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THE LINE OF THE FIRES

 

 

Man’s initial state is formless, opaque, composite, and also “impure.” Man is a being who “speaks untruth.” He could carry on living like this, though leaving no significant trace. Otherwise he must compose a series of connected gestures that make an “action,” karman. The quintessential action, the one that presupposes and assures that gestures have a meaning, is the sacrificial work.

But what is the origin of this work whose first peculiarity is that of being the model for all other work? Desire. Not a general, roving, multifarious, shifting desire—for “mortal man has many desires” and this plurality of desires dwells unremittingly within him from the first to the last moment of his life—but a single desire that seeks to detach itself from every other, to break its ties with the mesh of other desires and find the path to fulfillment. How? By becoming a “vow,” vrata. Entering a vow is like entering another space, that of detached desire, which binds itself, barricades itself from the outside world, and builds a sequence of gestures within the new space that reaffirm it each time. What then is the first of these gestures? To touch water. But not anywhere. To touch it on a point of the invisible line that joins the āhavanīya fire and the gārhapatya fire. This is the line of the fires. The gārhapatya, “domestic,” hearth is circular, sited to the west. There the fire is lit. There burn the embers with which the other fires will be lit. Not far away, to the east, on any type of ground, freshly swept with palāśa branches (Butea frondosa, Flame of the Forest, but it should also be thought of as brahman), a square hearth is built, called āhavanīya. On this fire the oblations will be offered—and it can be lit only with an ember taken from the gārhapatya fire. The āhavanīya fire is the sky, the gārhapatya fire is the earth (and it is circular since the earth is a circle at the center of other circles.) Between the two fires is the atmosphere, where we breathe, where we act. In the middle there is also “the trunk of the body,” where the heart, life, beats. There are other fires, but these two must be set up first: āhavanīya and gārhapatya. They provide the tension on which everything rests. Everything is supposed to happen on the invisible line that connects them. The miracle behind everything else can happen only here—only here can things acquire meaning. If man wishes to escape from the untruth in which he is born, and in which he is destined to remain, he must tread that line, touch the water there and formulate a desire. In this way he will enter the vow, enter the hazardous state in which truth can be spoken, in which desire can be fulfilled, in which the gesture assumes a meaning. If every sacrifice is a “ship that sails toward the sky,” the two fires, āhavanīya and gārhapatya, will be the sides of that ship, the limits within which the pilot (each and every sacrificer) must move, from the moment in which he begins to carry out certain movements: those movements, if they take place between the two fires, acquire a meaning that separates them from the ebb and flow of human actions.

The scene has to be observed from the viewpoint of the gods. Before a man (any man) crosses the line of the fires, the gods ignore him. Then, “having walked around the āhavanīya fire, from the east, he passes between it and the gārhapatya fire. For the gods do not know this man; but when he now passes between the fires they know him and think: ‘This is he who is about to make an oblation to us.’” When the ceremony begins, the man must first make himself recognized. The gods, until then, seem not to notice him. His destiny seems unimportant to them, his essence—undefined. They are huddled around the altar, but this is all they know about the earth, and all that interests them. So to make himself noticed, and then recognized, the man passes between the two main fires. That is the line on which tension vibrates, giving meaning. When the gods see someone crossing it, they immediately know something is going on. At that moment the man is recognized and finally exists. And he exists only so far as it is he who will present an offering. Man’s original lack of substance is gone and he becomes a being with whom the gods will deal. This is how relations between men and gods are established.

The sacrificer’s first concern will still be not to act in vain: the oblations are offered, the complex liturgical machinery is set in motion, but the gods can still ignore him. They may not recognize the sacrificer. More than the Hegelian recognition between master and servant, Vedic men were worried about the recognition between gods and sacrificer. Hence the excited dialogue between adhvaryu and agnīdh, his assistant, who is responsible for lighting the fire: “‘Has he gone, agnīdh?,’ and with this he means: ‘Has he really gone?’ ‘He has gone,’ replies the other. ‘Ask that they listen to him.’” The officiants are those who are already familiar with the world of the sky. This is the basis of their existence. What is more, they depend on the ritual fees they receive from the sacrificer, who is, however, an ordinary man, someone whom the gods may even ignore.

