Consumed by the arrogance of knowledge, the young Bhṛgu, son of the supreme god Varuṇa, was sent off by his father into the world (into this world, according to the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, into the other world according to the version in the Jaiminīya Brāhmaṇa) to see what knowledge alone could not reveal, to find out how the world itself is made. Without this, all knowledge is pointless.
In the east, Bhṛgu came across men who were slaughtering other men. Bhṛgu asked: “Why?” They answered: “Because these men did the same to us in the other world.” He saw the same strange scene in the south. In the west there were men eating other men and sitting about, calmly. In the north as well, amid piercing cries, there were men eating other men.
When he returned to his father, Bhṛgu seemed speechless. Varuṇa looked at him with satisfaction, thinking: “Then he has seen.” The moment had come to explain to his son what he had seen. The men in the east, he said, are trees; those in the south are flocks of animals; those in the west are wild plants. Last, those in the north, who cried out while they ate other men, were the waters.
What had Bhṛgu seen? That the world is made up of Agni and Soma, of these two brothers. Brought up as two Asuras in Vṛtra’s belly, they abandoned him to follow the call of another brother, Indra, and to pass over to the side of the Devas. Then “one of the two became the devourer and the other became food. Agni became the devourer and Soma the food. Down here there is nothing else than devourer and devoured.” And there are these two poles in everything that happens, without exception and at every level. But Bhṛgu discovered something else: the two poles were reversible. At a certain moment the positions will switch, indeed they will have to switch, because this is the order of the world. This explains why all that is said about Agni can also, at a certain moment, be said about Soma. And vice versa. A phenomenon that had already baffled Abel Bergaigne.
The revelations that Bhṛgu came across were set one within the other. First of all: the final act from which all others followed was the act of eating—or at least the act of severing, of uprooting. Every act that consumes a part of the world, every act that destroys. There is no neutral state, no state in which this doesn’t happen. The act of eating is a violence that causes what is living, in its many forms, to disappear. Whether grass, plants, trees, animals, or human beings, the process is the same. There is always a fire that devours and a substance that is devoured. This violence, bringing misery and torment, will one day be carried out by those who suffer it on those who inflict it. Such a chain of events cannot change. But the serious damage, the paralysis that this causes in those who become aware of it, can—we are told—be treated, remedied. This is Varuṇa’s knowledge, which Bhṛgu could not have learned without the impact of what he saw when he traveled the world—or the other world. And what was the remedy? The very act of perceiving that which is—and of manifesting it, not just with words, but with gestures: in this particular case, with a series of gestures to be carried out in the agnihotra, the most basic of all rites. Pouring milk into the fire—every morning, every evening—meant accepting that what appears disappears and that what has disappeared serves to give sustenance to something else, in the invisible. This was the lesson that Varuṇa sought to give his son.
It is easy to imagine from the story of Bhṛgu how the Vedic seers were skilled in detecting evil with supreme ease. Evil for them was already apparent at the moment when an axe first struck a tree or a hand uprooted a plant. It was metaphysical evil, inherent in everything that is forced to destroy a part of the world in order to survive, therefore above all in mankind. Compared with the moderns, who tend to limit evil to intentional acts, the Vedic seers had a conception of evil that covered a far wider area. And it included certain involuntary acts, as well as acts that just cannot be avoided if mankind wants to survive—for example, the act of eating. Evil is therefore everywhere and in everything. This explains why sacrifice is also everywhere and in everything. Sacrifice is the act by which evil is brought to consciousness, using an art learned from “he who knows thus.” That process in which evil is repeated and is directed, in its entirety, toward consciousness, through gestures and formulas, is the supreme remedy we can use in combating evil. Otherwise, all that remains is the mechanism revealed during Bhṛgu’s journey. Those who eat will be eaten. Those who slaughter will be slaughtered. Those who eat food will themselves become food.
