IX

THE BRĀHMAṆAS

He who knew the taut thread on which all creatures are woven, he who knew the thread of the thread, would know the great Exegesis.

—Atharvaveda 10.8.37 (trans. L. Renou, 1938)

He who knows the taut thread on which these creatures are woven, he who knows the thread of the thread, knows the great essence of brahman.

—Atharvaveda 10.8.37 (trans. L. Renou, 1956)

 

 

The Brāhmaṇas are the part of the Veda most neglected by scholars and most ignored by readers. In the second volume of Dandekar’s Vedic Bibliography, the list of writings on the Brāhmaṇas fills eight pages, while thirty are taken up by the Upaniṣads and twenty-eight by the Ṛgveda. We can guess that not so many scholars, and even fewer readers, have taken any interest in them. And we might wonder why.

A first reason is to do with form, literary genre. The Ṛgveda, after all, can also be read as the most magnificent—and also most persuasive—example of Symbolist poetry, while the Upaniṣads, as Schopenhauer quickly recognized, can be read as outstanding metaphysical texts. But the Brāhmaṇas were neither poetry nor philosophy (only Deussen dared to put them at the beginning of his universal history of philosophy, but his example has not been followed). The Brāhmaṇas are continually laden with gesture: “He [the officiant] does x and y.” This is the phrase that most often appears, each time prompting the thought: why does “he” do x and not z? The underlying assumption is that supreme importance is to be given to the liturgical gesture. And that ritual is given preeminence over every other form of thought, as if ritual were the immediate way by which thought itself becomes manifest. This, though, was exactly what the West wanted to shake off—starting with the Greeks and then through the whole of Christian tradition—like superstitious ballast. Liturgical reforms in the Catholic Church, over the centuries, mark a progressive, ruthless reduction in the range of ritual actions, and words accompanying these actions, up to the poor state of things in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. As for the Reformation, more than arguing particular points of theology, it urged a general rejection of the fripperies of worship. And yet, the heart of Christian doctrine is sacramental, linked to gestures that cannot be replaced by words. Hymns of thanksgiving, however lavish, can never substitute the gesture of the priest who breaks the bread. The sacramental act is the greatest obstacle for anyone wishing to adopt the regime of substitution. For it is an irreplaceable gesture, and a gesture that has immediate effect on the invisible. But if the invisible is to be discarded, then its intermediary must also be eliminated.

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Witzel once observed, in passing, that the Brāhmaṇas are “one of the oldest examples of Indo-European prose.” An invaluable comment, which very few seem to have given any thought to. In fact, if it is true that the Brāhmaṇas “are still regarded as incomprehensible and tedious by the very scholars who study them,” then why take any interest in their form? And yet prose—this varied, flexible, prehensile form, capable of stretching to every level, from manuals on horse riding or hydraulics up to Lautréamont, this form that has become normality itself, so normal as to become transparent, to the point of being barely noticed—made its appearance on Indian soil through this unattractive and often incomprehensible literary genre. The Brāhmaṇas are not thought (or at least: they are not what people today are accustomed to consider as thought); and they are not stories (or at least: they are a series of fragmented and continually interrupted stories). Rather, they give instructions above all about ceremonies whose inner meaning, already obscure, often becomes even more obscure due to the explanations the Brāhmaṇas seek to provide. History has taken enormous trouble to chemically separate these elements, associating them with certain injunctions: thought cannot tell a story, a story cannot be a way of thinking, ritual is an obsolete activity that we can do without. To understand just how deeply these convictions are embedded in the mind, we need only listen to ordinary language. If something is described as a “myth,” it is usually regarded as a baseless story; if something is described as a “ritual” act, it generally means it is a hollow and by now ineffective practice. This is diametrically opposed to the Brāhmaṇas, where “myth” is the very fabric of stories that have meaning, an everlasting meaning, and “ritual” is action in its most effective form. If there is such a misunderstanding—and it couldn’t be greater—over the two words that are the foundation of story and gesture, it is no wonder if the people of modern times have developed such an aversion to this literary genre—more antiquated, jumbled, abstruse than any other—that is the Brāhmaṇas. Their first emergence is usually dated, at the latest, to the eighth century B.C.E. The dating is contentious, as it always is in India. But certainly earlier than those Greek sages of whom we know. Thales, the first of the pre-Socratics in the Diels-Kranz edition, lived between the seventh and sixth centuries. Moreover, a text like the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa is so subtly arranged in its form as to suggest that it was elaborated over a long period. The Indian texts therefore clearly predate the earliest Greek speculation. But the subject matter is very similar—phýsis, the manifestation of that which is. It is a question of giving names to phýsis: in Greece it can take the form of poetry (Parmenides, Empedocles) or statements (Anaximander, Heraclitus). In India, it remains bound up with ritual, with gesture, even in the two longest and oldest Upaniṣads, the Chāndogya and the Bṛhadāraṇyaka. And, above all, the very form of the Upaniṣads—texts that were to be found at the end of a Brāhmaṇa—presupposes all the scrupulous, taxing, dauntless murmur of reasoning that precedes them.

The Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa belongs to the White Yajur Veda, a branch of the Veda devoted to the yajus, to the “formulas” recited by the adhvaryu during sacrifices. And the composition is painstaking, meticulous, always in danger of failing to keep a hold on the enormity of the material, all relating to the nature of the adhvaryu, this priest who works unceasingly and using every means—gestures, manual operations, words. While the other officiants spend their time chanting or watching in silence, the adhvaryu acts and makes the ceremony go on. He is its whirring engine.

When Renou had the chance, at Pune, to witness a Vedic sacrifice of the simplest kind, that of the Full Moon and the New Moon, he was struck by the activity of the adhvaryu: “One was able to gauge the overwhelming role of the manual officiant, the adhvaryu, on whom almost everything depends, gestures and words, despite the assistance he receives from two acolytes.” While the hotṛ, the chanter, “appeared at the important moments, dominating everything with his tall stature and his vibrant voice,” the adhvaryu provided the background to that “ample drapery of verses” with his “short, disjointed formulas,” similar to the way of arguing in the Brāhmaṇas—always starting, being interrupted, being forced to change direction, weaving the fabric of the work by resuming it at different points.

The school of the White Yajur Veda is different from that of the Black Yajur Veda, above all because there is a clear-cut separation between the mantras—or verse “formulas,” often taken from the Ṛgveda—and the commentaries on the ritual, which are in prose. We do not know and cannot guess what reasons lay behind this variance. But we can observe one result: the birth of prose, in the sense of a lengthy exposition, with no metric form, on a single subject: in this case the whole of the sacrificial rites. Until then, nothing of the kind had been seen in that form: of obstinate, meticulous, obsessive, relentless inquiry. Even if the Brāhmaṇas would one day become misused, spurned and reviled as a literary style, something of these origins would continue to energize prose, especially where that humble and practical form has revealed its intent to pervade every corner of everything, as in Proust. À la recherche du temps perdu, in fact, can be read as an immense Brāhmaṇa, devoted to expounding and illuminating the fabric of time within that long ritual (a sattra) that was the life of its author.

The “flavor,” rasa, of the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, an unmistakable flavor that cannot be reduced to that of a metaphysical or a liturgical commentary, lies first of all in the uninterrupted sensation of thinking the gesture at the very moment when the gesture is performed, without ever abandoning or forgetting it, as if the spark of thought might be released only at that moment in which an individual being moves his body in obedience to a significant course. It would be hard to find other cases where the life of body and mind have coexisted in such intimacy, refusing to detach themselves for even a single instant.

*   *   *

The Brāhmaṇas do not offer one cosmogony, like the Bible or Hesiod or many tribal epic poems, but clusters of cosmogonies, juxtaposed, superimposed, and contrasted. This produces a feeling of bewilderment—and in the end of indifference. If the versions are so many and conflicting, might they not be regarded as lucubrations of the ritualists? The multiplicity of alternatives tends to lessen their meaning. Even Malamoud, who is used to treating texts with supreme care and discretion, in the end shows signs of impatience when referring to these “cosmogonies replicated, repeated, piling up, from one text to another, or within one and the same hymn, pushing back, overwhelming, penetrating, breaking up, like crashing waves”—a vivid and accurate description of these stories of “false beginnings or relative beginnings” that seem to give no hope of a fundamental solidity when describing origins, which are always veiled. And Malamoud quotes here a verse from the Ṛgveda: “You will not know he who created these worlds: something shields you.”

