Nothing actually left it and nothing entered from anywhere—there was indeed nothing else—and it [this all, tónde tòn ólon] nurtured itself procuring its own destruction, whereas all that it suffered and did in itself and by itself happened by art [ek téchnēs]. He who had created it felt indeed that it would have been better if it had been self-sufficient and not needy of anything else.
—Plato, Timaeus, 33 c–d
Even today, in some Indian airport lounges, we can find a billboard with the following words: “Lead me from nonbeing to being. Lead me from darkness to light. Lead me from death to immortality.” Tourists either ignore it or read it with satisfaction, as a sign of age-old Indian spirituality. What are these words? They were part of a series of ritual formulas recited during the soma sacrifice, called pavamānas. While a priest intoned a chant, the sacrificer pronounced those words in a low voice, as we can read them in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad.
For the Upaniṣad the meaning of those words is clear: asat (unmanifest), tamas (darkness), mṛtyu (death) all mean “death” in the same way. It is assumed that every life in its raw state is an amalgam of nonbeing, darkness, and death. To leave it, we need help. And to get help, we need ritual.
***
Giving stability to the earth was the decisive action, whether it was the gods who achieved it, during their battle for supremacy over the Asuras, or whether it was Prajāpati himself, as the Taittirīya Brāhmaṇa says. What appears to us today as “the vast one (pṛthivī),” motionless and calm, was in the beginning a lotus leaf battered by the wind. That beginning is the state in which every person finds himself before the sacrifice begins. He is a confused being, wavering, at the mercy of unpredictable gusts of wind. He can find nothing to rest on. And so he has to imitate the action of the Devas: he will take some pebbles and place them around the edges of the area where he wishes to build fires. First of all to mark out, circumscribe (it is the same as the Greek concept of témenos). And so the earth will become a “foundation,” pratiṣṭhā, for any action whatever, for any thought whatever.
In dealing with the gods, there is an etiquette that justifies certain activities, without which nothing would happen. One of these is fence making. If it is true that “the whole earth is divine” and that sacrifices can be performed on any part of it, it is also true that the part chosen can only become a place of sacrifice after it has been closed off from the rest. The same happens when a hut is built to shelter the sacrificer during the time of consecration. “Now the gods are segregated from men and that which is enclosed on every side is also secret: this is why they enclose it on every side.” What is the underlying assumption? “The gods do not speak with everyone,” and so a way has to be devised to approach them: men must segregate themselves in the same way as the gods are segregated from men. Then perhaps the gods will pay attention. This is what the consecrator must do, so that he “truly draws close to the gods and becomes one of the divinities.” An initial separation from other men is achieved through the preliminary actions of the rite. And it is only possible through this separation to establish a rapport with the gods. Secrecy, the need for secrecy, arose from the original segregation of the gods from men. The one who intends to break this secrecy (the sacrificer) must agree to segregate himself from everyone else. Secrecy is not a way of concealing something that would otherwise be obvious to all. Secrecy indicates that one is entering an area where everything, including meaning, is enclosed. The secret is the place cut off by the enclosure, as a picture by its frame.
***
One enters the ritual as if entering a circle in perpetual movement. A particular act is prescribed at each point and has to be carried out at the next point, until we get back to where we began. But where then is the beginning? There isn’t one. Existence, all existence, begins in debt to something else, first and foremost to life itself. Between ṛṇa, “debt,” and ṛta, “world order,” there is a restless wavering. Debt is born out of order, and is given back to order. Otherwise the balance of things would be upset, life could not continue. It is a process that takes place at every instant, the elaboration and exchange of a substance that can be called anna, “food,” but incorporates within it also the word, the thought, the gesture of offering, the “yielding,” tyāga, of the substance itself. But if there is no beginning, will there ever be an end? No—for every offering leaves a “residue,” ucchiṣṭa, and this residue sets off a further chain of acts. Nor must we think that the whole process relates only to man’s rapport with the gods. For the gods must also sacrifice, perform ritual acts in the devayajana, the “place of offering of the gods,” since they too have forebears, pūrve devāḥ, the “gods before.” The circulation of substance is not limited to the earth or to the “intermediate space,” antarikṣa, between earth and sky, but pervades the whole cosmos, as far as the “celestial ocean” that can be recognized in the Milky Way.
