XII
GODS WHO OFFER LIBATIONS
There is one gesture that inextricably unites the whole Indo-European world. It is the gesture of the libation. The pouring of a liquid into a fire that flares up, destroying a valuable or an ordinary substance in the flame. Libation is found back in the Minoan period, on the Hagia Triada sarcophagus. Homer’s characters often carry it out as a necessary preliminary to their exploits. Sacrifices performed with no libation are extremely rare. And even Olympian gods are depicted on many vases in the act of offering a libation. Erika Simon has studied them—and has asked the inevitable question: to whom are they offering the libation? And why do gods feel they have to do it, just as much as humans?
In India, libation is to be found everywhere. The brahmin has to perform it each morning before sunrise, and each evening before dusk. It is the simplest rite, the agnihotra, which lasts about a quarter of an hour. Hundreds of times a year, thousands and thousands of times throughout a lifetime. But in the description given in the Brāhmaṇas, even the smallest rite is broken down into almost a hundred acts. And the texts tirelessly reiterate that this rite encapsulates all the others, and they describe it as the arrowhead of all rites: “What the arrowhead is to the arrow, the agnihotra is to the other sacrifices. For where the arrowhead flies, there flies the whole arrow: and so all the works of his sacrifice are released, thanks to this agnihotra, from that death.”
It is not a social rite. The head of every family performs it alone. He needs no officiants, his consort is not present. Violence—which always leaves some mark, however much one tries to hide it—is absent here. But destruction is present, the irreversible yielding of something to an invisible presence. This action of abandoning something is called tyāga—and is often presented as the essence of sacrifice, of every sacrifice. Or otherwise: as its prerequisite. It is the gesture that indicates someone is approaching an invisible presence—showing submission or at least the willingness to give way. Marcel Granet, in Danses et légendes de la Chine ancienne, a work in which his genius shines, defined the virtue of jang, which is indispensable to the Son of Heaven, who wants to maintain his sovereignty, as a yielding in order to get, where it is essential that the gesture of yielding comes before everything else.
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Libation: the act of pouring a liquid into the fire or onto the ground. Pure loss. Irreversibility. The gesture that most resembles the flow of time. The perfunctory Latins had only one word for it: libatio. The Greeks—three subtly different words: choḗ, spondḗ, and the verb leíbō. Spondḗ was the only way, in Greek, of saying “truce” or “peace treaty.” At the start of the Olympic games, heralds ran through Greece shouting: “Spondḗ! Spondḗ!” All fighting would then stop. The Vedic people used fourteen terms to describe a particular type of libation, graha, in a particular type of liturgy: the soma sacrifice. But only for the morning libations. Another five names were needed for those at midday. And five more for those in the evening. And yet they said there was no simpler, more straightforward act for showing the sacrificial attitude. “The murmured prayer is a covert form of sacrifice, the libation is an overt form,” we read in the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa. For the prayer is murmured, while the act of pouring liquid cannot be hidden. Vedic men performed this act every morning, every evening. But so did the Greeks, according to Hesiod, who recommended the offering of libations “when you go to bed and when the sacred light returns.” The Vedic people built a huge edifice of other ritual acts around this single act—and catalogued them in vast commentaries. The Greeks included it in their daily lives and in their rituals without any theorizing. Homer very often speaks about libations, since they formed part of the events he was describing. Their significance was implicit. The libation, as well as being the simplest form of worship, was also the oldest, if we are to believe Ovid. Water had been poured before blood: “Hic qui nunc aperit percussi viscere tauri / in sacris nullum culter habebat opus.” “The knife that today opens up the entrails of the slaughtered bull / played no role in the sacrifices.” And, once again according to Ovid, the libation came from India. Dionysus, or Liber, had introduced it on his return from his eastern expeditions: “Ante tuos ortus arae sine honore fuerunt, / Liber, et in gelidis herba reperta focis.” “Before your birth the altars were without offerings, / O Liber, and grass grew on their cold hearths.” But Dionysus, “having conquered the Ganges and the whole Orient,” was said to have taught the offering of cinnamon, incense, and other libamina. From Liber also the name libatio. Through him the Vedic doctrine of sacrifice became meshed with that of the Romans.
