Ardor (12 page)

This way of dealing with the mystery of election brings us face-to-face with an implacable difference and peculiarity, from the brahminic point of view. An average Westerner today (but most probably, also, an ancient), in front of a whole forest where he has to choose one tree among many, all equally suitable, would say: the first, or the last, or one at random. All three criteria are rejected by the Vedic ritualist. We might, with some surprise but no difficulty, accept the reasoning that leads to rejecting the choice of the first and the last. But the more delicate and difficult point is the exclusion of the third (and more obvious) possibility: the random choice. Here we are dealing with choice—and not only that, but the choice of something that makes the sacrifice possible. And eliminating, or at least circumventing, arbitrary discretion in this choice means abrogating the sovereignty of chance where it hurts most. But will the sacrificer succeed in his intent? Not exactly. Chance will be circumscribed, but not removed altogether. Above all, it will be
covered.
The choice is presented as motivated—but the motivation has to coexist with discretion. Searching for the chosen object “on the nearer side of the farther” and “on the farther side of the nearer” may sound like gibberish, but indicates an act that is not casual and yet can only remain impenetrable, even if carried out by an ordinary officiant and not by an inaccessible divinity. This guarantees that what happens—and above all what happens at the crucial moment, that of the choice—is not totally arbitrary, but nor can it be reconstructed through a finite series of steps. This is what will one day, with Gödel, be called “undecidable.” It is as if radical indeterminacy had taken over thought here, detaching itself from chance as well as from any
ratio.
While not being casual, the choice remains impenetrable, above all for he who has performed it.

How long must the sacrificial post be? Five cubits, it is stated, with a wealth of explanations: “For fivefold is the sacrifice and fivefold is the animal sacrificed and there are five seasons in the year.” That should be enough.

But following immediately after are the reasons—no less convincing—why it ought to be six cubits or eight or nine or eleven, twelve, thirteen, fifteen. An example of the brahminic luxuriance of correspondences, which immediately brings to mind something that cancels them out. And their incorrigible arbitrariness. A frequent mistake, which ignores the fact that certain sizes are ruled out: the post cannot be seven, ten, or fourteen cubits.
Not
everything is therefore equivalent. But the crucial passage is at the end, where there is a discussion about the possibility of the post
not
even being measured. The “immeasurable,” like the continuum, the implicit or the indistinct, is to be considered and respected, above all when it is a thunderbolt, if we remember that the first thunderbolt, that of Indra, was itself “immeasurable”—and thanks to its power the gods conquered everything. Here we see two fundamental impulses in brahminic thought brought together: the exasperating mania for exhaustive classification on the one hand; and the underlying willingness to recognize an immensity that overwhelms everything and can be felt everywhere.

*   *   *

We read at school and in science books that men were first hunters and gatherers, then herdsmen and tillers of the soil. Two stages that divide the history of humanity over hundreds of thousands of years, agriculture occupying by far the smaller part. But it would be enough to say that people lived in an initial phase
with
animals (killing them and being killed by them) and in a later phase
on
animals (through their domestication). They nevertheless had to kill animals, whether hunting them or butchering them. What changed was the relationship with the creatures they killed: consanguineous and kindred in the first phase, useful and submissive in the second.

Moreover, the description “hunting and gathering” conflates two distinct phases. Before being gatherers and hunters, people had to be gatherers and
hunted.
Certain kinds of predator were far better at hunting than humans were. The fangs of tigers or wolves were far more powerful than human hands. But this gray area of prehistory is lost in the description “hunting and gathering.” That was when, over a period of tens of thousands of years, the irreversible transition to hunting took place.

*   *   *

The
Odyssey
announces it from the sixth verse of the first book: Odysseus is
he who remains alone.
An anomalous situation, which required a whole poem to express it—and the whole of literature afterward, up to Kafka. No one in the
Iliad
remained alone. Even Achilles, the loner par excellence, was surrounded by many. As for Odysseus, he certainly hadn’t been looking for solitude—circumstances had brought it upon him. An irreparable rift causes him, one day, to become separated from his companions. It is one single episode, enough to divide his fate and his name from that of all the others forever: Odysseus is the only one who hasn’t fed upon the Sun’s herds of cattle.

Already in open sea, his ship was approaching the island of Thrinacia when Odysseus heard a mysterious sound: a distant and continuous rumble. He then understood: the sound came from the animals on that island which Circe and Tiresias had warned him to avoid. Guided by the two radiant daughters of Helios, Phaethusa and Lampetia, those animals—“seven herds of cattle and as many flocks of beautiful sheep / of fifty beasts each”—were the Sun’s herds. Each of them the substance of a parcel of time, one of the three hundred and fifty days of the lunar year. They were beings that “do not give birth / and never die.” They were everlasting life. Odysseus knew he should not have sailed so close to that animal sound. None of the many intelligent stratagems for which he would become famous went as far, none penetrated the ambulacra of divinity as much as his steadfast obedience to that mysterious prohibition. It is useless being clever unless you’re a theologian. And Odysseus, that day, was an outstanding theologian.