The widespread atrocities, the endless and unrestrainable alternation between devourer and devoured, that Bhṛgu had encountered during his wanderings to the four corners of the world—and which his father, Varuṇa, taught him to overcome through the practice of sacrifice—never disappear, but indeed become threateningly apparent during the performance of the sacrifice itself. The sacrificial flames are like eyes, “they fix their attention on the sacrificer and focus on him.” What they would most desire is not the oblation, but the sacrificer himself. In front of the fire, the sacrificer feels he is being observed, stared at. The eye that is studying him is the eye of the fire. Before he himself formulates a desire, he feels it is the fire that desires him, his flesh. Here occurs the substitution, the redemption of Self: a last, swift operation to which the sacrificer resorts so as to offer the fire something instead of himself. The sacrificer offers food to avoid becoming food himself.
Bhṛgu encountered during his terrifying journey a world in which animals devoured people. But this wasn’t just a reversal of the order. It was also a lightning glimpse of the history of humanity, as if someone had at last taught Bhṛgu about some of his forebears. The period during which men, rather than devouring, were devoured is none other than the first, very long chapter of their history. Varuṇa wanted his son’s education to include this vision of the past, in the same way that a young boy might be sent to a good college to learn his country’s history. The Vedics were also this: they ignored history, more than any other people—but they remained in contact, more so than any other people, with remote prehistory, which showed through in their rites and in their myths.
***
In the Vedic landscape there is one object that evokes terror and veneration: the sacrificial post. Of all the emblems of that time, it is the only one still visible. In certain Indian villages, even today, a piece of wood can be seen sticking out of the ground, for no apparent reason. Madeleine Biardeau has found many of these in various parts of India, noting that they are that “post,” yūpa, the “thunderbolt” of which the Vedic ritualists spoke. But why a “thunderbolt”? To understand this, we have to go back to a distant story:
“There are an animal and a sacrificial post, for they never immolate an animal without a post. This is why: animals did not originally submit to the fact of becoming food, in the way that they have now become food. In the same way as man walks upright on two legs, they also walked upright on two legs.
“Then the gods noticed that thunderbolt, i.e., that sacrificial post; they put it in the ground and, for fear of it, the animals became crooked and four-legged, and so they became food, as today they are food, because they gave in: this is why they immolate the animal at the post, and never without a post.
“After having brought the victim forward and lit the fire, he ties the animal. This is why it is so: the animals did not originally submit to the fact of becoming sacrificial food, in the way that they have now become sacrificial food and are offered in the fire. The gods cage them: even caged in this way, they did not give in.
“They spoke: ‘In truth, these animals do not know how this happens, that sacrificial food is offered in the fire, and they do not know that safe place [the fire]: let us offer fire in fire after having fastened the animals and lit the fire, and they will know that this is how the sacrificial food is prepared, that this is its place; that it is in the fire itself that the sacrificial food is offered: and they will then yield and be favorably disposed to being immolated.’
“After having first fastened the animals and lit the fire, they offered fire in fire; and then they [the animals] knew that this is truly how the sacrificial food is prepared, that this is the place; that it is in the fire itself that the sacrificial food is offered. And as a result they yielded and were favorably disposed to being immolated.”
It would be very hard to find another text that describes with such great precision, with such great pathos, the decisive step that formalized the slaughter of domestic animals: the establishment of the meat diet. It was a necessity, but above all a guilty act, an act of enormous guilt. To justify its necessity, form was given to the theological edifice of the sacrifice, a temple-labyrinth, full of passages and tunnels, with countless junctures. And the sacrifice was needed to incorporate the guilt within it, indeed it would intensify and preserve it, as if in a casket. That guilt alluded to another, more deep-seated guilt, a consequence of which would be the sacrifice: the guilt of imitation, of that distant decision that had led a species of beings who had been prey to assume the behavior typical of their predator enemies. The first act against nature that would one day be seen as human nature itself—no other species would be so bold.