The dialogue between the officiants takes place on a barren open space, marked out by three fires. The officiants had to understand whether the rite was successful. But how? By talking about the invisible, about something that was happening—perhaps—between the gods, between them and the sacrificer, along that aerial track which was the sacrifice. At that moment they might have seemed absorbed in monologues, participants in an identical hallucination.

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According to Coomaraswamy, “the oldest Indian type of sacred architecture, both enclosed and roofed,” is the sadas, the hut where the sacrificer or the initiand spends the night before starting the liturgical acts. “A place ‘apart’ (tiras, antarhita) to which the gods resort.” A place that helps us to understand the reason for every closed space: for “the gods are segregated from men, and thus secret also is this which is closed on every side.” The sacrificer sleeps there and, so long as he is there, “truly he comes close to the gods and becomes one of the divinities.” But nothing is permanent: soon after the rite, the hut will be demolished. And yet it is in this empty, fragile, and makeshift place, before even the temple came into being, that contact is made with the gods. Emptiness and separation from the rest of the world are enough. The first image of what will one day be the study, not just of St. Jerome, but of every writer: that room which is a witness to writing and protects it with “the cloak of initiation and of ardor.”

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It is a premise of Vedic sacrifice that only while man is preparing and celebrating it can he become something more than human. It doesn’t matter what he does up to the moment when the fire is set up: he will still just be human. So the night before the agnyādheya, the “setting up of the fires,” he doesn’t even have to remain awake: “Until he has set up a fire of his own, he is simply a man; so he can also sleep, if he so wishes.” Certainly, as it says a little earlier, “the gods are awake”—and coming close to the gods implies participation in their vigil. But it would be pointless of him to do so unless he has his own fire, unless he enters into that opus which is the sacrifice. Wakefulness is the pivotal point of the Vedic world. But it operates only within the uninterrupted work that begins when he sets up his own fire. In any event, Vedic men knew that every evil sprang from a troubled state of mind. They wanted their enemies or rivals to be afflicted by “bad dreams” before every other infirmity (which they listed: “lack of offspring, homelessness, ruin”).

*   *   *

The premise for every sacrificial act is metaphysical: entering the rite means entering the truth, leaving the rite means returning to untruth. A categorical statement, which ought to be placed beside the enunciation of the Way of Truth in Parmenides’ poem. The ritualist’s style is spare, abrupt, abrasive. There is no gradual progression and there are no moments of relief. The words are all the more penetrating: “Twofold is this, there is no third: truth and untruth. And the gods are truth, men are untruth. And so, by saying: ‘I now enter from untruth into truth,’ he [the sacrificer] passes from men to the gods. He shall speak only what is true. For the gods keep this vow: to speak the truth. And for this they are splendid. Splendid then is he who, knowing this, speaks the truth.”

There are two extremities of existence, two poles between which tension flows: truth and untruth. Like being and nonbeing in Parmenides. Tertium non datur. And the space in which this occurs has the sky and the earth as its extremities—or the āhavanīya fire and the gārhapatya fire. But we immediately notice a peculiarity: “truth” and “untruth,” in the text, are satya and anṛta. As if anṛta was the negation of another truth, indicated by the word ṛta. This takes us back to another open question: Heinrich Lüders, in his monumental, unfinished Varuṇa, devoted page after page to showing that ṛta, often translated as “order,” primarily meant “truth.” And his theory would seem to be borne out by the above passage, where satya and ṛta appear as equivalents. But synonyms do not exist. Satya is truth in relation to “that which is,” sat. Ṛta contains within it a reference to order, to the correct articulation which is in the root ar- (from which the Latin ars, artus—and also ritus). In ṛta the truth is still visibly linked to an arrangement of forms, to a certain way in which they are connected.