Not so his companions. Wracked by hunger, blinded by necessity (“all forms of death are abominable for wretched mortals / but the most miserable is death by hunger and through hunger to suffer fate,” said Eurylochus then to Odysseus’s companions), they surrounded and slaughtered the Sun’s herds. What then took place was a primordial wound that could never be healed. Life killed life. It was the first guilty act, from which all others followed. But men are never straightforward. They wanted to disguise their greed by staging a sacrifice, even without the right ingredients (libation wine, barley) for performing the ceremony. Food was no longer a secondary consequence of the sacrifice. On the contrary, the sacrifice was the pretext for devouring the food. And Odysseus’s companions, in fact, feasted for six days on the flesh of the slaughtered animals, “the finest of the Sun’s cows.” They had chosen them carefully—and far exceeded the extent of their hunger. They ate for the pleasure and sense of supremacy felt by those who eat dead flesh.

Yet it was not dead flesh. When they laid the skewers on the fire, they realized those pieces of flesh were moving, as if they were breathing. And above all, they gave out a deep, endless sound. No one else witnessed that scene of supreme horror. There was only one outside observer, the only one who watched and did not eat: Odysseus. It was then that their destinies broke apart forever. Odysseus had suddenly become the
lone man
(“I am one against many, and you force my hand,” he had said to his companions, heralds of the whole of humanity). He knew he would continue to live among those who kill life. But he would no longer have any fellow travelers. They would soon all be drowned. Odysseus’s only company then was the gleaming-eyed goddess, Athena.

*   *   *

Men today, who recoil from sacrifice, bow their heads when faced with the self-sacrifice of a god who creates the world (Praj
ā
pati) or who saves it (Christ). Self-sacrifice is the very essence of the sublime, heroic gesture. Abnegation marks nobility of spirit.

But, apart from the gods, self-sacrifice is also practiced by the animals. There is much evidence, above all in central and eastern Asia, of animals who
yield
to the hunter to be killed. They are moved to pity by his hunger and offer themselves to his arrows. The supreme gesture belongs to gods and animals. Men can only imitate them.

IV

THE PROGENITOR

The god at the origin of everything didn’t have a name but a title: Praj
ā
pati, Lord of the Creatures. He discovered this when one of his sons, Indra, told him: “I want to be what you are.” Praj
ā
pati asked him: “But who (
ka
) am I?” And Indra answered: “‘Exactly what you just said.’ So Praj
ā
pati became Ka.”

Indra wanted his father’s “greatness” or, according to others, his “splendor.” And Praj
ā
pati had no difficulty in divesting himself of it. So Indra became king of the gods, even though Praj
ā
pati had been “the sole lord of creation.” But it was neither “greatness” nor “splendor” that made Praj
ā
pati the “god alone above the gods,” a formula that smacks of incompatibility only for latter-day readers in the West. What Praj
ā
pati could not renounce was something else: the unknown, the irreducible unknown. At the moment in which he knew he was Ka, Praj
ā
pati became guarantor of the uncertainty involved in questioning. He guaranteed that it would always remain. If Ka didn’t exist, the world would be a sequence of questions and answers, at the end of which everything would be fixed once and for all—and the unknown could be erased from life. But since Praj
ā
pati “is everything”—and Praj
ā
pati is Ka—there is a question in every part of everything that finds an answer in the name of everything. And this in turn takes us back to the question, which opens onto the unknown. But this is not an unknown that is due to the inadequacy of the human intellect. It is unknown even for the god who includes it in his name. Divine omniscience does not extend to itself.

No wonder the gods, sons of Praj
ā
pati, increasingly ignored their father, to the point of forgetting him. For a power to be exercised, it has to be based on certainty. And Praj
ā
pati, though he was the one “whose commandments all the gods acknowledge,” had delegated the exercise of his sovereignty without raising any resistance. He had kept back for himself only the unknown, which was encapsulated in his name. An unknown that surrounded every certainty like an undrainable ocean lapping an island. For the administration of ordinary life, the preeminence of the unknown was a danger—and had to be obliterated. For the fathomless life of the mind—at the point where the mind reconnected with its origin, Praj
ā
pati—it was the very breath of life. In the same way that Ka had been “the sole breath of the gods.”

*   *   *

Praj
ā
pati: the creator god who is not entirely sure he exists. Praj
ā
pati is the god who has no identity, who is the origin of all insoluble paradoxes. All identities arise from him, who himself has none. And so he takes a step back, or to one side, allowing the rush of mortal beings, ready to forget him, to carry on. But they will then return to him, to ask him the wherefore. And the wherefore can only be similar to what made them first emerge: a rite, a composition of elements, of forms, a temporary—the only—guarantee of existence. Compared with every monotheistic god, and with all other plural deities, Praj
ā
pati is more intimate and more remote, more elusive and more familiar. Any reasoning person continually encounters him wherever speech and thought arise, wherever they dissolve away. That is Praj
ā
pati.

The
Ś
atapatha Br
ā
hma
ṇ
a
returns on innumerable occasions to the scene that takes place “at the beginning,” when Praj
ā
pati “desired.” And on most occasions we read that Praj
ā
pati wanted to reproduce himself, wanted to know other beings apart from himself. But there is a passage where it says that Praj
ā
pati had another desire: “May I exist, may I be generated.” The very first being to be unsure of his own existence was thus the Progenitor. And he had good reason, since Praj
ā
pati was an amalgam of seven
ṛṣ
is
, those “seers” who, in turn, had been seven “vital breaths,” though incapable of existing
alone.
Prior to the drama of things generated there was the drama of that which feared it could not exist. This was what forever marked Praj
ā
pati’s character and made him the most phantom-like, the most anxious, the most fragile of all creator gods. He never resembled a sovereign who elatedly surveys his dominions. He left that feeling to one of his sons, Indra—and he pitied him for it. He knew that, along with euphoria, and bound up with it, Indra would face mockery and retribution.