If, in digging out the ground for the altar, there was already a fear of hurting the land and its creatures, the killing of animals must have seemed horrific.
—Julius Schwab, Das altindische Thieropfer
The question to be answered: Why does the imbalance between divine and human have to be corrected with a killing?
***
Killing is present everywhere in the food chain that runs throughout the animal kingdom. In each link particular species have to kill others in order to survive. With man, the chain is not broken, indeed it expands. But man is the only being who reflects upon killing, who builds up the act into a sequence of prescribed gestures. As the Vedic ritualists say, man is the only one of the sacrificial victims who also celebrates sacrifices. This happens not because man occupies a final, culminating position in the food chain. Above him are alpha predators who have terrorized and hunted him for millennia—and can still get the better of him. The capacity to reflect upon killing is therefore an anomaly in the food chain, an unexpected divergence that occurs only in that link of the chain. Above it and below it, everything continues and proceeds as always, unchanged. The repertory of gestures is fixed in advance and takes no account of history, which is really a history of that anomaly: the transformation of a being who is basically vegetarian into an omnivore. It is a history of the various ways in which that anomaly appears in actions and gestures. If the food chain were observed from far away in space, human history would appear like a deformed link that assumes a multiplicity and variety of forms compared with the geometrically rigorous fixity of all the other links.
***
The greatest risk for sacrifice is that it too closely resembles the simple slaying and butchering of an animal. It is essential to anticipate this question: why invent the highly complex ceremony of sacrifice, if in the end everything is to be reduced to dividing up pieces of meat? Here is the answer given by the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa: the sacrificial victim shall be divided into thirty-six parts, because the bṛhatī meter consists of thirty-six syllables: “By dividing it in this way, the victim is made into a celestial being, whereas those who proceed in another way tear it apart like rogues or criminals.”
When the sacrificial rite comes closest to the crude, uncontrolled, formless course of things, then the last defensive barrier—the only one that can still separate behavior conducive to order from the behavior of “rogues or criminals”—is meter. And here we see the great role that meter plays in the Veda, as the primary articulation of form, as the first effective device for breaking away from the meaningless and arbitrary succession of existence. And thus the tireless development of correspondences between particular meters and particular gods. Here it is said, among other things, that “the bṛhatī is the mind.” And so, if the mind coils within itself the thirty-six fragments of the sacrificial victim, this alone is enough to transform those pieces of flesh into fragments of a whole that has a life of its own—and is perhaps also “a celestial being.”
There is no doubt: the dividing line is extremely fine. But the suspicion arises that this was perhaps an essential element in the game. In the end, it was much nobler and much simpler to pour something—even an ordinary liquid such as milk—to dedicate it to the gods. A solitary, highly potent, bloodless ceremony, the origin of every sacrifice. We might therefore imagine that, even when a precious liquid such as the soma was offered to the gods, it followed the gestures of the agnihotra. But this was not the case. The soma rites had to be accompanied by a sacrifice of animals. It was as if at that point sacrifice sought to put itself to the test, sought to show how close it was to what necessarily happened in normal, nonritual life, which is always a life of “rogues or criminals.” And, at the same time, how distant it was, as was shown by the mind-boggling complication of the whole agniṣṭoma, the soma sacrifice where animal killing was only one of the many sequences of prescribed gestures.
***
Puruṣa is a most mysterious figure. The name is often translated (even by Renou) as “Man.” Yet in the Ṛgveda it is not the word normally used to describe Man. Whereas in the Brāhmaṇas, human sacrifice is called puruṣamedha (a word not found in the Ṛgveda). Manu is much more frequent in the Ṛgveda—and the origin of the word (from man-, “to think”) much clearer. Puruṣa, however, appears in hymn 10.90, which tells how his body, dismembered in the sacrifice, gives birth to the various parts of the universe, but in the rest of the Ṛgveda the word appears only in passing, in another two hymns. As for its derivation, the only plausible explanation is from pūrṇa, “full.” It can therefore be associated with the “stanza of plenitude” in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad. The Ṛgveda presents Puruṣa and the dismemberment of his body only once, to show how order is established: “These were the first laws.” In the same way, Prajāpati appears only once, in hymn 10.121, to answer the question on ka, on who must receive the sacrifice. It is irrelevant whether or not the last stanza, where his name is spoken, was added later. The crucial element is that the figure on whom everything depends—whether Puruṣa or Prajāpati—is mentioned in only one hymn out of the thousand and twenty-eight hymns of the Ṛgveda. On the other hand, Puruṣa and Prajāpati are referred to endlessly in the vast and rugged plains of the Brāhmaṇas and the Upaniṣads.
