Roberto Calasso - Ka

“Apart from the building of the altar of fire, no sacrifice will ever be enough to make us immortal, because each uses too many elements or too few. They don’t have the right number. And the right number is the one that corresponds to the wholeness of time: ten thousand, eight hundred bricks, as many as there are hours in the year, which is Prajāpati.

“But what gives us this faith, śraddhā , in number and building? Seen from afar, we must look like bricklayers gone mad. From close up, we are a challenge to find a sense in what we do. There’s a moment when we scatter sand on the altar. Why sand? ‘It’s the part of Prajāpati that was lost.’ A vast and numberless part. Who could ever count it? When Prajāpati came to pieces, most of him was lost. And, ‘Prajāpati is the whole brahman ,’ the texts tell us. That dust, sole inhabitant of the heavens, reminds us how much has been lost.

“We are devotees of the distinct and the articulate, but the infinite festers in our bones. We must circumscribe it, as our skin circumscribes a weave of stuff in which we might otherwise lose ourselves, and which includes, among other things, death herself. Yet this is the only way to live. We are not so ingenuous as to imagine that our building is sound. There is nothing more flimsy and fragile than sacrifice and the place of sacrifice. If it is to work, it must be wrapped in the cloud of the immeasurable and enclose the immeasurable within itself. The greatest must be contained and embraced in the smallest. Thus the sand. Thus the silence, which gives rhythm to the rites. Thus the murmuring that sometimes goes on behind. The sand, the silence, the murmuring: emissaries of the incommensurable. A gesture to that part of Prajāpati we can never reconstitute. Amorphous, inexhaustible.”

In the beginning, Prajāpati didn’t know who he was. Only when the gods issued from him, when they took on their qualities, their profiles, when Prajāpati himself had shared out their shapes, forgetting none, sovereignty and splendor included, only then did the question present itself. Indra had just killed Vṛtru. He was still shaken by the terror of it, but he knew he was sovereign of the gods. He came to Prajāpati and said: “Make me what you are, make me great.” Prajāpati answered: “Then who, ka , am I?” “Exactly what you just said,” said Indra. In that moment Prajāpati became Ka. In that moment he understood, understood it all. He would never know the joys of limitation, the repose in a straightforward name. Even when they had recomposed him, in the ten thousand, eight hundred bricks of the altar of fire, he would always be a shape shot through by the shapeless, if only in those porous stones, svayamātṛṇṇa , avid of emptiness, that were placed at the center of the altar and allowed it to breathe.

Home of the dark germination of all that is, Prajāpati could hardly have an identity comparable to those who issued from him. Yet, in time, he would take his place alongside them — a god like any other, to whom victims are sacrificed, oblations dedicated. Spared the burden of bringing it about, he observed life more calmly now. It relaxed him to mix with the other gods, to lose himself among them. He liked the lower ranks best. Life was a spectacle that no longer depended on him. He loved to watch it, but would still get pains in all his joints whenever he was grazed by the wing of a desire. Which was little more than a memory now. For even desire had migrated into innumerable others. So Prajāpati waited for the moment when he would be forgotten. It began imperceptibly: long liturgies, lists of gods, from which his name would suddenly be missing. Gestures forgotten. Offerings overlooked. Were they considered superfluous, perhaps, for a god so discreet as not to demand them? For a first, long moment, no one noticed, in the celestial crush, that Prajāpati was gone. Everything went on as it always had, no function faltered. For a long time nobody realized, until one evening, as the shadows drew in, someone began to tell the legend of the beginning. At which, once again, there emerged, if only in words, the image of an elusive, indistinct, faceless figure, who had no name, and whom they could only call Prajāpati, Progenitor.

The Father saw the dawn. He saw the beauty of the Daughter rising. In the first cold light he was filled by a flame, to the tips of his fingernails. The flame beat there like a wave on rocks — then retreated. Now, in that leaden light, he wanted to go further. But was there a further? Had there ever been one? It was the body of Uṣas, Dawn, first white, now pink, that offered itself to the Father, as the light climbed upward.

The Father desired. This was no longer the heat he lived by, the furnace within that lit up the cavern of the mind. No, this heat was already darting out from his body, licking along Uṣas’s soft skin. The Father got closer and closer to the Daughter, in silence. But why did Uṣas suddenly have the hide of an antelope? The Father was aware of raising antelope’s hooves toward her, to caress her. A stronger light mingled with the radiance of the dawn, a light that emanated from the Father, but dazzled him too. He wasn’t sure whether he was embracing Uṣas’s breasts or the soft fur of an antelope. Prajāpati wrapped himself right around the Daughter, penetrated her, just as she hitherto had nestled in him. For the first time the Father’s phallus opened a path into the darkness of Dawn. Neither spoke. Dawn and heat were superimposed, one on the other, coinciding, as if inside and outside were the same cloth, faintly stirred by the wind. Around them there had never been anything distinct, only now did it seem that an outline began to form. The heat grew, almost to incandescence. All that could be sensed was the breathing of Prajāpati and Uṣas, the almost imperceptible movement of their bodies glued together.

Slowly a dark figure detached itself from the shadow, an archer. His was the first profile, of a darkness that a blade of light was carving out of darkness. He bent his bow. The more he bent it, the more the twined bodies were flooded with incandescence. Rudra yelled as he let fly his arrow. Like a flash Prajāpati withdrew from Uṣas. The arrow pierced his groin, opening a wound no bigger than a grain of barley, while his phallus squirted its seed onto the ground. Prajāpati’s mouth foamed with anger and pain. On her back, almost imperceptibly, the abandoned Uṣas trembled.

Such was the scene that lies behind all other scenes, the scene every other scene repeats, alters, distorts, breaks up, reconstructs, for it is from this dawn scene that the world descends. Were there witnesses? All around was nothing but emptiness — and a gust of wind. Yet there were those who saw, silent and greedy-eyed: thirty-three (or three hundred and thirty-nine? or three thousand, three hundred and thirty-nine?) gods crowded the balconies of the sky. They exchanged glances, annoyed. They said: “Prajāpati is doing something that’s never been done before.” They looked around for someone able to punish him. None of the gods had the power to strike Prajāpati. They exchanged glances again, conspiracy in their eyes, all thinking the same name, never pronounced: Rudra.

The gods harbored an ancient rancor toward Prajāpati. They didn’t understand this solitary, suffering father whom they were constantly obliged to heal through sacrifice. Above all they couldn’t forgive him for having generated Death. For though the gods were the first to gain the sky and had fed ever since on amṛta , the liquid that is the “immortal,” they knew that one day, however immensely far off, Death would catch up with them. They were terrified of blinking their eyelids, because they knew that anything that blinks dies. With staring eyes, they watched the hard stones of their palaces, waiting for a veil of dust to settle there, harbinger of earth and death.