Yet cosmogonies follow and overlap one another. But there is always the suspicion that they are “secondary creations.” The gods are not there at the beginning, but almost at the end. Before them appeared the “mind-born children,” mānasāḥ putrāḥ, of Prajāpati—successful attempts after many failures. And before them was Prajāpati himself, the Progenitor, though he—once again—was not a beginning. For Prajāpati to be created, the Saptarṣis had to meet and join forces, because they in turn felt unable to exist alone. A tangle of dark and tortuous stories, behind which always looms the outline of something else, perhaps only the “indistinct wave” to which the Ṛgveda refers.

*   *   *

On reaching the end of the tenth kāṇḍa of the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa, after five kāṇḍas devoted to describing how the fire altar is to be built, covering an equivalent of 678 pages in Eggeling’s translation, and after having negotiated a frenzy of additions and multiplications concerning the number of bricks to be used for building it and the way in which they are to be arranged, as well as various errors of calculation that have to be avoided during these operations, we come across three passages that are surprising for different reasons. After a final, breathtaking excursus on arka, a word in which a secret teaching is each time encapsulated, we immediately pass to a page that opens like a sudden clearing within the forest of numbers. It begins with these words: “Let him meditate on true brahman,” which is linked, a little later, to a passage beginning: “Let him meditate on ātman.” And it is followed by a few lines that already have the self-absorbed, final tone of the first Upaniṣads and end with the words: “Thus spoke Śāṇḍilya and so it is.” Śāṇḍilya, according to tradition, is the author of kāṇḍas 6–10 of the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa and these words of his are called the Śāṇḍilyavidyā, “the doctrine of Śāṇḍilya,” as if the essence of his thought is revealed there. And it is here, in fact, that we find the precise meeting point, if ever this were needed, between the Brāhmaṇas and the subsequent and consequent Upaniṣads. This is the point where ātman is described as being like a “grain of millet” and like “this golden Puruṣa in the heart,” after the five previous kāṇḍas had culminated in the description of how a minuscule human figure, the golden Puruṣa, was to be placed into the fire altar, whereas that same Puruṣa, that Person, is now to be found inside the heart and is revealed as being “greater than the sky, greater than space, greater than the earth, greater than all beings.” This is the Vedic catapult that suddenly takes us from the smallest to the immeasurable and reveals where to find something that anyone, every meditator, can call “my Self.” Here is a doctrine of enormous force, set out in a few clear, calm words, which will then extend throughout the Upaniṣads, for which it is the supreme teaching. “Thus spoke Śāṇḍilya and so it is.” For Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, the final clause—“and so it is”—would be missing. Nor could it have been otherwise.

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An old problem for Indologists is the relationship between the Brāhmaṇas and the Upaniṣads. Agreement? Disagreement? Conflict? For guidance, there is a simple test: if we read the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa as it is set out—and therefore followed immediately by the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad—we cannot avoid the impression of a perfect continuity of ideas. What changes is the stylistic register. After the incessant, detailed, stubborn exposition of the Brāhmaṇa, similar to the obsessive whirring voice of the adhvaryu, we now plunge into a dazzling incipit, which acts like a megavoltage discharge built up from the accumulation of nimbus clouds over the previous two thousand or so pages. It is as though, after a protracted compression and concentration of energies, we witness their release into bright fragments that instantaneously connect, without even a pause for verbs, as the Sanskrit language allows: “Dawn the head of the sacrificial horse, Sun its eye, Wind its breath, the open mouth Fire-of-all-men, the Year the Self,” (where Dawn, Sun, Wind, and Fire are Uṣas, Sūrya, Vāyu, and Agni, all gods of the Vedic pantheon).

The unstoppable effusions of the Brāhmaṇa are followed and contrasted by the highly condensed Upaniṣad. What remains is the flash of equivalences: as dawn rises the young girl Uṣas is superimposed on the head of the sacrificial horse; the eye—anticipating Goethe—is the sun; fire and wind go deep into the body of every man. For all this we have been prepared by the “hundred paths”—intersecting, tortuous, rough and arduous—of the Brāhmaṇa. Only after traveling them does the view unfold in its full splendor.

