XXI

KING SOMA

 

 

Thousands of pages in the Brāhmaṇas, and all the hymns in the ninth cycle of the Ṛgveda, are dedicated to soma. Of the few realia mentioned in the texts, soma is the most present. We cannot be sure what it was, except for saying: it was a “juice,” soma, which produced intoxication. Attempts at identifying it, from the mid-nineteenth century up to today, have all been rather awkward and unreliable. Nor do they explain why soma was already spoken of in the Vedic era as something from the past, for which a substitute had to be found in the rites. But how can its intoxicating effect be substituted? This is one of the many sharp ironies that anyone venturing into the Vedic world encounters. Not surprisingly, it is ignored, intentionally or otherwise, by many scholars who continue to treat soma like an algebraic symbol. It is more important—they argue—to make a precise reconstruction of the rites that celebrated soma, and less important to know what exactly they celebrated. The moderns, as a rule, are proud when they make statements of this kind, since they are indifferent about substance in general and concerned only with getting the procedures clear. In this way they think they have risen high up the evolutionary ladder.

But not knowing what soma was is like not knowing what fire is. For Agni and Soma are two gods, but they are also a flame and a plant—and, through that flame and that plant, they are the only gods in a continual voyage backward and forward between earth and sky. Not to know any more about the plant called soma is a grievous gap in our knowledge.

The expanding of the mind caused by soma did not stop at the flammantia moenia mundi, the blazing walls of the world. It went beyond. The mind darted beyond every barrier and watched everything from high above: “I extend beyond the sky and this great earth,” proclaims Indra (or anyone who feels like Indra). And in the meantime, at the end of every stanza, he repeats, as an obsessive murmur: “Have I drunk soma?” The speaker is no longer part of the world, but observes it from outside, as if watching a game or a puppet show. Intoxication, omnipotence, effortlessness: “I want to put this earth here or there,” “Soon I want to push this earth here or there.” The Vedic ritualists measured power on this sensation. In normal life, they lived in temporary huts and migrated with their herds. But when they tasted soma, the whole earth and sky became their faithful subjects, ready to let themselves be shaped or annihilated by a sovereign touch. When they spoke of power, they did not mean empires, which they ignored, but that sensation of a single person, of every individual who had taken part in a soma sacrifice and had taken a sip from one of the rectangular wooden cups, camasas, in accordance with the rules of the liturgy.

Childlike and grandiloquent, Indra was the first to sing of soma—and only soma could inspire the fervor that allowed him to perform his heroic deeds. One of which was the capture of the soma itself, thanks to an inversion of time that was intrinsic in Vedic logic. One day the other gods spitefully refused Indra the soma. He had committed too many crimes, beginning with the beheading of the three-headed Viśvarūpa, who after all was a brahmin. But if Indra was to be refused the soma, then this should apply as much to the kṣatriyas. The juice that gives the feeling of sovereignty was forbidden to the king of the gods himself and to the men who modeled themselves on him.

Meanwhile the brahmins drank soma—and kept silent. Indra celebrated soma—and could no longer drink it. Suddenly, in a flash, a secret, obstinate, unending conflict broke out between the two sovereign powers, between priest and king, who were required to work together. The Veda, unlike the rest of the world that would follow, was always biased in favor of the priests, without it being too apparent.

Who is noble? Anyone who can boast “ten consecutive ancestors who drank soma.” But, to drink soma, you had to be invited. Indra’s offense—greater than any other—was that of having tried to drink soma by force. Tvaṣṭṛ had refused to invite him. This was understandable, since Indra had just killed his son. But Indra should nevertheless have been invited by another brahmin, if not by Tvaṣṭṛ. This is the fundamental weakness of the kṣatriyas: their king has to be invited to drink soma. And only a brahmin can invite him. It is a question of intoxication, even of pure power. It is said that brahmins who drink soma can kill with their eyes.

*   *   *

The life of Soma—“the least understood god of the Vedic religion,” Lommel once wrote—has been left in obscurity because many have thought it enough to identify him with the soma plant or (later on) with the moon. But being an intoxicating juice, a celestial body, a king, and a god, all at the same time, is not in itself a problem for Vedic thought. In his royal manifestation, Soma was the head of a dynasty—the lunar dynasty—that cuts through the whole of Indian mythical history up to the Mahābhārata.

Soma’s father was one of the Saptarṣis: Atri, the Devourer. For three thousand years he had practiced tapas with his arms raised. He seemed like “a piece of wood, a wall, or a rock.” So heightened was his consciousness that he never blinked. And one day a juice began to trickle from his eyes and illuminated every corner: it was Soma. The goddesses that kept control over all directions gathered together to receive that glow in their wombs. But the light spilled over. Soma’s fetus fell to the ground and Brahmā placed it on a chariot drawn by white horses, which began to roam the skies, spreading a pearl-like glow. They said: “It is the moon.” At that time Dakṣa, the chief brahmin, had to marry off his sixty daughters. He looked up at the lunar radiance and decided to entrust twenty-seven of them to Soma. Soma would receive them, night after night, on his journey through the sky. And each daughter was to enjoy him in equal measure. They became the houses of the moon, the first silver-sequined corps de ballet. Then Soma was consecrated king with the celebration of a grand rite, where the future sovereign offered the three worlds as recompense to the ṛṣis who had officiated over the sacrifice.

At the end, Soma cleansed himself in the avabhṛtha bath that marked the conclusion of the rite. He immediately felt relieved, buoyant, free of responsibility at last. All the gods, all the ṛṣis had worshipped him. He was sovereign over all. What did he lack? Liberty. That strange intoxication that flows from liberty. He felt that new waves were crashing in his mind: arrogance and lust. What would the worst outrage be? To abduct the wife of a brahmin. Soma knew very well that “even if a woman has had ten non-brahmin husbands, if a brahmin once takes her hand then he alone is her husband to the exclusion of all others.” But no one could resist Soma, the fluid that penetrates everywhere and makes all desirable. And so he set his eye on Tārā, wife of Bṛhaspati, chaplain to the gods. It wasn’t difficult to snatch her, and it was thrilling to have intercourse with her, with her exquisite round, moon face.