More than a “sick animal,” according to Hegel’s definition, man is an animal who essentially imitates (and imitation can also be seen as a human sickness). Man is the only being in the animal kingdom who has relinquished his nature, if by nature we mean that repertory of behavior with which every species appears to be equipped from birth. Strong, but not so strong that he didn’t have to recognize his own defenselessness in the face of other creatures—predators—man decided at a certain moment (which may also have lasted a hundred thousand years) not to fight against his adversaries but to imitate them. It was then that the being who had been prey taught himself to become a predator. He had teeth, not fangs—and his fingernails were not enough to rip into flesh. Nor did his body produce a poison, like snakes, who were formidable predators. He therefore had to resort to something no other predator had: the weapon, the instrument, the tool. This is how the flint and the arrow were created. At this point, through imitation and the production of tools, two important steps were taken—mimesis and technology—which the remainder of history would try to develop, up until today. Looking back, the upheaval produced by that first step—of mimesis, by which humans, of all creatures, decided to imitate precisely those who had so often killed them—is incomparably more radical and devastating than any subsequent step. A response to this upheaval was the sacrifice, in its many forms. Nothing else can explain why such uncharacteristic behavior, in comparison with anything else in the animal kingdom, occurred more or less everywhere, in a wide variety of forms but invariably sharing certain essential features. The sacrifice, before it assumed any other meaning, was a response to that immense upheaval within the species—and an attempt to redress a balance that had been upset and violated forever.
Only in this way can sacrifice be understood: not just a way of covering up guilt, a pia fraus that enables the world to continue thanks to priestly stratagem. But a daring speculation that above all exalts guilt. It exalts it to the point of persuading the victim to become favorably disposed to being immolated. This, obviously, is not what happens. No one imagines that the goat or the horse let themselves be persuaded to be killed and butchered. None of the ritualists could have believed that. But to carry out a gesture in that direction, to express words with that intention: this is the supreme effort granted to thought, granted to action, where we come face to face with the irreconcilable. An illusory, transitory attempt. And yet that conscious illusion is the only force that makes it possible to establish a distance, albeit minimal, from the plain act of killing.
Nowhere else in antiquity (later the question would no longer be raised, since man was so convinced of his moral superiority) did anyone ever dare to suggest that animals originally walked upright and became four-legged only because they were terrified of something: of a solitary octagonal post, crowned with a bundle of grass to cover its bareness. The discovery of the post was not attributed to man, but to the gods, as if the post were indeed the axis mundi—and as if life were inconceivable without it. And yet the post is not enough: it forces animals to walk on four legs, in terror, but it does not persuade them to allow themselves to be slaughtered. The gods now had to propose a theological nicety: they explained to the animals that the sacrifice was an offer of “fire in fire.” Mysterious words: but the whole of the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, and in particular the sections on the fire altar, is devoted to describing it. That “thunderbolt” which is the sacrificial post was therefore not enough. The terror was overcome, but the animals still did not yield. Theory, lofty liturgical speculation, then took over. Only then did the animals give in. Or at least it was said that the animals gave in.
***
The terror is not only in the animals. It is in man. As soon as he saw the appearance of the “post,” the yūpa, man understood that he would have to kill those creatures who, until a moment before, were walking with him and by his side. He would have to take hold of the rope that is invariably tied to the post. It is a moment of paralysis. The liturgy then says: “Be bold, O man!” The man then continues, tries to be brave. Once again, he clings to theology: the knot his hands are already inadvertently preparing is none other than “the noose of world order.” As for the rope, it is “Varuṇa’s rope.” It is as if the gods themselves were acting. And with this the guilt is offloaded onto the gods. At the critical moment—the moment when the officiant ties the animal to the post—every part of his body is taken over by a god, limb for limb. Even the impulse that makes him act is attributed to Savitṛ, who is the Impeller. So he says: “At the impulse of the divine Savitṛ, I tie you with the arms of the Aśvins, with the hands of Pūṣan, you who are liked by Agni and Soma.” The one who acts is like a sleepwalker. How can he be guilty?
But nothing—not even the gods—is ever sufficient to offload the guilt. So a few moments later, the sacrificer will feel the need to ask the victim’s mother and father for permission to kill: “And may your mother consent, and your father…” But not even this is enough. Then the sacrificer adds: “And your brother, your companion in the herd.” And by this he means: “Any creature related to you by blood, with their consent I kill you.” Nothing less than unanimity is required when it comes to killing.
