Ardor (56 page)

And at the end of the ceremony, in the same way that King Soma is a bundle of crushed stalks, reduced to a “body unfit for offering,” so too the sacrificer, tired out, a shadow of his former self, makes his way toward the water that flows just below the sacrificial ground. There the cleansing bath,
avabh
ṛ
tha
, awaits him. The
soma
and the sacri
fi
cer: both yearn for new sap. They want to immerse themselves in the water, to forget.

“Thereupon both [the sacri
fi
cer and his wife], having gone down, bathe, and wash each other’s back. Having wrapped themselves in fresh clothing, they leave: like a snake that sloughs its skin, so he frees himself from all evil. In him there is no more guilt than in a toothless babe.”

Anyone entering the rite is burdened with gestures, acts, and
karman
, which literally means “ritual action.” There is no doubt: he sees the light, immortality, he touches the gods. But at the end he nevertheless wants to forget, exhausted. He wants to return to dull, insignificant, straightforward normality. And the sacrificer and his wife retrace the steps they took to arrive at the sacrificial site. They bathe in flowing water. The objects used in the sacrifice are thrown into the water, as if no one wanted to remember they ever existed. Everything must now be new. The innocence of the newborn child is never something given. On the contrary, it is hard fought for. And is short-lived. For the action immediately starts all over again. And the action, every action, and above all that sacred action that makes it possible to attain the light through
soma
, is a form of guilt. Not because it hurts or injures someone or something, even if it inevitably does hurt and injure, but simply because it is action. On the other hand, without
that
action any life is formless and empty. But from time to time we need to return to that formlessness, that meaninglessness, because we do not bear too much meaning, too much light, or too much guilt. The sacrificer no longer wears his own clothes. They too are part of an episode now swallowed up. But how will he dress, now? He covers himself with the cloth in which the
soma
stalks had been wrapped, in which they had appeared in the distant past, a few hours earlier, when the
soma
had still to be pressed. Tied around his wife is the cloth that had wrapped the cloth in which the
soma
lay. Then they leave, silently, passively, cleansed, empty. All that remains is a barely discernible fragrance—perhaps discernible only to them—coming from the two cloths in which the
soma
had for some time been kept.

*   *   *

“When G
ā
yatr
ī
flew toward Soma, a footless archer, aiming at her, shot off a feather, either of G
ā
yatr
ī
or of King Soma; and the feather, dropping down, became a
par
ṇ
a
tree.” Elsewhere we are told that this mysterious footless archer is called K
ṛśā
nu, but we learn little more. His appearance and attitude suggest a being on the margin of the unmanifest—or of “fullness,”
p
ūṛ
na
, which is another name for it. Like another archer—Rudra—K
ṛśā
nu tries to stop a deed that goes against the order of the world, and thereby creates life as we know it. In the case of Rudra, it was Praj
ā
pati’s incest with U
ṣ
as. In his case, it is the abduction of the
soma
, which will enable men to become drunk on it. K
ṛśā
nu’s nature is perhaps also implied in his being “footless,”
ap
ā
d
, a characteristic that links him with another enigmatic figure: Aja Ekap
ā
d, the one-footed goat. If we go back to the “unborn,”
aja
, to the “self-existing,”
svayambh
ū
, the last two figures that let themselves be recognized—though only in flashes and glimmers, without ever being described—are a Goat (Aja Ekap
ā
d) and a Serpent (Ahi Budhnya). We can distinguish nothing beyond them. The Goat has to stand up because it is the “supporter of the sky,” but if we look closer we see it is resting on only one hoof (
ékap
ā
d
). At times it appears as a column of fire speckled with black, the black of the darkness against which it stands out. And beneath it? The Serpent of the Deep, Ahi Budhnya. No text dares to say any more about it. Only its name is mentioned—five times, in the Vedic hymns, along with that of the Goat, as if these two figures hint at something beyond which we cannot go: the Unborn, the Deep. The inevitable and almost imperceptible channel for all that exists.

The world owes its existence to the infinitesimal delay of an arrow. Or of two arrows: that of Rudra, which pierced Praj
ā
pati’s groin, but did not prevent him from spilling his seed, and that of K
ṛśā
nu, which grazed the wing of the hawk carrying the
soma
and made one of its feathers drop to the ground, but did not stop the
soma
from reaching mankind. That particle of time was all time, with its uncontainable power. It was the way out of plenitude closed up within itself, the passage to plenitude brimming over into something else, into the world itself. But that superabundance had happened thanks only to a wound. The rites Vedic people sought to establish were primarily an attempt to treat and heal that wound, thereby renewing it. And burning one part of the superabundance that enabled them to live.

