The altar is a woman with perfect proportions: “With broad hips, shoulders a little less broad, and narrow at the waist.” Like a woman, it must not be naked. It is sprinkled with fine gravel or sand, so as to cover its body with a light gleaming film (“gravel is certainly an adornment, since gravel is fairly luminous”). Then with twigs and grass. The woman—the altar—makes herself beautiful, is helped to look beautiful, ready for the arrival of the gods. And so she passes a night.
At last she meets her lover, fire, “for the altar (vedi) is female and the fire (agni) is male. And the woman lies there embracing the man. And so a fruitful intercourse takes place. This is why he raises the two extremes of the altar on two sides of the fire.” Every sacrificial act is interwoven with a sexual act. And vice versa. This is the nature of how things are. Arranged to attract the gods, so that the gods are aware of the sacrifice. How is it done? How can the altar be made “pleasing to the gods”? By ensuring as far as possible that it resembles a beautiful woman. The altar, then, cannot be just a roughly hewn stone. Instead “it should be broader on the west side, narrower in the middle, and broad again on the east side.” Thus, looking at it, the gods cannot fail to feel attracted, as if by a beautiful woman lying motionless in a clearing. Awaiting her lover, her officiant, her victim.
***
The sacrificial setting was also an erotic one. One in which the intercourse didn’t have to take place under the eyes of many, as in the horse sacrifice. Sometimes the appearance of a female was enough for the seed to be spilled. This was how some of the most powerful ṛṣis were born, owing to the superabundance of their mental life. They were born, in fact, without their father needing to touch the body of their mother. So pervasive was his desire, kāma, that Prajāpati—Kāma was another of his names—spilled his seed at the mere sight of Vāc during a long sacrifice. It was a three-year sattra that he was celebrating together with the Devas and even with the Sādhyas, the mysterious gods who had preceded the Devas: “There, at the initiation ceremony, Vāc arrived in bodily form. Upon seeing her, the seed of Ka and of Varuṇa spilled simultaneously. Vāyu, Wind, scattered it into the fire as he pleased. Then from the flames was born Bhṛgu, and the seer Aṅgiras from the embers. Vāc, upon seeing her two sons, while she herself was seen, said to Prajāpati: ‘May a third seer, in addition to these two, be born as my son.’ Prajāpati, to whom these words were spoken, said ‘let it be so’ to Vāc. Then the seer Atri was born, equal in splendor to Sun and Fire.”
This occasion was not unusual among the many events we come across in the life of Prajāpati. On the contrary, it was a pattern that was set to recur, over and over again. Such episodes appeared frequently in the stories of the Devas and the ṛṣis. If it is not Prajāpati spilling his seed, it is his four sons—Agni, Vāyu, Āditya, Candramas—who spill it watching Uṣas passing before them. Mitra and Varuṇa spill it into a ritual bowl, during the soma rite, while they watch Urvaśī. And there are many stories of ṛṣis who spill their seed watching an Apsara (Bharadvāja watching Ghṛtācī, Gautama watching Śāradvatī, Nārada watching a group of Apsaras bathing). These scenes show one of the ṛṣis in solitary meditation, who is disturbed by the sudden appearance of a female being, generally an Apsara. But, for the gods, everything happens during a sacrifice, as if the erotic charge were always there and ready to be released at every liturgical scene. And the theory envisaged it. On various occasions, to justify the silence that has to accompany particular parts of the ritual, the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa says: “For here in the sacrifice there is seed, and the seed is spilled in silence.” From the moment when the fires are kindled to the end of the liturgy we find ourselves inside a field of erotic tension—and actions culminate in moments of silence in which the seed is spilled.