It is the liturgy of the agnihotra—the morning and evening libations, the germ cell of all sacrifices—that sheds light on the relationship between satya and ṛta. In a passage in the Maitrāyaṇī Saṃhitā we read: “The agnihotra is ṛta and satya.” Bodewitz translates this as “order and truth” and notes: “This of one of the passages which show that ṛta, ‘order,’ here occurring together with satya, ‘truth,’ does not mean ‘truth,’ as Lüders assumes in Varuṇa II.” And so a vast body of investigation would seem to come to nothing in just a few short words. But does it really come to nothing? Or are both scholars perhaps right in a certain way—and is our conception of the word truth too limited? Let us now consider another passage in the liturgy of the agnihotra: before moving on to the oblation, the adhvaryu touches the water and says: “You are the thunderbolt; take my evil from me. From sacred order (ṛta) I enter the truth (satya).” That is how P. E. Dumont translates it. But according to Willem Caland: “From the just I pass to the true.” Ṛta and satya, the Vedic ritualists would say, are a couple (like, as we will see elsewhere, satya and śraddhā, “trust in the efficacy of ritual”) and their relationship is dynamic: from almost a superimposition we pass to a contraposition. Truth, in ṛta, is interlinked with order, above all with the order of the world watched over by Varuṇa. And in this sense the word, having fallen into disuse after the Vedic era, would be replaced by dharma, where the meaning of “order” is clothed by that of “law” (we are at the origin of law and order). In satya, on the other hand, truth is a simple statement of that which is, devoid of any other reference. And so from order (ṛta) we can arrive at truth (satya), as from one degree of the same truth to another, now entirely free of any cosmic reference.

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The translation of ṛta will nevertheless remain a worry for Indologists, as Witzel has stressed: “There simply is no English, French, German, Italian, or Russian word that covers the range of meanings of this word.” And yet a good approximation does exist, at least in Witzel’s mother tongue—and it is Weltordnung, “world order.” But, for confirmation, we need the help of Kafka. Anyone wanting an introduction to the meanings of ṛta might begin their personal initiation by reading the chapter in The Castle where there is a nocturnal dialogue between the counselor Bürgel and K.—a dialogue culminating in two sentences that could be attributed to one of the Seven Seers: “That is how the world itself corrects the deviations in its course and maintains the balance. This is indeed an excellent, time and again unimaginably excellent arrangement, even if in other respects dismal and cheerless.” Wilhelm Rau observed that Renou himself wavered between two solutions when translating ṛta: “the cosmic Order” and “the regular ‘course’ of things = ordo rerum.”

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Questions of etiquette immediately arise: what should the sacrificer do as soon as he has taken his vow? What is the correct way to behave, so as not to defeat his purpose? First he must fast. Then, the night before the start of his planned rite, he should sleep on the ground, in the house of the gārhapatya fire. These are the first two rules of sacrificial etiquette.

But why is this? The vow is a way of welcoming the gods as guests—and is immediately perceived as such, for the gods see every movement in the mind of man. And so the first aim of the vow is to make space, to keep the area around the fire clear, since it is there that these new guests, the gods, sit waiting for their food. This is enough to link fasting with a rule of good manners: never eat before your guests. Then, when it is time to sleep, the sacrificer stretches out on the ground beside the fire. This is the first scene of the new life after taking the vow: a fire lit, protected by its house; invisible presences—the gods—who gradually gather around; a man sleeping on the ground: it is the sacrificer, who in this way starts to befriend the gods. He breathes together with them, he warms himself together with them. But he has to sleep on the ground, again as if by a rule of etiquette, reaffirming the immeasurable distance between the new guests and the man stretched out beside the new fire: “For it is from below, so to speak, that one serves a superior.”