There is no doubt, though, that in the Upaniṣads we see a tendency to give little value to knowledge gained through works and a parallel praise of knowledge detached from all action. It is the earliest gnosis, a model for all others. But it would be naïve and misleading to imagine that such a distinction was not already clear to the authors of the Brāhmaṇas, almost as if they were superstitious liturgical craftsmen, ignorant of metaphysics. The opposite was true—and from time to time they would refer with dry irony to what would, over the centuries, turn out to be the central point: “When they said ‘either through knowledge or through work’: it is the fire that is knowledge; it is the fire that is holy work.” An apparently superfluous comment, which touches, however, on a key question. Two types of knowledge are thus established: the first is knowledge that need not be combined with visible acts; the other is knowledge as liturgical acts. At this stage, the shocking innovation lay in the first type of knowledge, which would then develop into the figure of the renouncer—and from there into every theoretical inquiry considered as the natural and appropriate condition of thought. In fact, what one day would become philosophizing, detached from any kind of ritual gesture, was the final outcome of a long process, a process in the course of which the crucial step was the internalization of the agnihotra, the first and most simple of sacrifices. And what could be done with the agnihotra could also be done with the most complicated rite, the agnicayana, the building of the fire altar.

But this step is important not only in distinguishing between the two regimes of knowledge. It is just as important in showing that the object of knowledge is still the same: the fire altar. When even knowledge is detached from every liturgical act, becoming pure construction and contemplation of relationships, such relationships would still remain the same ones expressed through that splayed wall of bricks built and then abandoned in a forest clearing. This is what the Vedic ritualists wanted to keep in mind; this would be the point on which they would clash with the Buddha, who wanted only to extinguish the fire.

The authors of the Brāhmaṇas paid meticulous attention to the world of desires (and of sacrifice insofar as it is based on desire), but they already saw perfectly well that the ultimate dividing line was between that world and what happens when desire no longer exists: “Regarding this there is the verse ‘Through knowledge they ascend to that state where desires have vanished’: one cannot get there with ritual fees and those practicing tapas do not get there without knowledge.” With these words the paths of knowledge and sacrifice separate for the first time. Sacrifice, which arises out of desire (“Prajāpati desired” is said countless times—and every sacrificer, like him, says the same), cannot reach the point where “desires have vanished.” Knowledge, which until then was equivalent to sacrifice, now appears as the path that allows access to a point that will never be reached by the sacrificial act. We are now in the realm of the Upaniṣads—if by this we mean that the question of knowledge is now to be posed in terms that will be followed by the Buddha (or Spinoza).

*   *   *

How do we heal an error that is always lurking in an imprecise gesture, in an inappropriate word? The gods were the first to ask the question, to Prajāpati. He replied with a concise and definitive lesson on methodology: “One heals the Ṛgveda with the Ṛgveda, the Yajurveda with the Yajurveda, the Sāmaveda with the Sāmaveda. As one would put together joint with joint, so he puts them [the parts of the sacrifice] together whoever heals by means of these words [the three ‘luminous essences,’ which are bhūr, bhuvas, svar, corresponding respectively to the three Vedas]. But, if he heals them in any other way than this, it would be like someone trying to put together something broken with something else that is broken, or as if a poison were applied as a balm for a fractured limb.” This rule is also valid for the study and interpretation of the Veda. Bergaigne obeyed it in his Religion védique, illuminating the Ṛgveda with the Ṛgveda and nothing else. The Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa is waiting in the same way for a future scholar to fathom it in its entirety, as an immense opus dedicated to the opus of sacrifice. But the Brāhmaṇas have the peculiar characteristic of causing Indologists to lose their tempers. It’s an age-old tradition. As old as the work of those intrepid scholars (such as Eggeling or Keith) who devoted several decades to translating and annotating them. We might imagine that the impressive quantity of studies amassed, beginning with Sylvain Lévi’s illuminating Doctrine du sacrifice dans les Brâhmanas (1898), would have radically changed this attitude. But it hasn’t. After more than a hundred years, it reemerges unchanged—paradoxically in an otherwise fascinating book by Frits Staal, one of the greatest experts on the Brāhmaṇas.