The ṛṣis born from the sacrificial blaze have a mother, because the flames are the vagina of she who has seduced that god or those gods who have procreated them. And so Vāc will demand another son from Prajāpati from the same flames that have produced Bhṛgu and Aṅgiras. Considering how persistently the theory and practice of semen retention has been developed in India, culminating in Tantrism, it is all the more astonishing how often scenes of semen emission without contact appear in the earliest texts. The Ṛgveda describes it with total clarity in relation to Mitra and Varuṇa before the appearance of Urvaśī: “During a soma sacrifice, excited by the oblations, they simultaneously spilled their seed in a bowl.” This time the seed of the two gods isn’t received by the flames, but by a ritual object, the kumbha, a clay pot that holds the “night waters,” vasatīvarī. Thus one day Vasiṣṭha, the supreme ṛṣi, would be called Kumbhayoni, “He-who-has-had-a-pot-as-a-womb.” But the Ṛgveda also says that Vasiṣṭha was “born from the mind of Urvaśī.” The clay pot or the sacrificial flames were also the mind of the goddess or Apsara on which the gods who were watching her spilled their seed. An inseparable mixture of mind and matter. The seed of the gods spurted forth while the gods remained immobile. Urvaśī’s mind was the vagina and the ritual bowl in which the seed was collected. Thus the hymn in the Ṛgveda addresses itself to Vasiṣṭha: “You, the squirted drop, all the gods kept through the sacred formula, bráhman, in the lotus flower.”
***
If every act that happens in life is derived from a ritual gesture, then how can certain essential gestures that influence everything and are inextricably linked with everything, but have an unforeseeable and half-clandestine character, appear in the rite, how can they find a ceremonial position within it? The erotic gaze, for example, the exchange of glances between a man and a woman who do not know each other?
Movies, novels: these are the places where eyes meet, as part of a casual chain of events. But the Vedic ritualists, in their frenzy to include everything in the network of prescribed gestures, had even thought of this. There is a priest, the neṣṭṛ, whose main role was to escort and guide the sacrificer’s wife—the only woman present—onto the scene of the sacrifice. The wife of the sacrificer, though, had no complicated duties. Only two subtle, erotic gestures, which the neṣṭṛ supervised. Three times she exchanged glances with the udgātṛ, the “chanter.” That was enough for sexual union to take place, one of the many times it occurred during the rite. For the woman, at that moment, had thought: “You are Prajāpati, the male, he who gives the seed: place the seed in me!” Then she sat down and exposed her right thigh three times. Then three times, in silence, she poured over it the pannejanī water she had drawn that morning. Everyone was silent, all that could be heard was the gentle flow of water. Then she went back to hide herself in her tent.
At a certain point the sacrificer placed a bowl of ghee before his consort and told her to look at it. And so the woman “lowers her eyes to the sacrificial ghee.” Now—we are told—“the ghee is seed.” So what is happening, between the woman’s eye and the ghee, is “fertile intercourse.” At this moment the sacrificer’s wife betrays her husband on his own instructions. But if the husband didn’t ask her to look at the ghee, then his wife would be excluded from the sacrifice. There again, as soon as the wife looks at the ghee, their intercourse renders it impure, so the ghee has to be heated once again on the gārhapatya fire to remove its impurity before returning it to the āhavanīya fire. This is the formula that makes it possible to get around the difficulty: if the wife didn’t look at the ghee, the sacrifice would be flawed, in that she would be excluded from it; if she looked at it on the āhavanīya fire, the offering would be rendered irredeemably impure. She can therefore look at it, but only on the gārhapatya fire. The ritualist is there first and foremost to show how to get around these conflicts, to avoid these paralyzing alternatives.
From a whole range of details we are reminded that what is occurring during the sacrificial liturgy is also a sexual act. The sadas, “hut,” has many purposes during the ceremony, including that of accommodating the six dhiṣṇya fires of the officiants. But it is also a secret that has to be protected, since what it conceals is like intercourse between husband and wife—between the sacrificer and his wife. And “if a husband and wife are seen during intercourse, they immediately run away from each other, because they are doing something unbecoming.” There is only one point from which it is permissible to see what is going on in the sadas: from the door, “because the door is made by the gods.” Every other line of vision, every other angle of observation is illicit, like the act of a voyeur.