Once the “vow” (vrata) has been introduced, once the āhavanīya and gārhapatya fires have been introduced, once truth and untruth have been introduced, what is the next step? The act of yoking something to something else. The sacrificer “yokes” the water to the fire. And he announces it with an “indistinct” (anirukta) voice. Here, the yoking resembles what occurs in yoga (“yoke,” “junction”). It is a gesture of the mind taking hold of itself. This assumes that the mind is always a double entity, where two parts act upon and yield to each other. This is the exercise (the áskēsis, “ascesis”) behind all else. When, in the Bhagavad Gītā, Kṛṣṇa urges that it is good for the mind to be “yoked,” yukta, this is what is meant. The immobility of the lone renouncer is only a final outcome of this discipline. Its first manifestation is in gesture, in the liturgical act. Indeed, any liturgy takes this yoking for granted. And this continual reference to a precise mental action is perhaps the distinctive, recurring feature in all Indian thought, from the Vedas to the Buddha—and up to the Vedānta. But how does this act occur, by which the mind (or two elements—water and fire—that represent it) begins to act upon itself? This is the first and last question: “‘Who (Ka) yokes you to this fire? He yokes you. For whom does he yoke you? For him he yokes you.’ For Prajāpati is indistinct (anirukta). Prajāpati is the sacrifice: and thus he yokes Prajāpati, the sacrifice.” Who, Ka, performs the act? The answer is given in the question: who acts is “who?,” Ka, the secret name of Prajāpati, whose deeds the Brāhmaṇas are, in a certain way, recounting. And so elsewhere it can be said that “Prajāpati is he that yokes, that yoked, the mind for that sacred work.” And we also learn that that gesture, in the liturgy, precedes another: “They yoke the mind and they yoke the thoughts.” But before introducing himself with the name of Prajāpati, he steps forward, as if his shadow had appeared before he had, with the name Ka, the most mysterious, the most indefinite, the one that most radically expresses the difference between this being who preceded the gods and the gods themselves. And the name Ka arises in the most fitting way: murmured with an “indistinct” voice, anirukta. For all that is anirukta belongs to Ka: it is the implicit that can never become explicit, it is the “limitless unexplicit” (according to Malamoud’s formula), the unsaid that can never be said, the indefinite that will always escape definition. The whole liturgy is a tension between the form that is expressed (nirukta) and the indistinctness (anirukta) from which it arises. The latter is Prajāpati’s part. This is also because Prajāpati is made up of all the other gods, but without it being possible to say—as Sāyaṇa comments in relation to Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, 1.6.1.20—that he is “this or that.” He has to be remembered, he has to be taken into account, in every action, in every thought. Every action, every thought will be a move in the unresolved contest between those two ways of being.

With the first, simple action of moving forward carrying water, the sacrificer could already claim to have completed his task, since “with this first act he conquers all this [the world].” The liturgical setting begins to take shape. Meanwhile it is said that the water (āpas) is “all-pervasive”—playing on the root āp-, “to pervade”—and so reaches everything, and hence is used as a remedy to make up for the shortcomings of the officiants, in case they are ever unable to achieve everything. Then it is said that water is “a thunderbolt,” as we can understand by observing that where it flows, it erodes the earth. And water as a thunderbolt has already been used by the gods to defend themselves from the Asuras and the Rakṣas, the evil demons who continually disturb them while they are celebrating sacrifices. These arguments ought to be enough to explain the use of water. And its dangers, since dealing with water is like handling a thunderbolt. But what then might be the purpose of water in the liturgy? Firstly sexual. Once set down to the north of the gārhapatya fire, its fruitful coitus with the fire begins. The sexual act is the first example of an action that is both yoking and yoked, an action underlying everything else that takes place in the sacrificial work. And so we read a little later: “Let no one pass between the water and the fire, so that in passing he does not disturb the coitus which is taking place.” Eros is a certain state of tension that is only established if the distances are correct. The most common relationship, though, between water and fire is not erotic attraction, but rivalry. If the water was placed too far away, beyond the point exactly to the north of the fire, the fire itself would show its aversion. But also to stop too early, before the erotic tension is established, would be an error and a risk. It would in fact mean not reaching “the fulfillment of desire (kāma), for which he had carried forth the water.” The final key word, desire, kāma, appears here. And its precariousness can immediately be seen. Placing the water jug in the wrong place would be enough to bring down the whole vast edifice of sacrificial acts.