According to Staal, the Brāhmaṇas are an undigested hotchpotch, inside which the sober eye of the scholar has to “ferret out” (the verb is repeated within a few pages) some rare insight. The “most suspect” of all is the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa. One has the feeling that Staal would like to go further in deploring these texts that contain “a great deal of what we may call magic but is better, more truthfully and less condescendingly or insultingly described as simple superstition.” At this point he stops and asks, with haughty benevolence: “But should we not be charitable?” The answer follows immediately—and is less benevolent: “We should be, but there is a limit even to charity.” We can infer from this that the Brāhmaṇas, after almost three thousand years, still have no right to the Western scholar’s “charity.” And yet, from what texts other than the Brāhmaṇas has most of the knowledge been taken that infuses the work of some of the greatest scholars on ancient India—Caland or Renou or Minard or Mus or Oldenberg or Malamoud? Or Staal himself?

We might ask why the Brāhmaṇas above all, among the whole of the Veda, arouse such irritation. Perhaps the answer is to be found in the word that Staal, with his vehement prose, would like to expunge not only from Vedic ritual, but from ritual in general: meaning (the intention is declared in exemplary fashion in the title of an important book of his: Rules Without Meaning). The assumption—unspoken, but increasingly apparent over the years—is that, wherever meaning appears (and not just in Vedic ritual, but everywhere and always), everything tends to become obscure and arbitrary, destroying the noble transparency of science. In Staal there is a violent and preposterous contrast between his devotion and expertise in studying Vedic ritual and his contemptuous and ill-concealed intolerance toward the oldest texts in which those rites are described and explained. This intolerance grows from the hypertrophy of meaning that marks the Brāhmaṇas, and induces him to take refuge in the opposite extreme, in the realms of algebra and formalization, areas uncontaminated by that unwelcome guest: semantics. Staal’s theory, reduced to its bluntest and most provocative form, states that the rite is carried out for the rite itself, as if “art for art’s sake” could be applied several thousand years retrospectively and could indeed serve as a prelinguistic basis for human activity. A bold approach that doesn’t stand up to investigation. But Staal has used it because he has been struck by the very high degree of formalization (and a tendency toward algebrization) found in Vedic ritual. His studies of certain ritual sequences, above all those where recursive methods are applied, are in fact illuminating.

In that body of Vedic ritual, which is anomalous from every point of view, it is clear that two factors come together that elsewhere tend to remain separate: on the one hand a semantic excess, which leads to a proliferation of possible interpretations and can easily be passed off as an archaic remnant (as if it were a childish world where anything can be said about anything). On the other, a rigorous formalization that we are used to associating only with far more recent ideas (the very notion of a “formal system” is a twentieth-century acquisition).

If meaning is expunged from the Vedas, as Staal suggests, then at least two other words have to be expunged: religious and sacrifice. Staal, undeterred, does not shrink from the task. And his casualness applies not only to the ancient texts. Even when dealing with modern Indologists, in those rare cases where they are cited with approval, Staal has no qualms about carrying out corrective adjustments that guide the text toward the right theory: quoting an important passage by Renou on the “priority of the mantras and the liturgical forms which they presuppose,” Staal frankly warns us that he is replacing the word religious with the word Vedic. Now, the word Vedic can mean either a vague chronological indication or the connection of something to “knowledge,” veda. But Staal evidently wants to blot out anything religious from this “knowledge,” as if it were a disturbing alien element. More than anywhere else, this is untenable when talking about ancient India, where it is pointless searching for even the tiniest detail that is not intertwined with religion. As Staal himself has noted elsewhere: “There do not exist, for example, any Indian category and words that correspond to the Western notion of religion.” But they do not exist insofar as everything, in a Vedic context, is religious. Even so far as vocabulary is concerned, Staal seeks to intervene, presenting his own suggestions as an appropriate technical adjustment: “I prefer to use the word ritual rather than the word sacrifice, since I reserve this latter for describing the rituals that lead to the killing of an animal.” A neutral tone, as if the matter ought to cause no problems. But that adjustment is enough to cancel out countless passages in the Brāhmaṇas that speak of the rite of the soma as a killing. A killing of a plant and of King Soma, who is a god, welcome on earth. The Brāhmaṇas are tireless in reaffirming that all offerings, including the libation of milk in the fire, the agnihotra, are sacrifices. And here comes the Indologist Frits Staal, three thousand years later, who decides this isn’t so. And above all: that it mustn’t be so. His zeal takes him to the point of correcting Hubert and Mauss’s famous title: quoted by Staal, their Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice becomes Essay on the Nature and Function of Ritual. It is Western science, in its naïveté and its arrogance, that has decided this (and Staal has indeed entitled one of his books The Science of Ritual).