The result of her abduction could only be war, in the heavens. It was the fifth war between the Devas and the Asuras. Amid repeated massacres, with the final outcome still uncertain, many forgot the original reason for the conflict. But not Bṛhaspati, known as “the vulture” for the keenness of his gaze. He realized straightaway that Tārā’s womb was swelling (in the meantime she had been returned to him). He looked at her in disdain, and said: “Never will you be able to hold a fetus in your womb that belongs to me.” Then he ordered her to abort. But Tārā was stubborn and hated nothing more in the world than brahminic arrogance, of which Bṛhaspati was the epitome. She refused.

Questioned by the Devas, she admitted that she was about to give birth to Soma’s child. When Budha was born, he condensed in himself the luminescent beauty of both his mother and his father. Meanwhile Soma was wasting away. The sovereign of the heavens, the perfect lover, the repository of rapture, was suffering from consumption. He felt weaker, his light grew dim. He then returned to his father. Inert, all skin and bones, Atri did not deign to look upon him. But later, little by little, as he humbly served that motionless and silent being, Soma felt he was recovering. The sap slowly began to flow once more through the veins of the cosmos.

*   *   *

Tārā’s betrayal was all the more blasphemous and outrageous since King Soma was the only king for the brahmins, and therefore for Bṛhaspati. For the kṣatriyas everything can become food, except the brahmin, because “his king is Soma.” And so the brahmins cannot be touched by the kṣatriyas, but it is their fate to be deceived and mocked by their own sovereign: Soma. The most treacherous enemy is within one’s own power, even if it were brahman. “Spiritualia nequitiae in coelestibus,” as Paul would one day say. The greatest impiety comes from the sovereign god.

The seating position is most revealing: “And therefore the brahmin, during the king’s rite of consecration, sits below the kṣatriya … Brahman is the womb of royalty (kṣatra), and so, even if the king reaches the highest position, in the end he can only rest on brahman, his womb. If he should damage it, he would damage his womb.” An inextricable blend of subordination (the brahmin places himself below the king) and preeminence (the king can be born only from brahman).

*   *   *

Soma is pure quality on the threshold of the realm of quantity. Only thanks to soma is the existence of quantity justified: “Since he buys the king, everything here below can be bought”; “Since he measures the king, there is therefore a measure, the measure among men as well as any other measure.” Money, measure: to enter the world they need to have King Soma, the only material that is quality alone, immeasurable, irreplaceable, the origin of every measure, of every substitution. If this knot is cut, order falls apart.

Exchange is a violent act because there is no secure, guaranteed fluidity between sky and earth. The flow is obstructed, continually diverted. Sacrifice, and consequently exchange, serve to reestablish the flow, but through an action that has something forced, disturbing, about it, a restoration that presupposes a wound and adds a new one to it.

*   *   *

Soma was to be approached with desire, but also with fear: “Do not terrify me, O king, do not pierce my heart with your radiance.” The risk was apparent at every moment. Soma, liquid fire, had to make its way toward the head, where the Saptarṣis waited for it, crouching. But at the same time there was the plea: “Do not go below my navel.” If that happened, one would have been overpowered.

The first to abuse soma was also he who seized it: Indra. Eager, impatient, headstrong, he snatched the liquid from Tvaṣṭṛ and drank it without ritual, without mixing it, without filtering it. His body “fell apart on all sides.” The intoxicating liquid came out of every orifice. Then Indra vomited. He no longer knew what to do, so “he turned to Prajāpati.” “Indra lay on the ground, devastated. The gods gathered around him and said: ‘In truth, he was the best of us; evil has befallen him: we must heal him!’” This would one day lead men to perform the sautrāmaṇī rite, to remedy Indra’s illness and his crime against soma. From that time on, men prayed for draughts of soma adding a modest request: “Like the harness of a chariot, thus keep together my limbs.” And they made sure to add humbly: “Let these juices protect me from breaking a leg and preserve me from paralysis.” Drunken and precise.

*   *   *

Soma and Agni are linked by an affinity more powerful and secret than any other, above all because they are the only gods who allow themselves to be seen: Agni is in every fire that blazes; King Soma in every soma plant that someone collects on remote mountain slopes and then sells to be offered in sacrifice. They are also linked by their origins: when both still belonged to the Asuras and—in the words of the Ṛgveda—breathed in the “long darkness,” which was the belly of Vṛtra. They were born or came out of the monster, whom Indra had then killed with the help of Soma himself (Indra had ordered him: “Let us both strike Vṛtra, come out, Soma!”). But the story would become even more disturbing when it was discovered that Soma had not only left Vṛtra’s belly, but was Vṛtra. The Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa leaves no doubt: “‘Soma was in fact Vṛtra: his body is that of the mountains and of the rocks where the plant called Uśānā grows,’ so said Śvetaketu Auddālaki. ‘They go to fetch it and press it; by means of the consecration and of the upasads, by means of the tānūnaptras [ceremonies that form part of the soma sacrifices] and the invigoration they make it into soma.’” They are words that summed up the whole life of Soma, from when he had hidden himself inside himself up until when he had become a plant transported among men, and transformed and killed by men.

Agni and Soma, so far as their origins and their history, are highly mysterious elements that have to be flushed out of the dark, and yet at the same time they are the most apparent, the elements that are visible in the sacrifice, in the fires and in the favorite oblation of gods and men. Bergaigne rightly separated Agni and Soma from the Devas as a whole, not only because Soma is “fire in a liquid state,” not only because the characters of the two gods are to a large extent interchangeable, but because their entire existence belongs to a secret stratum of that which is, in the same way as rapture invades consciousness carrying with it something more remote, overwhelming and indecipherable.

In comparison with Agni and Soma, the Devas have something of the parvenus about them: born on the earth, the Devas reached the sky through sacrifice, and therefore through Agni and Soma. Agni and Soma, on the other hand, were born in the sky, and from there were conveyed to the earth: Soma being śyenabhṛta, “carried by the eagle,” Agni being delivered by Mātariśvan, the Vedic Prometheus. The Ṛgveda narrates it as follows: “Mātariśvan carried the one [Agni] from the sky, the eagle snatched the other [Soma] from the [celestial] mountain.” There is therefore a cross-movement, between the gods, which corresponds with two lineages. The gods, no less than men, could be different by birth.

*   *   *

“Now Soma was in the sky and the gods were here on earth. The gods desired: ‘May Soma come to us: we would sacrifice with him, if he came.’ They created these two apparitions (māyā), Suparṇī and Kadrū. In the chapter on the dhiṣṇya fires we read how the affair of Suparṇī and Kadrū came to pass.