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Libation: the unrenounceable gesture of renouncement. Never so harrowing as the moment when we see Antigone before her dead brother, and “right away she lifted up with her hands the dry dust and a well-wrought bronze bowl to sprinkle on the corpse a triple libation.” There is no need for fresh water—nor is it necessary to pour Oriental perfumes. Even the “dry dust” sprinkled by Antigone is just as good for a “triple libation.” And the hopeless incongruity between that “dry dust” and the “well-wrought bronze bowl” that Antigone uses to pay homage to her brother goes back to the very origin of the gesture, which is the simple celebration of something that is forever lost.
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The gods were great experts in the art of lengthening and shortening the rites. For the rite, like poetry, is greatly extendable or contractable. After having celebrated a sattra that lasted a thousand years, Prajāpati and the gods knew perfectly well that humans would be incapable of following them. Too weak, too incompetent. The gods said to themselves: “We have brought this [sacrifice] to an end with our divine, immortal bodies. Mortals will never be able to complete this. Let us try then to contract this sacrifice.” And so the thousand-year sattra became the gavāmayana, the “march of the cows,” which is still a sattra, but lasts only a year. But it could not be supposed, even then, that all people would spend a whole year on that rite. So the gods set about reducing it further and further. Until there were rites that lasted only three days, or two days—or just a few hours. And finally they arrived at the two agnihotras, for the morning and the evening. This was the nucleus that could be split no further. The rite consisted of pouring milk on the fire. Nothing could be simpler—even if the gesture was linked to dozens and dozens of others. Before this rite, below this rite there could be nothing more than formless life. Yet into those few minutes was concentrated the thousand-year sattra of the gods. “Therefore the agnihotra is unsurpassed. Undaunted is he who knows thus … therefore this agnihotra is unlimited.”
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Each morning and each evening, just before sunrise and again before the appearance of the first star, the head of the family pours four spoonfuls of milk into a larger spoon and then pours it into the fire, twice. All forms of worship emanate from this gesture, carried out by a single person, using the most ordinary of substances, with no need for the help of priests. And it is something that has no beginning and no end, since there would be endless arguments if anyone tried to establish that the morning libation or the evening libation had priority. One relates to the other, in a perpetual cycle. Nothing comes as close to the continuity of life. And so, “as hungry children press close to their mother, so do living beings around the agnihotra.” The simplicity of this rite can only stir the boldest speculations around it. And, above all, the “limitless” nature of those gestures reassures those who perform them as to the limitlessness of their own being, however plain and simple such display might seem: “And in truth he who knows the limitlessness of the agnihotra, in this way is himself born limitless in prosperity and progeny.”
The agnihotra is the occasion for making the distinctions on which all the rest will be built. The libation, however simple, will never be one alone, but double. Why? Because one does not exist. Even in the very beginning, there were always two beings: Mind and Speech, Manas and Vāc. Mind and Speech almost entirely overlap and allow themselves to be treated as “equals (samāna).” And yet they are “different (nānā).” When they become involved in the rite, both characters are to be remembered: so each of the libations appears as a replica of the other, yet at the same time they are different, since they are still two, and therefore with one preceding the other. And thus the relationship between two powers begins to take form. When Mind and Speech then free themselves from each other—as happens at the very moment in which the libation is repeated—it sets off the whole series of dualities with which we have to deal. And reproduced in each will be that tension between limitless and limited that already exists in the relationship between Prajāpati and the gods.