***
According to the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, it was not true that human beings, over the course of millennia, achieved the upright position, freeing themselves from their life as four-legged primates. On the contrary: humans were the only ones to have remained standing upright, while all the other animals became crooked and had to learn to walk on four legs. What decided their fate? Sacrifice, then killing. Animals cannot remain upright for fear of being killed: they have seen the post, they know they are destined to be tied to it, they know they will then be killed. Humans remain standing because they know they are the sacrificers. This is the dividing line that guides the course of human history.
At this point a chorus of voices will say that the Darwinian view has supplanted the thinking of the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa once and for all, as if the latter were a childish and disturbing prelude to the discovery of what really happened. But would it not be an irreparable loss for us to eliminate the Vedic vision? Does it not offer something to human knowledge that would otherwise remain unspoken and ignored? This is where the shared bond between man and the animal world finds its unshakable foundation, which goes well beyond any feeling of empathy. It is no longer man who is emancipated from his animal companions. But it is the animals who are seen as fallen beings, having had to submit to the condition of victim. An enlightened humanity could accept both Darwin’s vision and that of the Brāhmaṇas at one and the same time, with an impartial farsightedness—an improbable humanity.
***
“He then puts on a garment, for completeness: in fact in this way he puts on his own skin. That same skin that belongs to the cow was originally on man.
“The gods said: ‘The cow endures everything down here; come, let us put that skin onto the cow which is now on man: in that way it will be able to endure rain and cold and heat.’
“Having flayed the man, they therefore put his skin onto the cow, so that it could now endure the rain and the cold and the heat.
“In this way the man was flayed; so when even a blade of grass or something else cuts him, blood gushes forth. They then put that skin, the robe, on him; and for this reason man alone wears a robe, because it was put onto him like a skin. Care must therefore be taken in dressing well, so that one’s skin is completely covered. This is why people love seeing even an ugly person dressed well, since he is clothed with his own skin.
“He shall therefore not appear naked before a cow. Because the cow knows it is wearing his skin and runs away for fear that he wants to take it back from it. Even cows are therefore trusting when they approach those who are well dressed.”
If we want an example of an unfathomable story in the Brāhmaṇas, then this could be it. Only Kafka, in his stories about animals and men, reached a similar pitch. Here the basis of history is the whole of prehistory: man’s long dark period of laborious differentiation from other beings, which culminated in all these creatures being successfully grouped together under a single word: animals. In that period we see man’s astonishing, gradual transformation from prey to predator. The discovery of the meat diet: the primordial guilt and overwhelming stimulus for the development and spread of power. A story too distant and too secret to have left any verbal trace. But a story that has embedded itself in the least accessible level of human sensibility.
Man feels an irredeemable guilt toward the cow, as well as toward the antelope—an animal that cannot be sacrificed (because it is wild) though it will become the heraldic animal of sacrifice. It is true that “the cow supports everything down here,” but in return man flays it. To feed himself, man kills a being that up until then is feeding him. So extreme is the guilt that, to speak of it, he will have to invent a story that turns the situation upside down. Man will then find a justification: in his trepidation, in his uncertainty, in remembrance of his defenselessness.
