Roberto Calasso - Ardor

Devotio unites within itself the two extreme, most devastating possibilities of the sacrifice: the sacrifice of the person who has the charisma of power and the substitution of a human victim with another human victim, with any other human victim. Today, the only form of sacrifice universally visible on television screens, almost every day, is this last variant of devotio.

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The devotio of Decius Mus occurred during a war that, according to Livy, much resembled a “civil war.” The Romans and the Latins were too much alike “in language, customs, weapons, and military institutions.” It was an ideal occasion for devotio to be used.

A civil war is a war where any battlefront disappears. Now the front is everywhere — and the attack can come from anyone, as happened in Iraq and Afghanistan after the Twin Towers. But devotio sought to drag a whole army to ruin, magically contaminated by the death of an enemy. Whereas Islamic suicide-killers cause the instant death — along with their own — of a group of people who are similar to the attacker “in language and customs.” The Roman consul — or his substitute — had to fight to the death. The Islamic suicide-killer has to blow himself up. Ordeal is replaced by a death that strikes at random, as if by inscrutable decree. And above all, the devotio is no longer a single act that strikes a single group. Essential now is the plurality of acts, multiplied in every direction. This implies that an exclusive form of devotio is turned into one in which a succession of various unknown individuals substitute the absent leader. In the war against the Latins, the impulse to carry out the devotio had come in the silence of a night, when two consuls had been visited by the “apparition of a man of greater than human stature, and more majestic, who declared that the commander of one side, and the army of the other, must be offered up to the Manes and Mother Earth; and the army and the people whose leader has devoted the enemy legions, and himself, to death would have the victory.” A divine name always has to be evoked to encourage or instigate the act.

And we continue to resort to the names of gods when it comes to weapons regarded as decisive, as if they still had an irresistible attraction. Saturn and Apollo were immediately recruited by NASA. Agni is an Indian long-range missile. Saturn could have been a valid name because of his fatal aura, and Apollo for his epithet of “he who strikes from afar,” hekatēbólos , but for Agni the correspondence is even more convincing. Agni is Fire, the very element of which the weapon is built. And he is the first messenger, he who wove the perpetual flow between earth and sky, between the place of men and that of the gods. Agni, indeed, points toward the sky even today. But, once it has disappeared from sight and become an imperceptible dot in the atmosphere, Agni will turn around and seek out its objective on earth. A vertical voyage, up and down, which was the basis of the sacrifice, has become a horizontal movement, where the sky serves only as an obstacle-free terrain. This is the comparison that best represents the current state of affairs: the compulsion to resort to the gods, but wiping them from existence and using their names to evoke deadly power. A trick of infidels who cannot resist using the family crest.

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The religion of our time is the religion of society, within which even Christianity or Islam are vast enclaves. Its herald, though he was not entirely aware of it, was Émile Durkheim, who crystallized the notion in Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse , first published in 1912. More than with elementary forms of religious life, the book dealt with the transformation of society into a religion of itself. But it is part of its nature that the religion of society does not seek to describe and identify itself as such. Its conduct is similar to that of the religions of the past: pervasive, omnipresent, like the air we breathe.

According to Durkheim, the “moral ascendancy” of society, given the pressure it exercises over every individual, would be sufficient to explain the origin of religion. As for religion itself ( any religion — and not just that of the Australian Aborigines with which he had been concerned from the very beginning), Durkheim describes it as “the product of a certain delirium.”

And if religion dies out? This would not mean that the delirium would die out. Durkheim is consequential — no one can deny it — and immediately he ventures to suggest: “Maybe there is no collective representation that is not in a sense delirious.” Including therefore also the secular, skeptical collective representation of those at the beginning of the twentieth century who sought to explain the “inexplicable hallucination” they considered religion to be.

Seen from a distance of a century, this view, set out in spare and austere prose, could itself be plausibly described as a calm delirium. Society is more clinging and pressing than ever, but it is difficult to recognize a “moral ascendancy” in it. One cannot see, for example, through what argument such “moral ascendancy” could be denied to Hitler’s Germany. Was it not perhaps a society like so many others? Conversely, there seems no doubt that life carries on, more and more, within a “fabric of hallucinations,” which are the irrepressible secretions of society itself (of any society, in the same way as Durkheim referred to any religion): thin layers of pixels that wrap the world tighter and tighter, like a new kind of mummy, where the corpse itself tends to crumble away under the layers of bandages.

What Durkheim was describing was not the explanation of every religious phenomenon as an inevitable product of society (“the god is only a figurative expression of the society”). On the contrary: it was the founding charter for the transformation of society itself into a new all-encompassing cult, compared with which every previous form would seem inadequate and childish. But this was the overwhelming historic phenomenon that was being developed at the time of Durkheim — and which now dominates the planet. So omnipresent and so evident that it is not even noticed. Paradox: the totally secular society is one that turns out to be less secular than any other, because secularity, as soon as it extends to everything, assumes within itself those hallucinatory, phantasmal, and delirious characteristics that Durkheim had identified in religion in general. And this is what Durkheim was talking about, without meaning to and without recognizing it, when he wrote: “Thus there is one region of nature where the formula of idealism is applicable almost to the letter: this is the social kingdom.” The “formula of idealism” was an antiquated way of suggesting what, a little earlier, Durkheim had described, more perspicuously, as a “fabric of hallucinations.” But the crucial point was another: it was all in that “almost to the letter.” Life continues from then on, and forever more, within a “social kingdom” where hallucinations have to be understood “almost to the letter.”

What are rituals? Durkheim asks this in the manner of someone spying on certain unintelligible sequences of gestures. And he immediately comes to the point: “Whence could the illusion have come that with a few grains of sand thrown to the wind, or a few drops of blood shed upon a rock or the stone of an altar, it is possible to maintain the life of an animal species or of a god?” Everything points to the view that “the efficacy attributed to the rites” is no more than “the product of a chronic delirium with which humanity has abused itself.”

Up to this point the reasoning is consequential. But Durkheim goes one step further. For him, rites ( all rites) are senseless delirium, but they have a sense. Indeed, they have one sense only , which is found everywhere, among Australian Aborigines as much as in ancient Greece: “The effect of the cult really is to recreate periodically a moral being upon which we depend as it depends upon us. Now this being does exist: it is society.” In one well-prepared move, Durkheim has managed to pull out of his magician’s hat something that might seem even more hallucinatory and delirious than a god or a totemic animal: nothing less than a “moral being,” who must be presumed identical everywhere and capable of embracing any form of existence insofar as it is a supreme and total being: society (“the concept of totality is only the abstract form of the concept of society”—it can be no surprise that people began talking a few years later about totalitarianism ).