Roberto Calasso - Ardor

The result of her abduction could only be war, in the heavens. It was the fifth war between the Devas and the Asuras. Amid repeated massacres, with the final outcome still uncertain, many forgot the original reason for the conflict. But not Bṛhaspati, known as “the vulture” for the keenness of his gaze. He realized straightaway that Tārā’s womb was swelling (in the meantime she had been returned to him). He looked at her in disdain, and said: “Never will you be able to hold a fetus in your womb that belongs to me.” Then he ordered her to abort. But Tārā was stubborn and hated nothing more in the world than brahminic arrogance, of which Bṛhaspati was the epitome. She refused.

Questioned by the Devas, she admitted that she was about to give birth to Soma’s child. When Budha was born, he condensed in himself the luminescent beauty of both his mother and his father. Meanwhile Soma was wasting away. The sovereign of the heavens, the perfect lover, the repository of rapture, was suffering from consumption. He felt weaker, his light grew dim. He then returned to his father. Inert, all skin and bones, Atri did not deign to look upon him. But later, little by little, as he humbly served that motionless and silent being, Soma felt he was recovering. The sap slowly began to flow once more through the veins of the cosmos.

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Tārā’s betrayal was all the more blasphemous and outrageous since King Soma was the only king for the brahmins, and therefore for Bṛhaspati. For the kṣatriyas everything can become food, except the brahmin, because “his king is Soma.” And so the brahmins cannot be touched by the kṣatriyas , but it is their fate to be deceived and mocked by their own sovereign: Soma. The most treacherous enemy is within one’s own power, even if it were brahman. “Spiritualia nequitiae in coelestibus,” as Paul would one day say. The greatest impiety comes from the sovereign god.

The seating position is most revealing: “And therefore the brahmin, during the king’s rite of consecration, sits below the kṣatriya … Brahman is the womb of royalty ( kṣatra ), and so, even if the king reaches the highest position, in the end he can only rest on brahman , his womb. If he should damage it, he would damage his womb.” An inextricable blend of subordination (the brahmin places himself below the king) and preeminence (the king can be born only from brahman ).

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Soma is pure quality on the threshold of the realm of quantity. Only thanks to soma is the existence of quantity justified: “Since he buys the king, everything here below can be bought”; “Since he measures the king, there is therefore a measure, the measure among men as well as any other measure.” Money, measure: to enter the world they need to have King Soma, the only material that is quality alone, immeasurable, irreplaceable, the origin of every measure, of every substitution. If this knot is cut, order falls apart.

Exchange is a violent act because there is no secure, guaranteed fluidity between sky and earth. The flow is obstructed, continually diverted. Sacrifice, and consequently exchange, serve to reestablish the flow, but through an action that has something forced, disturbing, about it, a restoration that presupposes a wound and adds a new one to it.

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Soma was to be approached with desire, but also with fear: “Do not terrify me, O king, do not pierce my heart with your radiance.” The risk was apparent at every moment. Soma , liquid fire, had to make its way toward the head, where the Saptarṣis waited for it, crouching. But at the same time there was the plea: “Do not go below my navel.” If that happened, one would have been overpowered.

The first to abuse soma was also he who seized it: Indra. Eager, impatient, headstrong, he snatched the liquid from Tvaṣṭṛ and drank it without ritual, without mixing it, without filtering it. His body “fell apart on all sides.” The intoxicating liquid came out of every orifice. Then Indra vomited. He no longer knew what to do, so “he turned to Prajāpati.” “Indra lay on the ground, devastated. The gods gathered around him and said: ‘In truth, he was the best of us; evil has befallen him: we must heal him!’” This would one day lead men to perform the sautrāmaṇī rite, to remedy Indra’s illness and his crime against soma. From that time on, men prayed for draughts of soma adding a modest request: “Like the harness of a chariot, thus keep together my limbs.” And they made sure to add humbly: “Let these juices protect me from breaking a leg and preserve me from paralysis.” Drunken and precise.

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Soma and Agni are linked by an affinity more powerful and secret than any other, above all because they are the only gods who allow themselves to be seen: Agni is in every fire that blazes; King Soma in every soma plant that someone collects on remote mountain slopes and then sells to be offered in sacrifice. They are also linked by their origins: when both still belonged to the Asuras and — in the words of the Ṛgveda —breathed in the “long darkness,” which was the belly of Vṛtra. They were born or came out of the monster, whom Indra had then killed with the help of Soma himself (Indra had ordered him: “Let us both strike Vṛtra, come out, Soma!”). But the story would become even more disturbing when it was discovered that Soma had not only left Vṛtra’s belly, but was Vṛtra. The Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa leaves no doubt: “‘Soma was in fact Vṛtra: his body is that of the mountains and of the rocks where the plant called Uśānā grows,’ so said Śvetaketu Auddālaki. ‘They go to fetch it and press it; by means of the consecration and of the upasads , by means of the tānūnaptras [ceremonies that form part of the soma sacrifices] and the invigoration they make it into soma. ’” They are words that summed up the whole life of Soma, from when he had hidden himself inside himself up until when he had become a plant transported among men, and transformed and killed by men.

Agni and Soma, so far as their origins and their history, are highly mysterious elements that have to be flushed out of the dark, and yet at the same time they are the most apparent, the elements that are visible in the sacrifice, in the fires and in the favorite oblation of gods and men. Bergaigne rightly separated Agni and Soma from the Devas as a whole, not only because Soma is “fire in a liquid state,” not only because the characters of the two gods are to a large extent interchangeable, but because their entire existence belongs to a secret stratum of that which is, in the same way as rapture invades consciousness carrying with it something more remote, overwhelming and indecipherable.

In comparison with Agni and Soma, the Devas have something of the parvenus about them: born on the earth, the Devas reached the sky through sacrifice, and therefore through Agni and Soma. Agni and Soma, on the other hand, were born in the sky, and from there were conveyed to the earth: Soma being śyenabhṛta , “carried by the eagle,” Agni being delivered by Mātariśvan, the Vedic Prometheus. The Ṛgveda narrates it as follows: “Mātariśvan carried the one [Agni] from the sky, the eagle snatched the other [Soma] from the [celestial] mountain.” There is therefore a cross-movement, between the gods, which corresponds with two lineages. The gods, no less than men, could be different by birth.

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“Now Soma was in the sky and the gods were here on earth. The gods desired: ‘May Soma come to us: we would sacrifice with him, if he came.’ They created these two apparitions ( māyā ), Suparṇī and Kadrū. In the chapter on the dhiṣṇya fires we read how the affair of Suparṇī and Kadrū came to pass.