“Gāyatrī flew toward Soma, sent by those two. While she was carrying him away, the Gandharva Viśvāvasu stole him from her. The gods realized this: ‘Soma has been carried away from yonder, but he does not come to us, for the Gandharvas have stolen him.’

“They said: ‘The Gandharvas are fond of women: let us send Vāc to them and she will return to us with Soma.’ They sent Vāc to them and she returned with Soma.

“The Gandharvas pursued her and said: ‘Soma for you, Vāc for us.’ ‘So be it,’ said the gods. ‘But if she prefers to come here, do not take her away by force: let us woo her.’ And so they wooed her.

“The Gandharvas recited the Vedas to her, saying, ‘See how we know them, see how we know them.’

“The gods then created the lute and sat playing and singing, saying: ‘Thus we will sing to you, thus we will amuse you.’ She [Vāc] turned to the gods; but, in truth, she turned to them frivolously. Since, to go toward the dance and the song, she went away from those who sang hymns and prayed. And so even to this day women are only frivolous beings: for it was in this way that Vāc returned, and other women do as she did. And it is for this that they most readily take a fancy to he who dances and sings.

“And so Soma and Vāc were with the gods. Now, when someone buys Soma to obtain it, it is to sacrifice with the [Soma] obtained. He who sacrifices with [Soma] not bought, sacrifices with Soma that is not truly obtained.”

Here is the story of the conquest of Soma, the basis for every liturgical act, told with the usual sobriety and making punctual reference to another passage—much as a Western scholar could do—where there is a full account of the story of Suparṇī and Kadrū. What would the rite be if it didn’t have this radiant substance at its center, which is also the most sought-after celestial guest on earth? The gods are the first for whom life would lose all meaning without him. But the gods, alone, would not be able to capture Soma. They need the help of a being that is both a meter and an animal: Gāyatrī, who appears as a large bird. The power of form was never, and will never again be declared as boldly as in this passage: the gods could not have taken off from the earth without the help of a sequence of twenty-four syllables, which is a living being. The story of how the capture took place will continue later on. Here the emphasis is on what happened after the capture. First, the celestial obstacle: the Gandharvas, who live in the heavens, do not let Soma escape. Viśvāvasu snatches him from Gāyatrī. Once again, the gods wouldn’t know what to do without the help of another female being: Vāc, Speech. The story that follows is not just a primordial comedy of the sexes, that perhaps only Aristophanes would have known how to stage with equal skill. Here it is a metaphysical game—and for the first time, with great clarity and concision, an equivalence is established: Speech-Woman-Money. Lévi-Strauss would reach the same conclusion in Structures élémentaires de la parenté. And didn’t Western science, in its most noble form, speak through him? It is an equivalence full of ambiguities and pitfalls. But also of immense power. And the access path to all modernity: all that is needed is for exchange to expand and free itself from all respect—and we will be in the new world, preordained and perhaps even outlined in the mould of antiquity. This alone would be extraordinary: but even greater is the corrosive criticism that the civilization founded on brahman exercises here upon itself. If the frivolous Vāc had not gladly agreed to be used as barter, like a putain au grand cœur; if the gods—to heighten even more the outrageousness of the scenario—had not chosen to dance and sing to get her back, rather than chanting the Vedas, as the Gandharvas do, touchingly in their innocence, then Soma, the hypostasis of the Vedas, would never have reached the gods. Lastly, if Soma had not been bought—as the ritualist punctiliously states at the end—then it would not be the real Soma, the effective Soma, the Soma “obtained” that makes it possible to “obtain.” The deliciously erotic and mocking scene of the contest for Soma between the innocent Gandharvas—as innocent and fond of women as only celestial beings can be—and the wily gods is also the scene that introduces us to the realm of the value of exchange, all too familiar to any modern reader. There is no interval between the eventful arrival on earth of Soma, a self-sufficient and radiant substance, and the universal establishment of exchange, where Soma even takes on the role of hidden guarantor and surety, like gold to currency for Marx. The archaic and the ultramodern are here described at the same time, in the same terms. Perhaps this is the secret of the Gāyatrī meter.

*   *   *

The text of the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa had already told us: “In the chapter on the dhiṣṇya fires it is said how the affair of Suparṇī and Kadrū came to pass.” At last we reach it—and we read this:

“Now Soma was in the heavens and the gods were here [on the earth]. The gods desired: ‘Would that Soma might come to us; we could sacrifice with him, if he came.’ They produced two apparitions, Suparṇī and Kadrū; Suparṇī in truth was Vāc (Speech) and Kadrū was this [Earth]. Disagreement broke out between them.

“They then argued and said: ‘Whichever of us can see farthest will have the other in her power.’ ‘So be it.’ Kadrū then said: ‘Look over there!’

“Suparṇī then said: ‘On the yonder shore of the ocean there is a white horse by a post, I can see it, do you also see it?’ ‘Of course I see it!’ Then Kadrū said: ‘Its tail hangs down [from the post]; now the wind blows it, I see it.’

“Now, when Suparṇī said: ‘On the yonder shore of the ocean,’ the ocean in truth is the altar, with this she meant altar; ‘There is a white horse by a post,’ the white horse, in truth, is Agni and the post means the sacrificial post. And when Kadrū said: ‘Its tail hangs down; now the wind blows it, I see it,’ this is none other than the rope.

“Suparṇī then said: ‘Come, let us fly there to see which of us has won.’ Kadrū said: ‘Fly there yourself, you say which of us has won.’

“Suparṇī then flew there; and she saw that all was as Kadrū had said. When she returned, she [Kadrū] said to her: ‘Have you or I won?’ ‘You!’ she replied. This is the story of Suparṇī and Kadrū.

“Then Kadrū said: ‘I have won your Self (ātmānam); over there is Soma in the heavens; go and fetch him for the gods, and with this redeem yourself from death.’ ‘So be it!’ replied [Suparṇī]. Then she produced the meters; and Gāyatrī seized Soma from the sky.

“He [Soma] was closed between two golden cups; the sharp edges closed together at every blink of an eye; and those two cups were, in truth, Consecration and Ardor (tapas). Those Gandharva guardians watched over him; they are these hearths, these fire-priests.

“She [Gāyatrī] snatched one of the cups and gave it to the gods. This was the Consecration: and so the gods consecrated themselves.