It can be said that, in the Ṛgveda, the two figures are used, first of all, as support for two phrases that have a formidable capacity to be expanded, as will be seen throughout the rest of the Veda. For Prajāpati, it is the question repeated at the end of every verse, before his name is spoken: “To what god shall we offer the oblation?” For Puruṣa, the phrase appears in the last stanza: “The gods sacrificed the sacrifice through the sacrifice (yajñéna yajñám ayajanta devắs).” The particularly dense and solemn nature of the formula is confirmed by the fact that it is repeated in identical terms, together with the whole of the next verse, at the end of hymn 1.164, the dizzying hymn of Dīrghatamas, the ṛṣi called Long-Darkness. Here too, scholars seem to hesitate when dealing with such a bold form of words. Geldner translates: “With the sacrifice the gods sacrificed to the sacrifice.” But yajñám is an accusative, not a dative. Renou translates: “The gods sacrificed the sacrifice through the sacrifice.” And the meaning obviously changes. But even Renou is still evasive. This is how he comments on the verse: “In other words, Man is at the same time the object offered (victim) and the object to which one aspires (divinity).” But at least one further explanation is needed: in the Vedic verse the endless circle of self-referentiality is outlined, which men have been obliged to pursue since then, up to Gödel and beyond. An endless circle that is not a defect of thought, but a foundation of thought itself. The ṛṣis were sure of it: “To this the human ṛṣis, our fathers, adhered when the original sacrifice was born in primordial times. With the mind’s eye it seems to me that I see them, those who first sacrificed this sacrifice.”
As to Puruṣa: it is true that the gods behaved toward him like the officiants who tie the victim to the yūpa, the “post.” And it is stated clearly: “When the gods, in laying out the sacrifice, had bound Puruṣa as victim.” And the following passage is also true—that the gods cut Puruṣa into pieces, as happens with every animal victim (“when they had cut up Puruṣa”). But at the same time Puruṣa was already the sacrifice, as the Brāhmaṇas fully explain. Together with Prajāpati he had appeared from the golden egg that floated on the waters: “After one year, from it was born Puruṣa, this Prajāpati.” And Prajāpati, as is repeated insistently, is the sacrifice. So the gods, who operated on his body, were none other than his tools. And the same would one day be the case for men, who imitate the gods in their acts. Only this could lighten the guilt for having killed the one from whom, piece by piece, everything was born: meters, stanzas, chants, but also the sky, the sun, the moon. Guilt that the gods heaped onto men, before men, in turn, heaped it onto the gods.
***
During his endless vicissitudes, Prajāpati seemed sometimes to ignore what he himself had done. After having generated the worlds of men and gods, he happened to look upon them as if they were something strange and unknown:
“Prajāpati desired: ‘Would that I might conquer the two worlds, the world of the gods and the world of men.’ He saw the animals, the domestic and the wild ones. He took them and by means of them took possession of the two worlds: by means of the tame animals he took possession of this world and by means of the wild animals he took possession of the other world: for this world is the world of men and that other is the world of the gods. And so, when he takes the tame animals, with them he takes possession of this world and when he takes the wild animals, with them he takes possession of the other world.
“Were he to complete the sacrifice with the domestic animals, the roads would converge, the villages would have boundaries close to each other, and there would be no bears, men-tigers, thieves, assassins, and rogues in the forests. Were he to complete the sacrifice with the wild animals the roads would diverge, the villages would have boundaries far from each other and there would be bears, men-tigers, thieves, assassins, and rogues in the forests.
“As to this they say: ‘Certainly this, the wild animal, is not part of the cattle and should not be offered: if he were to offer it, the wild animals would soon drag the sacrificer away dead into the forest, for the wild animals belong to the forest; and if he were not to offer wild animals, it would be a violation of the sacrifice.’ And so they release the wild animals after having passed fire around them: thus, indeed, it is not an offering and nor is it a non-offering, and thus they do not drag the sacrificer away dead into the forest and there is no violation of the sacrifice.”
