Roberto Calasso - Ka

In the person of Dīrghatamas Māmateya, a new figure had arrived on the scene: knowledge. Knowledge is the question of the identity of the agent. Between the young man given the task of plunging his knife into the dead horse and Arjuna on his war chariot there is a relationship of direct descent. They are the same person. Just as Dīrghatamas Māmateya is Kṛṣṇa, the charioteer.

Knowledge is not an answer but a defiant question: Ka? Who? Knowledge is the last ruse, which allows us to escape being killed, to obtain a — provisional — stay of execution. Which was another reason why one celebrated the sacrifice of the horse.

There is a horse’s head rolling along the surface of the sky: it is the sun.

There is a horse’s head rolling across the earth: it is the receptacle of sweetness.

There is a man’s head rolling across the earth: it is the person who hasn’t solved the enigma of the horse’s severed head.

Like everything, the aśvamedha , which is everything, began and ended with water. There was a bath at the beginning. There was a bath at the end. After the final bath ( asabhṛtha ), “those who do good and those who do evil return to their village together, hand in hand.”

The sabhā is a hall: a place for meetings, royal audiences, games. Something happens there, something is made manifest: it is the place of initiation. In the beginning, it was a place where dice was played, where a cow was killed. In the beginning is always something that later gets hidden. The sabhā was already there, we discover, before the world — what we call “the world”—began. It was in the middle of the palace — subterranean, invisible, watery, celestial — of Varuṇa. And it was still there at the end, when India was invaded by the Islamic swarms. It stood in the middle of the palaces of the Mughal princes. It was in a sabhā that the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas, cousins and enemies, tossed dice to decide their destinies.

There are two indispensable elements in any sabhā : doors and columns. Everything else is optional. Lots of doors, lots of columns. Varuṇa’s palace has a thousand columns and a hundred doors. And this place that belonged first and foremost to the dead became the model for every other sabhā . It is to this that the rule which establishes that a sabhā must be erected toward the south, in the direction of the dead, discreetly alludes.

Varuṇa had invited the more eminent ṛṣis to his sabhā together with a number of foreigners and theologians. Welcoming them, he said: “The time of cruel disputes about enigmas, the time of the brahmodyas that ended with someone getting his head broken or cut off, is over. Maybe it’s to do with the aeon coming to an end, I don’t know, but it’s getting hard to find anyone who realizes that when you think you risk losing your head. All the same, we’re still responsible for the task of keeping thoughts moving and turning. More and more things are tending to unfold in the form of intertwining monologues. I’d be the last to oppose this new style. I just wanted my sabhā to host some travelers from the far West. Hybridization is de rigueur these days.”

When you went into the sabhā , the columns generated a sense of vertigo, as though you were in a geometric forest, or an alcove walled with mirrors. It must have been the same in the telestērion in Eleusis: the candidate for initiation came in and couldn’t understand the purpose of this parallelepiped of air measured out by columns standing at the same distance from each other in every direction. Then, in the huge hall, something would be moving. Shadows between the columns. They were the Cows, at once silent and docile. They wandered about as though in a field. A dull clatter of hooves on stone flags. But the Cows were also the Dawns. They filed by like heavily made-up dancers in a hurry to get onstage. And they were Words too. Whispered syllables. Lifting your eyes between the columns, you would suddenly see a golden swing. Everything else was doors and columns. Something was about to happen. But where was the center? Everywhere seemed central, each point protected by columns equally innumerable. Would the prodigy appear? They called it “the sun in the rock.” It was the vision that Varuṇa granted to Vasiṣṭha, born of the seed he had squirted in the air: the vision that brings clairvoyance, that made Vasiṣṭha a ṛṣi .

Varuṇa, the god hidden in the place of the ṛta , in the waters that are Truth and Order, never confided in men. Nor in the ṛṣis either. Everybody, every second of the day, felt the eyes of his spies upon them. And every second of the day they feared the bíte of Varuṇa’s nooses tightening around them. They all knew that at least one of those cords, whether long or short, thick or thin, was ever wound around them: the noose that keeps everyone tied to the yūpa , the pole from which the paśus , the domestic animals, the herds ( pecus ) destined for sacrifice, can never move too far away. Men are counted among the paśus .

But Varuṇa did strike up a friendship with one of the ṛṣis , a friendship that later went sour: with Vasiṣṭha. As a result, the other ṛṣis treated Vasiṣṭha with a respect that was mixed with envy and fear, tacitly recognizing him as superior to themselves, because he had knowledge that had been granted to him alone. People spoke of Varuṇa and Vasiṣṭha as having made a mysterious voyage together on the sea. They sailed across the ocean. A ship appeared and disappeared amid the cresting waves. With no sailors, no helmsman, no weight. Two motionless figures trod the deck and gazed at each other. The taciturn Varuṇa chose this watery waste to reveal secrets no one else ever heard.

Vasiṣṭha also claimed to have sat on the gold-and-silver swing that hangs from the sky. As if he were an Apsaras. Was he to be believed? After all Vasiṣṭha was in some way related to the first of the Apsaras, Urvaśī.

They were celebrating a soma ceremony. Solemn, already intoxicated, the gods stood in their ranks. Then Urvaśī crossed the sacrificial clearing. The gods looked up, some thrilled, some obtuse. They had never seen such beauty, nor such a bold, easy manner, that paid them no attention. The Apsaras didn’t exist as yet. But the gods sensed that with Urvaśī a new kind of being had made its appearance. A kind they would always be chasing after. Urvaśī crossed the clearing with a swift, light step, her feet barely showing under a long robe fastened tight beneath the breast. But immediately her presence filled the entire space. As she passed. Mitra and Varuṇa simultaneously squirted off their seed. It fell into a large bowl, standing among the liturgical accessories. It was from that bowl that Vasiṣṭha together with Agastya, was born. That’s why people called him the Kumbhayoni, “He-whose-womb-was-a-jar.” He grew up feeling he was the child of Varuṇa and Urvaśī. They said he was “born from the mind of Urvaśī”—and not just from the seed of Varuṇa and Mitra.

Perhaps this is why Vasiṣṭha always lived in the greatest intimacy with Urvaśī, even if he never so much as touched her body. As for Varuṇa, being his son is a dangerous business. Often Varuṇa will generate in order to kill. Vasiṣṭha knew that, but he was proud of it too. He would always remember the time he had been alone with Varuṇa in the midst of the ocean. Once, at night, he entered his father’s palace by one of its hundred doors. He ran along everidentical corridors, as though in a mirror. He knew that no living creature had ever set foot here. He wasn’t looking for anything. He just wanted to be able to say: “I’ve been in my father’s house.” But while he ran he felt the terror of the cattle rustler upon him; his throat was dry. And when the cord of a snare tugged at his ankle, he was brought down like a cattle rustler. He didn’t even see his father. He found himself outside, propped against a wall like a bloated, worn-out goatskin, an old man suffering from dropsy. His father’s waters again. Everybody hurried past on the road to the market, the way one does hurry past the disfigured and useless, while his damp and flabby lips still whispered the words of ciphered hymns.