When you gods were in the waves, holding each other tightly, thick foams then rose up from you, as from dancers.
—Ṛgveda 10.72.6
This book was started quite a number of years ago out of the rash idea of writing a commentary on the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, the Brāhmaṇa of One Hundred Paths. The Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa is a treatise on Vedic rituals that dates back to the eighth century B.C.E. and is made up of fourteen kāṇḍas, “sections,” which add up to 2,366 pages in Julius Eggeling’s five-volume translation in the Sacred Books of the East series, published in Oxford between 1882 and 1900. This is at present the only complete translation (that of C. R. Swaminathan has so far reached only the eighth kāṇḍa). The Brāhmaṇas—and the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa stands out among them—contain thoughts that cannot be ignored yet rarely find a place in the philosophy books. Thus, very often, they were treated with impatience, as being a sort of intrusion.
The Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa is a powerful antidote to current existence. It is a commentary that shows how one can live a life totally dedicated to passing into another order of things, which the text dares to call “truth.” A life that is impossible to live, since almost everything is worn down in the strains of that transition. But a life that certain people tried, very long ago—and of which they wanted to leave some record. It was a life based above all on particular gestures. We should not be led astray by the fact that some of those gestures still survive today in India and are commonly performed by a great many people who know almost nothing about how they originated, while other great civilizations have left no comparable legacy: the civilization of the Vedic ritualists did not withstand the test of time—it fell apart, remaining for the most part inaccessible, incomprehensible. And yet all that still shines out of it has a power that stirs any mind not entirely enslaved to what surrounds it.
***
People at the beginning of the twenty-first century speak much about religion. But very little in the world is religious in the strict and rigorous sense. And not so much with regard to individuals as to social structures. Whether these are churches, sects, tribes, or ethnic groups, their model is an amorphous superparty that lets people go further than the idea of the party had previously allowed, in the name of something that is often described as “identity.” It is the revenge of secularity. Having lived for hundreds and thousands of years in a condition of subjection, like a handmaiden to powers that were imposed without caring to justify themselves, secularity now—sneeringly—offers all that still makes reference to the sacred the means to act in a way that is more effective, more up-to-date, more deadly, more in keeping with the times. This is the new horror that still had to take form: the whole of the twentieth century has been its long incubation period.
If one wants to talk about anything religious, some kind of relation has to be established with the invisible. There has to be a recognition of powers situated over and beyond social order. Social order itself must seek to establish some relations with that invisible. All this does not seem to be of great concern to religious authorities at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In the higher ranks of Christian or Islamic hierarchies, or among the pandits of Hinduism, it is easy to find keen sociologists or social engineers who use the sacred names of their respective traditions to impose or sustain a certain collective order. But it would be hard to find anyone who could speak the language of Meister Eckhart or Ibn ‘Arabī or Yājñavalkya—or could even remind us of such a voice.
In the face of this, the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa offers the picture of a world made up only of what is religious, with no apparent curiosity or concern about anything that is not. As the Brāhmaṇas see it, the religious pervades every tiny gesture—and even pervades all that is involuntary and accidental. For Vedic ritualists, a world without such characteristics would have appeared meaningless, in exactly the same way as their writings have often appeared to readers of today. The incompatibility between the two views is total. And the disparity of forces is overwhelming: on the one hand a chain of procedures that has succeeded in covering the entire planet for the first time with an invisible digital network; on the other hand a body of texts, partly accessible only in a dead, perfect language, which describes actions and entities that seem no longer to have any importance. Yet the thinking of the Vedic ritualists, in its sometimes unfathomable eccentricity, had this peculiarity: it always posed crucial questions, in the face of which all thinking going back to the Enlightenment shows itself to be clumsy and inadequate. The ritualists did not offer solutions, but they knew how to isolate and contemplate the knots that cannot be undone. It is by no means certain that thought can do much more.
***
It would be pleonastic to use the word symbol in a world where multiple meanings could be found in every tiny fragment. What, for example, would water be a symbol of in the Veda, other than—almost—everything? To apply the Western notion of “symbol” to the Vedic world would rapidly produce a general state of meaninglessness through an excess of meaning. Indeed there is no exact word in Sanskrit for “symbol.” Bandhu, nidāna, sampad: these are words that indicate an affinity, tie, bond, correspondence, nexus, assimilation, but cannot be reduced to official functions, as happened in the case of the symbol.
In the ordinary Western mind, as it has developed over centuries of elaboration before producing hordes of anonymous Bouvards and Pécuchets, it is generally assumed to be quite unnecessary for the vast majority of things to be a symbol of something else, except in certain clear-cut cases where such a role is considered legitimate—and also useful. The flag is a good example. But the Vedic world would then be a boundless expanse of flags.
At the same time, a modern Western mind is able to navigate the Vedic texts, though with some difficulty—finding itself at times before obstacles that seem insurmountable—and discover something vital that can be found nowhere else. And the difficulties it encounters are not that much greater than those that a present-day Indian has to face. The distance between Indian and Western cultures of today, though obviously great, becomes negligible when compared with the astral distance of both from the Vedic world.
How does contact become possible? Analogically. In the silent plains of the past, the Veda is most probably the widest, most complex, most ramified area, where people lived granting sovereignty and preeminence to only one pole of the mind: the analogical pole. A pole that works perpetually (and cannot fail to work) in every being, at whatever time, in the same way as its corresponding pole: the digital pole. Under whose dominion the entire world now finds itself living—an experimental condition that is unprecedented. But, though the preeminence of the digital pole is solid and secure, this does not mean the analogical pole is disappearing. And in fact it has no option but to continue working, since physiology demands that it does. Yet at times it works secretly, or in disguise, or at least without letting itself be noticed. On the other hand, digitality was also present and active in the Vedic world, though bridled and trampled upon. And it cannot be otherwise, since this is how our brain and our nervous system are made. This implies, among other things, that nothing can in principle stop them from trying to act and react in ways they once used to, over several millennia. On the scale of the brain, those times are not even so very far distant.
Behind the Ṛgveda, behind the swarming of gods, behind the seers who saw the hymns, behind the ritual acts, we glimpse something that could approximately be called Vedic thought. If this thinking was the most hazardous and consistent attempt at ordering life in obedience to the analogical method alone, that attempt could not last—and we can only be amazed that it has managed to survive in particular places and particular periods, like a wedge of alien material. Yet it is also true that this attempt, vulnerable though it might have been, has also had the strength to keep some of its features alive over a distance of millennia, when other grandiose constructions had sunk. In Greece today, its gods and their rituals speak only through the silence of their stones. The same is true for Egypt, the most hoary of civilizations. But the Vedic mantras continue to be recited and sung, intact, sometimes in the same places where they were formed—or even in Kerala. And particular ritual gestures, to which Vedic thought had devoted obsessive attention, continue to be carried out in the saṃskāra, in the sacramental ceremonies that are part of countless lives in India.