***
The oblation is preceded by a cry, an invocation, the vaṣaṭ: “May Agni conduct you to the gods!” That cry is the orgasm. If the oblation were presented before the vaṣaṭ it would be like seed not shed into the vagina, the cry of orgasm would not coincide with ejaculation. And so “the oblation is made either at the same time as the vaṣaṭ or immediately after it has been uttered.”
The ejaculation, like immolation, can be regarded as the culmination of a process, but also marks its interruption, the beginning of a withdrawal from pleasure. If the pleasure is not interrupted, it would be as if the sacrificer were able to remain in his new body, intact, in the sky. But then he would have to leave his other body between the jaws of Agni and Soma, lifeless before the āhavanīya fire.
***
In the divine erotica, multiple seductions were frequent: Agni with the wives of the Saptarṣis or Soma with his sisters or Śiva once again with the wives of the Saptarṣis. Or Agni with the waters: “Agni once desired the waters: ‘May I couple with them,’ he thought. He coupled with them; and his seed became gold.” When Alberich pursues the Rhine Maidens to possess the gold from which to make the Ring, he searches for Agni’s seed, submerged there from remote times as a sign of the mutual penetration of opposites that makes life possible. “Gold’s bright eye” is there, “which now wakes, now sleeps,” writes Wagner in impeccably Vedic terms (Wellgunde in the Prelude of Das Rheingold). To snatch the gold from the waters brings disaster since it returns the world to a state where its elements are separated and thus cannot be regenerated. Neither the waters nor the gold will ever manage to regain the radiance that is the hallmark of elusive and everlasting life.
***
There is nothing more misleading than to think of the Ṛgveda as a work concerned only with sublime tone and enigmas, incapable of describing things directly. We also find irreverence toward the gods is already there, as well as every other trait later to be developed in Indian history. And no god is mocked and jeered more than Indra, the king of kings. In the tenth and last cycle of the Ṛgveda, which is also the one containing some of the loftiest enigmatic hymns, we find the hymn of Vṛṣākapi, the monkey-man. It is a hymn with multiple voices, divided between Indrāṇī (a sort of Mrs. Indra, who is given no name of her own), Indra himself, the monkey-man Vṛṣākapi, and his wife, Vṛṣākapāyī (a mirror image of Indrāṇī). It is not clear who the monkey-man is, nor to what extent he is an animal or a man. Perhaps he is a bastard son of Indra, produced with one of his concubines, whom his father keeps with him and protects. But the monkey-man shows disrespect (we don’t know in what way) to the mistress of the house (Indrāṇī), who takes it out on her husband. The tone of the scene is exactly like that of the commedia dell’arte—or even Neapolitan comedy in the style of Scarpetta or De Filippo. The trickster Vṛṣākapi could be Punch. The scene is a family row, packed with sexual innuendo and bawdiness. The wife of the king of kings, furious because Indra won’t intervene against the monkey-man, says to him: “No woman has a butt as fine as mine, no one fucks as well as me, no one grips tighter, no one can raise her thighs higher.” No surprise that the dour Leopold von Schroeder should confess that the hymn “contains passages so obscene that I hesitated long before including it in this collection.” Geldner resorts to euphemism in his translation. As for Renou, twice in this verse he resorts to ellipsis. So people of modern times, proud cultivators of low style, need have no worry. Even the Vedic seers were familiar with such language and used it when the situation arose. And they also understood the comic effect produced by the clash of conflicting tones. Throughout the hymn devoted to the pranks of the monkey-man every verse ends with the exclamation “víśvasmād Índra úttaraḥ,” “Indra über alles.”
