Roberto Calasso - Ka

Soon after the flight of Agni and Soma, Indra struck. Crushed and creased up in his agony like an empty wineskin, Vṛtra looked at his killer and whispered: “Now you are what I was.” The translatio imperü was complete, and the shapeless, shoulderless creature chose to seal it with his own words. But what was to become of that gasping carcass that had until so recently contained the supreme powers? “Nothing is dissolved, everything passes on,” thought Indra. “Split me in two,” groaned Vrtra. So Indra split him into two parts, which went on swelling and contracting, the way a lizard’s severed tail will go on flicking from side to side. Still dripping with soma , one part moved toward the sky: that was the moon. The other became the bellies of men. They have never ceased to expand and contract since.

Agni was the last of four brothers. Three died before him, were lost. They all suffered the anguish of being “yoked.” Fire is ever in mourning for those brothers.

In the beginning, Agni was more like a spy than anything else. Hidden away, he watched the ṛṣis ’ brides about their baths: they shone like altars of gold, like white slivers of moon, like crests of flame. Agni thought: “I shouldn’t get excited and desire them. When I am in the hearth at home, I can gaze at them for as long as I want and lick their feet too.” In the evening, the women stretched out by the smoldering logs and bared their feet. Agni loitered with them alone, studied them, desired them. He knew the soles of their feet, the folds of their robes. He slowed his flame down to be able to watch them as long as possible. His desire intensified.

The gods had gathered around Agni. They seemed friendly enough, but they were surrounding him. “We’d like you to be our hotṛ ,” one began. “I don’t feel I’m a priest, I’m not up to it. Three of my brothers have already died that way. I don’t want to be useful to anyone. I just want to burn. They ran like madmen between earth and sky. Then one by one, they disappeared. I am no better or worse than they. So why try again? I cannot bear to have a yoke around my neck. Even if it is studded with emeralds. I don’t want to be obliged to follow just one path,” said Agni — and he fled. He wanted to hide, but where? Varuṇa is present, even when two strangers are plotting together. There’s nowhere safe to hide in this world. So Agni decided to hide himself in himself. For fire, hiding in oneself means in the waters. That was where he had once appeared from. Agni looked for a pond, for rushes rustling in the wind. He slipped into a bamboo cane. Finally he sensed that there was nothing above him. All was silent, no sound of messengers. In the pond a sleepy frog felt the water burn his soft, white belly. He looked around, nervously. Who could be disturbing this stillness? Was Agni back? Hopping slowly along, the frog went to find the gods. “Looking for Agni, by any chance? Check the canes in my pond,” he said. Once again Agni was surrounded. But this time they grabbed him like a wretched runaway. Yet still the gods spoke sweetly to him, reassuring him: “We won’t do you any harm, we won’t hurt you.” Agni bowed his head: “I accept, but don’t forget my brothers, let a part of the offering go to them.” “Don’t torment yourself, Agni,” said the gods. “Your brothers will always be near you. They will be the three sticks that mark out the fireplace. Something will fall on them too…” “If that’s how things stand…,” said Agni, sadly.

The mind was confined in a compound, like the Cows, like the Dawns. Whatever happened, happened inside a fence, inside the walls of a palace, inside a cave sealed by a great stone. Outside foamed the immense ocean of the world, barely audible beyond a thick wall of rock. Inside, in the compound, was another liquid, a “pond,” which, however small, was nevertheless equivalent to the ocean without. The ocean was outside the mountain but inside the mountain too. By splitting the rock, Indra allowed the inside ocean, “the ocean of the heart.” hṛdyá samudrá , to communicate with the outside ocean, the palpable ocean of the world. It was a moment that opened up a new way of knowing. For the ṛṣis it was knowledge itself, the only knowledge they wished to cultivate. Not the mind shut away in its airy cage reconstructing a conventional image that corresponded point by point to the vast cage of the cosmos. But, quite the contrary: the waters of the mind flowing into those of the world and the waters of the world flowing into those of the mind to the point where they become indistinguishable one from the other. The ultimate difference between the knowledge passed on by the ṛṣis and every other knowledge consists in this: for the ṛṣis and all their descendants, knowledge begins when the Cows flee from the compound, when the Dawns awake, when the Waters flow through the cleft in the rock, when the doors of the mind are thrown open and it becomes impossible to say which waters are flowing in and which flowing out, what is substance and what is the substance of the mind. And everybody else? They live in ignorance of the compound, the rock, the Cows, the Dawns, the Waters. It’s hardly surprising if misunderstandings abound.

How often Indra was greeted as he who had opened the rock of Vala, who had freed the Cows, who had let the Dawns loose in the sky. But Indra knew it wasn’t true. And he knew that others knew too: the watchful eyes of Bṛhaspati and the Añgiras were ever on him. He couldn’t pretend with them. For it had been Indra, the hero, who had fallen into line behind them, the priests — and not vice versa. It was from them that he learned to transform his harmless babble into a whisper that worked, that changed things.

So Indra preferred to tell the story of how he had slain Vṛtra. Here too he had been helped — and helped a great deal. But the story could be presented as a duel between two champions. And when handed down by word of mouth, that was all that would be left: a monster and a hero, a handsome hero with a blond beard that dripped with soma . Yet nobody ever took Indra completely seriously. Alone, downcast, gazing at the stagnant water of a pond, he would say to himself: “You can make the whole world — and still it’s not enough. They’ll always look down on you with their arrogant, unblinking eyes.” They, the brahmans.

Indra wasn’t an intellectual god — and the ṛṣis often treated him with disdain for his hotheaded adulteries, his tawdry adventures. But at bottom Indra existed to accomplish a single deed: the splitting of the cosmic mountain. Without that enterprise there would have been no knowledge. Especially not the knowledge the ṛṣis cultivated. All this we owe to that vigorous, impure god on whose body the ṛṣis mockingly tattooed scores upon scores of vulvas. It wouldn’t be right to say that Indra gave an order to nature and made it possible for the world to exist. There was already an order — even with that mountain looming between earth and sky and keeping its treasures prisoner. What was missing was the flow within the order. That was what Indra made possible.

Indra is needed because without him there are things that can’t be done. But then he is left to one side, a cumbersome relic. A Western cousin of his, Apollo, loosed his arrow at Python, coiled up like Vrtra on the mountain at Delphi. Indra too could claim to have slain the monster. But when Apollo had conquered Delphi, he made it the place of possession, which is composed of divination and syllogism. Indra wasn’t in a position to aim so high. With ṛta in the sense of “order,” he still had much to do, when he settled the world down, clipped the wings of horse and mountain, or scooped out the beds of the celestial rivers. In his role as cosmic engineer he was respected and even loved. But what did he know of ṛta in the sense of “truth”? In only one of the seventy-seven times it speaks of him does the Ṛg Veda grant Indra the epithet ṛtāvan , “endowed with truth.” The realm of the true word, the realm to which nature answers, was closed to Indra. Others had claimed it before him, severe and secretive figures who shunned him as a parvenu. Hounded by guilt and derision, ultimately ousted by a child god, Skanda, after having so often been mocked himself for being new and self-made, Indra ended up wandering around like a melancholy king beset by ungrateful subjects who look the other way when he passes by.