***
The gods dwell where they have always dwelt. But on earth, certain indications about those places have now been lost. Or we no longer know where to find them among old sheets abandoned and dispersed. Meanwhile, life goes on as if nothing had happened. Some think those sheets will one day be rediscovered. Others that they were of no particular importance. Others, yet again, have no idea they ever existed.
***
Humanity does not have a superabundance of modes of thinking. And two—connective and substitutive thinking—stand out like inimical brothers. Each is based on a statement: “a is connected to b” and “a stands for b” (where “a implies b” is a subset of “a is connected to b”). There is no form of thought that cannot be subsumed into one or other of these two statements. And they are in a relation of chronological succession, because the connective has always preceded the substitutive in every place or time, if we take connective as referring to the Vedic bandhus, and therefore to those “bonds” and “nexuses” that link the most disparate phenomena by affinity, resemblance, and analogy.
The more mature thought is—in the sense of it being multifaceted, all-embracing, precise—the more it practices both of its modes to the very end, to the full extent of their potential. To choose one or the other, as if they were two political parties, would be puerile. But it is essential to distinguish their respective fields of application. Neither the connective nor the substitutive have the capacity to extend to everything. In certain spheres, they become vacuous and inert. The more subtle and effective the activity of one of the modes of thinking becomes, the more it can identify and accurately delineate the areas to which it applies.
Connective and substitutive: the two modes of the mind can be so defined by referring to their dominant characteristic. But, if we are referring to the implementation of their workings, they could also be described as analogical and digital, insofar as the principal way of substitution is through codification—and the number is what enables it to act with maximum ease and efficiency. And the digital mode is applied above all to the realm of quantity, where the result of an operation is a number that substitutes an initial number. Whereas the analogical mode is based on similarity, thus on the connection between entities of whatever kind.
Convention and affinity are other useful terms for defining the two poles of the mind. Convention means that, whatever a is, it can be decided that “it stands for b,” therefore it substitutes it. An impositional principle, not based on argument—and highly effective. Affinity means that, for reasons not necessarily clear or apparent, there is something in a that it shares with b, so that anything said about b will in some way involve a. At the beginning it is a largely obscure terrain—and destined to remain so to some extent even at the end of any investigation. The perception of affinities is never-ending. We can say where the process begins, but not where it can be ended. The convention, on the other hand, begins and ends in the act with which it is established.
This is what we are made of. In the same way that the binary number system, in its simplicity, allows an endless series of applications, so the two modes of the mind lend themselves to supporting the widest variety of constructions that combine or mix together, or repel each other. And each continually referring to the other. Every decision that claims to divide them or declares the predominance of one over the other is useless, because both continue to operate, consciously or otherwise, at every instant, for anyone and in anyone.
***
The connective mode and the substitutive mode correspond to two irreducible elements of nature—and of the mind that observes it: the continuum and the discrete. The continuum is the sea; the discrete, the sand. The connective mode assimilates itself to the continuum, in that it produces a never-ending amalgam, an uninterrupted strip of figures where each enters the other. The substitutive mode multiplies indefinitely the grains that, seen from a certain distance, compose a single distinct figure, in the same way that the halftone screen allows things photographed to be recognized. More than categories, the continuum and the discrete are dimensions with which the mind works nonstop. And through them the world works. They are “the poles of a fundamental complementarity of thought throughout all time.” The mind and the world draw upon that obscure, inexhaustible background, like craftsmen in the same workshop.
***
There is nothing pleasant about the picture of someone taking an animal, tying it to a post, and then strangling or suffocating it, or slitting its throat. And yet that gesture formed the centerpiece of solemn rituals, in India and elsewhere. Clearly it must have been considered necessary, inevitable. Instead of concealing it, they flaunted it, surrounding it with bold and mysterious speculations. Then that same gesture, at a certain point during the Christian era, became unacceptable as a public spectacle. But the number of animals killed each day—strangled, suffocated, their throats slit (other methods of killing also came along in the meantime)—never diminished, indeed it steadily grew. There was no more talk of sacrifice, except in books. And yet, in laboratories, they talked about test animals being sacrificed.
Sacrificial practices all have a familiar nature, whether they are celebrated in Cameroon or among the Australian Aborigines, in the American Northwest or in the Temple of Jerusalem, in Mexico or Iran or in Imperial Rome. Examining documentary evidence or archaeological finds, it is impossible to deny that we know—in an obscure way—what they consist of. They are words and fragments of phrases that belong to dialects of one and the same language, of which nowhere is the grammar and syntax worked up to the degree of perfection that we find in the India of the Vedic ritualists. We can say of Vedic sacrifice what was said about the Mahābhārata: in it is found all that exists elsewhere—and what is not to be found there does not exist anywhere else. Every detail of the sacrificial rites of every part of the world can be illuminated from a passage in the system of Vedic sacrifice, yet there are many details of Vedic sacrifice that can be illuminated only by themselves. Behind the disparate, ramified, discordant practices of sacrifice—so disparate and so discordant that various scholars today, out of speculative cowardice, are tempted to treat sacrifice itself as an invention of anthropologists—the outline of a sacrificial vision can be recognized, and it involves everything. This vision, though ubiquitous and persistent, also has the following characteristic: if it is not accepted, it can dissolve away instantly. There is no obligation to describe, to interpret the world in sacrificial terms. There is nothing to prevent thinking in a way that totally ignores the sacrificial vision. Sacrifice itself can easily be described as a mental disorder. And yet its language cannot be expunged. Irritatingly, it remains and returns. The sacrificial practices have gone. But the word is still used—and everyone seems to understand it immediately, even without being anthropologists. At the opposite extreme, in Vedic India the sacrifice was like breathing. It is therefore a phenomenon that continues to exist even unconsciously—indeed it is an implicit condition of our own lives, in whatever place or time.
***
In the battle between sacrificial and anti-sacrificial stances, the most plausible result could be that the former is gradually defeated, abandoned, repressed, forgotten, superseded in Hegelian manner. It would remain, if at all, an archaic survival (it could be said of almost everything that it is an archaic survival) and some scholar would take it upon himself to search out traces of it.