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“For whichever divinity a person draws this libation, that divinity, being seized by this libation, fulfils the wish for which he draws it.” This sentence appears in the passage that most clearly expresses the acrobatic play on the word graha throughout the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa. Usually translatable as “libation,” graha is always related to the verb grah-, “to grasp”—in a similar way as the German word begreifen, “comprehend” (from which Begriff, “concept”), is related to greifen, “grasp.” A further difficulty arises with the continuous alternation, in the word, of the active and passive meaning: graha can be the one who grasps and the one who is grasped, what draws the libation and what is drawn by it. At this point Eggeling explained in a note: “The whole Brāhmaṇa is a play on the word graha, in its active and passive meanings of grasper, holder, influence; and draught, libation.”
The libation is a way of grasping (of understanding) the divinity. And from it the divinity feels bound, grasped. This also happens with names: they are our libations to reality. They are used to grasp it: “The graha is in truth the name, for everything is grasped by a name. Why wonder, then, if the name is graha? We know the name of many, and is it not perhaps with the name that they are grasped for us?”
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A crucial equivalence is that between Sun—“that one burning yonder”—and Death. Not only can the source of energy be a cause of death, but it is death itself. This is why the relationship between Sūrya and his bride Saraṇyū bears so many similarities to that of Hades and Persephone: for the ṛṣis did not regard Hades as the one who rules over the shades but the one who streaks the sky and spreads light. Yama, ruler of the dead, would be just a son of his—a consequence of his being, which itself is already Death.
The ṛṣis, tireless speculators, thought they could make a pact with Death. They had to find a way of going beyond the Sun—therefore beyond Death. How? Thanks to the agnihotra. They had to play on the relationship between fire and light, between Agni and Sūrya. And so they established a cyclical sacrifice, where Agni and Sūrya are alternated in the offerings, fire is offered in light and light is offered in fire—at the beginning of each day, at the beginning of each night, forever. They said: “In the evening he offers Sūrya in Agni and in the morning he offers Agni in Sūrya.”
Everything, as always, went back to an episode at the very beginning. Agni, “as soon as he was born, tried to burn everything here: and so everybody tried to get out of his way.” Those who existed at that time considered him an enemy. And so, “since he was unable to endure this, [Agni] went to man.” And he proposed an arrangement: “Let me enter within you! Then, after having reproduced me, maintain me: and, as you will have reproduced and maintained me here, so then will I reproduce and maintain you in the world yonder”—“the world yonder” meaning the celestial world that is reached beyond the Sun. Man accepted: agnihotra is based on this agreement, and in this agreement man finds the only possibility of going beyond Death: using Death as a steed, making it possible to climb on its back, like a circus acrobat. And so in both daily libations of the agnihotra, at dawn and at dusk, man has to mount firmly on Death: in the evening “he mounts firmly on Death with his toes”; whereas in the morning “he mounts firmly on Death with his heels.”
Implicit is the thought that Death is a cycle. What destroys is the simple passing of day and night. The new day means the destruction of the night. The new night means the destruction of the day. Together, they signify the destruction of the works carried out during the day and during the night. How can we escape from the cycle? By rising above it, looking upon it from on high, standing upright on the back of the sky: “In the same way as, when standing on a chariot, one looks down from above at the wheels that revolve, so he looks down from above at day and night.”
But who can lift us up? The agnihotra. Then the Sun, which is Death, can allow us to be lifted onto his back, so we may see what lies beyond the Sun and are no longer touched by Death. How is it done? To escape Death, the feet have to be mounted firmly on Death. Then the journey begins. The Sun rises and carries us with it. Just by standing on Death—and only if Death helps us by carrying us on its back, as if it were a huge animal, without shaking us off—we will see the world that opens up beyond Death.
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The Sun’s first name was Mārtāṇḍa, Dead Egg. It so happened that Aditi, the Limitless, had given birth to seven children, who then became the main gods, the Ādityas. But appearing from her womb immediately after was a formless being, “as broad as it was high”: it was Mārtāṇḍa, the Dead Egg. The gods decided not to throw it away because, they said: “that which is born after us must not be lost.” And they began to give it form. When we think of the Sun as the origin of life, the image is mixed with the memory of a formless being, “a mere lump of bodily matter.” Death and formlessness, which haunt life at every moment, are there from its very origin. Indeed, they are the foundation on which Vivasvat, the Radiant One, the Sun, rests, dazzling us with his light, who conceals first of all himself.