The clearing used for celebrating the sacrifice was a setting where there was a risk at every step of offending or disturbing some presence. The water had to be placed to the north of the fire, not too far away. A short invisible line joined them. And the officiant had to take great care not to cross it. So powerful was the eroticization of the space—and above all that bare space where the officiants moved—that it is easy to see why they felt no need to make simulacra. The air was already crowded with them.

But fire and water were not the only powers that had to be heeded. The sacrificial ground was besieged by a mass of intruders—for the gods there were the Asuras, their brothers and enemies; for the officiants there were the Rakṣas. For the sacrificer, all of them were his rivals, his enemies. Nothing pleased these intruders more than interrupting the sacrificial work. To chase them off (over and over again, since they never let themselves be overcome once and for all) various stratagems were needed. The first was silence: the liturgy begins when speech is held back, for only silence assures continuity, unmarked by syllables and verbal forms. In the silence of mental discourse, such forms still exist, but as if reabsorbed in an aqueous element, from which they surface for just long enough to be submerged once again. Another stratagem is fire. Bringing the liturgical objects close to the flame is like beginning the process of tapas, “ardor,” that constant production of heat, in the mind and in the liturgical act, which will encompass the whole rite and will defend it from outside. The intruders will be driven back, flayed.

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The scene of the sacrifice is an empty open space on a slight slope, dotted with the fires and the altar. The bitter conflict of elements that is about to take place has to be mitigated. The tips of the bundles of grass are still wet: resting on the ground they dampen Aditi, the Limitless One who sustains us all. Another sheaf of grass, called prastara, is untied: it is Viṣṇu’s braid. Yet another is strewn around the altar, since the gods sit here and they find it “a good seat.” The sacrificer and his wife will also sit on a sheaf of grass, which has another name. Lastly there is a sheaf of grass with an awe-inspiring name (veda, “knowledge”). Its purpose is not clear. During the ceremony, while an officiant is reciting a mantra, it is handed from one officiant to another, and finally to the sacrificer as well as his wife. The spare and barren scene is becoming dappled with soft, damp grass. The sacrificial ground is now strewn with seven sheaves of grass, just as the earth had been strewn with plants. And the altar—a beautiful woman of perfect proportions, stretched out in her nakedness before the eyes of the gods seated around her, and of the officiants—also has to be dressed, attractively, veiled with a heavy, sinuous cloak of grass: in various layers, at least three (the number must be uneven).

Added now to the spoons and ladles, to the seven sheaves of grass, are three stakes around the āhavanīya fire. The scene is already animated in a vast hallucination: the sacrificer recognizes his body in the spoons and ladles, he feels it crossed by the breath of life; he recognizes Viṣṇu’s braid placed on the altar that the officiants are busy clothing. He sees the grasses multiplying, as in the beginning of time, spread over the ground so that the gods find a comfortable bed. Lastly, three fencing stakes are added around the fire. Who might they be? Their closeness to the fire suggests something lofty and secret. They are the first three Agnis: the first dead gods. And dead through fear of themselves, of fire. Through fear of being unable to deal with the nature of fire. They are a first warning of death as bare absence. It is an example of how the gods bring back the dead: in the form of stakes. High pathos cloaks the figures of the first three Agnis. Mute, they have no wish to tell us what happened to them when they died. And neither will Agni comment on that act of restitution performed by the gods. But we know he is reconciled to it. Thus he has assumed the role of hotṛ, of “invoker”—and his ceaseless movement stimulates the very life of the sacrifice. Life itself.