But this is not the case. In its Vedic variant—the most complex, intricate, subtle, staggering—the sacrificial stance contains an implication that goes very far: it is quite possible to ignore the very thought of sacrifice, but the world will continue just the same—whatever happens—to be a huge sacrificial laboratory. In the words of Paul Mus: “Beginning from Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, 10.5.3.1–12, a closer examination of sacrificial doctrine shows that, if sacrifice is the reason for every life, life itself, even if it is not redeemed by it, is like a sacrifice which ignores itself.” Now, if any life whatsoever is “a sacrifice which ignores itself,” every attempt to overcome sacrifice will turn out to be illusory. But why should the whole world be a sacrificial laboratory? Simply because it is based—every part of it—on an exchange of energies: from outside in and from inside out. This is what happens with every breath. And likewise with eating and excreting. Interpreting physiological exchange as sacrifice is the critical step, on which all else depends. And it is a step that, reduced to its most elementary form, implies only that between everything internal and everything external there is a relationship, a communication that can have a meaning—and a wide diversity of meanings, up to the hypermeaningful fervor of the Veda.
The sacrificial attitude implies that nature has meaning, whereas the scientific approach offers us the pure description of nature, in itself devoid of meaning. And this absence of meaning in the description is not due to an imperfect state of knowledge that can one day be remedied. Indeed, from description it will never be possible to reach meaning. Knowledge about a neural pathway, however perfect, will never be translated into the perception of a state of consciousness. This is the ultimate, insurmountable obstacle that the sacrificial attitude sidesteps at the very beginning. Perhaps arbitrarily. Indeed, most certainly arbitrarily, so far as the detailed correlations that it then sought to establish. But is it not an equally arbitrary gesture if, starting with a particular point of scientific investigation, we seek to introduce meaning into what is described?
Meaning is a work of the mind—and we might say that the mind always keeps company with primordial doubt, when “in the beginning this [world], as it were, existed and did not exist: then there was only the mind.” For the Veda, “mind,” manas, has a sovereign position, but only insofar as it corresponds to a state in which the world itself did not know whether it existed or not. In a certain way, the Vedic absolutism of the mind is much more ready to entertain radical doubt about itself than is scientific empiricism, which always offers its results—however provisional and perfectible—as a verified (and therefore true) transcription of that which is.
***
In many different times and places, a rite was created that practiced the destruction of something in connection with an invisible counterpart. If one of these elements is missing, there is no sacrifice. And, if all three are present, the ceremony can have many different—and even conflicting—meanings. But all will share at least one characteristic: detachment, yielding, abandoning something to an invisible counterpart. If such an action were performed onstage, half the stage would remain empty—the half featuring those for whom the sacrifice was made.
What is more, sacrifice has to have a destructive element. There can be no sacrifice unless something is consumed, dispersed, discharged, poured. And in a large number of cases the ceremony calls for a killing, the spilling of blood. To understand sacrifice we have to understand why, in offering something to an invisible entity, the offering has to be killed.
While the reason for the gesture of offering itself is not too difficult to find (made out of fear or respect, in order to corrupt, to establish a relationship), the reason justifying the act of killing is not at all clear. First, it is not clear why the entity or entities to which sacrifice is made require the offering to be destroyed. Nor is it clear why, even when the sacrifice is centered around the offering of a precious substance (soma), the offering must be accompanied by the killing of various animals.
***
No theory about sacrifice manages to cover the phenomenon in its entirety. The rite is too plastic, changeable, adaptable to the various motives. Yet there is no difficulty in describing as sacrifices all those acts carried out in remote times and places. What holds them together is not so much the specific meaning as certain preconditions, which are unfailingly there.
And they are the following: that every sacrifice is a formalized sequence of actions addressed to an invisible counterpart; and that every sacrifice implies a destruction—something must be separated from what it belonged to and be dispersed. It may be life, for the animal that is killed; or money, for the taxpayer who is invited to make “sacrifices” (in this case we are no longer talking about ritual, but the word continues to be used in a broader sense); or it may be a liquid, even just water, which is poured as a libation; or a perfume, such as incense, which is dispersed; or the life of the sacrificer himself, as in the Roman devotio. The variants are many and subtle. The motives mean or sublime. The ceremonies age-old or improvised—the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa described them as “supreme action (śreṣṭhatamaṃ karma).” In any case, it still has to be understood why, over thousands of years and in places far apart and unrelated to each other, it was felt necessary to turn to an invisible counterpart, performing a series of gestures that, without exception, include a destruction—and in any case the detachment of something from the animate or inanimate being to which it belonged. Sacrifice is in the first place a caesura, in the original sense of the word, which comes from caedo, to cut, a verb used in sacrificial killing. But, if the sacrifice introduces a caesura into life (into any life), then we must ask what happens if that caesura does not occur. There would then be another caesura, but this time in the sense of interruption, after an incalculable series of acts. The whole history of mankind can be seen from this standpoint, if we consider that evidence of sacrifices can be found from the Paleolithic age onward, long before any verbal testimony. Meanwhile, in certain places, on certain days, blood sacrifices are still performed, even today.
Abdellah Hammoudi, a professor of anthropology at Princeton, a Moroccan of Sunnite family, decided one day in 1999 to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, as numerous relatives, friends, and co-nationals had done. He wanted to understand, as an anthropologist. And to discover what remained of his education as an Islamic believer. The pilgrimage to Mecca imposes various obligations, including the task of choosing a lamb and slitting its throat at the Feast of the Sacrifice. Hammoudi wanted to avoid it. He paid a “charitable works corporation” to perform the act in his place. Hammoudi would be just a spectator.
When the day approached, “in Mina, the sheds looked like a giant concentration camp for animals: two, three, four million heads or more. An immense crowd of pilgrims was preparing to sacrifice them as an ‘offertory,’ along with the sacrifices of expiation or alms… We were gathered here to save our own lives, a salvation requiring that we kill these animals. The mass of pilgrims, who had reached the peak of renunciation—after the station at Arafa, the prayer at Muzdalifa and the stoning at Mina—was about to snuff out millions of lives… Modernization of the hajj certainly had something to do with it: the optimal-productivity animal pens, closed-off areas, grid-like arrangements of space, failsafe security and surveillance systems. Each domain had its own camp: the masses of animals in their sheds and, not far off, the masses of humans in their camps surrounded by high chain-link fences stretching ad infinitum along the straight streets… Police vehicles on the ground and helicopters constantly circling overhead completed the picture. This order would allow the human masses to annihilate the animal masses in the name of God.”