If the Sun is Death, what is night? Once the evening libation has been performed, the vast expanse of darkness opens up. But, once again, points of reference are reversed. The darkness appears “rich in lights,” for the ceremony has lit it with the embers of Agni: “‘O you, rich in lights, may I safely reach your end!’ [the sacrificer] murmurs three times. She that is rich in lights (citrāvasu) is without doubt the night, since, in a certain way, she rests (vas-) after having gathered the lights (citra): so one doesn’t see clearly (citram) from a distance.
“Now, it was by means of these words that the ṛṣis safely reached the end of the night; and because of them the Rakṣas did not find them: because of them he too [the sacrificer] now safely reaches the end of the night; and because of them the Rakṣas do not find him. He murmurs this while standing.”
Long before the song of the Swiss Guards (“Notre vie est un voyage / Dans l’hiver et dans la Nuit, / Nous cherchons notre passage / Dans le Ciel où rien ne luit”), which Céline used as an epigraph to his Voyage, the ṛṣis had been murmuring very similar words—and every sacrificer since them. Ever at risk of ambush, moving forward in the darkness: this is the tension underlying every ritual scene: “Dangerous indeed are the paths between sky and earth.” What we see is of little importance compared with the invisible maze, where the Enemy lies in wait, where the celestial waters open. The ṛṣis entered it, troubled and uncertain, like Céline’s Bardamu, clinging to ritual words that showed them the route.
* * *
Socrates spent his last day—from the moment the prison gates were opened until dusk—talking with his disciples about how easy it is for a philosopher to die. Unlike the gods, who find it easy to live. He also talked about an “obstacle.” He said: “The festival of the god has delayed my death.” Athens, in obedience to a vow to Apollo, forbade anyone to be executed by the state during the period of the annual pilgrimage to his sanctuary at Delos. And Socrates’ death sentence had been pronounced a day before the ship’s departure for Delos. So he had spent his time during this period—a month, according to Xenophon—composing a hymn to Apollo and adapting some of Aesop’s fables. Everyone wondered why. And Socrates replied that he had been urged in a dream to “compose music.” A dream that had recurred through his life, which he had always interpreted as an encouragement to practice philosophy, since “philosophy is the greatest kind of music.” But now, in that time of suspension before his death, Socrates had come to a different conclusion: perhaps the true meaning of the dream was its literal meaning. It would be “safer” to obey the dream without adding any interpretation to it. And so he had composed a hymn to the god whose festival was being celebrated (and, later the same day, he would also reveal that Apollo was his god). And so also—“since a poet, if he is really to be a poet, has to compose myths and not reasonings (mýthous all’ou lógous)”—he had devoted himself to those myths that were “ready to hand,” the Aesop fables. Spoken on that day and with such tranquillity, they were words that would amaze his disciples—as well as the curious and spiteful Sophists. Socrates, as everyone knew, had spent his whole life elaborating discourses, reasonings, arguments: lógoi. Why should he now, at this moment, devote himself to mýthoi, which he had always treated with a certain disdain? Socrates had no wish to reply; instead he spent the whole day composing lógoi, no more or less striking than so many others that his disciples had heard in past years, in response to a question from Cebes, his most cautious disciple: “Why do you say, Socrates, that a man ought not to do violence to himself and, on the other hand, the philosopher does not want anything more than to follow someone who dies?” The question was well put. If the philosopher is so willing to die, why should he condemn suicide? Socrates’ reply was a series of lógoi, but this time interspersed and subtly interwoven with terms and formulas of quite another kind: that of the Mysteries. And he immediately cited a lógos, but in the sense of a “formula” that is pronounced en aporrḗtois, “in the unnameables” (a traditional way of referring to the Mysteries). Socrates gave it as an example of “mythologizing about the journey yonder,” which he proposed as the best way “of passing the time between now and sunset.” It is as though his thinking, in this last dialogue, swerves in a way that exposes it to a bright light of indiscernible origin. But all now appears transformed.