The three stakes never told the story of their flight, their terror and their suffering, but they realized the gods were using them. Without their rigid presence, Agni would never have accepted his responsibilities. In this way they felt they could ask what the gods are accustomed to ask: a part of the sacrifice. And they had the part of the sacrifice that is lost, the part that is accidentally spilt. A subtly metaphysical solution: to those who are lost goes that which is lost. And at the same time a great relief for men who live in terror of being unable to completely offer what they are offering, of losing an essential part of it—through clumsiness, outside attacks, ignorance. At last they would know that nothing is lost: the earth receives it and transmits it to the three brothers who had themselves disappeared into the ground.

Finally, another three characters appear on the ever more populated and animated scene of the sacrifice. Once again three pieces of wood: but this time they are alight. The first brushes past one of the three brothers of Agni. With that slight contact, as with two old friends, the invisible fire is lit. Then it is the visible fire that has to be lit: the burning ember is brought close to the center of the altar while one officiant pronounces a verse in the gāyatrī meter. The fire cannot be lit unless he pronounces it, for only words spoken in that meter give power, give meaning to the action. At the same time, what the ember lights is the gāyatrī itself. And the gāyatrī in turn lights the other meters, one after the other. It is the first prodigy: the lighting of those verbal beings—the meters—which carry the oblation to the sky, like mighty birds. And from the sky they will come down among mankind. So enormous is this event that the other two embers must imitate it, in other kindling sequences: the second lights springtime, which lights the other seasons and sets in motion the circulation of time. Lastly, the third ember will kindle the brahmin, the last being who has to travel with the oblation toward the gods—and he too waits to be set alight. A meter, a season, a priest: the fire touches them and everything starts to exist.

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Long before fire aroused fear, fire had felt terrified of itself, and of what men (and gods) would ask it to do. Agni’s three older brothers had chosen to vanish, to disappear forever, rather than take responsibility for the fire. They knew that guilt and anxiety are created through dealings with the gods that would have to be nourished with the flame of sacrifice. And it was the task of fire to point out the way, the many stopping places between the sky and the earth, the routes that Agni would endlessly follow. This was to be life, the world. And Agni, as had also happened to other gods—even to Śiva, to Brahmā—had felt a strong aversion. He tried to hide. Every time we see life born like fire from water—or even just light glowing on water—we have to remember it is a sign of Agni’s hiding place, from which Agni was snatched. This ought to be enough for us to understand that the first divine feeling toward life—life as it appears on earth—was simple anxiety and rejection. If this is not clear, it will never be clear later on why all ceremonial acts take place in an atmosphere of latent terror—as if handling something highly dangerous, something that has to be got rid of: guilt, similar to the Buphonia festival in Athens, when the axe that had slain the first ox was passed from hand to hand. With Indra—when he killed Viśvarūpa, the three-headed son of Tvaṣṭṛ the Craftsman—it was the three mysterious Āptyas who accepted the task of absorbing the guilt themselves. This wasn’t enough, though, and for a long time, like an abandoned animal, Indra suffered the consequences of his crime: the killing of a brahmin, the most serious offense, which sticks in the throat of the assassin like a burning ember. The mad rush of guilt, rejected by all those who touch it, ends up in the dakṣiṇā, the “ritual fee” made to the priests, which is the origin of money and also a form of Vāc, Speech. It is a mystery that will pop up everywhere: punctual, penetrating, subtle.

It was not only Agni who was gripped by terror and fled, but also Indra, after having hurled the thunderbolt at Vṛtra. We find at a certain point that even Śiva disappeared. Not through terror, of course—Śiva can never be accused of feeling terror—but certainly as a refusal, a rejection of something that could also be the world. Indra even yields at the moment that ought to mark his triumph, the completion of his enterprise. In front of Vṛtra, Indra feels weaker, he doesn’t trust his own thunderbolt. And the one who goes looking for him, to persuade him to return, is Agni, another fugitive, who in turn had not felt able to assume the role of messenger of the sacrifice. It might be said that all these gods occasionally feel paralyzed when faced with the task of existence—and of having a purpose. Such moments were—perhaps—the model for the radical rejection of the world that would later emerge in many forms among men in India.