The ritual area has to be clearly marked out, for its boundaries are those of an intermediate world, which we may describe as the world of effective action. It is where we find, on the one hand, a relentless urge for dominion and control and, on the other, an anxious, intense feeling of impermanence. The homologous elements certainly correspond, in the various realms of that which is, but they are also spiteful, slow to obey, elusive. For this reason rituals always begin anew, for this reason they are interlinked, for this reason they tend to eliminate any gap in time where inertia might creep in. And here we touch upon the final obstacle: ritual serves to make life possible, but since ritual tends to occupy time fully (certain rites, such as the mahāsattra, can even last twelve years), life itself becomes impracticable. There is no time free of obligations, free of prescribed rules, in which to live it.
***
For the Vedic liturgists, any place, generally speaking, can become a ritual scene. It is enough that water is not too far away and there is sufficient space to mark out the lines between the fires. This is tantamount to admitting that the ritual opus can—indeed must—start each time from nothing. The first thing to do is find a neutral surface with no defects. Any trace that the past may have left has to be swept away. But for the Vedic people, with their marvelous literalism, sweeping away the past means that an officiant sets to work in the clearing, like an obsessive housewife: “When setting up the gārhapatya fire, he first sweeps the chosen space with a palāśa branch. For, when he sets up the gārhapatya fire, he settles himself in that place; and all the builders of fire altars have settled on this earth; and when he sweeps that place, with this action he sweeps away all those who have settled here before him, saying: ‘To avoid settling myself on those who have been here before.’ He says: ‘Away from here! Away! Crawl away from here,’ then: ‘Go away, go and slip away from here,’ he says to those who slither on their bellies. ‘You who are here from ancient and recent times!’ and therefore both those who are here from a remote time as well as those who have settled here today.” The palāśa branch sweeps an area of level, featureless ground. A gesture that, if seen by a passerby, might seem like a domestic ritual moved outdoors for everyone to see, in a place that belongs to no one. Before anything can begin, every previous gesture, every mute connotation with the past, has to be swept away. It’s an important and decisive moment, to the extent of being equated with an action through brahman: “He sweeps with a palāśa branch, for the palāśa tree is brahman: through brahman he sweeps away those who have settled there.”
***
The ritual action is an imitation. Of other men, who lived in the beginning? Or of gods? But what actions of the gods, then? The answer appears during the building of the fire altar when certain bricks, known as dviyajus, “which require a double formula,” have to be arranged. At that moment the sacrificer thinks the following words: “I wish to go to the celestial world following the same form, celebrating the same rite that Indra and Agni used to enter the celestial world!” Here it is not a matter of imitating the heroic or erotic exploits performed by the gods of the sky in the sky or in various forays from sky to earth. Here the first action to be imitated—first action meaning rite—is the one through which the gods found a way to the sky. What the sacrificer is imitating is the act of the god himself making himself a god; something far more secret than any other act that might be attributed to a god once he has become a god. What man seeks above all to imitate is the process by which divinity is gained. And it is highly significant that, to do it effectively, man seeks to imitate the “form” of gestures carried out by the gods. This will one day become the basis of that secular activity which is art. But to imitate the process by which the sky is conquered produces unpredictable results. Imitation might perhaps finally be so effective as to enable men to reach the sky, like so many unwelcome guests. This is why the gods look upon rites performed by men with satisfaction but also suspicion. There is always the risk that men will go too far, as far as the sky, as far as the gods themselves.