Man is the only flayed animal. And not just by nature—at one time he too had a skin—but because the gods, at a certain point, decided to flay him and give his skin to the cow. This is the true story of primordial times—the story to which men were forced to go back when they began to eat the flesh of the cow and also to flay it. To justify himself, man had to keep alive the memory of a time when he was an animal like so many others, protected like all of them by a skin. Then he became a single sore: “Having been flayed, man is a sore; and, by anointing himself, he is healed of his soreness: because the skin of the man is on the cow, and even fresh butter comes from the cow. He [the officiant] supplies him with his own skin, and for this reason [the sacrificer] has himself anointed.” In his state of dereliction, this being who no longer has any defense from the world regains his own skin through the butter that anoints him: with that beneficial anointment the cow gives back to man something of what it has received from him. It follows, among other things, that man is a sort of outcast of nature. A blade of grass is enough to make him bleed. His only possibility of survival, and of saving himself from that excess of suffering which is his lot, is through artifice: the anointment that covers his body, the clothes that form a new skin. At that point, thanks to the powerful catapult of practices ignored by every other being, man can return to mingle with nature. But he must not appear naked in front of the cow: the animal would remember the cruel story of what had happened and would run off, fearful of losing its beloved hide. The cow flees from man not just for fear of being flayed, but because man—a flayed being—might try to take back his skin, which now adorns the cow. There is an unaccountable embarrassment when a naked human body finds itself among animals: a feeling that is difficult to deny, but on which no attention ever appears to have been focused. For the Vedic ritualists, however, it was the mark of distant and painful events that had left a mark in the rite. And above all, it was the recollection of the only possible way to justify relations with these mild animals that were close to human life through rain, heat, and ice. At the same time it should be added that, in the long history that separates the Vedic ritualists from Beau Brummell, never has such a clear-sighted explanation been given for the importance of dress. And never has a more convincing justification been offered for the peculiar embarrassment people feel about nudity.
Vedic India is the only place, throughout world history, where the following question has been asked: why is it true that “man should not be naked in the presence of a cow”? People seem to have had no concern about the question, either in ancient times or today. But the Vedic ritualists did. They also knew the answer: because “the cow knows it is wearing his [man’s] skin and runs away for fear that he might want to take it back.” And they then add a note of charming frivolity, based on another disconcerting observation: “Cows are therefore trusting when they approach those who are well dressed.” Perhaps only Oscar Wilde, had he known it, would have been able to comment with authority on this reason for dressing well.
As for the Vedic ritualists, they gave it credence through a story that others would one day have called a myth, but which in their words sounded like a dry, anonymous account of how things began. Everything started when the gods, watching events on earth, realized that the whole of life was supported by the cow. Men were its parasites. One of the gods—we don’t know which—urged humans to allow their skin to be used to cover the cows. So the gods flayed man. If we try to go back to the very beginning, this is therefore the natural human state: the Flayed Man, as in sixteenth-century anatomical drawings. Unlike the naïve positivists, who presented primordial man in natural history museum display cabinets with a monkey-like covering of hair, the Vedic ritualists saw him not as the mighty lord of creation, but as the being who was most exposed, most easily vulnerable from the world outside. For them, man didn’t just conceal a wound, but was a single wound. They wanted to add an eloquent detail: man is a hemophiliac by vocation, as even a blade of grass can make his blood gush forth.
Among the many characteristics that distinguish man (depending on the point of view: he is the only one who speaks, the only one who laughs, the only one who cries, the only one who celebrates sacrifices), the fact that he is the only creature who feels the need to dress is generally seen as the clearest sign of his inextricable link with artificiality. But, here again, the Vedic ritualists thought differently—and refuted in advance all those who came later. According to them, when at the beginning of the rite of “consecration,” dīkṣā (which is also an initiation), the sacrificer wears a linen robe, at that moment “he wears his own skin.” Only then does man regain his “completeness.” Only then does he return to that which was his original state.
This is a complete reversal of the current view: here artifice indicates the reconquering of nature as something whole. But it is still a temporary reconquest since, at the end of the liturgy, man will have to free himself of all the objects (and garments) he has used during the rite, thus returning to his condition of being impure and flayed. Naturalness is a temporary state, linked to a garment and a certain sequence of gestures (the rite).
***
Anointing was one of the most frequent gestures in rituals, in places far and wide, right up to the ceremony that consecrated Western kings. But none of the explanations given for it is as wild as the one offered by the Vedic ritualists. It presumes that man starts off, not from nothing, but from less than nothing. His original condition is not just that of an impure being, immersed in untruth. In the beginning, man doesn’t even have his whole body. Before he begins to act, someone has acted on him, flaying him. Man, in the beginning, is therefore a single sore. The wound, for him, is not one injured part of his body, but the totality of his body. The anointment covers this edgeless wound with a soft, wet, invisible film that makes movement and life possible. To understand the immensity of the ritual work, and its meticulous obsessiveness, it has to be placed in the context of this human condition at the very beginning, which is one of complete helplessness and pure pain. And only this can justify it.