So far as secular society, sacrificial ceremonies are not allowed. Even though the word is still in common use, like a poisonous snake accidentally applied for therapeutic purposes. And then it is always pronounced in worthy contexts, in reference to noble gestures of abnegation and self-denial. But above all it will come back into frequent and timely use in wartime, to describe those killed, all of those killed, including those who were most averse to being killed in a war.
***
The ultimate question that sacrifice poses: why, in order to establish contact between human and divine, does a living being have to be killed? Or at least, why does a certain quantity of a certain material have to be destroyed—burned or poured away? Strangely, this very question, which lies at the root of all others, has been avoided in the various conflicting theories about sacrifice. Girard doesn’t avoid it, but this is because he regards sacrifice purely as a social fact, where the divine is just a convenient façade. And sacrificial violence then becomes the outlet for general violence. But if the divine, as the ancient theologians meant it, existed—indeed were the fullness of existence—how could we explain the continual repetition of bloody acts devoted to it?
***
Secular society, in its purity, ignores ritual ceremonies. But ridding itself of them is not easy. To achieve this, squads of protestants had to clear the way, leaving as a legacy, among other things, the religious wars, a model for every civil war, and a certain way of behaving, a model for that chimera that was later to be called “secular morality.” Rituals survive in secular society for certain legal necessities: the swearing of oaths in trials, the preset pattern of words in marriages. All the rest are ingrained customs, such as birthdays. The same with military processions or New Year speeches by heads of state. Customs that come and go, practices that we can—if we wish—ignore. Strictly speaking, with a little care and planning, we could avoid being involved in any kind of ritual, from the cradle to the grave. For death there are no rites. Not even at funerals. At such moments even established customs seem particularly feeble.
Waking up each morning, rain or shine, and knowing there are no duties to follow. Making coffee, looking out the window. A feeling of blankness. Indifference. To reach this state, various millennia had passed. But nothing remained of it, apart from an opaque curtain, on all sides. No one celebrated this fact as an achievement. It was normality, reached at last. A characterless state, prior to desires. A mute foundation to existence. There would be no shortage of time for whims, plans, survival strategies. And this was the central point: time was not taken up, measured, assailed by obligatory gestures, without which there was a fear that all might fall apart. This might well have produced a feeling of exhilaration. But it was not to be. Indeed, the first sensation was of emptiness. And with it, a certain tedium. The metaphysical animal looked around, not knowing what to grasp hold of.
So secular society has not learned how to value its discoveries. It has felt no sense of relief. Instead, looking at itself, it has found itself insubstantial. Immediately it has felt the need for some cause to espouse, to give itself substance and regain solidity. And with causes once more there are obligations. A network of ready-established meanings has settled once more on the world. Why then have rituals been abandoned? Causes are always cruder than rituals. They are parvenus of meaning. Rituals, on the other hand, brought together the whole of the past, certain gestures repeated innumerable times, until they became part of human physiology, as a strange trust in their effectiveness grew. The fall of ritual also brought with it a heavy aesthetic decline. Free expression was always more awkward, more imprecise than the prescribed gesture. And forms tended to become uncertain and inert, now that they could develop unimpeded.
Secular society (and this would potentially include the whole planet) has therefore lost a great opportunity. It could have rediscovered a sense of wonder at the world, though this time from a safe distance that prevented it from being overwhelmed. But something else happened. A potent compound has been formed between technical procedures and ignorance of powers, which has left its mark on everyday life.
***
How might we define a secular society? Before resorting to complicated theories, we might say that such are societies that share the same airport boarding procedures. Therefore a network of societies that covers the planet. Essential in defining the secular society is the acceptance of a certain number of procedures. Those of airports are among the simplest, but in other cases the procedures can reach a dizzying complexity, especially where money is concerned. Once applied, the procedures may then be associated with very different forms of societies: tribal or authoritarian or cosmopolitan or libertarian or communist or theocratic or democratic or feudal. The range is vast, with unforeseeable opportunities for hybridization. But the basis doesn’t change—and is made up of procedures. This is the crucial innovation, compared with every previous form of society. As for the social forms themselves, they can also consider themselves mutually incompatible and fight each other with lethal expedients. Nevertheless they have much more in common than what we are prepared to admit. And that common basis could also have a greater heft than all the religious and ideological differences. From the point of view of procedures, secular society is the first universal society, marred by numerous civil wars, wars that seem to have been part of its physiology from the very beginning.
***
Substitution, exchange, value: pivotal elements around which the world we call modern revolves. Their origin lies in sacrificial practices—and in the metaphysics of sacrifice. There is no sacrifice that does not involve exchange; there is no sacrifice that does not acknowledge substitution; there is no sacrifice that does not have a value at its core. But what happens when sacrifice is no longer allowed, as the modern world is proud to declare? Where has it ended up? As a superstition? How can we get to understand that the three categories (substitution, exchange, value), of which no one would dare suggest they are superstitions, were created and formed as part of one and the same superstition (sacrifice itself)?
The ban on practicing blood sacrifice in Western societies grew up and developed alongside the ban on capital punishment. But the latter is a legal issue that is accompanied by long, passionate debate and is crystallized into laws. Whereas the ban on blood sacrifice is almost never mentioned. It is implicit—and the issue is avoided, with a certain embarrassment. Yet, if a certain ethnic group in London or New York today, in obedience to its traditional practices, seeks openly to perform a blood sacrifice, the police immediately step in. Applying what laws? They would have to rely on regulations against cruelty to animals. And those regulations are found on the periphery of the law, as basic rules of public order. The question is not dealt with in major legal textbooks. Blood sacrifice is something to be cast aside, preferably without any accompanying words. Killing animals has to be the prerogative of those who work in slaughterhouses, in the same way that only the police are authorized to use violence. But any decision that regards the monopoly of violence is a fundamental aspect of society and treated with meticulous attention to detail (the police can use violence only in certain specific circumstances), whereas what happens in slaughterhouses slips out of control (apart from certain humanitarian measures toward animals—and the word itself immediately sends shudders down the spine) and is regulated only in terms of effectiveness and practicality. There is a remarkable omission when it comes to the killing of animals, today. And there is no more direct way of discovering how thought can become so subtle and can agonize over the question than by reading the Vedic texts. Texts from a remote civilization that celebrated innumerable—and often bloody—sacrifices.
***
The dominant view in twentieth-century anthropology, heightened and taken to an extreme in the thought of René Girard, was that every society, in order to survive, needs sacrifice, either as an institution that produces a homeostatic effect, or as a mechanism that makes it possible to concentrate the violence produced within it on a victim, ostracized from society itself.