***
In the Vedic pantheon, there is no Apollo to whom poetry belongs with his own exclusive dominion. Bṛhaspati is the “poet of poets,” though Soma, Vāyu, and even Varuṇa, the dark, remote, formidable Asuras, are also poets. And so too are the gods as a whole. Why? For one reason alone, one which has enormous consequences. Once having reached the sky and immortality, the gods continued to perform sacrifices. We are not told what “invisible fruit” they expected—now that they possessed all conceivable fruits—nor what desire motivated them. But perhaps this has to be accepted: “The mysterious plan of the gods when they meet together—of that we have no knowledge.” The hymns certainly show the gods frequently in the act of sacrifice. But a sacrifice can only be effective when accompanied by the right formulas, which only the kavi, the “poets,” know how to devise. Agni has to follow the worship as an “inspired seer who brings the sacrifice to completion.” And here the texts use the word vípra, describing the poet who quivers from the tension of speech. And so, if the gods hadn’t been poets, their divine life would have been inconceivable, unacceptable.
***
Ritual serves above all to resolve through action what thought alone cannot resolve. It is a cautious, timid attempt, made in spite of our own fragility, to answer dilemmas that arise every day, that besiege us, mock us. For example: what do we do with the ash produced by the sacrificial fire? Throw it away? Or use it in some other way? The question was put in this way: “The gods at that time threw away the ash from the hearth pan. They said: ‘If we make this [ash], such as it is, part of us, we will become mortal carcasses, not freed from evil; and, if we throw it away, we will place outside Agni that part of it that belongs to the nature of Agni; discover then in what manner we should act!’ They said: ‘Meditate!’” And what will be the outcome of the meditation? The ash has to be disposed of (otherwise it would mean becoming matter that “is used up”). Yet at the same time, in disposing of the ash, an essential part of Agni must not be lost. So what happens? The ashes are thrown into water. And these words are spoken: “O divine waters, receive these ashes and place them in a soft and fragrant place!” Indeed, they say: “Place them in the most fragrant place of all!” And then: “May the consorts, married to a good lord, bow down to him.” The “consorts” here are the waters, who have found a “good lord” in Agni. The waters are chosen as a place for ashes, because Agni was born from the womb of the waters. Now he returns to it. But with this act the ashes would simply be dispersed, though in their proper place. The doubt would remain that some intrinsic part of Agni’s nature had been lost. And so the officiant, passing his little finger over the waters, collects a few specks of ash to be returned to the fire. So Agni will not be lost. And ritual, thought, and life can go on.
***
The ritualists’ anonymous hero—and ideal author of the Brāhmaṇas—is the adhvaryu, the officiant who ceaselessly performs the prescribed actions and murmurs the sacrificial formulas during the rites. Without him nothing would happen, nothing would take form. Like an attendant, he goes from one task to the next. He does not experience the relief, the liberation of chanting. His is just a murmur. He is an artisan of liturgies, working away humbly, resolutely, under the fixed gaze of the brahmin who waits, motionless, to catch every error, every impropriety—and to punish it. Of the adhvaryu we read that “he is the summer, because the summer is, so to speak, fiery: and the adhvaryu leaves the sacrificial ground as something fiery.” Parched and singed from his continual occupation around the fire, the adhvaryu was the first who could say, as did Flaubert (and Ingeborg Bachmann): “Avec ma main brûlée, j’écris sur la nature du feu.”: “With my burnt hand, I write on the nature of fire.”
***
The course of the sacrifice is punctuated with moments of drama—or even of comedy or subtle humor. So, for example, we find the story of Indradyumna Bhāllaveya (about whom we know little, but can presume he was a learned ritualist): “It happened that Bhāllaveya composed the incitative formula with an anuṣṭubh verse and the formula for the offering with a triṣṭubh verse, thinking: ‘In this way I will receive the benefits of both.’ He fell from his chariot and, on falling, broke his arm. He then began to reflect: ‘This has happened because of something I have done.’ Then he thought: ‘It has happened because of some breach by me of the correct procedure for the sacrifice.’ And so the correct procedure for the sacrifice must not be broken: and so the two formulas must have verses in the same meter, either both anuṣṭubh or both triṣṭubh.” The sacrifice is a form that is composed in every single moment. And an error in form can be due to a certain greediness in desiring, to a wish to acquire too many benefits through the forms themselves. The result is immediate: Bhāllaveya falls from his chariot and breaks an arm. In the same way that the outside world is ready to offer the fruit of desire, so too is it ready to chastise any form that arises from a tainted desire. The prime purpose of the outside world is an ordeal. Depending on the meters that Bhāllaveya has selected and used, he either moves forward or falls from the chariot and breaks an arm.