Prajāpati seemed momentarily to have forgotten having made the world, which appeared to him from the very beginning split in two: this and that, the world of men and the world of the gods. That is: a world of untruth and a world of truth. Prajāpati wanted to find a way of taking possession of these worlds. Then “he saw” the animals. That to see has a disturbing implication in this case, for it is always connected to an action. And the action is one alone: killing. In that “he saw,” there is still the perception of the prehistoric hunter.
To go ahead and conquer the world of men and the world of the gods, he had to use animals. Animals are the keyboard of the two worlds. At one and the same time, between animals themselves there is a gap that corresponds perfectly to the one between men and gods: men are equivalent to domestic animals, gods to wild animals. We might think, then, that Prajāpati (the model of every sacrificer) would perform a double sacrifice. But he didn’t. On the one hand, the only means of action is sacrifice. On the other, sacrifice of wild animals would bring ruin to the sacrificer: the victim, being too powerful, would kill the killer and drag him away into his world. Here we have the metaphysical spark, at the point, as ever, where we are about to come up against the irresolvable contradiction. Reason would be crippled at this point, and would dare to go no further. Not so with the liturgy. The solution found—to release the victim, but first to carry a burning ember around it, a gesture performed only as a prelude to immolation—is not a childish attempt at compromise nor the indication of a collapse in reasoning. On the contrary, it is an indication that thought, in its inquiry into life, has encountered something that does not allow one straight, unambiguous solution but demands two conflicting responses. On the one hand, sacrifice can be nothing less than total—and must therefore include wild animals—because sacrifice corresponds with life itself. On the other hand, the sacrifice of wild animals would mean the end of the sacrificer—and therefore interruption of the sacrificial activity.
This situation should be compared with that of the modern world over a very similar issue: the killing of animals. On the one hand, such killing is practically unlimited, based on an alleged social need (the vegetarian diet cannot be imposed by law). On the other hand, all attempts at moral justification fail miserably, even by a civilization that prides itself on giving moral justifications for everything. The conflict rings out loud and clear. But it has not become part of the general awareness. Indeed, the issue is regarded as distasteful and is avoided. It is left to professional agitators like Elizabeth Costello to raise it in academic circles, as J. M. Coetzee, her chronicler, recounts. The reaction is a series of muffled coughs of embarrassment.
***
The first action of sacrifice personified is to flee. It runs away from the gods before running away from men. And its flight from the gods takes place while the gods are not yet gods. Only the sacrifice can, in fact, make them into fully fledged gods. We are never told exactly why the sacrifice runs away. But we know that being the sacrifice means first of all agreeing to be killed. There is a deep revolt, in every being, in the face of this—and more than any other, in that being who is the sacrifice itself.
Nothing in the sacrifice is immediate and certain: indeed, it is the result of an action of recovering, of calling the sacrifice back with words. The gods had to beg the sacrifice: “Listen to us! Come back to us!” And the sacrifice then agreed. But agreement came after a blunt refusal. Aware of the delicacy of the matter, the priests pass this creature, fragile as a seed, from hand to hand—“like a bucket of water,” in the words of Sāyaṇa. And so a tradition is established.
Sacrifice is an animal ready to escape. Maintaining silence is like shutting that animal inside an enclosure. And this gives the impression of possessing it. But if the sacrifice escapes, becoming spoken word, then the sacred formula—ṛc or yajus—will reveal its nature as a remedy extracted from evil itself: “When he withholds speech—since speech is sacrifice—he therefore closes the sacrifice within himself. But when, after having withheld speech, he emits some sound, then the sacrifice, once allowed its freedom, escapes. In that case, he should then murmur a ṛc or a yajus addressed to Viṣṇu, for Viṣṇu is the sacrifice; so he captures the sacrifice once again; and this is the remedy for that violation.”
***
At the center of the sacrifice we find an obscure word: medha, the sacrificial essence that circulates in the world like water and accumulates in a hundred beings fit for sacrifice. “Essence” here is not to be understood (only) in the metaphysical sense: medha means “marrow,” “juice,” “sap.” “In the beginning the gods offered man as a victim. When he was offered up, the sacrificial essence, medha, left him. It went into the horse.” And, after the horse, into the ox, into the sheep, into the goat, and lastly into rice and barley. Sacrificial substitution therefore implies that a life-giving substance continues to flow, even though it is housed in different receptacles. The passage from animal to vegetable is only one of these passages. But we should not imagine that this happens because sacrifice is being made more and more innocuous. On the contrary: the fact of killing is also claimed for rice and barley. All of that which possesses sacrificial essence, medha, is killed. Rice and barley no less than man or ox. The process is one, the cycle is the same, for “he who knows thus.”
