Roberto Calasso: Ka

In the end, Mṛtyu withdrew to the women’s hut at the western edge of the sacrificial clearing. He was beaten, humiliated, but not entirely undone. Prajāpati stared out at the empty arena, the clumps of shriveled grass around the edges. He knew now that this solitude, every solitude, is illusory, is inhabited. There is always an intruder — a guest? — hiding in the women’s hut.

The brahmans of the Vedic period followed the example of Prajāpati, who had dueled long with Death, vying with him in sacrifices — Prajāpati, who had been about to give up the game for lost, exhausted, inadequate, when the sampads flashed across his mind, numerical equivalence, geometry stamped on light, and then he saw how the vast dispersion of all that lived, but above all that died, could be articulated in relationships that did not deteriorate. What the mind sees, when it grasps a connection, it sees forever. The mind may perish, together with the body that sustains it, but the relationship remains, and is indelible. By creating an edifice of such connections, the brahmans imagined, as their forefather Prajāpati once had, that they had beaten Death. They persuaded themselves that evil was inexactitude. And thus died the more serene.

To bring forth “this,” idam , was a long torment for Prajāpati. And likewise to have it become “all this,” idaṃ sarvam , including the flies and the gadflies for which he was later reproached. Little by little he was overcome by a tremendous lassitude. A being would appear, and immediately some joint of his would come loose. The lymph shrank in his body like water in a puddle under a scorching sun. As his joints were coming apart, came apart, one after another, he gazed at bits of himself, spread out on the grass, like alien and incongruous objects. Suddenly he realized that all that was left of him was his heart. Beating, begrimed. As he struggled to see himself in that scrap of flesh, he realized he no longer recognized himself. He shrieked like a lunatic: “Self! Self, ātman !” Impassive, the waters heard him. Slowly they turned toward Prajāpati, as though to some relative fallen upon hard times. They gave him back his torso, so that it might once again protect his heart. Then they offered up a sacrificial ceremony to him, the agnihotra . It might turn out useful, someday, they said — if Prajāpati should ever wish to reassemble himself in his entirety.

As his children were hurrying away, Prajāpati had glimpsed a head of tawny, waving hair, a white shoulder, a shape that cast a spell. “Oh, if only she would come back…,” he thought. “I would like to join myself to her…” Everyone else had gone. Generating creatures seemed the most pointless of procedures. Before they appeared, he experienced a tension, a spasm within. But the creatures appeared only to disappear, in a cloud of dust. Then, in his loneliness, Prajāpati took a bowl and filled it with rice, barley, fruit, butter, honey. He looked like a beggar fussing with his few belongings. He offered his bowl to the void. “May that which is dear to me come back into me…,” he whispered. It was a windless night. Directly above the bowl he had placed on the ground trembled the light of Rohiṇī, the Tawny One, who ever so slightly shook her hair. One day they would call her Aldebaran.

One question tormented the Progenitor: Why were his children so irreverent, why had they fled from him? And the gods too, why did they pretend not to know him? There was no one to explain, everybody had gone. Prajāpati was left with the corrosive sensation — something that had always dogged him — of not really existing. He looked around in perplexity. All creatures were sure they existed except him, who had given them their existence. Without him, “this” would never have been, but now he felt superfluous in respect to the world, like milk spilled while being carried from one fire to another, milk that one then tosses away on an ants’ nest. Scarcely had he given birth to the other beings when Prajāpati realized he wasn’t needed.

The world was dense. Prajāpati empty, feverish. He lay on his back, unable to get up. Even his breathing grew heavier. He felt all the breaths that had animated him drift away and disappear. There were seven of them, and he bade farewell to each one, calling them by name. He felt he had “run the whole race.” No one came near to moisten his lips. The gods left Prajāpati to die like an old man people have no more time for than a bundle of rags.

Of all Prajāpati’s body, the only part left attached was the sacrificial stone. It alone stood upright amid the desolation. In the silence, the wind blew little eddies of sand off it. There was no end to them. That sand is what has been lost of Prajāpati, forever.

What did Prajāpati look like when he was torn apart at the joints and scattered throughout the world? To one side there was a cold, empty cooking pot.

That was Prajāpati.

When Prajāpati was exhausted, a white horse appeared, its muzzle bent to the ground. For a year it never lifted that muzzle. Slowly, from the horse’s head, aśva , a fig tree grew, aśvattha. The white horse, the fig tree: Prajāpati.

The gods were too plainly present to understand their Father, Prajāpati. They existed — that was all. They told the truth. They weren’t complicated enough. They didn’t know the death that “doesn’t die, for he is within the immortal.” They didn’t grasp the skein’s loose end dangling from the asat (which, whatever it may be, is the negation of what is: a-sat ). Prajāpati thought he would never speak to anyone now. But one day one of his sons, the most solitary and melancholy, eyes gray and distant, came to speak to the Father instead of running away from him. It was Varuṇa. He said: “Father, I want to be your pupil. I want sovereignty.” At the time Prajāpati was a dry old man who talked to himself and to animals. He laughed when he heard the word “sovereignty.” He said: “Son, you saw how much your brothers and sisters respected me. I was lucky they didn’t trample all over me. I know only what is of no use to you people…” “The only thing I care about is what you know,” said Varuṇa, undaunted. “Teach me for a hundred years.” The years passed swiftly and were the happiest of times for Father and son. When Varuṇa went back to his brothers, they got up from their seats, baffled and afraid. “Don’t be afraid, we are equals,” said Varuṇa. “The sovereignty you see in me is in you too. The only difference is that you don’t know it.”

Prajāpati’s numbers were thirteen, seventeen, thirty-four. Thirteen and seventeen were the numbers of surplus, that extra above a whole (twelve, sixteen) where Prajāpati found refuge. Everyone was careful to avoid them. Nobody wanted to meet him. Indeed, so determined were they not to that they forgot that they would meet him in those numbers. They avoided them and ignored him without even asking themselves why. But what of thirty-four? There were thirty-three gods. Prajāpati came before the gods and after the gods. In front of them and behind them. Always a little to one side. He was the shadow that precedes the body. The gods were born of him, but they didn’t want to remember that “all the gods are behind Prajāpati.” Transported by sacrifice, intoxicated, the gods conquered the sky, as if it had always been theirs. They didn’t design so much as a glance at the earth, where Prajāpati was left behind, a herdsman abandoned by his herd.

Unlike the gods, who have a shape and a story, or even many shapes and many stories, who overlap perhaps, perhaps merge together, or swap over, but always with names and shapes — unlike the gods, Prajāpati never lost his link with the nameless and shapeless, with that which has no identity. They didn’t know what to call him, apart from Lord of the Creatures, Prajāpati — and even that was too definite. Behind that, his secret name was Ka — Who? — and that was how he was invoked. Prajāpati was to the gods as the K. of Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle is to the characters of Tolstoy or Balzac. His stories were always the stories of a stranger, unknown to gods and men, the origin of gods and men.