The incident with Bhāllaveya clearly shows the Vedic attitude toward the world. There are three simultaneous passages, each included in the other: each event that occurs is significant; its significance is connected to an act performed by the person concerned; the ideal area in which every event takes place is the scene of the sacrifice. It is the scene of the action on which later actions depend. Bhāllaveya doesn’t immediately think the accident is due to blameworthy acts he has committed in normal life. His first thought goes to what he has done in the liturgy. That is the area that bristles with significance, the first to which his thoughts turn. Normal life is a secondary consequence of it. It is no surprise, then, that there was no concern at the time about leaving records or chronicles, and that history as such was ignored.
***
The sattra is the most extreme, esoteric, all-pervading rite in the Vedic liturgy for its conception, for its form. Based on the number twelve, it has to last for a minimum of twelve days, otherwise a whole year or, in theory, twelve years (in the last case it is known as the “great sattra,” mahāsattra). And this capacity to invade time, to fill it to its very limit, alone gives food for thought. Caland and Henry, with their usual clarity, immediately realized this and asked themselves: on what does the person celebrating a sattra live? And if the rite itself occupies a whole year, what life does he lead outside the rite? These were only their first questions: “One might at this point ask, not only what interest they had in celebrating [this rite]—for it would be irreverent to believe them incapable of holding a sincere faith and piety that would be self-sufficient—but at least on what these men lived, who, absorbed every day in the practice of a meticulous and taxing devotion, surely didn’t have the possibility to create resources by other ways.” The invasion of time, to the extent of forcing out every other form of life, was only one of the peculiarities of the rite. In the sattra there is no sacrificer: everyone is sacrificer and officiant at the same time. As a result, there is not even the ritual fee for priests. As a result, all twelve officiants have to go through the consecration, which is normally reserved only for the sacrificer. And they appear as a compact body, a group of beings consecrated for one single purpose. There are no divisions by categories or roles. The rite becomes absolute: it occupies the totality of time and is celebrated by beings consecrated for the sole purpose of carrying it out.
If a rite lasts a year and then begins immediately all over again, what time will there be for living life that is not part of a ritual? So the ritualists thought: if the game becomes untenable, fight back by raising the stakes. Are people afraid of rites that last a year? Let them listen then to a story in the life of the gods: “The gods were once celebrating the consecration ceremony for one [sacrificial session] of a thousand years. When five hundred years had passed, everything here was worn out, namely the stoma chants, the pṛṣṭha chants, and the meters.
“The gods then perceived the element of the sacrifice that cannot be worn out and by means of this element they obtained success in the Veda; and in truth, for him who knows this, the Vedas are intact and the work of the officiants is carried out with that inexhaustible, triple knowledge.”
What then is the element that remains intact? Anybody would be impatient to find out. Impassive, the ritualist is ready with the answer. It consists of five exclamations that punctuate certain moments of the ceremony. Eggeling doesn’t even translate them, as if they were simple interjections. But Minard, meticulous as ever in seeking to fix the “element of the sacrifice that cannot be worn out,” translates them as: “Oh, come! Here, listen! Adore! We, the worshippers! Heave-away!” We seem to be eavesdropping on a scene of men at work. And yet they are the germ cells of the sacrifice, loaded with power. But there is a further argument, of crucial significance for the ritualist. The syllables of the five exclamations, added together, are seventeen in number. And Prajāpati is composed of seventeen parts. It is a perfect example of sampad, that “correspondence” which is above all a “numerical congruence.” The sampad is the supreme weapon of the intellect, which Prajāpati finally resorts to in his duel with Death. When the gods realized this, they felt satisfied. They had isolated the inexhaustible element of the sacrifice—and had established the glorious truth that the five exclamations, added together, made seventeen syllables. It was another way of saying: added together, they made Prajāpati, the Progenitor.
