certainly this, the wild animal, is not part of the cattle and should not be offered: if he were to offer it, the wild animals would soon drag the sacrificer away dead into the forest, for the wild animals belong to the forest; and if he were not to offer wild animals, it would be a violation of the sacrifice.’ And so they release the wild animals after having passed fire around them: thus, indeed, it is not an offering and nor is it a non-offering, and thus they do not drag the sacrificer away dead into the forest and there is no violation of the sacrifice.”

Prajāpati seemed momentarily to have forgotten having made the world, which appeared to him from the very beginning split in two: this and that, the world of men and the world of the gods. That is: a world of untruth and a world of truth. Prajāpati wanted to find a way of taking possession of these worlds. Then “he saw” the animals. That to see has a disturbing implication in this case, for it is always connected to an action. And the action is one alone: killing. In that “he saw,” there is still the perception of the prehistoric hunter.

To go ahead and conquer the world of men and the world of the gods, he had to use animals. Animals are the keyboard of the two worlds. At one and the same time, between animals themselves there is a gap that corresponds perfectly to the one between men and gods: men are equivalent to domestic animals, gods to wild animals. We might think, then, that Prajāpati (the model of every sacrificer) would perform a double sacrifice. But he didn’t. On the one hand, the only means of action is sacrifice. On the other, sacrifice of wild animals would bring ruin to the sacrificer: the victim, being too powerful, would kill the killer and drag him away into his world. Here we have the metaphysical spark, at the point, as ever, where we are about to come up against the irresolvable contradiction. Reason would be crippled at this point, and would dare to go no further. Not so with the liturgy. The solution found — to release the victim, but first to carry a burning ember around it, a gesture performed only as a prelude to immolation — is not a childish attempt at compromise nor the indication of a collapse in reasoning. On the contrary, it is an indication that thought, in its inquiry into life, has encountered something that does not allow one straight, unambiguous solution but demands two conflicting responses. On the one hand, sacrifice can be nothing less than total — and must therefore include wild animals — because sacrifice corresponds with life itself. On the other hand, the sacrifice of wild animals would mean the end of the sacrificer — and therefore interruption of the sacrificial activity.

This situation should be compared with that of the modern world over a very similar issue: the killing of animals. On the one hand, such killing is practically unlimited, based on an alleged social need (the vegetarian diet cannot be imposed by law). On the other hand, all attempts at moral justification fail miserably, even by a civilization that prides itself on giving moral justifications for everything. The conflict rings out loud and clear. But it has not become part of the general awareness. Indeed, the issue is regarded as distasteful and is avoided. It is left to professional agitators like Elizabeth Costello to raise it in academic circles, as J. M. Coetzee, her chronicler, recounts. The reaction is a series of muffled coughs of embarrassment.

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The first action of sacrifice personified is to flee. It runs away from the gods before running away from men. And its flight from the gods takes place while the gods are not yet gods. Only the sacrifice can, in fact, make them into fully fledged gods. We are never told exactly why the sacrifice runs away. But we know that being the sacrifice means first of all agreeing to be killed. There is a deep revolt, in every being, in the face of this — and more than any other, in that being who is the sacrifice itself.

Nothing in the sacrifice is immediate and certain: indeed, it is the result of an action of recovering, of calling the sacrifice back with words. The gods had to beg the sacrifice: “Listen to us! Come back to us!” And the sacrifice then agreed. But agreement came after a blunt refusal. Aware of the delicacy of the matter, the priests pass this creature, fragile as a seed, from hand to hand—“like a bucket of water,” in the words of Sāyaṇa. And so a tradition is established.

Sacrifice is an animal ready to escape. Maintaining silence is like shutting that animal inside an enclosure. And this gives the impression of possessing it. But if the sacrifice escapes, becoming spoken word, then the sacred formula— ṛc or yajus —will reveal its nature as a remedy extracted from evil itself: “When he withholds speech — since speech is sacrifice — he therefore closes the sacrifice within himself. But when, after having withheld speech, he emits some sound, then the sacrifice, once allowed its freedom, escapes. In that case, he should then murmur a ṛc or a yajus addressed to Viṣṇu, for Viṣṇu is the sacrifice; so he captures the sacrifice once again; and this is the remedy for that violation.”

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At the center of the sacrifice we find an obscure word: medha , the sacrificial essence that circulates in the world like water and accumulates in a hundred beings fit for sacrifice. “Essence” here is not to be understood (only) in the metaphysical sense: medha means “marrow,” “juice,” “sap.” “In the beginning the gods offered man as a victim. When he was offered up, the sacrificial essence, medha , left him. It went into the horse.” And, after the horse, into the ox, into the sheep, into the goat, and lastly into rice and barley. Sacrificial substitution therefore implies that a life-giving substance continues to flow, even though it is housed in different receptacles. The passage from animal to vegetable is only one of these passages. But we should not imagine that this happens because sacrifice is being made more and more innocuous. On the contrary: the fact of killing is also claimed for rice and barley. All of that which possesses sacrificial essence, medha , is killed. Rice and barley no less than man or ox. The process is one, the cycle is the same, for “he who knows thus.”

“Now when they lay out the sacrifice, celebrating it, they kill it; and when they press King Soma, they kill him; and when they obtain the victim’s consent and cut it up, they kill it. It is by means of a pestle and mortar and with two millstones that they kill the offering of grain.” The Brāhmaṇas have often been accused of being “immensely monotonous.” And yet at times — indeed so frequently as to rebut any accusation of monotony — we find sentences or passages in those texts that describe with great clarity and concision what others elsewhere have been loath to put in writing. The scriptures in many different civilizations have always been reticent about the act of killing. It is indeed a favorite opportunity for euphemism. Not so in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa. The act of killing, generally a natural part of sacrifice, is applied here first of all to the sacrifice itself: celebrating a sacrifice implies the killing of the sacrifice. What this means is not immediately clear, but it can be linked to the stories where the sacrifice runs away from the gods in the guise of a horse or an antelope. The sacrifice can be an abstraction — and sometimes runs away in the face of similar abstractions, such as “priestly sovereignty.” But likewise, a plant that is a king — Soma — can be killed. Or a simple offering of grains of barley. Or an animal victim. Most people would use the word kill only for the last of these. Whereas for the Vedic ritualists the killing of the animal victim is only one of many instances in a series of killings. This procedure could be read as the opposite to euphemism. Instead of toning down the violent occurrence, it is extended to apply to everything, since what happens in the sacrifice involves the whole of existence and is to be found at every level, among abstract concepts just as much as among plants.