“Now when they lay out the sacrifice, celebrating it, they kill it; and when they press King Soma, they kill him; and when they obtain the victim’s consent and cut it up, they kill it. It is by means of a pestle and mortar and with two millstones that they kill the offering of grain.” The Brāhmaṇas have often been accused of being “immensely monotonous.” And yet at times—indeed so frequently as to rebut any accusation of monotony—we find sentences or passages in those texts that describe with great clarity and concision what others elsewhere have been loath to put in writing. The scriptures in many different civilizations have always been reticent about the act of killing. It is indeed a favorite opportunity for euphemism. Not so in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa. The act of killing, generally a natural part of sacrifice, is applied here first of all to the sacrifice itself: celebrating a sacrifice implies the killing of the sacrifice. What this means is not immediately clear, but it can be linked to the stories where the sacrifice runs away from the gods in the guise of a horse or an antelope. The sacrifice can be an abstraction—and sometimes runs away in the face of similar abstractions, such as “priestly sovereignty.” But likewise, a plant that is a king—Soma—can be killed. Or a simple offering of grains of barley. Or an animal victim. Most people would use the word kill only for the last of these. Whereas for the Vedic ritualists the killing of the animal victim is only one of many instances in a series of killings. This procedure could be read as the opposite to euphemism. Instead of toning down the violent occurrence, it is extended to apply to everything, since what happens in the sacrifice involves the whole of existence and is to be found at every level, among abstract concepts just as much as among plants.
***
In Sanskrit, in Greek, and in Latin, killing was defined as a “consent” by the animal to be immolated. In India, killing took place outside the sacrificial area and was not to be seen by anyone except the śamitṛ, the slaughterer who performed the act. And even where a vegetable substance such as soma was sacrificed, the pestle had to strike it in the presence of someone who was blindfolded.
In factory farms, right now, millions of animals spend a life of agony crammed together in spaces that prevent them from any movement, before being killed as hastily as possible. According to food industry ideology, this takes place with the “consent” of the animals themselves, who are supposed to feel more secure in such conditions.
***
When certain crucial stages were reached, various actions served to sidestep or surmount a contradiction that would otherwise have been crippling. When the animal chosen as a victim is taken for immolation, could the sacrificer touch it or not? He must not touch it—it is said—because it is being taken to its death. He must touch it—it is said—because “that [victim] that they are taking to the sacrifice is not being taken to its death.” Which argument is right? Both are. But which should be followed? If the sacrificer touches the victim, he makes contact with death. If he does not touch it, he is cut off from the sacrifice. So what should he do? Watching the sacrifice, we would have seen the pratiprasthātṛ guiding the victim, touching it from behind with two skewers, the adhvaryu holding the hem of the pratiprasthātṛ’s robe, and then the sacrificer holding the hem of the adhvaryu’s robe. Moving forward in a line, in silence, like Bruegel’s blind men. But slightly bent in concentration. This was the answer. In this way the sacrificer touched and at the same time didn’t touch the victim. And in this way they thought to escape logic by means of ritual gesture.
***
At the moment of immolation, those present are to avert their eyes. The animal is killed beyond the sacrificial boundary, next to the śāmitṛ there is fire where they will cook the victim’s limbs, outside the trapezoidal area marked out for the sacrifice, to the northeast. As in Greek tragedy—and with a perfect correspondence of meaning—the killing takes place offstage. The rite and the tragedy are complex ceremonial activities that make it possible to work through that intractable event, which must not be witnessed.
And here is the main point at which the use of euphemism inherent in every sacrifice emerges. Before striking the victim, they cannot say: “Kill it!” because “that is the human way.” They have to say: “Make it consent!” Some regard this instruction as hypocritical; others as sublime. It is both. And, above all, it is what happens in any case, as soon as the mute act is clothed in words. But it would be naïve to think that the Vedic ritualists were eager to cover up or mitigate something. That certainly was not their style. When necessary, they knew how to spell things out very clearly: “When they make the victim consent, they kill it.”