For once, then, they were concerned about mankind. They knew man was too weak to resist. He would never even manage to celebrate a rite of only five hundred years. They said to themselves: “Let us find a sacrifice that is a substitute for the thousand-year sacrifice.” And they tried hard to combine and compress the forms. An activity they were most fond of. They invented accelerated rites, in the same way as accelerated courses would one day be invented for students who lag behind—and, for the gods, all humans lag behind. In the end, with a sense of relief, they established the minimum form of sacrifice, the shortest, most suitable form for human capabilities—as well as being arranged to correspond, in miniature, with the complete form. And so they said to each other: “When he [the sacrificer] spends one year celebrating the rites of consecration, in this way he is assured of the first part of the thousand-year ceremony; and when he spends a year celebrating the upasads [a particular soma rite], in this way he is assured of the central part of the thousand-year ceremony; and when he spends a year with the pressing [of soma], in this way he is assured of the final part of the thousand-year ceremony.” All was now clear. People need no longer worry. The gods had found the abbreviated formula for the ceremony, gauged to fit man’s capabilities. It was enough for them to sacrifice for three years in succession. And the gods, in their magnanimity, would accept the ceremony as if it had lasted a thousand years.
***
In describing one sequence of the sattra, when the mahāvratīya cup, the cup of the “great vow,” is used, we read: “For what food is for men, the vow (vrata) is for the gods.” Here at last, in the clearest terms, we see what the gods expect of men: to feed themselves on their “vows,” to which some feel bound in relation to an invisible presence, which is nourished by that mental tension. Certainly not by the smoke and blood of sacrifices, as the theological opponents of the Vedic ritualists would one day suggest, above all the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews, who would still claim that the pagan gods, and even the God of Moses, were appeased “by the blood of goats and calves.”
***
The Vedic ritualists were keen to make it clear that there is no way out of sacrificing. The sacrifice is like a secret formula that has to be protected in every way from the eyes of the enemy. This is true not just for men (such an assertion would be banal and tremendously limited): it had been just the same for the gods. As they hurled themselves into their repeated and indecisive conflicts with the Asuras, the Devas thought: if we are ever defeated, where could we keep the sacrifice? (Someone must have been tormented by the same concern during the Second World War, worrying about the formulas for the atomic bomb.) Their answer: on the moon. It would have been their place of refuge in the event of being defeated on earth.
Sacrifice accompanies us everywhere. We realize this even when we look up at the moon. What are those dark spots on the lunar disk? Places of worship. This has been so since the day the Devas decided to take various sacrificial altars to the moon. They set them down on the white dust, and the marks they left were of identical proportion to those of the fine body of a woman. From there they look down on us, from there they still make signs to earth and work on its behalf. The altars were lifted in the air toward the moon while the gods said: “Lifting up the earth that gives life, before the bloody battle.” And they repeated: “Before the bloody battle.”
***
That the sacrifice was a “controlled catastrophe,” to use Heesterman’s vivid expression, can be seen from certain marginal observations: “The houses of the sacrificer could easily collapse behind the back of his adhvaryu, when he goes away [from the cart] with the sacrifice, and could crush the family [of the sacrificer].” Here we see the sharp, piercing sense of impermanence that must have pervaded the Vedic world. When the sacrificer starts the ceremony, he turns his back on the old world, which is nevertheless the everyday world on earth. Sucked into another space, he can ignore all he is leaving behind, in a first après moi le déluge. And the mighty void which then opens up in the world could act like a tornado that whips and crushes man’s flimsy shelters. But the sacrificer knows that one day he will have to leave the sacrifice—and he would like to leave it safe and sound, and find too that the world he had left behind is also safe and sound: above all his house. And so the sacrificer does not forget to plead: “May those who have doors remain secure on the earth!” Even if he is already swept away by the elation of roaming in the “atmosphere,” he knows that one day not only will that elation come to an end but he himself will yearn to leave it, to return to ordinary, dull, secular life, as if returning to a haven of peace.