“Then she snatched the other cup and gave it to the gods. This was Ardor: and so the gods practiced ardor, namely the upasads [triple offerings of ghee to Agni, Soma, and Viṣṇu], for the upasads are ardor.”

What Kadrū (Earth) sees and her sister Suparṇī (Speech) does not see—in the far distance beyond the ocean where that horse appears who is Agni—is the rope that ties the horse to the sacrificial post: “None other than the rope.” Speech, in comparison with Earth, is she who does not see with total precision. And total precision is a rope that is tied to death. And so Kadrū challenges her sister to carry out the very action that can redeem her from death: the theft of soma. It is as if Kadrū had said: Since you are like this—and you do not see what ties you to death—you have to fly off into the heavens and carry out that brave task which alone can redeem you from death. Otherwise, not seeing the rope that ties you to the sacrificial post means being already dead—or at least having lost your Self.

*   *   *

Existence becomes complete only in the presence of soma. The story of the abduction of soma is therefore, so far as humans are concerned, the basis for everything else. A story of release and at the same time of redemption, of a gift which is at the same time the extinction of a debt. It is no surprise, then, that the story of Suparṇī holds within itself the principle that has governed everyone’s life since then: “As soon as he is born, man is born as a person owing a debt to death; when he offers sacrifices, he redeems his person from death, in the same way that Suparṇī redeemed herself for the gods.” These few lines explain with great clarity the reasons behind the radically different assumptions that separate Vedic India from the West. Or at least from the unspoken assumption that, after long elaboration, has ended up becoming Western good sense: that vision of man as a tabula rasa, the wax tablet to which Locke referred. This is the only assumption that allows the complicated mechanisms of society to operate (and for what else—some say—is thought required?). Certainly, the West is also Plato, for whom an equivalent to Vedic “debt” is the recovery of memory. But here we are talking about assumptions that support living in society. And, in particular, of those that are only rendered explicit with the beginnings of the modern age (starting with Locke). At that moment, what had previously worked covertly becomes evident. And it converges in the principal idea of empiricism: the individual as an entirely unprejudiced perceptive apparatus, a being that takes form on the basis of what gradually has an impact on his senses—and nothing else.

“Debt,” ṛṇa, is a key word for Vedic man. His whole life is a continual attempt to settle four debts that weigh upon him from birth: debt to the gods, to the ṛṣis, to his ancestors, to men. They will be paid off, respectively, through sacrifice, through studying the Veda, through procreation, and through offering hospitality. The fact that there are four debts must not lead to confusion. They originate from one debt alone—the debt toward death and its god, Yama. Yet the text here doesn’t name the god, but speaks only of “a debt toward death (ṛṇaṃ mṛtyoḥ).”

Life is an asset that death has left in trust for all humans (to be used while it lasts). An asset whose restitution death requires, making man return to death. This is the basis of every life, its innate imbalance. But to this imbalance there is a counterbalance, from the part of the gods: when man offers the oblation to certain divinities, “whoever the divinities are, they consider it as a debt for them to fulfill the desire of the sacrificer at the moment in which he makes the oblation.”

Here, another key word appears: śraddhā, “trust in the effectiveness of ritual.” Which is the Vedic way of expressing our “belief.” And above all, as Benveniste observed, “the exact formal correspondence between the Latin crē-dō and the Sanskrit śrad-dhā is the proof of a very ancient heritage.” The sacrificer, with his defect as an innate debtor, faithfully offers the oblation, in the belief that at that same moment the gods will begin to recognize they have a debt to him. Only the institution of a double obligation—of people to the gods and of the gods to people—ensures that flow which is life itself. By obtaining a credit with the gods, man (namely the sacrificer) delays, postpones, defers the moment when he will have to settle his debt with death. Every action is founded on this double imbalance. On the basis of this imbalance every action acquires meaning.

Malamoud observes that the word ṛṇa, “debt,” apparently has no etymology. The four innate debts, and the very notion of debt, are presented baldly, without explanations—and are destined to go far, remaining alive and powerfully felt much later on, in the world of bhakti, of “devotion,” which claims to do without ritual orthodoxy. To this Malamoud adds, by way of a parallel, that “there is no mythology of indebtedness.” This is surely true, in fact, though with one exception: the story of the two sisters Kadrū and Suparṇī (or, in other texts, Vinatā) and the capture of Soma—a story that is, by no coincidence, the basis for all other Vedic stories. That story is enough to establish the perpetually unequal system of exchange between men and gods. But also between life and death.

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How can men imitate the complex scenario of the capture of Soma? By replicating the last stage: the barter between Vāc and Soma. They offer a cow to a mysterious character (the trader who brings the soma on his cart) so as to purchase that prized item. Everything happens through an equivalence: the cow is Vāc. And the cow is milk. And the milk is gold: “Milk and gold have the same origins, for both are born from Agni’s seed.” The human repetition has nothing of the overwhelming divine theatricality. But it reveals a point that had remained hidden before: that barter—between a female being and a substance—is more accurately a sale, which is carried out through gold, the source of all currency. The first exchange, the first substitution, takes place with something that cannot, by its very nature, be substituted: soma, the substance that is a state of being, a state of mind that can be attained only through it.

*   *   *

But with the purchase of soma not everything is resolved. Another scene is included as a grotesque and enigmatic prelude. The first sale was a sham. In just the same way that Vāc had been offered in barter to the Gandharvas to obtain Soma but then—thanks to the wooing ploy—had to be returned to the gods, so too the cow that men use to buy the soma from the trader returns in the end to them. How? Because, at the end of the haggling, the soma trader is given a thrashing and the cow is led away. That which on the divine stage was a delightful and subtle exchange of words becomes an act of pure violence on the human stage. It is as if the act of selling was too serious to be entirely accepted. A brutal act must cancel out its consequences. But this only makes things worse—it is a fatal step.

Selling and measuring, those two irreversible gestures, can be carried out only after the arrival of the royal guest, the soma plant on the trader’s cart, as if only soma was capable of providing a standard, to which every exchange, every measure can be related: “He [the adhvaryu] then spreads out the cloth folded in two or in four, with the fringe toward east or toward north. On it he measures the king: and, since he measures the king, there is therefore a measure, the measure among men as well as any other measure.” Soma, the being that is pure quality, discernible only as an intensity of mind, exalted by the juice of that plant, guarantees and establishes the world of quantity, where everything is measured and is sold. What would happen without soma? Selling and measuring would continue, but dictated by the rule of “false weight,” as Joseph Roth would say.