***
In the Atharvaveda it is said that Earth “has black knees” like a child at play, but for another reason: because the flames have licked them, for Earth is “cloaked in fire.” And, if we close our eyes, how do we recognize Earth? From its scent. It is the same fragrance that marked the fortunes of the Genies and the Nymphs, the Gandharvas and the Apsaras. He who invokes Earth also wants to acquire that fragrance. It is a fragrance associated with far-off memories: “That scent of yours that has penetrated the lotus, the scent which the immortal gods carried with them to the marriage of Sūryā, O Earth, that primeval scent, let me be entirely perfumed by it.” The scent of Earth recalls one of the happiest moments in the lives of the gods: when Sūryā, daughter of the Sun, went to marry King Soma. The Earth’s scent did not envelop Sūryā alone, but all girlhood splendor: “That scent of yours which is in human beings, female and male, which is their fortune, their pleasure, that which is in horses, warriors, that in wild animals and elephants, the splendor, O Earth, which is in the young girl, bathe us in it, so that no one wishes us harm!” All subsequent marriages, ever after, were a pale copy of what took place on Sūryā and Soma’s wedding day. Even the hymn in the Ṛgveda that describes it begins by talking about Earth: “Earth is underpinned by Truth.” And how could Earth be ignored on such an occasion? The hymn tells us straightaway that Earth—here called Pṛthivī, the Vast—“is great” thanks only to soma, to this intoxicating plant. Earth, for us, would not be so immense without soma to help us perceive it.
The bride soon appears: “Sūryā’s fine dress was entirely embroidered with verses. The cushion was Intellect, the ointment was Gaze, the basket was Sky and Earth, on the day on which Sūryā went to her husband.” Beside her, two handsome identical young men: the Aśvins, her brothers and attendants. Sūryā moved forward: “Her chariot was Thought, and Sky was the canopy.” The chariot was drawn by the two months of summer. So summertime is auspicious for weddings. The effect of all that happened from the moment of Sūryā’s arrival has reverberated down to today, though the daughter of the Sun is long forgotten. And from that day the psyche of the bride has received its imprint. This must encourage the husband to be humble. Even though he will be the first to touch his bride’s body, he will be her fourth lover: “Soma had her first, the Gandharva had her second, her third husband was Agni, the fourth the son of man.” Though the twentieth century would include psychology among its discoveries, no inquiry into the psyche of the young girl, the kórē, has reached such precision. When she reaches her wedding, even if her body is intact, every young girl has a long love story behind her. Her first lover was Soma—or Hades—since he is the ruler, as white as moonlight or as black as the darkness of the Underworld. For he is absolute and final. But after Soma comes the Gandharva Viśvāvasu, the wicked genie, the mental image of eros that besieges the young girl in her solitude, her dreams, her games. He is stubborn and wily, he knows how to wheedle his way into women’s rooms and excite their fancy. Before the young girl can reach her marriage he has to be ritually driven out: “‘Leave here: this woman has a husband!’ thus I addressed Viśvāvasu with the homage of my songs. ‘Look for another young girl, who is still living with her parents: this is your fate: understand it.’” And if the Gandharva obstinately remains, he has to be told: “Leave here, Viśvāvasu! We implore you, paying homage to you, look for another, who may be lustful! Allow the bride to be united with her husband.”
The third lover is Agni. Why? Agni is everyone’s lover. Women, old and young, gathered around the fire and showed him the soles of their feet. From there the heat of the flames began to caress them, then climbed even farther, beneath their dresses, up to their thighs. If the Saptarṣis’ wives betrayed them with Agni, what resistance could there be from an ordinary girl who had not yet been touched—and who is now being caressed in a way that no one else would ever equal? The fourth is “the son of man.” His male arrogance is the most unfitting and unseemly. And yet, through the lengthy exercise of patience, with no claims to domination, he will have to find his way through the indelible memories of those lovers who have preceded him and whom he will try to emulate to succeed at last in being at least the fourth. And nothing will change when the young girl becomes a mother with many children. As the hymn says toward the end, invoking Indra: “Put inside her ten children, let her husband be the eleventh!”