Roberto Calasso - Ka

The wild animals were a noisy, colorful lot. Hard to keep them quiet. Inevitably they would get mixed up with the other three hundred and forty-nine victims, all tame animals, tied to the twenty-one poles. It was a circus and a slaughterhouse. Anyone would have thought they all awaited the same fate. But that wasn’t so. Or at least, not from a certain point on. All the victims, wild animals or tame, were anointed, using different sticks and knives depending on their kind. For the horse, the knife was encrusted with gold; for the victims tied to the horse, it was decorated with copper (the horse was tied to the central pole, but twelve lesser victims were tied to his body and hampered his movements); for the other victims it was decorated with iron. It seemed, then, that all the animals were being prepared for the sacrificial slaughter. And you could feel sure of this when the agnīdh began his circumambulation around the victims, waving a firebrand. A circle of fire was traced out around each victim. But just when you expected that the two hundred and sixty wild animals were about to be strangled (and already perhaps people were wondering how the priests would manage with the midges), to your amazement you would see that one by one the wild animals were being untied and set free. Why? To answer that question is to have the answer to everything — and since “the aśvamedha is everything,” it also includes the answer to this question.

What would have happened if the wild animals had been sacrificed? “If they were sacrificed, they would soon drag the sacrificer dead into the forest, because wild animals partake of the forest.” So the sacrificer-king spared the wild animals in self-defense. At the same time, the sacrificer-king remembered that when Prajāpati wished to reach the world of the gods, he did so by taking possession of the wild animals: “With the tame animals he took possession of this world, with the wild animals he took possession of that world [the world of the gods].” So what was to be done? To sacrifice wild animals meant to kill oneself. Not to sacrifice them meant not to reach the world of the gods. Of course, one would still possess “this world,” something one could do by sacrificing the tame animals. But how important was this world in the end? Man is born into untruth, “this world” is precisely that, the world of untruth. The sacrifice is precisely that which allows us to go beyond this world, to gain access to the truth. Thus, if one forgoes the sacrifice of wild animals, one commits a “violation of the sacrifice.” Yet if they are sacrificed, you know that you, as sacrificer, will be swallowed up in the forest, dead together with the beasts sacrificed. Here loomed the invisible crag of contradiction. Here one was banging one’s head against the hardest of walls. What was to be done? The ritualists, those who thought out the aśvamedha exactly the way Prajāpati had evoked it, were experts in logic and metaphysics. They knew that contradiction is close, as close as can be, to the untrembling heart of thought. They also knew that thought would not overcome contradiction. Yet there was something that might at least get around contradiction, that might allow something prodigious to come into being: a and b , its opposite, simultaneously. And what was that? Gesture. If the wild animals are arranged in the intervals between the twenty-one poles to which the tame animals are tied, if they are anointed, if they feel the coldness of the blade, if, finally, the agnīdh circles around them with a burning brand in his hand: well then, at that point in a certain sense those victims have indeed been sacrificed. But at the same time, these are the very victims who are not sacrificed, because shortly afterward another priest will untie their bonds and set them free. Thus the sacrificer does not lose himself, is not swallowed up in the forest, and yet no “violation of the sacrifice,” something that could have even more serious consequences, has been committed. When one gets to the bottom of the bottom, one encounters that strange particle much loved of the ritualists: iva , “in a certain sense.” One encounters those strange figures that “are neither something offered in sacrifice nor something not offered in sacrifice.” Is it any surprise, then, if ultimate knowledge can only become manifest through enigma? And if enigmas are more than anything else the pretext for generating further enigmas? Enigmas are what issues from brahman . They are what the priests of the brahmodya exchanged between themselves, the dialogue they conducted while seated on opposite sides of the central pole, from which fanned out, symmetrical and equidistant, the other twenty poles, to which the other three hundred and thirty-six tame victims of the sacrifice were tied. That dialogue was de rigueur as one approached the irreducible, insuppressible nucleus of the ceremony, of the story of the horse: the killing.

The brahmodya , the dialogue by enigmas between the two priests seated one to the south the other to the north of the sacrificial pole, began shortly before the horse was slaughtered. “What was the first thought?” was the first question that the hotṛ asked the brahman. Then: “Who is the great bird? Who was the tawny one? Who was the fat one?” Unhesitating, the brahman replied: “The sky was the first thought. The horse was the great bird. The night was the tawny one. The sheep was the fat one.” But the hotṛ pressed on with other questions. Insistently, he challenged the brahman: “I ask you what is the extreme point of the earth. I ask you what is the navel of the world. I ask you what is the seed of the stallion. I ask you what is the supreme home of the word.” Again unhesitating, the brahman replied: “It is the altar ( vedi ) that is called the extreme point of the earth. It is the sacrifice that is called the navel of the world. It is the soma that is called the seed of the stallion. It is the brahman that is the supreme home of the word.” What had happened? The hotṛ had put forward enigmas. The brahman had solved them. But what were his solutions? Enigmas of a higher order. This alone was enough to suggest that they were the right answers.

They were constantly thinking of residues, of completeness, the possibility that something would be lost. They saw the sacrificial horse, in all his splendor, anointed, decked out for the ceremony, grass in his mouth, a bridle around his neck, going toward the gods, toward his death. And they wondered: the things we gave him — the bridle, the drape, the grass — will they too go with him to the gods? But what will become of the meat that the flies get? Of the shreds that stick to the ax? Of the meat caught beneath the fingernails that tear it apart? This too, all of this, should go to the gods, this too will need an invocation to help it on its way to the gods. So they dedicated an invocation to the flies.

The most distressing moment for the horse was not when, glossily decked out, he led the procession toward the sacrificial pole. Nor when the adhvaryu and the sacrificer-king murmured in his ear that he would be done no violence, that he would not suffer, while the horse knew very well that he was about to be done violence and that he would suffer. Rather it was when, having tied him to the sacrificial pole, they then tied a further twelve victims, goats for the most part, black and white, to various parts of his body, and the goats would writhe around and tug at him, because they sensed that they were about to die. Hence the horse could no longer have his customary freedom of movement. To know that liturgical speculation considered these animals who were tormenting him as his subjects could be of little interest to the horse. He would have preferred to be alone and untrammeled for the brief time that lay between him and his death.