The thesis of the Brāhmaṇas was that the world is based on sacrifice, which is performed when the surplus of available energies is burned. Vedic society seeks to superimpose itself, point for point, moment for moment, upon this process—and offers the energy burned to powers that have a name. The different ways in which a society chooses to burn the surplus end up giving it its shape.
The two approaches have one area in common: that area where guilt is developed. In the case of society as viewed by Girard, the guilt is based on the fact that the victim is innocent—and his killers know it. In the case of the Brāhmaṇas, the guilt is based on the fact that every destruction of excess is a killing. And killing recalls the decisive step in the creation of society: the transformation of the human animal from prey into predator. Before becoming a hunter, man had been the animal who was hunted. And before settling as a farmer who lives off the land, man had been a hunter who lived on the flesh of the animals he killed. This is linked to another crucial step in the memory of the species: the transition to a diet of meat, in which a primate that was fundamentally vegetarian changed into a carnivore, assuming a character that is typical of his own enemies. It was a radical change that had a lasting effect on his psyche. There is therefore a lasting memory of how the sacrifice took form. And that secret history, infused with guilt, leaves its traces in the actions of the sacrifice. And so guilt constitutes the basis of sacrifice, in any version.
Girard’s fallacy was to think that sacrifice in the brahminic version was a disguising of the other sacrifice, which seeks to banish a scapegoat. Thus, with the boldness of the debunker—a boldness much like that of Freud’s and, at one time, of Voltaire’s, which the West proudly regards as one of its singular, irreplaceable qualities—Girard proceeded to unmask first Greek tragedy and then, little by little, other literary and religious forms, including finally the speculations of the Brāhmaṇas.
But in pursuing this illusion, Girard was doing nothing more than tracing back the movement in secularized society that can no longer see nature or any other power beyond itself and believes it is itself the answer for everything. A movement that is still active today and has made the world into a secular totality dotted with islands and streaks of fundamentalist religion. And here there is good reason to think that even the secularized world is prone to fundamentalism, in that the only one on which it adores lavishing offerings is society itself. Offerings that ought to give a lustrous shine: first of all advertising, the endless, ever-changing stream of images that covers every surface, the only laboratory that continues nonstop and covers the totality of time, like a sattra. Apart from some isolated cases, such as occasional glimpses in Simone Weil, attention has not yet been focused on the religion of society, which is the highest form of superstition. And yet this should be our challenge, this immense object of contemplation, so boundless and pervasive that it is not even perceived as an object.
***
Nature, for urban man, is a barometric variation and a few leafy islands scattered across the urban fabric. Apart from this, it is raw material for manufacture and a scenario for leisure. For Vedic man, nature was the place where the powers were manifest and where exchanges between the powers took place. Society was a cautious attempt at becoming a part of those exchanges, without disturbing them too much and without being annihilated by them.
***
As soon as war became total, and therefore far bloodier than any previous war in terms of death toll and weapon power, it absorbed within itself the lexical legacy of sacrifice. Victim, self-denial, consecration, redemption, trial by fire—all words and expressions recurring in war reports. Where the dominant word is sacrifice itself. A phenomenon that reached its peak—as if European history had converged toward that point—in the First World War. Never had the language of sacrifice been so squandered, in the absence of sacrificial rites. The Second World War brought a further growth in weapon power and the number of dead. But a new factor would be added: the extermination of Jews and other enemies for racial reasons by Hitler’s Germany. For several years, just after the war, language faltered: there was an uncertainty about how to describe these events. By 1948, Raul Hilberg was already working on a book that would become one of the leading works on the question, entitled simply The Destruction of the European Jews, published in 1961. But another word soon began to spread: holocaust. A word that did not belong to the language of the time and describes one of the two basic types of Jewish sacrifice: ‘olah, the offering “that goes up” to the altar where the victim is completely burnt. A sacrifice quite different from the “peace offerings,” shelamim, ceremonies where the officiants were allowed to eat a part of the sacrificial meat. And so the extermination of six million Jews by the Nazis was described using a word that suggested certain sacred ceremonies, celebrated from the time of Noah by the ancestors of those killed. Someone pointed out that this was an enormous blunder, but no one listened and the word became established by force of use in the various European languages. Something irreversible had happened: in fact, as was being discovered in all its horrendous detail, the extermination of the Jews had not been carried out as an operation of war, but as a process of disinfestation. And that process, in which the Jews had been the victims, was now being described using a word that Jews themselves, as officiants, had used for certain ceremonies to please Yahweh. The immensity of that misunderstanding was a sign that history had entered a phase where muddle and misconstruction between ancient and modern would be pushed far—much farther than ever before.
And yet, in the inappropriate and jarring choice of the word holocaust to describe the extermination of the Jews, an invisible hand was at work that was not just the hand of ignorance. That word was indicative of something that was lurking mysteriously. War had taken over from sacrifice, but now sacrifice was about to take the place of war. The extermination of the Jews, in the way it was carried out by the Nazis, had been something halfway between the slaughterhouse and a decontamination process. And it could have happened in peacetime, like a gigantic waste disposal operation. So military terms were no longer appropriate. And for this reason it was natural—horribly natural—to fall back on the terminology of sacrifice.
Several years would pass, and the twenty-first century opened its eyes watching the collapse of the Twin Towers. Here again, an uncertainty in language. The attackers were immediately called “cowards.” But cowardice is the oddest accusation to make against someone who kills himself with full determination and maximum violence. Or the suicide attackers were called kamikaze. But the Japanese kamikaze were soldiers carrying out acts of war. Whereas the attackers in New York were civilians acting in peacetime. At work once again was a subtle wish to deflect attention, fixing it on an exotic and inappropriate word. It would have been better to open the pages of Livy and note that the Islamic suicide-killers had much in common with a mysterious sacrificial institution in ancient Rome: the devotio.
***
It is everyday experience at the beginning of the third millennium that sacrifice has become the new feature of war. Islamic suicide-killers follow variations on the Roman rite of devotio recorded by Livy in the case of the consul Decius Mus. In 340, while fighting against the Latins under Mount Vesuvius, having taken a vow to the gods of the underworld, he plunged on horseback into the enemy ranks and after being stabbed several times, fell “inter maximam hostium stragem,” among a great heap of enemies. His death had the purpose of dragging the whole army of the Latins to defeat, through its contagion.