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“After which he should cast off the vow, saying: ‘Now I am he that I really am.’” The sacrifice is complete. Hundreds of prescribed gestures have been performed. Hundreds of formulas have been spoken. What is to be done? It’s a tricky situation. The sacrifice has to be treated like a skittish animal: first remove its yoke, which no longer has a purpose, and at the same time pour water—the water described as praṇītāḥ, “carried forth”—because “the sacrifice, while it is unyoked, backing away could injure the sacrificer.”

The sacrificer then has to think about himself. He too has a yoke to remove: the vow. How does he express it? The sacrificer knows he ought to say: “I pass from truth to untruth,” to describe exactly what he is doing. But it would be inappropriate, unseemly to acknowledge this, after the fervor of the liturgy. So he resorts to a formula that might seem tautological and yet is discreetly, humbly allusive: “Now I am he that I really am.” In other words: an ordinary man who knows he is being ignored by the gods. And he returns with a certain relief—though he doesn’t dare say it—to an anonymous, undisciplined, negligible life. But a life freed from the constraint of meaning.

What is the underlying presumption? Truth is an unnatural state for man. Man enters such a state only through the artificiality of the vow and the long sequence of actions (rites) connected to it. But he cannot remain there. The procedure for leaving the vow is just as important and delicate as that for entering it. In some way, man yearns to return to untruth, just as he yearns for sleep after the strain of a long vigil. Truth, whose name (satya) refers to “that which is” (sat), is an impermanent state for man, toward which he aspires and from which he slips away. Normality, the constant state of being, is in untruth, which immediately reenvelops man once he leaves the vow, the sacrificial action.

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The most important step in the task of setting up the fires is the attempt to transfer the fires from the outside world to the remotest depth of the sacrificer’s body. The whole doctrine of yoga rests on this operation, since in the beginning “the fires surely are these breaths: āhavanīya and gārhapatya are the exhaling and the inhaling.” The origin of this difficult transposition was an episode in the war between the Devas and Asuras. The Devas were not yet gods then—and were therefore mortals, as the Asuras were. Between the two enemy forces there was only one immortal being—Agni—to whom everyone turned. So the Devas thought of infusing him into themselves. They let themselves be invaded by that immortal being—and so gained the advantage over the Asuras. It was a question of prefixes: they had chosen ā-dhā-, “to establish inside,” rather than ni-dhā-, “establish below” (in the outside world, where grass is burned and meat is cooked), to which the Asuras were stubbornly attached. From then on, it became much easier to talk about inside and outside, about what happens visibly in the world and what happens invisibly in each person. Tending the fire was a single action that could just as well be carried out sprinkling butter on the flames or speaking words of truth. As Aruṇa Aupaveśi said one day: “Worship, above all, is truthfulness.”

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There is life when something is still also something else. There is death when something is only itself, a rigid tautology. This was one of the implications of the doctrine transmitted to Śvetaketu and his father, Uddālaka, by the king of the Pañcālas. That day, a warrior instructed a brahmin master and his son. The king didn’t refrain from pointing out how unusual the event was. Not only was Uddālaka unfamiliar with the doctrine, but—said the king—“this knowledge, before you, had never reached the brahmins.”

And yet Uddālaka had taught his son the doctrine that goes beyond. But the path of the esoteric is endless. Now it was for Uddālaka to present himself as a disciple, a brahmacārin just like his son. Each time, it was a question of starting over again. And it was he himself who suggested this. “We shall go back down and present ourselves as disciples.”

