Roberto Calasso - Ka

For a long time they walked through the shadows, following the tracks of the she-dog Saramā. Leading the way, face ever set in the same expression, Brhaspati cleared their path. Then came the Añgiras, all moving with the same rhythm, like a single person. Indra, with heavier step, brought up the rear. Having reached the horizon, they pressed on without a moment’s hesitation. They trod the back of the sky. Thus for days they marched while beneath them the deserts stretched out like vast carpets and the forests shrank to dark stains. From time to time they would be caught by gusts of opalescent stardust. Beneath them, far away, the earth. Above, close by, the stars, like ships in the night. They looked neither behind nor below. Without turning, Bṛhaspati raised his hand. Indra looked up and saw an immense wall of smooth gray rock. “Why does it seem so earthly? We’ve left the earth behind,” thought Indra. Above them the rock seemed to stretch away forever. It had the nobility, the coldness, of something that does not wish to exist. It ignored them, as it had always ignored everything. “Here it is,” said Bṛhaspati. They stared in silence. A long time passed before the Añgiras began their murmuring. In the indistinct stream of sound, occasional syllables flared and faded. Bṛhaspati was rapt in thought. Then he joined in with his sharp, almost shrill voice. Indra was the most uncertain, then followed the others’ example, with clear tones. They fell silent again. There was a distant shuffling. “They’re in their stall,” said Bṛhaspati. “The secret names, of the Cows number one and twenty. We must find them all,” he added. There was a faint light and an immense solitude. For a long time they stood motionless. Perhaps for years. There were no witnesses, unless hidden behind the glow of the Bear. All of a sudden, a few sharp, silvery syllables sheared off from the dull, monotone murmur. Chained together they pealed out. They became meters, recognizable as contours. They stood out in the air. From behind the rock a distant lowing answered, and swelled. From the darkness, the Cows. Slowly, like a fabric torn away thread by thread, a cleft began to open up in the rock. They gazed long on that thin line, etched in the grayness by some invisible hand. Ceaselessly they uttered the syllables. They composed names. A stream of light and dust, a clatter of hooves, a dazzling herd. The Cows emerged from the cave of Vala. The light was made of waters, which filled the sky. On the crest of the waves came the Dawns. Like songsters on a merry-go-round, clutching papier-mâché carriages, they rode the foaming billows, pink breasts leaning into an empty sky. Behind them, like a sovereign and a shepherd with his crook, who comes after his flock, appeared the Sun. Saramā barked. No one paid her any attention. Brhaspati, the Aṅgiras, and Indra looked on with glazed and happy eyes.

King Soma — they called him. He was a king and a substance. Of whatever deeds he did, little has come down to us. But he was the object of others’ deeds. Abducted, ambushed, retaken, sold. Then pressed, filtered, slain. These are the things one hears tell of Soma. Rather than a king, Soma is what makes someone king. He is sovereignty itself. He is what all who ever wished to be king have sought. He is a brightness buried in the waters. He is guarded by a Nymph-Snake. Then there was a Nymph and a Snake. Or just a Snake, or just a Nymph. No one who aspires to sovereignty can achieve his goal except by means of the Snake and the Nymph. The Nymph can bite into that substance, chew it, and then with a kiss slip it into the mouth of whichever hero, god, or man turns up.

Soma was brought to earth in the beak of an eagle. Then, they said, “The thinkers have found the form that gives joy, when the eagle brings the juice from afar.” Later, in the words of the hymns, he ascended from earth to sky on the “vessels of truth.” Like Agni an indefatigable messenger, he would sometimes sit awhile on the back of the sky and watch the two tribes he was constantly traveling between: the gods in their celestial palaces, the men on the earth. He yearned for horses, flocks, men, waters. Above all, waters. And the Ten Sisters. He knew it was dangerous to let them, the fingers, touch him. But it was immensely pleasurable too. So Soma sat motionless, head veiled, between the ten shrews and silent girls who brushed him throughout the sacrifice. So much for what took place on earth. In the sky, on the other hand, beyond the rocky vault, he would find the Seven Sisters who glide among the fringed branches of the Milky Way. More slender fingers thrust deep in the shadows. Islands, ponds, river meanders, a delta arching over everything. “How many games with numbers….” he once thought, smiling to himself. But he wasn’t confused. Those seven rivers that divided up the sky were mothers, sisters, lovers, subjects. He entered them like sun in water.

The soma was placed on two wooden boards carefully lined up over two holes dug out in the ground to amplify the sound. An ox skin was stretched over the boards. Five stones were placed on the skin in the shape of a quincunx. The stone in the middle was the biggest.

Soma arrived like a lover ten girls were waiting for: the fingers, the Ten Sisters. They would caress him, handle him, squeeze, kill — but only and always indirectly, through the stones. Because those ten girls were in league with the five stones. The lovers’ tryst was an ambush. Soma, King Soma, would arrive wrapped in a cloth, his robe. They would undo the knot, the turban, revealing a bundle of stalks. Then a celebrant would pick up the cloth and wrap it around the head of the grāvastut , “praiser of the stones.” The cloth would fall on his eyes, so that he couldn’t see. He would be a blind singer. The grārastut would speak with his face turned to the stones and the soma , would celebrate them while the liturgical motions were performed, while the stones murmured their part, rubbing against each other, crushing the soma , but he wouldn’t actually witness the murderous deed acted out before him, until the inebriating white sap hidden in the soma stalks began to flow.

What the Devas and the Asuras called amṛta (and they claimed to be its children too) men called soma , perhaps out of discretion, not wanting to insist too much on that nondeath that the soma did win for them, but never sufficiently, so that it was always having to be won all over again. Without the soma , nothing in the world could shine, nothing shone in the mind, nothing emanated sense. Around that substance — as likewise around the memory of it, indeed mostly around the memory of it — were composed gestures, deeds, hymns, adventures. Looking around themselves at everything in existence, men saw it was all made up of variations of just two elements: fire and this clear liquid. Agni and Soma, the Devourer and the Devoured. “Everything down here without exception is devouring or devoured.” Likewise themselves, moment after moment after moment, devoured, devouring.

As the ṛṣis saw it, creation, the tangible state of the world, was a secondary phenomenon, recent and modern. The first thing to understand was what made perception of creation possible. They saw a flux, the waters. In the waters an eye surfaced: the soma. This was what they meant when they sang, “The rivers that do not deceive, that have made the eye great.” Soma is, “among the gods, he who is awake.” By this we know him: that he is a god who is also an edible substance, and hence the most material; that he is perfect wakefulness, and hence the most immaterial, the nearest to the elusive flow of consciousness.