More than the warrior, it is the figure of the suicide-killer that has brought trouble for the entire American and allied military-industrial apparatus. And this is because the lethal weapon of sacrifice is voluntary death. Much more to be feared when it conceals substitution within it. Devotio, in principle, was reserved for those who exercised supreme imperium, as in the case of the consul Decius. But Livy explains: “Illud adiciendum videtur, licere consuli dictatorique et praetori, cum legiones hostium devoveat, non utique se, sed quem velit ex legione Romana scripta civem devovere; si is homo qui devotus est moritur, probe factum videri” (“It seems proper to add here that the consul, dictator, or praetor who formulates the devotio for the legions of the enemy need not designate himself for the devotio but may also choose any citizen from a regularly enlisted Roman legion; if the man designated for the devotio dies, it is deemed that all is well”). The only problem might be where the soldier whom the leader designates for the devotio does not in the end die. In that case a sacrifice of atonement has to be performed: “a seven-foot-high image of the man is buried and an atonement victim is killed.”
Devotio unites within itself the two extreme, most devastating possibilities of the sacrifice: the sacrifice of the person who has the charisma of power and the substitution of a human victim with another human victim, with any other human victim. Today, the only form of sacrifice universally visible on television screens, almost every day, is this last variant of devotio.
***
The devotio of Decius Mus occurred during a war that, according to Livy, much resembled a “civil war.” The Romans and the Latins were too much alike “in language, customs, weapons, and military institutions.” It was an ideal occasion for devotio to be used.
A civil war is a war where any battlefront disappears. Now the front is everywhere—and the attack can come from anyone, as happened in Iraq and Afghanistan after the Twin Towers. But devotio sought to drag a whole army to ruin, magically contaminated by the death of an enemy. Whereas Islamic suicide-killers cause the instant death—along with their own—of a group of people who are similar to the attacker “in language and customs.” The Roman consul—or his substitute—had to fight to the death. The Islamic suicide-killer has to blow himself up. Ordeal is replaced by a death that strikes at random, as if by inscrutable decree. And above all, the devotio is no longer a single act that strikes a single group. Essential now is the plurality of acts, multiplied in every direction. This implies that an exclusive form of devotio is turned into one in which a succession of various unknown individuals substitute the absent leader. In the war against the Latins, the impulse to carry out the devotio had come in the silence of a night, when two consuls had been visited by the “apparition of a man of greater than human stature, and more majestic, who declared that the commander of one side, and the army of the other, must be offered up to the Manes and Mother Earth; and the army and the people whose leader has devoted the enemy legions, and himself, to death would have the victory.” A divine name always has to be evoked to encourage or instigate the act.
And we continue to resort to the names of gods when it comes to weapons regarded as decisive, as if they still had an irresistible attraction. Saturn and Apollo were immediately recruited by NASA. Agni is an Indian long-range missile. Saturn could have been a valid name because of his fatal aura, and Apollo for his epithet of “he who strikes from afar,” hekatēbólos, but for Agni the correspondence is even more convincing. Agni is Fire, the very element of which the weapon is built. And he is the first messenger, he who wove the perpetual flow between earth and sky, between the place of men and that of the gods. Agni, indeed, points toward the sky even today. But, once it has disappeared from sight and become an imperceptible dot in the atmosphere, Agni will turn around and seek out its objective on earth. A vertical voyage, up and down, which was the basis of the sacrifice, has become a horizontal movement, where the sky serves only as an obstacle-free terrain. This is the comparison that best represents the current state of affairs: the compulsion to resort to the gods, but wiping them from existence and using their names to evoke deadly power. A trick of infidels who cannot resist using the family crest.
***
The religion of our time is the religion of society, within which even Christianity or Islam are vast enclaves. Its herald, though he was not entirely aware of it, was Émile Durkheim, who crystallized the notion in Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, first published in 1912. More than with elementary forms of religious life, the book dealt with the transformation of society into a religion of itself. But it is part of its nature that the religion of society does not seek to describe and identify itself as such. Its conduct is similar to that of the religions of the past: pervasive, omnipresent, like the air we breathe.
According to Durkheim, the “moral ascendancy” of society, given the pressure it exercises over every individual, would be sufficient to explain the origin of religion. As for religion itself (any religion—and not just that of the Australian Aborigines with which he had been concerned from the very beginning), Durkheim describes it as “the product of a certain delirium.”
And if religion dies out? This would not mean that the delirium would die out. Durkheim is consequential—no one can deny it—and immediately he ventures to suggest: “Maybe there is no collective representation that is not in a sense delirious.” Including therefore also the secular, skeptical collective representation of those at the beginning of the twentieth century who sought to explain the “inexplicable hallucination” they considered religion to be.
Seen from a distance of a century, this view, set out in spare and austere prose, could itself be plausibly described as a calm delirium. Society is more clinging and pressing than ever, but it is difficult to recognize a “moral ascendancy” in it. One cannot see, for example, through what argument such “moral ascendancy” could be denied to Hitler’s Germany. Was it not perhaps a society like so many others? Conversely, there seems no doubt that life carries on, more and more, within a “fabric of hallucinations,” which are the irrepressible secretions of society itself (of any society, in the same way as Durkheim referred to any religion): thin layers of pixels that wrap the world tighter and tighter, like a new kind of mummy, where the corpse itself tends to crumble away under the layers of bandages.
What Durkheim was describing was not the explanation of every religious phenomenon as an inevitable product of society (“the god is only a figurative expression of the society”). On the contrary: it was the founding charter for the transformation of society itself into a new all-encompassing cult, compared with which every previous form would seem inadequate and childish. But this was the overwhelming historic phenomenon that was being developed at the time of Durkheim—and which now dominates the planet. So omnipresent and so evident that it is not even noticed. Paradox: the totally secular society is one that turns out to be less secular than any other, because secularity, as soon as it extends to everything, assumes within itself those hallucinatory, phantasmal, and delirious characteristics that Durkheim had identified in religion in general. And this is what Durkheim was talking about, without meaning to and without recognizing it, when he wrote: “Thus there is one region of nature where the formula of idealism is applicable almost to the letter: this is the social kingdom.” The “formula of idealism” was an antiquated way of suggesting what, a little earlier, Durkheim had described, more perspicuously, as a “fabric of hallucinations.” But the crucial point was another: it was all in that “almost to the letter.” Life continues from then on, and forever more, within a “social kingdom” where hallucinations have to be understood “almost to the letter.”
What are rituals? Durkheim asks this in the manner of someone spying on certain unintelligible sequences of gestures. And he immediately comes to the point: “Whence could the illusion have come that with a few grains of sand thrown to the wind, or a few drops of blood shed upon a rock or the stone of an altar, it is possible to maintain the life of an animal species or of a god?” Everything points to the view that “the efficacy attributed to the rites” is no more than “the product of a chronic delirium with which humanity has abused itself.”