The formula in the Brāhmaṇas corresponds precisely with the Roman ritual that required the meek consent of the victim in order for the ceremony to be faultless. And before that, the Delphic oracle had recognized that “if an animal consents by bowing its head toward the lustral water… it is right to sacrifice it.”
The worry continues even after the killing—or after the consent, if we want to use the language of the gods. At that moment the victim has become food for the gods. But “the food of the gods is living, immortal for the immortals,” whereas the victim is a lifeless animal, strangled or with its throat slit. The contradiction is intensified especially around the killing of the sacrificial victim, like specks emerging in various places on a canvas, marring its perfection. What should be done, then? At this point, the sacrificer’s wife was to be seen coming forward. She would turn to the sacrifice, praise it. Then she would approach the victim and begin to clean its orifices with water. The vital spirits passed out—had passed out—from there. But “the vital spirits are water.” And so that motionless body, freshly bathed, now returned to being “truly living, immortal for the immortals.” Another obstacle had been overcome.
***
The first tangible form of evil is created by the anguish of the victim who is about to be killed. That anguish deposits itself in the heart. But the primary characteristic of evil is that, like energy, it cannot be eliminated, but only transformed, moved elsewhere. And so the evil passes from the heart of the victim to the spear that pierces it. But what will happen to the spear? The officiants would like it to be swallowed up in the current, near to the sacrificial ground. And so they cautiously approach the waters—seeking to assuage them, asking for their friendship. But as soon as the waters see them approaching with the spear, they draw back. Negotiation then begins. The officiants know they have to make a pact with the waters. They will agree not to throw the spear into them after the sacrifice to Agni and Soma—nor after that to Agni alone. And in exchange they will obtain an agreement that once the barren cow has been killed they can then, at the end of the ceremony, throw the spear into the waters. The ritualists felt satisfied with this, because with the barren cow “the sacrifice is completed.” And that which completes—they thought—has the power, due to its strategic position, to transfigure all that has gone before it. By freeing themselves from that extreme part of the evil, they could believe they were free of all evil. It would have been hard to achieve more than this.
The gods were the first to feel a sharp sense of guilt over the sacrifice. When the first victim was seized, they were filled with fear: “They did not feel inclined to that.” They knew what they were about to perform was the model of all guilt. They would pass this on to mankind. And so, whatever sacrificial speculation might one day be raised over guilt, to the point of wandering into abstraction or into the remotest realms of heaven or creation, at the end of the ceremony the perception of guilt would once again emerge, even more sharply, more insistently—and be concentrated on one object: the spear that pierces the heart. How can it be eliminated? Guilt does not decay, diminish, disappear. Like radioactive matter, it continues to emit radiation. Once again, it was a question of finding an answer to the unanswerable: “He shall bury the spear at the point where the dry and the damp meet.” A mysterious, indefinable point. A point—we can suppose—where the elements neutralize each other, where even anxiety would be suspended, inoperative, even if not entirely removed. This is what can be achieved: an impermanent balance. The anxiety remains. To get rid of the spear as soon as the barren cow has been slain: this pact remains valid even until today. The most effective measure has always been to forget it.
At the end of the sacrifice, rites are necessary in order to leave it. They correspond point by point with the rites celebrated to enter the sacrifice. The form A-B-B-A, known to anyone who studies music, originates here. The same also goes for any structure where the end must correspond with the beginning. And since, at the beginning, there was nothing on the sacrificial ground, all traces must be destroyed, removed, wiped away. The grass used as a cushion for the invisible gods is burned, various utensils are destroyed, the sacrificial post is burned. Only one object remains intact—the spear that has pierced the victim’s heart—but it is concealed, for “the instrument of the crime or of the suffering must be hidden.”
***
The final dilemma over the sacrifice emerged when Soma was killed. There was then an exchange between the gods and Mitra, whom the sacrificer recalls at the moment when soma is mixed with milk:
“He mixes it [soma] with milk. The reason he mixes it with milk is this: Soma was really Vṛtra. Now, when the gods killed him, they said to Mitra: ‘You kill him too!’ But he did not like it and said: ‘I am certainly a friend (mitra) of all; if I am not a friend, I will become a nonfriend (amitra).’ ‘Then we will exclude you from the sacrifice!’ He said: ‘I also kill.’ The cattle moved away from him, saying: ‘He was a friend and has become a nonfriend!’ He was left without cattle. Mixing [the soma] with the milk, the gods then supplied him with cattle; and likewise now this [officiant] supplies it [to the sacrificer] mixing [the soma] with the milk.