Whether it is the celebration of an aśvamedha or a soma sacrifice, all nevertheless ends with a purifying bath. Too much tension, contamination, guilt, horror, exaltation have been concentrated around the sacrifice. Now he thinks only of freeing, ridding himself of that excess energy, of returning to being an ordinary creature who lives in untruth. To do so, the sacrificer reveals that up to that moment he has felt like the victim: the first feeling he names is that of one who is “untied from the sacrificial post.” And at the same time he gives no more weight to the sensation than someone who, feeling too hot, goes looking for cool, fresh water. So violent is the sense of liberation that his first thought is to let his clothes float away in the current. Now they float away, forever. The Vedic ritualists were certainly not worried about possessions. They made use of few objects, always as temporary vehicles, to be destroyed, abandoned, thrown away as soon as they were of no further use to the opus, to that unique sequence that appeared against the background of the invisible and flowed back to it. The only visible remains were an area of ground that had been trampled over, with ashes and charred logs and little else. Better for them to be rid of everything, starting with their own clothes, cast off like the dried skin of a snake.
***
One day—perhaps every day—someone woke up and conceived the “plan,” saṃkalpa, for a sacrifice. He chose a suitable place, a clearing not far from running water, on a slight slope. He drew lines on the ground, or got someone else to draw them: rectangles, trapezoids. This was the place where he would say: “Now I pass from untruth to truth.” But the ceremony didn’t involve just one person. There had to be sixteen officiants—and the sacrificer’s wife was also there. Then there was the śamitṛ, with the task of appeasing (in other words, strangling) the victims immediately outside the sacrificial area. Lastly, to celebrate a sacrifice, it had to be rewarded with the distribution of ritual fees to the officiants. If any one of these elements was absent, the sacrifice was ineffective, indeed harmful. The sacrifice turned against the sacrificer.
There was also another risk, an obstacle that could ruin the sacrifice. It was vital that no other sacrificer was celebrating his sacrifice in a place too close. The Āpastamba Śrauta Sūtra gives clear instructions in this respect: “If the distance of a day’s journey by horse, or a hill, or a river crossing the mountains separates the two sacrifices, or if there is a mountain between the two or if the sacrifices are celebrated in two different kingdoms, then there is no conflict between the two sacrifices. The text of a Kaṅkati Brāhmaṇa says: ‘There is no conflict between the sacrifices if the sacrificers are not enemies.’”
There is a certain flavor of multiple delirium about imagining a number of open spaces, each in immediate proximity to a community (which couldn’t have been numerous), where dozens of officiants were simultaneously circling around fires, reciting, singing, murmuring, each running the risk of overlapping or interfering with the others. The texts refer several times to such events, suggesting what to do, especially where the sacrificers are rivals. We can then also imagine that they are sacrificing with opposing desires, each bent upon the ruin of the other.
The desire forming the basis of the sacrifice thus meets various obstacles: it has to be capable of being formulated (to understand itself), it has to be capable of paying itself (for its own existence), it has to avoid colliding with the desires of others. The sacrifice originates from one person alone but broadens out into a community, where it can be affected by the opposing desires of others—desires that are either too close (danger of imitation) or adverse (which is why the texts continually refer to spiteful rivals).