Up to this point the reasoning is consequential. But Durkheim goes one step further. For him, rites (all rites) are senseless delirium, but they have a sense. Indeed, they have one sense only, which is found everywhere, among Australian Aborigines as much as in ancient Greece: “The effect of the cult really is to recreate periodically a moral being upon which we depend as it depends upon us. Now this being does exist: it is society.” In one well-prepared move, Durkheim has managed to pull out of his magician’s hat something that might seem even more hallucinatory and delirious than a god or a totemic animal: nothing less than a “moral being,” who must be presumed identical everywhere and capable of embracing any form of existence insofar as it is a supreme and total being: society (“the concept of totality is only the abstract form of the concept of society”—it can be no surprise that people began talking a few years later about totalitarianism).
Perhaps Durkheim’s view will one day appear no less improbable than that of the Urabunnas who broke off pieces of rock and threw them randomly, in all directions “in order to secure an abundant production of lizards.” And yet for the whole of the twentieth century Durkheim’s voice was the voice of science, of a sober and cautious learning that dispels all delirium, even though it studies its forms with diligent benevolence. And this could not happen except by way of an act of faith that conferred divine status on an invisible entity (society).
***
In the end, the question of rituals could be expressed in this way: society celebrates them to sustain, reaffirm, or give credence to itself—and in this case nothing marks them better than military parades on national holidays, tributes at war memorials, or speeches by heads of state at New Year (and from these rites, examples of the highest kind, all others should be inferred); or alternatively, society celebrates rituals to establish contact with something outside itself that is largely unknown and certainly powerful—something of which nature itself is a part. In this case, the model rite would also be the least visible, performed by an individual, in silence, not corresponding to fixed moments of time, as with festivals, celebrations, and commemorations. The two paths are divergent and incompatible. Separated by one essential difference: the second path can never include the first, due to the unyielding disparity between those for whom the ritual is performed. But the first can include the second: for this to happen, it is enough that the very notion of society manages to become the entity that is largely unknown and certainly powerful to which certain rites are directed. If this is a god—and a god who demands human victims—society has no difficulty in taking its place, as we have seen on so many occasions. Countless human beings have become victims for the benefit of society.
***
The word sacrifice has now assumed a psychological and economic meaning: this is clear to anyone. Someone makes sacrifices for the family. A government asks sacrifices from its citizens. But if the same government were to ask citizens to celebrate sacrifices, whether or not involving killing, the suggestion would sound very odd. It would seem like a fit of madness.
Yet mankind, for most of its history, has celebrated sacrifices. In Egypt, in Mesopotamia, in India, in China, in Mexico, in Greece; in Rome and Jerusalem; in various parts of Africa, Australia, Polynesia, the Americas, central Asia and Siberia; sacrifices have been celebrated everywhere. Why then have such acts become unthinkable, at least for an entity that still calls itself the West but now extends across the whole earth?
“The great tasks of government are sacrifices and military action,” we read in the Zuo zhuan. But “the most important task of government is sacrifice.” And, in a period not so distant from this Chinese text, Plato wrote in his Laws that “the noblest and truest rule” was this: “For the good man, the act of sacrificing [thýein, a specific word for sacrifice] and engaging in continual communion with the gods through prayers, offerings, and devotions of every kind is the thing most noble and good and helpful for a happy life.” Both the Zuo zhuan and the Laws seek to define the proper way of living, for the community and for the individual. And both texts immediately point to sacrifice. Something so essential might change somewhat over time (like the art of war) but it is very hard to believe that it could disappear, becoming unimaginable. And yet this is exactly what has happened with the celebration of sacrifices. A caesura separates the last few centuries of the secular and Christian West (and secular because previously Christian) from all that had happened previously. And this caesura is what should be studied, contemplated.
***
Sacrifice is a word that creates immediate embarrassment. Many use it casually when they talk about psychological considerations, money, or war. Linked always to some noble sentiment. But, if we are referring to the ritual ways of what in the past was called sacrifice, there is a sudden repulsion. Sacrifice is, by definition, something that society will not accept, belonging to an age that is dead and gone forever. Sacrifice is regarded as something barbarous, primitive, the stuff of peplums. Why, then, is the word continually used? Especially in key issues where there is nothing, it seems, to take its place.
The reasons for the sacrifices described in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa or in Porphyry’s De abstinentia or in Leviticus remain just the same if we have a perception of the numina, the divine powers to whom the rites were addressed. But that perception has become confused over time. So the ceremonies seem no more that a sequence of foolish gestures, generally culminating in the killing of an animal. And this is the only point on which there is no possible blurring, since it is patently obvious to anyone today that the world depends upon the daily killing of millions of animals. Killings that take place in many different ways, but all, without exception, in obedience to one single rule: they should not take place in public. This rule is enforced in very different cultures as inviolable and inalienable, without any real voice of opposition. The killing of animals during sacrifices ought therefore to stir a universal feeling of repulsion. And so it does—yet at the same time sacrifice is associated with a series of fine and noble images. Indeed, the word itself is still used, metaphorically, in situations where it inevitably denotes something dutiful and commendable. This tangle of very strong and contradictory feelings becomes evident as soon as we begin to look at the world today, which pretends to ignore sacrifice. And perhaps in that tangle, more than anywhere else, we notice how this world of today is detached from and, at the same time, dependent on all that has preceded it. The inevitable embarrassment of anyone who approaches the question of sacrifice is only a symptom of the persistence of that tangle, which seems to become even more tightly knotted whenever we try to unravel it. And above all, for most people, it remains invisible. The simple act of being aware of it would itself bring a radical change.
***
It wasn’t just the difference between consubstantiation and transubstantiation that worried Luther when it came to the Eucharist. There was another question to be answered. Was the Last Supper to be interpreted as a divine and human gathering, which the Mass had simply commemorated? Or was it a sacrifice, celebrated by a priest who was also the victim? And a sacrifice that heralded another sacrifice—this time a blood sacrifice—the crucifixion?
Luther had reached a point where he could no longer contain himself and, with his innate vehemence, he declared that to interpret the Mass as a sacrifice was “the most impious abuse (impiissimus ille abusus)” and all such teachings produced “monsters of impiety (monstra impietatis).” That moment marked the watershed in the Western history of sacrifice. A voice was finally saying that sacrifice could be abandoned. Or rather, that it was something barbarous and incompatible with the true religion, in which iustus ex fide vivit, the just man lives by faith, without resorting to particular gestures, particular acts, as a way of seeking justification through pious works. And on this point Luther was inflexible.