The adhvaryu who officiated at the soma ceremony kept a piece of gold tied to his finger. Why? In the human world—the world of untruth—soma bursts in like a palpable truth, the only substance flowing from the other world, the world of the gods, who are truth. This justifies the precautions, the ways they use to approach it. The officiants move around it as if it were a red-hot mass. They know that every gesture of theirs can harm it, but can also harm the truth, which is there before them, defenseless like any plant. And it’s a guest.

And therefore before touching the soma with their fingers they touch it with gold, a divine intermediary since it is the seed of Agni, “so that [the sacrificer] can touch the stalks [of the soma] with truth, so that he can handle the soma with the truth.” In order to deal with soma, so as not to upset it, men have to transform themselves into bearers of truth, going against their nature. This is what the rite is all about. All the more evident, in contrast with this delicate care, is the brutality that marks the purchase of the soma, when the trader who had sold it ended up being beaten with staffs.

*   *   *

“He buys the king; and, since he buys the king, everything here can be bought. He says: ‘Soma-seller, is King Soma for sale?’ ‘He is for sale,’ says the soma-seller. ‘I will buy him from you.’ ‘Buy him,’ says the soma-seller. ‘I will buy him for one-sixteenth [of the cow].’ ‘King Soma is certainly worth more than that,’ says the soma-seller. ‘Yes, King Soma is worth more than that; but great is the greatness of the cow,’ says the adhvaryu.”

This scene is the basis for every economy. But why must the soma be purchased—and why does it have no effect unless purchased? Why, if not simply for emphasis, does the text explain several times that it is referring to “bought soma”? Because the debt comes before the gift. We are born in debt, we make offerings and then—in time, through ritual—we receive the gift. The trader represents the Gandharvas who intercept Soma, a primordial clash between sky and earth. This reminds us that Soma does not arrive as a simple gift, even for the gods. They have to redeem him from the Gandharvas. They had to become “debtless” toward them. And, even earlier, the soma itself had been captured by Gāyatrī to ransom Suparṇī (or Vinatā) from slavery. There is always a payment to be made before anything is obtained. This is because nothing ever happens between sky and earth without some obstacle. There is always at least the shot of an arrow, something is always snatched away. The consequences of that act then weigh upon life on earth. Anyone who disregards them knows nothing about the heavens.

*   *   *

The sacrificer approaches a priest sixteen times and tenders his ritual fee. The dakṣiṇā can be of four kinds: “gold, a cow, cloth, and a horse.” The distribution of fees is made following a strict order. The last to be paid is the pratihartṛ priest, entrusted with the simplest task: to keep the cows, “so that he [the sacrificer] does not lose them.”

Watching this scene, in its meticulous arrangement, one might think it is the most recent part of the rite—almost an addition aimed at sealing the closure of the ceremony with the offering of a payment to the priests who have performed it. A naïve, modern notion. The first to distribute ritual fees had been Prajāpati. The world, the gods, humans had only just begun to exist. Everything had just arisen from Prajāpati’s sacrifice. But Prajāpati was concerned all the same about distributing ritual fees, almost as if exchange had been there from the very beginning. To such an extent that this distribution of ritual fees could diminish the world—or even exhaust it, unless it were stopped.

This, at least, was the view of Indra, king of the Devas, who were always frightened of being ousted: by their brothers the Asuras, but also by men who tried to reach the heavens through sacrifice—or even, it was now discovered, by the ill-considered magnanimity of the Progenitor. “Indra thought to himself: ‘Now he is giving everything away and will leave nothing for us.’” Indra realized at that moment that the power of exchange and substitution, if left to itself, is uncontrollable and corrosive, like the power of a central bank that goes on printing money. So he stepped in with his thunderbolt, in this case a simple formula: the invitation to pray to him.

Indra obtained relatively little satisfaction for his troubles, compared with the solemnity and severity of the obligation connected with the ritual fees. Its principle is set out and repeated in this form: “There should be no offering, as they say, without a ritual fee.” This phrase comes close to being a postulate. And the implications that can be drawn from these few far-reaching and allusive words are endless. The postulate itself is only occasionally recalled, when it is appropriate—and is always accompanied by the phrase “as they say,” the simplest and quickest way of appealing to the authority of tradition. In this way we learn that you cannot offer something, thus perform a gesture (indeed the gesture) that is essentially gratuitous, without at the same time giving a dakṣiṇā, which is exactly the opposite: a fee, a payment for a particular work carried out by another. Thus implying that gratuity has a price. And not only does it have a price, but it has to have one. Gratuity must be connected with exchange (because the fee is given in exchange for the opus, the priest’s labor). But the exchange can arise only from the gratuitous act, with the simple offering, with the tyāga: the decision to “yield,” to abandon something, to let it disappear in the fire, while watching it, attentively.

In the story of King Soma, those who lose out overall are the Gandharvas. It is they whose main mission was to be the keepers of Soma who are now left as keepers of the void. It is a position that would have to be remedied, if the world wants to maintain its equilibrium. And so it was: “The gods officiated with him [man]. Those Gandharvas who had been the keepers of Soma followed him; and having come forward they said: ‘Allow us to have a part of the sacrifice, do not exclude us from the sacrifice; let us also have a part of the sacrifice!’

“They said: ‘And then, what is there for us? As in the yonder world we have been his keepers, so will we be his keepers here on earth.’

“The gods said: ‘So be it!’ Saying: ‘[Here is] your retribution for Soma,’ he assigns them the price of Soma.”

Soma has to be purchased because it was stolen from the heavens—and the price is paid so as to silence its keepers, the Gandharvas. Devastating violence first, then an exchange that gives an illusion of fairness: this is not only the relationship that men have with the sky, but also that of the gods when they still had to conquer it.

The exchange appears in relation to an injury. More to cover it up than to heal it. The violence that took place in the heavens with the abduction of the soma cannot remain unanswered, but the answer can only be a reasonable and misleading one: a price for something that could not be substituted. The substitution arises in relationship to something it does not have the power to substitute. The hýbris of exchange is fully revealed when it claims to bring about substitution of something that cannot be substituted. And what is it that cannot be substituted? The soma. Only in relation to soma does exchange show itself in all its greed forcing into submission the totality of all that is.

