Roberto Calasso - Ka

Kaśyapa said: “You are continually finding the word ‘sacrifice’ in the texts and you ask yourselves: why this word, this obscure act, and why so soon? Why does it come before all others? Why doesn’t it appear, if appear it must, after the completion of the more basic actions? To know the answer, you must first remember. See the beginning. ‘With the eye that is mind, in thought I see those who were the first to offer this sacrifice.’ So say the texts. Who were the first to offer the sacrifice? What was there to see?

“The sky was empty. On the earth but two groups of beings, gods and ṛṣis —those gods and those ṛṣis who were called Ádityas and Aṇ Watching the sky, they wandered around the earth, and desired. They desired the sky. Each group knew the other harbored the same desire. They watched each other from a distance. Each wanted to make their move before the other. Canny and deceitful, the gods managed to sacrifice first. No sooner had they conquered the sky than they asked themselves: ‘How may this celestial region be made unattainable by men?” Immediately a thought came to them: ‘Wipe out the trail.’ They sucked the essence from the sacrifice until it was quite dry. Then they decided to hide the essence, the way bees hide honey. Down below, on earth, they could still see the sacrificial clearing: ashes, sticks, heaps of stones, grass, logs. It looked like an abandoned bonfire. But you could sense that something had happened there. So the gods took the sacrificial pole, the yūpa to which the victim was tied, and used it like a broom to smooth over the earth, cover up and confuse. That’s why the pole is called yūpa , because the gods used it to wipe something out, ayopayan. Soon enough the Aṅgiras turned up. They suspected a trick, because the gods had slid off. They looked around, in that speechless clearing. They sang and kindled their inner fires. They said: ‘There must be some telltale sign, something must be peeping out in this clearing.’ All they could hear was a rustle of ferns. The Añgiras prowled around, cautiously, silently, taking care where they put their feet. A turtle popped up out of the grass. The Añgiras exchanged glances. ‘It must be this, then, the sacrifice…,’ they said. ‘Let’s stop it.’ As it turned out, the turtle was indeed the sacrificial cake. They surrounded it. They invoked the names of many gods, to stop it. The turtle paid no attention and went right on walking. They pronounced the name of Agni. At that the turtle stopped. It drew in its legs. They picked it up, heaped together some wood, lit the fire. They wrapped the turtle in Agni. It was their offering to the gods. Thus the Añgiras too conquered the sky. From that day on they have plied back and forth between earth and sky.

“I was that turtle.”

Atri said: “Since we watched everything from above, from the light of the Bear, we were the model of those who observe, those who watch over: the brahmans. Only one thing distinguished us from them, our not performing a certain gesture: we were not obliged to eat the prāśitra , the ‘first portion,’ that piece of wounded flesh, torn by Rudra’s arrow and no larger than a grain of barley, which a brahman on the contrary has to eat. If the brahman doesn’t open his mouth to take the prāśitra , the sacrifice will not be able to heal. The brahman eats the guilt, he assimilates it into his circulation. Thus he ‘restores what was torn asunder.’ The tearing is within the ceremony — and the ceremony itself serves to heal it. Everything is within the sacrifice. With the sacrifice one heals the sacrifice. I say this so that you might not imagine it easy to escape from sacrifice. In every sacrifice there is the uncertainty of a journey toward an unknown destination. ‘When exactly did the journey begin?’ two priests asked themselves. ‘Did it go to the home of the gods?’ ‘Did it really go?’ ‘It went!’ ‘I ask the gods that they may listen!’ ‘That they may acknowledge it!’ The sacrificer must make himself heard, must make himself seen. What was the vehicle of sacrifice? A chariot, made up of meters. The gāyatrī and jagatī meters are the sides of the chariot. If the word doesn’t scan, the chariot won’t travel. And vāc , ‘word,’ is Vāc, the divine maiden who steers the mind toward the sky, who supports it on its journey, nourishes it, helps it.”

Jamadagni said: “We are here to speak because struck down — quite for how long we do not know, though the first signs came early — by the disease of the ritual. The building was still majestic, the joints meticulously executed, there were no cracks. Or rather, only the prescribed cracks, the three bricks with the holes, heralds of the immense that remained outside our construction. But would it be enough? Mightn’t a murderous wind blow up one day, to destroy it all? Mightn’t the tension slacken one day, the frail ship of the ceremonial word go down in a storm? And above all: hadn’t our presumptuous idea of building been of its very nature vain, since building inevitably implies a series of gestures, and thus falls within the category of action? Action: a mysterious, terrible word. Yājñavalkya and Ārtabhāga withdrew to discuss the matter. Not all were to hear. Not all would be able to bear that truth. Can action, action of whatever kind, free us? Or is action perhaps the main thing, indeed the only thing, from which we must free ourselves?”

Atri said: “Even before breathing, men desired. But what is desire? Before our eyes, there is nothing; behind our eyes something lights up: an image, a few words that return obsessively, or just one word. The world is a desert: where can we find the expedient that would turn that presence behind the eyes into something before the eyes? There was action, the gesture that changes things. But do action and gesture belong to he who accomplishes them? If they do, to accomplish an action once implies accomplishing it always. If not, every action that seeks to evoke the object of desire is aleatory. The object might appear, but only the way an animal might cross one’s path in the forest. And this was exactly our experience. At which point we began to suspect that actions do not belong to he who acts. But in that case, what does belong to such a person? Where does the action begin? It was important to know that to understand where what belongs to he who acts ends. There was the danger that everything might come apart, that even the desiring mind might start to doubt whether it really belonged to itself: for isn’t a desire similar to an action? Isn’t it, like an action, something that appears, complete with its own shape, its momentum and direction? But, if the two resembled each other, perhaps we might pass from one to the other — and from the latter, once again through resemblance, to the object desired. And what was the nature of the object desired? A place, a being, a state, a substance: something unique, not to be mistaken for anything else. Something irreversible. Something that, once it appears, must ever belong to what is. But where to find an action that has these characteristics? Whoever drinks water will always repeat the same gesture of drinking water. The action has nothing unique or irreversible about it. It can be repeated as often as one comes across running water. Unless there happens to be a radical difference between one example of running water and another. But no one ever claimed as much. Rather we asked ourselves what action might be of its nature both unique and irreversible. And linked to something’s appearing. Perhaps it was this latter consideration, the most important aspect of all, which pointed the way. To cause something to appear was beyond us. But to cause something to disappear? Things can resemble each other by contrast too. So we posed ourselves a question that sounded like a riddle: what is that action that is unique and irreversible — and can evoke the unique and irreversible? One day someone came up with the answer: Causing something to disappear. But we were bound to recognize that, at least as far as men are concerned, causing to disappear is another way of saying ‘killing.’ Perhaps this partly explains why a delicate halo of mourning surrounds every desire achieved. In the vain, formless, undefined realm of gesture we had succeeded in finding one, and only one, this one, whose characteristics corresponded to those of the object of desire. So we placed our quiet trust, śraddhā , in this: that that object might prove to be the last link in the chain of that particular action. The link where to that which disappears there corresponds, in another part of the chain, something that appears: the fruit. That was sacrifice. But at the beginning, between ourselves, we called it ‘the wheel of desires.’ That wheel is also the punishment to which desire is ever tied.”