But the Vedic ritualists were too subtle to think that, if anyone wanted to get rid of their rival, all they had to do was celebrate their sacrifice a sufficient distance away. The rival is a perpetual presence, lurking within, wrapped up in the gestures of the officiants. Among the materials for the sacrifice—the sambhārāḥ, “utensils” required for the liturgy—there are two identical wooden spoons. The first is called the juhū, the other the upabhṛt. Both are filled with ghee. Both are brought close to the fire. But the offering is poured from only one of the spoons, while the officiant holds the other directly below, with his left hand. Why? The ritualist (in this case Yājñavalkya) gives the answer: “Certainly the sacrificer is behind the juhū and he who wishes ill is behind the upabhṛt; and if [the officiant] should speak of two spoons, he would be letting the spiteful rival clash with the sacrificer. Behind the juhū is he who eats and behind the upabhṛt he who has to be eaten; and if [the officiant] should speak of two [spoons], he would be letting he who has to be eaten clash with he who eats. So speak of only one spoon.”
What, then, will one see? In front of the fire of the oblations, the officiant is about to pour the ghee from a wooden spoon in his right hand, while in the other hand he holds an identical spoon, also full of ghee, but is careful not to use it. Why this complication? The second spoon is the shadow of the first, it is the double that emanates from the sacrificer and is bound to accompany him, threatening to overpower him.
The second spoon seems entirely superfluous. But if it were not there, it would mean that the presence of the spiteful rival is being ignored, making things even more dangerous. For the sacrifice to be perfect and complete, everything has to appear exactly as it is—evil as well as good, falsity as well as truth, disorder as well as order. To disregard just one of these powers means leaving it free to strike. Even nirṛti, which Renou boldly translated as “entropy,” a power opposed to “order,” ṛta, a nullifying power that lives in gaps, cracks, holes, crevices, has a right to its oblations, presented with no less devotion than that reserved for any other goddess (for that was how Nirṛti was portrayed: as a goddess “with a terrifying mouth”). During the stage in which the sacrificer is consecrated and initiated, he has to look for a crack or split in the ground, to make a special fire there and present the oblation with these words: “This, O Nirṛti, is your portion: accept it graciously, svāhā!” It is the only way to prevent Nirṛti from taking hold of the sacrificer when he is in the highly delicate condition of being consecrated and initiated—and so to avoid regression to the most helpless state of all, the embryo.
It should be no surprise, therefore, if the liturgical texts make continual mention of the risk of a spiteful rival bursting forth—or the possibility of the ceremony being usurped. And we should not imagine, as Heesterman suggests, that this corresponds to an historical phase in which the sacrifice, more than a religious ceremony, must have been like a tournament that often ended in death. The Vedic ritualists were accustomed to talking about the invisible as something very much present. They saw the gods huddled around the altar (around all altars, of all the sacrificers who celebrated a rite, over every valley and plain). And likewise they saw human enemies, those whose desires conflicted with those of the sacrificer and who sought nothing but his ruin. But in every crevice or hollow of the landscape they also saw the “terrible mouth” of Nirṛti, the goddess who disrupts every complete and well-ordered action and sucks it back into a vertiginous void. A goddess with powerful emissaries. Among these, dice and women. And so the person being initiated (and this is true for every sacrificer) abstained from gambling and sex during the days of the consecration.
***
At the end of the sacrifice, the sacrificer is empty, a wrinkled husk. For the underlying gesture throughout the ceremony is the tyāga, the “yielding,” the act of abandoning something—and potentially everything—to the divinity. But what has been abandoned isn’t lost. It travels, it is looking for its “place,” loka, in the sky: there it recomposes a body, a being. And the task is repeated over and over again. The main concern now is to survive on earth, to come out of the sacrifice unscathed. This is the moment for three oblations that revive the sacrificer. But the gods are jealous and astute: even now, when the ceremony is finished, they remain there, saying crossly: “These he should really be offering to us!” The sacrificer then insists: “What was emptied he fills again.” And so continues the skirmish between men and gods.