*   *   *

If we first ask ourselves what are meters, the answer has to be that they are footprints. Footprints in which someone else puts their feet. And in putting their feet there they enter into the being of the one who has left the first footprint. This happens with the tracks of the cow that is used to obtain the soma: “He follows her, stepping into seven of her tracks; thus he takes possession of her.” The cow is Vāc, Speech: as a resplendent woman she charmed the Gandharvas and finally abandoned them, preferring the frivolous songs of the gods to their pious liturgical chants. But Vāc has to be wooed—and so too the cow that is sold to obtain soma. Among its gifts there is this: to have marked out the first rhythm, a step, which men would then imitate. But it is essential that such a measure is external to man, that it originates from another being. Speech is a desirable woman or an animal that is used as currency. In any event, the sound that erupts from the depths of man, and would seem to be a part of him like a groan, is instead external, indeed it is the first visible being that he desires, even if she is now no more than a succession of tracks.

To win over the woman who is Speech they were forced to carry out a series of acts that might conceivably appear mad, but they were simply strictly following instructions: having placed their feet in six tracks in succession, they sat in a circle around the seventh track left by the right front hoof of the cow that was to be sold to obtain soma. They then took a piece of gold and placed it inside the track. They now poured ghee over it, until the track was full. If the piece of gold had not been there in this hoof print, they could not have made any offerings, since an offering is made only into fire. But gold—like milk—is Agni’s seed. And so pouring ghee over the gold was the same as pouring ghee into the fire. And since ghee is a thunderbolt, the cow into whose track the offering is poured was freed, because the thunderbolt is a shield. Once again, everything is consequential. Finally, they shook the dust of the track over the sacrificer’s wife. Then they made sure that the cow looked into the eyes of the sacrificer’s wife. It seemed as if two females were exchanging glances. But it wasn’t like that. The cow is female, but soma is male. Since the cow was exchanged for soma, the cow was the soma. So the gaze became the gaze of a male. And by exchanging glances with the sacrificer’s wife, a “fertile coitus” took place. The sacrificer’s wife then spoke: “I have seen eye to eye with the far-seeing divine dakṣiṇā: do not take my life away from me, I will not take yours away; may I obtain a hero under your gaze!” “A hero,” the ritualists add, here means “a son.”

*   *   *

The soma, purchased and loaded on a cart, arrives and is greeted like a royal guest. When the officiant handles a plant that is soma, he dresses it, moves it—and in the meantime talks to it. The plant is king, guest, friend. When he lays it down on his own right thigh, which is now Indra’s thigh, soma is “the beloved on the beloved one,” “propitious on the propitious one,” “tender on the tender one,” for “the ways of men follow those of the gods.” Even sacrifice, at this point, is presented as an obligatory celebration for a high-ranking guest: “In the same way that one would place a large ox or a large he-goat on the fire for a king or a brahmin, so he prepares for him [Soma] the guest-offering.” But a king is unlikely to arrive alone. Who then forms his retinue? The meters do. Like K.’s assistants in The Castle, the meters go where Soma goes: “The meters act around him [Soma] as his attendants.” What is seen is a cart that carries the stalks of a plant that “is in the mountains.” But those who know also see, beside the cart, the shimmering of meters, similar to the rays of the sun.

Sweet, affectionate words are murmured to it—like those murmured to the horse just before it is killed during the aśvamedha—to persuade it that no one wants to harm it and it will not suffer, and so the soma plant, the newly arrived royal guest, is told why it has been bought. For a noble purpose, certainly, though a mysterious one: for “the supreme sovereignty of the meters.” Then, straight after, we read: “When they press him, they kill him.” The proximity of these two phrases is in the purest Vedic style. First the esoteric formula (the “supreme sovereignty of the meters,” about which the text has actually given no explanation); then the dry, rugged, clear-cut description: “When they press him, they kill him.” It is the very tension of all liturgical thinking.

Before reaching the moment of the pressing, problems of etiquette arose. The king was brought down from the cart and laid on the stones that would crush him. The stones are eager, they are already openmouthed. King Soma, who is nobility, descends to his people of stones. This already raises a doubt in the mind of the ritualist—is it improper, a breach of etiquette, to invite King Soma to descend? Certainly—and (here we detect a sigh from the ritualist) “so people today confuse good and bad.” Every complaint about how times are getting worse seems to originate from this brief aside. But the ritualist immediately recovers: this excessive magnanimity of King Soma, who descends to his people, eventually to be killed, must be answered by a gesture from the people, who have to maintain their distance, still placing themselves beneath him. How? By going down on their knees: “And so, when a noble approaches, all these subjects, the people, kneel down, sit lower than him.”

Now the stones surround the soma with their mouths gaping. The sacrificer prays in succession to Agni, then to the soma bowls, and lastly to the stones themselves, since they know the sacrifice. Only those who know speak. “The stones know.” And they “know” because the stones are Soma. Not only is Soma killed, but he is killed by his own body, by fragments of his body, by rocks that have been broken from the mountains that form him (“those mountains, those rocks are his body”). What happens? A murder or a disguised suicide?

And here, at this solemn moment, we are reminded that “Soma was Vṛtra.” The noble King Soma, the being abducted from the heavens to spread rapture on the earth, had also been (in some way—in what way?) the primordial monster, the main obstacle to life.

*   *   *

There is always something prior to the gods. If it is not Prajāpati, from which they originated, it is Vṛtra, an amorphous mass, mountain, snake on the mountain, goatskin, a repository for the intoxicating substance soma. The gods knew that, in comparison with that indeterminate being, their power was too young and insecure. Even Indra, agreeing to fight a duel with Vṛtra, was by no means sure what would happen as he hurled the thunderbolt. He still feared he was the weaker. He immediately hid. The gods crowded behind him. Vṛtra lay dying on one side. The gods hid themselves in fear on the other. They sent Vāyu, Wind, to investigate. He blew on Vṛtra’s bloated body. There wasn’t a quiver. Once reassured, the gods then threw themselves on his corpse. Each wanted a larger portion of soma than the others. They brandished their grahas, cups, to fill them to the brim. But Vṛtra’s vast corpse, upon which the gods clambered like parasites, was already giving off a powerful stench. The intoxicating substance, which they drew from the defenseless body, had to be filtered and blended with something else to become ingestible even for the gods. They still needed the help of Vāyu, of a breeze that blended with the liquid soma. This was the Vedic version of the Spirit that revives: Vāyu who disperses Vṛtra’s stench and transforms the liquid within his body into an intoxicating and enlightening drink.