But so too was the Roman Church. Here it was not a question of deploring or defending indulgences, something blamable on weaknesses that were human, all too human. Here the entire liturgy was at stake, and the very framework of religious life. And so on September 17, 1562, forty-two years after Luther had proclaimed his terrible words, the Council of Trent promulgated nine canons. The first of these was that of: “Anathemizing anyone who shall say that in the Mass no true and proper sacrifice is offered to God,” whereas the third obstinately condemned “anyone who shall say that the Mass is a sacrifice only of praise and thanks or bare commemoration of the sacrifice of the cross, and not propitiatory, or that it benefits only they who receive it and must not be offered for the living, for the dead, for sins, suffering, satisfactions, and other needs.” Here was a rejection, therefore, not only of the negation of sacrifice but also of that form of euphemism that meant transforming the Mass into the commemoration of a sacrifice. Because commemorating is not the same as performing, it no longer belongs to that sphere of actions that are efficacious. Here once again, after so many empty disputes, was the arcane and archaic wisdom of the Roman Church, its capacity to recognize when a founding principle of its very existence was at stake. But it was a battle already lost. Luther was not just suggesting that a part of religious society wanted to be rid of sacrifice, but that the whole of secular society, in its expansion over the world scene, would look upon sacrifice as a meaningless institution, to be consigned to the lumber room. Four centuries later, it is no surprise that a Catholic theologian, Stefan Orth, ends his inquiry into various recent writings on sacrifice by saying that nowadays “many Catholics are in agreement with the verdict and the conclusions of the reformer Martin Luther, according to whom speaking of a sacrifice in the Mass would be ‘the most great and tremendous horror’ and an ‘accursed idolatry.’” It is a sort of delayed surrender of arms, as if world pressure has forced the Catholic Church to abandon even this doctrine. Without which, however, the entire edifice of St. Peter would inevitably collapse.
***
Jesus’s gesture of breaking bread during the Last Supper and speaking the words “Hoc est corpus meum” is a dazzling ray of light that opens up two horizons, behind and ahead. Behind Jesus himself we can look back to the beginning, to the situation when the officiant and the oblation are the same (“ipse offerens, ipse et oblatio,” in the words of Augustine). A situation to which every sacrifice alludes, but which is reserved for the deity. Ahead of Jesus is a view that goes beyond the observer, toward that which has still to take place. In fact, the sacrifice announced by the fractio panis, which prefigures the dislocation and fracturing of his joints in the crucifixion, is not a sacrifice but a death sentence confirmed by the voice of the people. Therefore it is something belonging not to the religious domain but to the secular domain and, ultimately, to the domain of public opinion. Two extremes are therefore set: on one side the sacrifice that no man can celebrate, except by committing suicide; on the other the abandonment of sacrifice, substituted by a judicial sentence and by the majority choice of a community. The Eucharistic innovation suggests the opening up of two conflicting and incompatible perspectives. The sacramental bread will assume the name of hostia, which is the technical term describing the oblation in sacrifices of atonement. But Jesus’s trial and the carrying out of his sentence will follow a procedure imposed by the Roman state, alien to the religion of Jesus’s own people. There remained only one point of contact with the sacrifice: the killing would take place “extra castra,” outside the city.
***
Reading the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa is like making a journey to the radiant heart of India. But the idea—later abandoned—of a commentary certainly did not aim to do that. On the contrary, it was an attempt to move away from any specific coordinates of time and place to return to observing certain simple gestures, of which we may be aware or unaware, but are always with us and without which we could not exist: the actions of breathing, swallowing, copulating, cutting, killing, evacuating, speaking, burning, pouring, thinking, dreaming, watching—and more. Cultures have practiced each of these actions, indeed they have become identified with the methods and techniques used to develop them. But, once the anthropologists had seemingly concluded the work of listing all of these configurations, a sense of indifference and atony took over. All of these cultures marched off, in formation, like lead soldiers each dressed in different uniforms. Marching off not to war but to a World Exposition—one respectful of all diversity and futile in its foundation, which was simply this: all diversity is to be respected, because, within a particular culture, it serves to maintain social balance. But, since we are concerned here with techniques, each placed on the same level, how do we work out which will be the right technique? And what could it mean for a technique to be right? Every technique, by its nature, recognizes only one criterion, that of effectiveness. But effective in relation to what? The only acceptable technique is that which relates to material power and conquest. But what if we are aiming for an effectiveness of another kind? Then, perhaps, the Brāhmaṇas might be helpful. Because they deal only with irreducible gestures, eliminating any other concern. And because they introduce techniques and criteria of effectiveness that very often seem to be ironic and impatient glosses on what, three thousand years later, has established itself as common sense. Such an abrupt and disorientating shift of perspective might well be beneficial in itself, like a sudden change of air.
***
The gods appear like foam, ready to be blown away. Their waves persist. “A divine vitality, infinitely agile and deceptive,” wrote Céline in a letter of 1934, thinking of the America that was around him. He was also referring to the world.
***
In the end, we might well ask: what can be the relevance of all we read in the Veda, seeing that it has nothing to do with modern life in a secular society? None, we could say. But then quantum mechanics has no correspondence whatsoever with modern life, whereas Newtonian physics has ended up becoming the very model of common sense. And should we then perhaps think of quantum mechanics as unimportant? The Veda might be more comparable to a microphysics of the mind than to other categories (archaic or magic or primitive thought or other descriptions of that kind, now inert). The impressive vividness of those writings, even though nothing of them is borne out by common experience, might indicate that something of that-which-is continues to appear as the Vedic seers saw it. Or at least it resembles nothing so much as what the ṛṣis have passed down to us.
***
In the present world there are so many brands that strive to become myths. But the expression “myths of today” is a lexical abuse. A myth is one fork in one branch of a vast tree. To understand it we need to have a view of the whole tree and the great number of other forks that are hidden within it. That tree has not existed for a long time—well-honed axes have chopped it down. Modern stories that most resemble myths (Don Giovanni, Faust) therefore have no trunk on which to attach themselves. They are stories that are orphaned, self-sufficient, but have none of that sap which flows inside a tree of myths and whose composition is constant in every part of it—a sap that contains a certain coefficient of truth. And it is that very coefficient of truth that enables us to understand and make use of stories from the most distant times and places. What these stories offer is something that, once found, remains unscathed by any further investigation or discovery. Anyone who has entered the flow of mythical stories can let himself be swept anywhere, knowing that one day the very same current will bring him back to the land from where he first set off. And from where he may, at any moment, set off once again.