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Even back in the times of Keith (1925) it could be suggested with a certain candor that all is possible (and that therefore all is arbitrary) in the Vedic texts: “If the waters can practice asceticism, it is not surprising that speech can speak standing in the seasons, or that the sacrificial consecration can be pursued by the gods with the aid of the seasons, or that the ascent of the meters to the sky should be visible.” In short, in the Veda anything goes, declared Keith, at almost the same time as the première of the great musical of the same name. What offended a sane Westerner was above all “the notorious ‘identifications’ of the Brāhmaṇas which, since long, had been the laughing stock of occidental scholarship.” This was an “identification technique that establishes links, equivalents, nexuses (or correlations) between, or identity of two entities, things, beings, thoughts, states of mind, etc. Both entities are unrelated, according to our way of thinking.” Examples? “When the text says ‘the muñja grass is strength’ and ‘the udumbara tree is strength,’ or ‘Prajāpati is thought’ and ‘Prajāpati is the sacrifice,’ it will not be clear why some kind of grass (a living being, or dead material) could be the same as ‘strength’ (an abstract idea, or a force experienced); or, in the second case, why and how the god Prajāpati, ‘the lord of creation,’ could be the same as ‘thought/thinking,’ and, at the same time, the idea or act or ritual (‘sacrifice,’ yajña).” This passage is found in Witzel’s introduction to his edition of the Kaṭha Āraṇyaka (an extremely rare instance of a Vedic text that can properly be described as published in a critical edition). And his intention is clear: to illustrate in a neutral and fair-minded tone why Vedic thought continues to be so disconcerting, but without adopting the usual voice of disapproval, in the manner of Keith or Eggeling or Max Müller. Yet, even in this very recent formulation, there is much that jars. What, indeed, is “our way of thinking” (almost as if the West were a seamless mass of unalloyed good sense)? And are the strange examples of identification that Witzel offers us indeed so inconceivable? Does saying that a certain grass “is strength” really sound any more incomprehensible than Jesus’s words at the Last Supper when he says that a piece of bread is his body and some wine his blood? Is saying “Prajāpati is thought” any stranger than talking about the word made flesh? Is it possible to hold that “our way of thinking” is so barren and desolate that it doesn’t embrace, at least to some extent, thinking in images?

We still, though, have to understand why the Vedic texts—and above all the Brāhmaṇas—continue to evoke such a feeling of vertigo and obscurity. Not because they involve thinking in images (without which all thought would be inert). But because they use it all the time, with extreme devotion, unperturbed about any implication, indeed putting every implication into action (through gesture). This is the intractable Vedic offense, that triggers so many reactions of rejection and fear. The Western attitude toward imagery wavers between minimization (x is only a metaphor, and therefore not binding) and the temptation to interpret metaphors literally (a practice leading to various basic psychic pathologies, above all paranoia and schizophrenia).

But in Vedic thought, identifications are not metaphors. As Witzel has rightly said, “the majority of sentences establishing identifications are simple nominal clauses of the type ‘x [is] z’ or ‘x vai z’; they are frequently summed up by a statement ‘x eva z’” (where eva and vai are words roughly corresponding to “indeed,” “in fact”). The cautious and uncompromising way of metaphors is therefore ruled out from the very beginning. The identification (or equivalence) superimposes two entities without any exercise of caution. And here we sense the slight sneer of Western superiority, recalling Musil’s description of the scientists in Diotima’s salon. Once the metaphor is gone, an irresolvable confusion would be created between the two entities whose equivalence is asserted. But it is obvious from a thousand indications that the Vedic ritualists were in no danger of confusing the multiple levels of that which is. Instead, they saw them at every moment and allowed thought to waver continually from one to the other. To cover themselves—and give an ironic nod to the effect that they were well aware of the rules and limitations of the game—they often resorted to the particle iva, “so to speak,” “in a certain way.” Far more subtle than the clumsy “like,” which elsewhere (in the West) announces entry into the realm of the metaphor. Iva is more vague—and lets the unknown and the uncertain become involved at the very moment when a nexus, a bandhu, is established.