So Vāyu ended up winning the right to taste some of the first soma. Indra felt left out. He was the hero, the one who alone, shuddering, had accepted the challenge. It was he who had hurled the thunderbolt. And now he had to give way to the vain Vāyu. They took their dispute to Prajāpati. This was his ruling: Indra would always have a quarter of Vāyu’s share. Indra said he wished, through soma, to have language—indeed, the articulated word. From that time on, through Prajāpati’s decision, of all the languages throughout the world, only a quarter are articulated, and therefore intelligible. All the rest are indecipherable, from the warbling of birds to the noise of insects. Indra thus did not gain the upper hand. He lowered his head, in sadness. Yet the decision followed a general rule: that most things remain hidden. Only just a quarter of Puruṣa is visible. And the same goes for brahman. The unmanifest is much greater than the manifest. The invisible than the visible. The same also with language. We must all know that when we speak, “three parts [of language], kept in concealment, are motionless; the fourth part is what people use.” Speech conserves and renews such a fascination only because language throws an inaccessible shadow much larger than itself.

*   *   *

Certain filters, called pavitra, are essential in worship—either two kuśa blades, used for purifying water, or two strips of white wool, used for the soma. Their use recalls the cosmic drama between Vṛtra and Indra. Vṛtra’s nature was that of covering (vṛ-), enveloping, enclosing within him, obstructing every “evolution,” a word that in Sanskrit corresponds with pravṛtti, the word that indicates life being lived. This monstrum par excellence, since he held everything within himself, also held supreme knowledge—the Vedas—and soma, the intoxicating drink. For Indra, killing him meant not only making life possible, but also conquering what could make life inextinguishable: knowledge. And it also meant that the waters flowed, brimming over into the world, where they produce the surplus that is life itself. Yet, even though Indra’s gesture implied salvation, it was also a guilty act, one of immense guilt, commensurate with the enormity of his victim. The first sign of guilt is the impurity that has poured into the world since then, through Vṛtra’s wound. This liquid is precious but also putrid. And it is enough to contaminate everything, except for those waters that rose up in disgust to escape evil contact, becoming kuśa grass. The waters, though immediately contaminated, at the same time escape impurity—at least in part. So they will be used to sprinkle, and then consecrate, every element. And here a subtle theological problem appears: how can those who have not been consecrated consecrate? This too is a guilt for which the officiant “makes amends”: already a first sign that guilt extends up to the peak of purity.

The presence of filters enables us to understand that the world is an impure mass. If this were not so, it would not be alive, but would still be closed up in Vṛtra’s vast belly. Now, when even the waters are suspect, since they are in part contaminated, what will allow the return to purity? The world has to be filtered, in the same way that the prodigious soma has to be filtered, which otherwise would not be tolerable. And here is a crucial step: the only element that can provide help, in this scenario of a cosmic swamp, is the stirring breeze. The wind that “blows purifying (pavate)” corresponds with the two blades of grass that filter, pavitra: but why are there two blades of grass but only one wind? Here follows another decisive step for Vedic theology: there are two filters because there are two basic breaths (inhaled and exhaled), which, by entering the body and leaving it, make it live. So the wind is those breaths and those breaths are the two filters of kuśa grass. This dazzling equation introduces the supreme function of breath (from which the whole of yoga and countless reflections on breathing follow) and explains why the world, this formless and fetid mass of elements where the liquid held in Vṛtra’s wounded body continues to flow even today, needs a breath of wind to filter it, to give life to it, to make it usable in a ceremonial act.

*   *   *

In the beginning, the gods lost the soma; men did not have it. But they both found themselves performing the same gestures when they recovered it (or bought it): practicing tapas, fasting—with ever greater rigor. In the meantime, men as well as the gods “heard its sound,” the sound of soma. What was this sound for the gods? We are not told. But we know what it was for people. The sound of the lost soma said: “On such and such a day the buying will take place.” For the gods, an undefined sound; for men, the announcement of an exchange, a sale. This is the passage from divine to human: abrupt, curt. But we are made to understand that, without exchange, man does not exist. Or, at least, he can never obtain soma. As for immortality, it would be naïve to think that for men it may mean an endless duration. So it is made clear: “This assuredly is immortality for man: when he attains a full life.” The most important thing for man is to give form to life, making it whole, perfect, in the same way that the fire altar must be whole, perfect. There is no answer to the question that worried Prajāpati’s creatures: does the perfect life include Death in it? On this there is no answer, either positive or negative.

*   *   *

The “comedy of innocence” is just the same for the bear about to be killed by hunters as it is for Soma. When the stones are on the point of striking the stalks of the divine plant to bring out the juice, the intention to kill must be directed toward any enemy or being that is hated. Then the sacrificer can say: “Here I strike x, not you.” The guilt therefore resides not in the act—the killing of Soma—but in the mental picture accompanying it. And if the sacrificer has no enemies? If he hates no one? Then he directs this thought, with hatred, to a blade of straw: “If he hates no one, he can even think of a straw, and thus no wrong is incurred.” Corollaries: the act is a necessity, an inevitable step. And it is in itself a guilty act. But anyone who doesn’t want to increase his own guilt, which belongs already to the fact of existing, has to separate their mind from the act, to direct it toward an object that mitigates the guilt. The straw indicates that we are approaching the nonexistent and the invisible. Does anything exist beyond the straw? The detachment that Kṛṣṇa will teach Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gītā, the nonadherence to the act. This is one step higher than simply diverting the act onto another object.

*   *   *

“And he [Soma], insofar as he is generated, generates him [the sacrificer]”: a phrase that rings out three times. It touches on a delicate and crucial point: mutual procreation. A general rule among the gods, it now finds a ritual counterpart. Nothing exists in itself, all is the result of work. Likewise for soma: the plant from the heavens does not exist until it is pressed, filtered, and sprinkled by the sacrificer and by the priests. But, at the point when soma comes into being, it produces the sacrificer. The existence of the soma brings about a transformation in the person who with his actions has brought it into being.