*   *   *

Soma not only induced intoxication, but encouraged truth. “For the man who knows, this is easy to recognize: true and false words clash. Of these two, the true, the just, is what Soma protects. And he fights untruth”: This is hymn 7.104 of the
Ṛ
gveda.
This double gift—rapture and the true word—is what distinguishes Vedic knowledge. If Soma did not lead to rapture, it could not fight for the true word either. And much the same happens to anyone who receives Soma into the circulation of their mind. Dionysus was swept into rapture and used sarcasm against anyone who opposed him. He never claimed to protect the true word. It was as if the word passed among his retinue of Maenads and Satyrs, but without being much noticed. Dionysus was intensity in its purest state, that overcame and destroyed every obstacle, without dwelling on the word, whether true or false. Possessed by the god, the bacchant declared: “Make way, make way / let lips not be contaminated with words.”

*   *   *

“Now we have drunk
soma
; we have become immortal; we have attained the light, we have found the gods.” Sudden, lightning words, the opposite of the sequence of riddles that makes up so much of the
Ṛ
gveda.
Men need
soma
so that they can
find
the gods; but the gods, in turn (and primarily their king, Indra) need
soma
in order to be gods. They chose
soma
one day as their intoxicating drink because “the vigor of the gods” is due to
soma.

If
soma
is desired just as much by the gods as by men, it will also become their factor in common. Only in rapture can gods and men communicate. Only in
soma
do they meet: “Come toward our pressings, drink
soma
, you
soma
drinker.” This is how people address Indra, in the first hymn dedicated to the god in the
Ṛ
gveda.
Only insofar as people are able to offer rapture to the gods can they hope to attract them to the earth. What people offer the god is what the god himself has conquered for them—and for the other gods—committing the gravest of crimes, the killing of a brahmin, when he cut off the three heads of Vi
ś
var
ū
pa. There is a secret understanding between Indra and men, for Indra is the god who most resembles men (and several times he will be mocked for this): he has killed a brahmin to obtain the
soma
, in the same way that people kill King Soma to obtain the intoxicating liquid from which he is made. Killing, sacrifice, and rapture are bound together, both for god and man. And this makes them accomplices, it obliges people to celebrate long, exhausting
soma
rites. But it is also the only way of attaining a life that—for a while—is divine.

ANTECEDENTS AND CONSEQUENTS

When you gods were in the waves, holding each other tightly, thick foams then rose up from you, as from dancers.

—
Ṛ
gveda
10.72.6

This book was started quite a number of years ago out of the rash idea of writing a commentary on the
Ś
atapatha Br
ā
hma
ṇ
a
, the
Br
ā
hma
ṇ
a of One Hundred Paths.
The
Ś
atapatha Br
ā
hma
ṇ
a
is a treatise on Vedic rituals that dates back to the eighth century
B.C.E.
and is made up of fourteen
k
āṇḍ
as
, “sections,” which add up to 2,366 pages in Julius Eggeling’s five-volume translation in the Sacred Books of the East series, published in Oxford between 1882 and 1900. This is at present the only complete translation (that of C. R. Swaminathan has so far reached only the eighth
k
āṇḍ
a
). The Br
ā
hma
ṇ
as—and the
Ś
atapatha Br
ā
hma
ṇ
a
stands out among them—contain thoughts that cannot be ignored yet rarely find a place in the philosophy books. Thus, very often, they were treated with impatience, as being a sort of intrusion.

The
Ś
atapatha Br
ā
hma
ṇ
a
is a powerful antidote to current existence. It is a commentary that shows how one can live a life totally dedicated to passing into
another
order of things, which the text dares to call “truth.” A life that is impossible to live, since almost everything is worn down in the strains of that transition. But a life that certain people tried, very long ago—and of which they wanted to leave some record. It was a life based above all on particular gestures. We should not be led astray by the fact that some of those gestures still survive today in India and are commonly performed by a great many people who know almost nothing about how they originated, while other great civilizations have left no comparable legacy: the civilization of the Vedic ritualists did not withstand the test of time—it fell apart, remaining for the most part inaccessible, incomprehensible. And yet all that still shines out of it has a power that stirs any mind not entirely enslaved to what surrounds it.

*   *   *

People at the beginning of the twenty-first century speak much about religion. But very little in the world is religious in the strict and rigorous sense. And not so much with regard to individuals as to social structures. Whether these are churches, sects, tribes, or ethnic groups, their model is an amorphous superparty that lets people go further than the idea of the party had previously allowed, in the name of something that is often described as “identity.” It is the revenge of secularity. Having lived for hundreds and thousands of years in a condition of subjection, like a handmaiden to powers that were imposed without caring to justify themselves, secularity now—sneeringly—offers all that still makes reference to the sacred the means to act in a way that is more effective, more up-to-date, more deadly, more in keeping with the times. This is the new horror that still had to take form: the whole of the twentieth century has been its long incubation period.