***
If people at the very beginning (in other words, people who had not yet instituted sacrificial rites) were flayed and suffering beings, lacking in “completeness,” the decision to kill oxen and cows could only seem like a blasphemy. They looked upon those tame and mighty animals who grazed everywhere, protected by their magnificent hide, as a living provocation, rather like certain rich people who flaunt jewelry bought at auction from families that have fallen on hard times. Wrapped in improvised clothing, so as not to raise suspicion, men approached the animals and killed them. They had decided to put an end to the lives of those beings who until then had been a support for life itself. Sacrifice, the theory and practice of sacrifice, was a long, exasperated, captious, daring reworking of that gesture into actions, into formulas, into chants. People now went about in linen robes: it is said that the warp and weft of the cloth belonged to Agni and Vāyu and that “all the divinities had a part” in producing them. The same gods who had flayed them in the first place now took pains to protect them.
***
The most widespread objection to modern vegetarianism goes like this: you avoid eating beef, but the hides are used to make your shoes, your belts, your clothes. How can you be consistent in claiming to condemn the killing of these animals, which is also being done to clothe you? There is no convincing solution to this question—and the answer given by those who declare they wear only cord or plastic shoes or cloth or metal belts is simply pathetic. The industrial production cycle is much more sophisticated—and there is no way of totally avoiding contact with the secondary products of meat slaughter.
The Vedic ritualists did not find themselves in this dilemma, but knew perfectly well that the act of eating animal flesh was a crux metaphysica that might not even have a solution. And it is precisely here that Yājñavalkya stepped in.
We are in the third kāṇḍa of the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, in a part of the work that, according to tradition, was written by Yājñavalkya himself. But, exactly as would happen in the Mahābhārata, where Vyāsa was the author and occasionally appeared as a character, so too in that Brāhmaṇa, composed in the form of a treatise, Yājñavalkya manages several times to find his way into various scenes, always in crucial passages. Always with sharp, abrupt comments, like Marpa with his cane, ready to use it to wake up the pupil who would one day become Milarepa.
What happens after the passage where people had been flayed and their skins now clothe cattle? This is by decree of the gods. It follows that if people are not allowed even to show themselves naked in front of cows so as not to frighten them, they certainly won’t be allowed to kill them, let alone eat them. Here we find ourselves close to the origin of the prohibition on meat-eating in India. From here an uninterrupted line leads us to the cows wandering in the city traffic or lying pensively on temple steps. And yet didn’t the same Vedic ritualists spend their time meticulously describing animal sacrifices in which a part was then offered to the gods and a part was eaten by the officiants?
The point was very delicate—and had to be resolved by Yājñavalkya. First, according to the text, an officiant takes the consecrated person—who now wears a linen robe and so once again has a skin—into the hut built in the sacrificial area. And immediately after, it adds the requirement “that he [the consecrated person] shall not eat cow or ox; for the cow and the ox certainly support everything here on earth.” Once again, a decision from the gods had to be sought. They said: “Certainly the cow and the ox support everything here; come, let us bestow on the cow and the ox whatever strength belongs to the other species!” It wasn’t therefore just the human hide that had been transferred to cattle. But strength in general, dispersed throughout nature. So cows became a concentration of everything. To kill them would have meant killing everything. “If someone were to eat an ox or a cow, it would be as if, so to speak, he were to eat everything or, so to speak, as if he were to destroy everything.” Already the insistence—twice in two lines—on the particle iva, “so to speak,” warns us that we are in a highly fraught and dangerous area. The tone is serious—and immediately afterward there is a resounding threat, one of the earliest formulations of the doctrine of reincarnation: “One [who acts] thus could be reborn as a strange being, as one of evil repute, as one of whom it is said: ‘He has caused a woman to abort’ or ‘He has committed a sin.’ So he must not eat (the meat of) an ox or cow.”