There was a very clear concern, during this last stage of the liturgy, to be rid of the gods. It was feared that they didn’t want to leave the field. They had been invited to go, they had received their gifts. But now they had to return to their august abodes. To leave men to their lives. Some gods had arrived on foot, others by chariot. Now they had to leave in the same way, laden with their gifts. And the sacrificer, during this delicate phase, needed help. So once again he turned to Agni: “The willing gods that you, O god, brought here, speed them each to their own abode, O Agni!” The sacrificer, like an impatient host, even went on to say: “You have all drunk and eaten.” In this way “he bids good-bye to the divinities.” Dry, consistent, with no note of self-righteousness or bigotry: this is how the Vedic ritualists spoke.
***
In Vedic India, every sacrificial rite is a motionless journey, a journey within a room, if we regard the sacrificial area as a vast open-air room. Broken down into hundreds, into thousands of gestures accompanied by formulas, formulas without actions, actions without formulas, it ended with a “bath,” avabhṛtha, that washed away all that was left of the journey and made it possible to return to normal life. In order to survive, that return was obligatory. The Taittirīya Saṃhitā says: “If they didn’t return down into our world, the sacrificers would go mad and perish.”
But there is one rite that is a real journey, a long journey lasting exactly a year. If a hypothetical sacrificer were immediately to start it all over again, his life would be an unending journey. It is the sattra, one of those rites where the sacrificer is also officiant. No ritual fee is therefore given to him. It would be like paying himself.
When the ritualists spoke about “those of times past” they were not referring to historical events but differences in liturgical practices. And the old days were always better. What they used to do then would always be beyond the capabilities of officiants today. Every rite contains moments of greatest concentration and tension. In a sattra lasting one year, “those of times past” used to celebrate three great days, called mahāvratas. But already by the time of the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa only one day was celebrated. The ritualist notes bitterly: “Today, if someone celebrated in that way [like the ancients], he would surely crumble away like an unbaked clay pot would crumble away if filled with water.” That is what men today are like: fresh clay that easily disintegrates. But even if what can be done today is a pale image of what ought to be done, there is always a way of establishing an exact correspondence between the weakness of today and the intact forms of times past. This requires the patient, meticulous work of the ritualists.
In the sattras lasting a year the officiants built up a new body, piece by piece, limb by limb. Each segment of the rite corresponded to a part of this body. The first ceremony produced the feet, “for with the feet he moves forward.” On the day of the summer solstice, the viṣuvat, which divided the year in two, a new head was obtained. And, since the year consisted of two equal parts, in the first the fingernails had “the shape of grass and trees,” while in the second they assumed “the form of the stars.”
They knew very well that to celebrate a rite lasting one year was a risky business. Those who are consecrated to celebrate it “cross an ocean.” The opening rite is therefore “a flight of steps, for it is by a flight of steps that one enters the water.” This is the origin of the ghats, found throughout India even today, in every place where you enter the water: along the Ganges at Varanasi, but also on countless other rivers and lakes. The flight of steps, which in the West immediately evokes the ascent to heaven, for India was above all the proper way of descending into the waters, which mark every beginning. And so the second segment of the rite, the caturviṃśa day, was a point where the water reached as far as the armpits or the neck. A moment of rest before entering deep water. In the subsequent phases, which lasted more than five months, you had to swim, without a break. Until you reached a shallow bank, where the water became ever more shallow: until it reached the thigh, then the knee, then the ankle. It was the sign that you were reaching the solstice, the viṣuvat, which “is a base, an island.” A moment of respite, before throwing yourself back into the water and passing through stages that were the exact mirror image of the first months of the rite. Then again there was a shallow bank, when you reached the mahāvrata. Another key point. Then you came out of the rite, once again by a flight of steps. You had to leave in the same way as you entered.
Śvetaketu—to whom his father, Uddālaka Āruṇi, had stated a doctrine in three words, three words that have come down through the centuries: “Tat tvam asi,” “This you are”—said to his father one day: “‘I want to be initiated for a one-year rite.’ His father looked at him and said: ‘Do you, you who have a long life, know the shallow banks of the year?’ ‘I know them,’ he replied, for indeed he said this as someone who knows it.”