And at the end of the ceremony, in the same way that King Soma is a bundle of crushed stalks, reduced to a “body unfit for offering,” so too the sacrificer, tired out, a shadow of his former self, makes his way toward the water that flows just below the sacrificial ground. There the cleansing bath, avabhṛtha, awaits him. The soma and the sacrificer: both yearn for new sap. They want to immerse themselves in the water, to forget.

“Thereupon both [the sacrificer and his wife], having gone down, bathe, and wash each other’s back. Having wrapped themselves in fresh clothing, they leave: like a snake that sloughs its skin, so he frees himself from all evil. In him there is no more guilt than in a toothless babe.”

Anyone entering the rite is burdened with gestures, acts, and karman, which literally means “ritual action.” There is no doubt: he sees the light, immortality, he touches the gods. But at the end he nevertheless wants to forget, exhausted. He wants to return to dull, insignificant, straightforward normality. And the sacrificer and his wife retrace the steps they took to arrive at the sacrificial site. They bathe in flowing water. The objects used in the sacrifice are thrown into the water, as if no one wanted to remember they ever existed. Everything must now be new. The innocence of the newborn child is never something given. On the contrary, it is hard fought for. And is short-lived. For the action immediately starts all over again. And the action, every action, and above all that sacred action that makes it possible to attain the light through soma, is a form of guilt. Not because it hurts or injures someone or something, even if it inevitably does hurt and injure, but simply because it is action. On the other hand, without that action any life is formless and empty. But from time to time we need to return to that formlessness, that meaninglessness, because we do not bear too much meaning, too much light, or too much guilt. The sacrificer no longer wears his own clothes. They too are part of an episode now swallowed up. But how will he dress, now? He covers himself with the cloth in which the soma stalks had been wrapped, in which they had appeared in the distant past, a few hours earlier, when the soma had still to be pressed. Tied around his wife is the cloth that had wrapped the cloth in which the soma lay. Then they leave, silently, passively, cleansed, empty. All that remains is a barely discernible fragrance—perhaps discernible only to them—coming from the two cloths in which the soma had for some time been kept.

*   *   *

“When Gāyatrī flew toward Soma, a footless archer, aiming at her, shot off a feather, either of Gāyatrī or of King Soma; and the feather, dropping down, became a parṇa tree.” Elsewhere we are told that this mysterious footless archer is called Kṛśānu, but we learn little more. His appearance and attitude suggest a being on the margin of the unmanifest—or of “fullness,” pūṛna, which is another name for it. Like another archer—Rudra—Kṛśānu tries to stop a deed that goes against the order of the world, and thereby creates life as we know it. In the case of Rudra, it was Prajāpati’s incest with Uṣas. In his case, it is the abduction of the soma, which will enable men to become drunk on it. Kṛśānu’s nature is perhaps also implied in his being “footless,” apād, a characteristic that links him with another enigmatic figure: Aja Ekapād, the one-footed goat. If we go back to the “unborn,” aja, to the “self-existing,” svayambhū, the last two figures that let themselves be recognized—though only in flashes and glimmers, without ever being described—are a Goat (Aja Ekapād) and a Serpent (Ahi Budhnya). We can distinguish nothing beyond them. The Goat has to stand up because it is the “supporter of the sky,” but if we look closer we see it is resting on only one hoof (ékapād). At times it appears as a column of fire speckled with black, the black of the darkness against which it stands out. And beneath it? The Serpent of the Deep, Ahi Budhnya. No text dares to say any more about it. Only its name is mentioned—five times, in the Vedic hymns, along with that of the Goat, as if these two figures hint at something beyond which we cannot go: the Unborn, the Deep. The inevitable and almost imperceptible channel for all that exists.

The world owes its existence to the infinitesimal delay of an arrow. Or of two arrows: that of Rudra, which pierced Prajāpati’s groin, but did not prevent him from spilling his seed, and that of Kṛśānu, which grazed the wing of the hawk carrying the soma and made one of its feathers drop to the ground, but did not stop the soma from reaching mankind. That particle of time was all time, with its uncontainable power. It was the way out of plenitude closed up within itself, the passage to plenitude brimming over into something else, into the world itself. But that superabundance had happened thanks only to a wound. The rites Vedic people sought to establish were primarily an attempt to treat and heal that wound, thereby renewing it. And burning one part of the superabundance that enabled them to live.

*   *   *

Soma not only induced intoxication, but encouraged truth. “For the man who knows, this is easy to recognize: true and false words clash. Of these two, the true, the just, is what Soma protects. And he fights untruth”: This is hymn 7.104 of the Ṛgveda. This double gift—rapture and the true word—is what distinguishes Vedic knowledge. If Soma did not lead to rapture, it could not fight for the true word either. And much the same happens to anyone who receives Soma into the circulation of their mind. Dionysus was swept into rapture and used sarcasm against anyone who opposed him. He never claimed to protect the true word. It was as if the word passed among his retinue of Maenads and Satyrs, but without being much noticed. Dionysus was intensity in its purest state, that overcame and destroyed every obstacle, without dwelling on the word, whether true or false. Possessed by the god, the bacchant declared: “Make way, make way / let lips not be contaminated with words.”

*   *   *

“Now we have drunk soma; we have become immortal; we have attained the light, we have found the gods.” Sudden, lightning words, the opposite of the sequence of riddles that makes up so much of the Ṛgveda. Men need soma so that they can find the gods; but the gods, in turn (and primarily their king, Indra) need soma in order to be gods. They chose soma one day as their intoxicating drink because “the vigor of the gods” is due to soma.

If soma is desired just as much by the gods as by men, it will also become their factor in common. Only in rapture can gods and men communicate. Only in soma do they meet: “Come toward our pressings, drink soma, you soma drinker.” This is how people address Indra, in the first hymn dedicated to the god in the Ṛgveda. Only insofar as people are able to offer rapture to the gods can they hope to attract them to the earth. What people offer the god is what the god himself has conquered for them—and for the other gods—committing the gravest of crimes, the killing of a brahmin, when he cut off the three heads of Viśvarūpa. There is a secret understanding between Indra and men, for Indra is the god who most resembles men (and several times he will be mocked for this): he has killed a brahmin to obtain the soma, in the same way that people kill King Soma to obtain the intoxicating liquid from which he is made. Killing, sacrifice, and rapture are bound together, both for god and man. And this makes them accomplices, it obliges people to celebrate long, exhausting soma rites. But it is also the only way of attaining a life that—for a while—is divine.