This is the formula of the Mysteries: “We men are in a sort of garrison post (phrourá) and must not free ourselves or run away.” Highly enigmatic, Socrates immediately recognizes. But he adds: “It is a sound way of expressing the fact that the gods are our guardians and that we men are part of the property of the gods.” A brutal as well as pious definition: someone committing suicide would consequently be taking from the gods part of their property. Man is therefore in debt to the gods for his existence. This is the point that comes closest, in the West, to the Vedic doctrine of the four “debts,” ṛṇa, that make up man. And here the differences between Plato and the Vedic ritualists become all the more apparent. What for them was a clear and binding doctrine is presented by Socrates as a doctrine that is secret and extreme, suitable for the “composing of myths” with which he wants to occupy his last hours.
Even though, a little later, Socrates would go back to reasoning with his disciples, as he had done so many times before, the halo of mystery over that initial formula would envelop his “hunting for that which is,” as he described then his philosophy. And it would bring him as close as possible to a katharmós, a specific term used to describe the purifying transformation that took place in the Mysteries. To the point when Socrates goes as far as stating that “thought (phrónēsis) can itself be a katharmós.” Never as in that phrase did Socrates’ doctrine coincide so closely with the unrevealed, unrevealable doctrine of the Mysteries. Perhaps it was this—much more than arguments over the immortality of the soul, which are always open to doubt—that Socrates wanted to leave as his legacy to his disciples.
But the relationship between his philosophy and cult—in the Mysteries or in any other form—concealed some more secrets. Socrates’ last words have been debated over the centuries—up until Nietzsche and Dumézil. “Crito, we owe a cockerel to Aesculapius. But pay the debt, don’t forget it.” Words in which he talks once again about debt. In their enigmatic exchange (“‘It shall be done,’ said Crito. ‘But have you anything else to say?’ The question remained unanswered”), these words have distracted attention from Socrates’ last gesture—which had no less weight.
When an official of the Eleven appeared with the hemlock, Socrates asked him a question, “looking up at him from below, as was his custom.” He wanted to know whether he was allowed to use some of the drink to pour a libation. “We prepare just enough for it to be drunk,” answered the official. Meaning: it is exactly the amount needed to kill. Socrates nods—and says that he will confine himself to offering a prayer to the gods “so that the change of residence from here hence may go well.”
The implications of the scene are endless. Deep down, Socrates wants to preserve the sacrificial practice, which required part of the drink to be offered to the gods before being drunk. An established custom that went beyond practices of faith and was respected at every symposium. It was the gesture of giving way to the invisible.
At the same time, by doing so, Socrates sought to offer a deadly poison to the gods. All that would be written in future centuries about him being corrosive and disruptive is anticipated and underlined by that gesture. And the official, by declaring that the potion had been prepared with the exact amount needed to kill him, showed that state law contravened the age-old rule requiring a part of any drink to be poured off, to be destroyed as an offering to the gods. “Speísas kaì euxámenos épie,” “When he had poured a libation and prayed, he drank,” says Xenophon, describing Cyrus. But the expression already appears in the Iliad. And every Homeric formula is firmly rooted in Greek life. The underlying principle: there is no prayer without libation, there is no libation without prayer. That was the most solid alliance between gesture and speech, in addressing the divine.
Thus the death sentence turned out to be murder. All that remained for Socrates was prayer, speech. But for the whole Athenian civilization it was assumed that speech and libation went together. One required the other. Whereas now there were only those spare words of hope for a peaceful “change of residence,” metoíkēsis, fitting for a philosopher. Whose final wish had been refused. A pious yet blasphemous desire: offering a libation, sharing a poison with the gods. When the official of the Eleven refused to grant Socrates’ request, the last wish of a man condemned to death, the link between gesture and word had, for the Greeks, been broken. From then on, the word stands alone, self-contained, orphaned and sovereign.