There are two versions of what happened that day, one in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, the other in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad. They match each other, but with small, telling variations. The five questions put to Śvetaketu, not by a king but by one of his own followers, and which Śvetaketu was unable to answer, mostly related to the two ways that open up after death: the “way of the gods,” devayāna, and the “way of the ancestors,” pitṛyāṇa. But they also included a strange, apparently unrelated, question: “Do you know how, at the fifth oblation, the waters take on a human voice?”

In order to explain what ways there are for leaving the world and how they are reached, the king of the Pañcālas had first to explain how the world is made, starting with the celestial world. “That world,” he said, was made of fire. But rain, earth, man, and woman are made of the same element, which is also a god: Agni. All are made of fire.

He then had to describe what fire is made of: logs, smoke, flame, embers, sparks. To explain how the celestial world, rain, earth, man, and woman were fire, he had to show in what way they were connected to each of their parts. The thought that operates by way of nexuses, correspondences, bandhus, is exacting, it does not allow for vagueness. And so, this time, man and woman appeared in the vision of the king of the Pañcālas: “In truth, O Gautama [as Uddālaka was often called], man is Agni: words are the logs, breath is the smoke, the tongue the flame, the eye the embers, the ear the sparks.” Certain words in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad version vary, but the essential nexuses are confirmed: “The word is the flame, the eye the embers.”

As for the woman, her correspondence with the fire was entirely sexual: “Logs are her womb, her attraction to man the smoke, her vagina the flame, the embers coitus, the sparks pleasure.” An erotic compendium. But we should not think that the Vedic vision of women is so limited, despite it being so acute. The point was this: the equivalences with Agni, relating in order to the celestial world, rain, earth, man, woman, were at the same time a sequence of oblations to Agni—and the woman served to make it possible to pass to the fifth oblation, for it is in the woman’s fire that “the gods offer the seed; from that offering man is born.” And only at this point—after the fifth oblation—can we understand what the answer was to the mysterious question put to Śvetaketu: “At the moment of what oblation do the waters take on human language, do they rise up and speak?” Śvetaketu’s reply ought to have been: at the fifth oblation, because it is then that the waters protect the embryo for several months, until they become the voice of the human being that is born. It all fitted together. Not only the nexuses, the correspondences with fire and its constituent parts, but also—no less important—with the ritual order, therefore with the order of the oblations, which are each linked to the other like a sequence of equations.

But there was something that interrupted them: death. Man is conceived, then “lives so long as he lives. When he dies, he is placed on the fire. His fire is Agni, the logs the logs, the smoke the smoke, the flame the flame, the embers the embers, the sparks the sparks.” Until a moment earlier, it seemed that the embers and the sparks might be transformed into anything whatsoever—and that everything was ready to be transformed into them. But now, all of a sudden, they were just embers and sparks, simple repetitions of themselves. Now, at the moment of cremation, it turned out that the logs were the logs, the flame was the flame—and, even if out of discretion it wasn’t spelled out, the corpse was the corpse. It is difficult to imagine an inference of death that could be harsher, more unclouded, more clear-cut than these few tautological words.

*   *   *

“Thereupon he goes off, on foot or by cart; and, when he has reached what he considers to be the boundary, he breaks silence. And when he returns from his journey he maintains silence from the moment when he sees what he considers to be the boundary. And, even if there were a king in his house, he would not go to him [before having paid homage to the fires].” Behind the terse prose of the ritualist, we glimpse all the pathos of the journey: of any journey, as though Nerval or Proust were to recognize their own bedrock here. One has truly departed, and therefore can leave the silence that distinguishes the delicate phase of transition, only when the fires—or, according to another commentator, the roof of one of the fire huts—can no longer be seen. And the same when returning. Homeland, home—these are the fires. Even if a king were in your house, you have to pay homage first of all to the fires. There is something so intimate, so direct, so secret in each person’s relationship with his fires that it seems to suggest a model for every personal relationship.