Roberto Calasso - Ka

The gods took Vāc to the borders of Gandharva country, like a group of suitors dating a dancing girl. They were in a daze from her perfume. But they thought: “The Gandharvas will be in even more of a daze than we are.” And others thought: “Perhaps it’s the last time we’ll ever see Vāc. We’ll be reduced to the same wretched creatures we were before. Why live at all, without Vāc and without Soma?”

Days went by. Then a delegation of Gandharvas suddenly turned up to speak to the gods. Normally carefree, cheeky, happy creatures, they seemed awkward, tormented. Almost unrecognizable. They began to speak with a solemn, uncertain tone: “You know that Vāc is among us.” Pause. “She has enchanted us all. With due respect we would like to ask if we might keep her.” The gods pretended a half smile of incredulity. “And what would we get in exchange? What could equal the worth of the most beautiful and enchanted of women, she whose bed lies in the waters, who bends Rudra’s bow, who pervades both earth and sky?” The Gandharvas lowered their eyes. Then one of them said softly: “Soma.” Apparently unimpressed, the gods accepted. “With her as a great naked one they bought Soma the King,” say the texts.

The Gandharvas were already walking away when one of the gods stopped them: “But what will you tell Vāc about this? You’re not planning to force her against her will… Vāc has to be courted. At least let it be hers to decide who she wants to be with. Let’s invite her to a party…” The Gandharvas accepted. They thought they knew Vāc now. They prepared themselves with great determination, studying the Vedas. They would sing her the most sublime and difficult hymns in impeccable voices. And so they did, at the party. The splendidly handsome Gandharvas looked like austere brahmans. Their singing was pure and exact. Then it was the gods’ turn. They had used their time to invent the lute. They danced, they played, they sang, with a lightness and impudence no one had ever seen in them before. When they had finished, Vāc turned to them and smiled. She went back to the gods. The texts say: “That is why even today women are nothing but frivolity.”

Vāc: Voice, Word. Although eminent scholars hardly noticed her existence, Vāc was a power at the world’s beginning. Her place is in the waters, which she herself fashioned. An elegant woman, decked in gold, celestial buffalo, queen of the thousand syllables, fatal bride, mother of emotions and perfumes. Of the men she singles out Vāc says: “He whom I love, whoever it may be, I give him strength, I make him a brahman, a ṛṣi , a wise man.” There is no merit or virtue of any value in one whom Vāc has not singled out. He will forever be someone who looks without seeing. Since Vāc “knows all, but does not move all.” Guardian of inequality, she descends from above and touches only her chosen ones. Her help brings salvation. It was she who suggested she be bartered as a prostitute so that the gods could get back the soma . Quick to take offense, every intonation vibrant, her anger, should someone neglect her or prefer another, is terrible. Then she leaves the gods’ camp behind, but without going back to the Asuras. She wanders around the no-man’s-land between the two armies. Life dries up, things lose their shine. The word becomes treacherous to touch, to articulate. No one wants to speak. There’s a shadow in the undergrowth. No longer the painted woman with her gleaming jewels whom everyone desired, she approaches like a lean lioness, ready to tear her victims apart: that’s Vāc, now.

On the seventh day of the moonlit fortnight of March they met together where the Sarasvatī silts up in desert sands. They were setting off to celebrate a rite that was also a journey from which one might not return — from which some did not want to return. They headed east, against the flow of the Sarasvati, because “the sky is against the flow.” And the place they hoped to reach was none other than the “bright world,” the svargaloka , the sky that once the gods had conquered. The light of that world opened out in a place called Plakṣa Prāsravaṇa, where the Sarasvatī came down to earth after her celestial journey, spreading out in ponds and meanders. Before setting off, they consecrated themselves to Vāc, to the Word, because “Sarasvatī is the Word and the Word is the way of the gods.” Traveling toward the source of the river, they would be traveling toward the source of the Word, whence it vibrates. “They go even to Plakṣa Prāsravaṇa; Plakṣa Prāsravaṇa is the furthest border of the Word; at the furthest border of the Word, there is the bright world.” They said to themselves: “The Word, Vāc, is the only way to reach the bright world. Vāc is Sarasvatī, this running river that silts up here, in our world, and loses itself. Setting out from this point, from the sands of our world, we must follow the river upstream. It is a long, hard undertaking, that goes against the way of things, which know only how to go down. The Word, and these waters, are the one help we have. We shall follow the Word, so as to be able to leave it behind. A mere span to the north of Plakṣa Prāsravaṇa, the Word is no more. Only something that shines. The center of the world.”

The gṛhapati , first among the celebrants and leader of the expedition, took a cart chock and hurled it as far away as he could. As he hurled it, he yelled, and the others yelled with him. They yelled and beat the ground, because “yell and blow are shows of strength”—and strength was something they needed. A herd of cows came after them, patient and silent. There might be ten, there might be a hundred. Where the chock fell they kindled the fire called gārhapatya . Then thirty-six paces to the east they prepared the fire āhavanīya . Thus for forty-eight days they walked along the banks of the Sarasvatī, sacrificing according to the phases of the moon, tossing the chock toward the east and stopping where it fell, yelling. That was their life: walking, yelling, “ tribu prophétique aux prunelles ardentes .” Each time they stopped to sacrifice, they would take some of the sand left on the altar and carry it to the next place. A traveler who came across them without knowing anything of their ways would have thought them mad.

Walking upstream along the Sarasvatī was not without its dangers. Once, the daunting huntresses of the Śālvas attacked a group of celebrants and killed their grhapati , whose name was Sthūra. The others mourned him. But one of the celebrants saw their dead friend ascending to the sky along the line of their sacrificial fires. Another said: “Don’t weep for Sthūra. Whoever dies along this path ascends directly to the heavens. Don’t mourn these deaths. Once we were wretched, now the heavens await us.”

If they got as far as Plakṣa Prāsravaṇa, they would find a tree. At its feet rose the water that descends from the Milky Way, that is the Milky Way. The nearer one gets to that place, the more one feels the Word wear thin. “The breeze passes through the fabric,” thought the celebrants. The Word stretched thinner and thinner, to the limit. The more they sensed it, the closer they knew they were to the “bright world.” And, immediately beyond the point where the Word ended, they had reached their goal. But there were other ways the rite might be accomplished. One day they realized they had lost all they had. They woke — and the cows were gone. Stolen? Run off? Or the gṛhapati might die along the way. Perhaps he was killed in an enemy ambush. Or perhaps he just died on his feet. Even in these cases the rite had been accomplished. Or they might discover, one day, that the ten cows they had set out with were now a hundred. And again this might mean that the rite was accomplished. But whatever happened, when it was over, before returning to their lives so as not to go mad—“If he did not descend again to this world, he would either depart to a region which lies beyond all human beings, or he would go mad,” warned the Pāncavimśa Brāhmana— they bathed in a delightful bend of the Sarasvatī, in Kārapacava, just as Cyavana had immersed himself with the Aśvins in another meander of the Sarasvatī, rediscovering his youth.