“And to this they say: ‘Surely he did not like killing!’ So the milk that there is in this [mixture] belongs to Mitra, but the soma belongs to Varuṇa: and so it is mixed with the milk.”
Sacrificing implies complicity in the killing. Only in this way is it possible to avoid being excluded from the sacrifice. And this must be a far more serious threat, if Mitra, the Friend, the one who represents the brahmin’s purity, is prepared to take part in the killing, so as not to be excluded from the rite. But what is to be lost by being excluded from the sacrifice? Everything—if what there is to be gained is a result of action. And if action comes from desire. Anyone who accepts the action—and the desire that prompts it—also accepts the killing. It is the inflexible rule of sacrificial society, in this respect similar to—and perhaps the model for—every secret society, every criminal society. The group is based on complicity—and the most solid complicity comes from killing. That this then consists of pressing the juice of a plant can offer no form of reassurance. Indeed, it allows us to see how the realm of killing is larger than we might imagine, as large as the world.
***
Any reference to *the invisibles *in Vedic times is not to be interpreted as a metaphysical allusion, but as referring to a situation that recurs in all “solemn,” śrauta, rituals. Those present belong to four groups: the sacrificer, for whose benefit the rite is celebrated (he is present, but, once he has been through the consecration, he plays no active part); the officiants (sixteen: the hotṛs, the udgātṛs, the adhvaryus), who have to pronounce the verses of the Ṛgveda, chant the melodies of the Sāmaveda, murmur the formulas of the Yajurveda while the countless gestures that make up the ceremony are performed (this being the exclusive task of the adhvaryu); the brahmin, a priest who watches every detail and intervenes only when errors are made, otherwise remaining silent. But a last group is also there: the gods, invisible presences. Or more exactly: those who are crouching around the āhavanīya fire, on fragrant layers of kuśa grass, entirely invisible apart from Agni and Soma. Agni is always visible, for he is the fire. King Soma is visible in the agniṣṭoma, because in that rite it is the soma itself that is offered.
After being purified with the pavitra—the “filter,” which in this case is made of stalks of a sacred herb—for “impure, indeed, is man; he is foul within, insofar as he speaks untruth,” the sacrificer folds his fingers one by one toward his palm, evoking a different power for each, because he wants to take hold of the sacrifice. And the commentator adds: “The sacrifice is not in fact to be taken hold of visibly, as this staff or a garment, but invisible are the gods, invisible the sacrifice.”
Every sacrificial practice, beneath every sky, implies a relationship with the invisible, but never as in the India of the Vedic ritualists has that relationship been declared, celebrated, studied down to the tiniest details, including even the movements of the little finger. Thus we discover that the little fingers are the first to be moved in the gesture of taking hold of the sacrifice, and represent nothing less than the mind. This continual fluctuation between minuscule and huge, with equal attention to both, is the primary hallmark of Vedic liturgy. And such is the tension and the precision of that intense, ceaseless relationship with the invisible, that it is no surprise that the visible scene of Vedic life remained so bare, so unimpressive, so averse to all monumentality. And it is no surprise that its inhabitants had such a lack of interest in leaving behind any trace that was other than textual or whose object was not to be found in that invisible which could not be grasped like a staff or the hem of a garment, but was nevertheless to be grasped. The invisible is like the onetime forest animal—it is the prey that the liturgy teaches us how to hunt, showing us how to prepare the ground, how to stalk it, how to catch it. And finally how to kill it, as happened in hunting, and is now repeated in sacrificing.
There is one ultimate question on sacrifice, after all the others: why does the offering to the invisible have to be killed? Suffocating the animal, pressing the soma, grinding corn: all these are considered acts of killing. And already this suggests an intensity of thought, a concern to clarify that elsewhere was not felt necessary. But for the Vedic ritualists this was only the penultimate question. It was bound up with another, which they asked repeatedly: why is the celebration of a sacrifice also the killing of the sacrifice? Why, in the case of the sacrifice, does its performance have to involve not just the execution of the victim, but that of the sacrifice itself? Why is the sacrifice an act that not only kills, but kills itself?