The words are short, abrupt, they do not seem to allow for any reply. But they are turned on their head in the next sentence: “Nonetheless Yājñavalkya said: ‘I, for my part, eat it, provided it is tender.’” The text then moves on, without any comment. Yājñavalkya’s metaphysical probe had touched a point that is usually avoided: there is a pleasure in eating the flesh of dead animals that is deeply physiological, just like sexual pleasure. In that case too, pleasure and guilt come together—and remain inseparable. When we go back beyond a certain threshold in phylogenesis, there is no escaping these simultaneous conflicting drives, which are not yet feelings but dark and highly powerful imperatives: allusions to our most distant memories, from which, however, we are separated by an insuperable barrier, like dreams that have been blotted out.
What conclusions can be drawn from all this? The doubt cannot be solved. The teaching set out in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa seems to require abstinence from meat, with various arguments and a severe tone. Yet the supposed author of the text breaks in impetuously and insolently to say the opposite. What would be the right doctrine?
***
Guilt connected to sacrifice—guilt about killing and destruction in general: more fundamentally, guilt about what disappears—extends not just to animals, but to the plant world, so as plants and trees can be saved by sacrifice. Everything is killed, starting from the sacrificer, who has just—temporarily—avoided it, when “Agni and Soma have taken he who sacrifices between their jaws,” and starting from Soma himself, who will be killed by the pestle in the mortar. Others will eventually be tied to the “post” before being killed. And for each victim the event is described through euphemism: the sacrificial killing is called “appeasement.” During the sacrifice, the officiant speaks to the sacrificial horse using words of high, visionary, tender lyricism, promising that no harm will come to it and that it will follow the path of the gods, in the same way as Siberian hunters speak with gentleness and devotion to the bear they are about to kill. Something similar happens with the tree. The officiant is even required to reassure it: “This sharp-edged axe has led you toward great bliss.” The reference to “bliss” is meant to mitigate the impact of a “thunderbolt”: “for the axe is a thunderbolt.” Thunderbolt is everything that has an absolute power. But the ritualists were too subtle to define only certain potentially lethal arms in this way: “the razor is a thunderbolt,” but it is also true that “water is a thunderbolt,” and “ghee is a thunderbolt,” in the same way that “the tree they cut down to make the sacrificial post is a thunderbolt” and “the year is a thunderbolt.” And one day it happened that “the gods perceived that thunderbolt: the horse.” In the case of the tree, of that “lord of the forest” which is chosen for the sacrifice of soma, the mitigation of guilt will be achieved above all by placing a blade of darbha grass on the trunk. It would be foolish to mock the meagerness of such means. A tuft of darbha grass alone can purify the face of a “consecrated one,” a dīkṣita, one who can therefore perform a sacrifice: “For impure, indeed, is man; he is foul within, in that he speaks untruth; and darbha grass is pure.”
Choosing the tree to cut down, from which to make the yūpa, the sacrificial “post,” which in itself epitomizes the totality of the sacrifice, is like choosing any other victim: it is the act in which the mystery of election is revealed. The ritualist therefore considers it with great care, so that the sacrificer must bring all his keenness into play. What tree will he choose? Not the closest one in the forest. That would be too crude and too simple. It would be as if all you had to do was take one step forward to be chosen—and one step back not to be. But nor will the sacrificer choose the tree farthest away. The last would then be the most likely—and all, if they wanted to avoid being chosen, would rush to the most conspicuous positions. Here again the choice would lose its mystery. No, the sacrificer will choose “on the nearer side of the farther” and “on the farther side of the nearer.” And where in the forest does the farther begin? Where does the nearer reach its limit? No one can know this. Not even the sacrificer, until that inscrutable moment when he will say to the tree, in that grim, unctuous tone that all victims recognize: “We favor you, O divine lord of the forest.”
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.
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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 (Prajāpati) 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.