Here we enter the most arcane area of Vedic liturgical speculation, an area in which it becomes increasingly difficult to find parallels in other civilizations. And it is an area where we have to move with caution, since “the gods love what is secret,” as the texts never tire of repeating, as soon as we cross the threshold of the esoteric.
Why then does the sacrifice itself have to die, every time it is performed? And why does it then have to be performed again? The sacrifice is never a single act, nor can it ever be. The single act is the killing: the knife that slashes a body, the arrow that pierces it. But the sacrifice is—and has to be—a sequence of acts, a composition, an opus*.* Everything converges slowly, meticulously toward the oblation or the immolation. Hours, days, even months (or years) at one extreme; just a few seconds at the other. The sacrifice requires time. And it requires the existence of time as something clearly marked out. But we know from what happened to Prajāpati that the articulation of time is the same as the disjointing of the Progenitor, his dismemberment into the Year, therefore his death: “When [Prajāpati] became disjointed, the vital breath went out from within him.” And, what was even more serious for the Progenitor of the gods, Prajāpati felt a dread of death: “Having created all existing things, he felt emptied and was afraid of death.”
Life Below requires death Above, in the same way as life Above demands death Below. For the gods to continue living, it is necessary to perform a killing. For men to continue living, the Progenitor has to be dismembered in the world. This is the ṛta, “world order”—or, at least, it is one of its fundamental principles. But this is not enough—and points to something else. There cannot be a smooth flow, an undisturbed exchange, between the visible and the invisible. There is a sudden gap between the two poles, which can only be bridged through precise and complicated measures. Measures so complicated that they can absorb a whole lifetime. Sacrificial killing is the most apparent and most serious of these. If the offerings circulated between sky and earth, if they didn’t have to be accompanied by a violent act, there would be an immediate correspondence between the visible and the invisible. The invisible would appear at any moment in the world, which would thus come to lose its opacity, its harsh muteness. Life would be a great deal easier—and less hazardous. But it is not like this. Every awakening is matched by a radical uncertainty over everything—and, if the agnihotra had to be celebrated every day just before sunrise, it was because there was no guarantee that this would happen. Perhaps Sūrya, the Sun, needed help.
Violence—though limited, mitigated, described by way of euphemism—could not be eliminated, insofar as it was the only adequate, irreversible signal of that hiatus, of that discrepancy between visible and invisible which nothing could heal. Between the two extremes there was a cavity, an open wound. Which could be—temporarily—healed only on condition that it was reaffirmed in the violent action of the sacrifice: “He thus heals the sacrifice by means of the sacrifice.” If this happens, the unbridgeable ravines of the sacrifice are transformed into a celestial flight path. That hawk, which until a moment earlier had been an altar built with ten thousand eight hundred bricks, as many as the hours of the Vedic year, would then rise up and fly. An altar made of time. And time could not be deprived of the power, indeed the obligation to kill.
It is never clearly stated in the Vedic texts that there is a swerve, a gap, a break between visible and invisible, that the visible ends up suspended over the void. Not all of the forest doctrine (an expression used to indicate esoteric teaching) was to be enounced—or to be enounced in certain terms. There remained something precipitous, looming, which corresponded to the makeup of that which is. If sacrifice were only an illusion of particular groups of people living in remote times and conditions, then the life that ignores it would not feel compelled to remember and rediscover it, disguised, subtly recurrent and evasive, like a blackbuck antelope in the midst of traffic.
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Certain ideas of the Vedic ritualists could be set out without resorting to their categories and reasoning, but using words acceptable even in a twenty-first-century university lecture hall. Like this, for example: the relationship between the visible and invisible is superimposed onto that between the discrete and the continuum. In the same way that the visible will never manage to penetrate the invisible, however much it expands and however transparent and significant it becomes, so too the discrete will never manage to coincide with the continuum, which envelops and surpasses it. There is a break point, between the two series, often recognizable by some trace of blood. The invisible and the continuum belong to the mind and express its sovereignty. The visible and the discrete are the expansion of what is outside the mind, innervated by the mind but not reducible to the mind. All that takes place is an exchange and an uninterrupted passage between the four corners of this quadrangle. The point where the paths meet and cross is the center of the quincunx, the fifth stone on which are laid the stalks of the soma before the other four stones strike it, rip it apart, so that the intoxicating juice can drip from it.