Iva, svid, two expressions that could even be left untranslated (as often happens), indicate that we are crossing the threshold of hidden thoughts. According to Renou and Silburn, “the word iva accentuates indetermination, evokes latent values.” In the same way that svid above all accompanies questions in which enigmas are voiced. There were two ways of introducing into discussion that aspect of the anirukta, of the “unexplicit” that is destined to remain so, ever shifting but always encircling the spoken word like a halo. Since thought proceeded by way of identifications, comparisons, equivalences, iva was a reminder that everything said was to be understood “in a certain way,” without becoming fixed in its identity. Which of itself does not exist—or at least only “so to speak,” iva.

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In the troubled history of the Brāhmaṇas, after much insult and abuse, the day of reckoning at last came. It happened in July 1959, at the Indological conference held at Essen-Bredeney. An eminent Indologist, Karl Hoffmann, stood up to deliver a few words that sounded like a long-awaited Supreme Court ruling: “The monuments of Vedic prose (the saṃhitās of the Black Yajur Veda and the Brāhmaṇas) are, as the immensity of the twelve principal works that they contain is already proof by itself, the literary precipitate of a significant period in the history of the spirit and religion, stretching from the Ṛgveda, India’s most ancient literary monument, to the Upaniṣads. The contents of these monuments in prose are made up of theological discussions on the rituals of Vedic sacrifice. The arguments they present often seem devoid of meaning, which is why Max Müller could describe them as ‘the twaddle of idiots and the raving of madmen.’ This may be explained, however, through the magical vision of the world that dominates here (Stanisław Schayer). And they constitute furthermore, as a sort of ‘prescientific science’ (Hermann Oldenberg), the germ cell of the speculative thought of the Indians.”

Unwieldy, solemn, perfectly right. The French school, in truth, from Sylvain Lévi to Mauss, Renou, Lilian Silburn, Mus, Minard, and Malamoud, hadn’t felt the need to issue such a declaration of principle. They all knew that the Brāhmaṇas were an immense and largely unexplored mine of thoughts—and they were not concerned about declaring it. They concentrated instead on the task of bringing the texts to light and connecting them to one another. But we know that German science always needs legitimation. And so, on that July day, Karl Hoffmann assumed the responsibility of formally accepting, after almost three thousand years, the formless and semiclandestine corpus of the Brāhmaṇas among those works of thought that can be classed as indispensable to humanity. It was as if a group of patients had suddenly been moved from a mental hospital to an academy.

*   *   *

During the early years of the twentieth century, anthropologists were divided in two rival camps: one declared that ritual preceded myth, the other that myth preceded ritual. Childish squabbles—as became apparent a few years later. Mauss saw it as such from the very beginning. For him it was clear that “myth and ritual cannot be dissociated except in the abstract”—and he wrote this in 1903. The important thing was not to set illusory, unfounded precedents—on one side or the other—but to show “the interpenetration of ritual and myth, to reveal the living organism which they form through their union.” And thirty years later he would devote an entire course, using Strehlow’s evidence from Australia, to illustrate cases of perfect interdependence between ritual and myth, that showed “their solidarity, their intimacy.” On the one hand, ritual appeared each time as a “dramatic representation (verbal and physical) of myth,” whereas myth, if construed as a simple story and “detached from its cult necessities,” ended up revealing itself to be “without real foundation, without practical essence and without symbolic flavor.”

But it was exactly this that required an explanation. Why do particular gestures have meaning only if they are based on a story? Why do particular stories need to be told through particular gestures? Here we approach a riddle that lies hidden in the depths of the mind. It is the riddle of the simulacrum, of the eídōlon, of the image that must become visible in order to be effective. This is a characteristic not just of certain cultures, but of whatever culture, in the same way that Pythagoras’s theorem, though formulated in Greece at a particular time, and in Mesopotamia even earlier, did not belong only to the Greek or Mesopotamian cultures, since it is universally applicable. Yet a certain degree of lucidity has to be achieved in a particular place and at a particular time over certain relationships. What Mauss described as the necessary “intimacy” between myth and ritual, the interaction between liturgy and story, had perhaps never been so clear and so effectively put into action as in the time and in the doctrine of the Brāhmaṇas. It should not, therefore, be a case of anthropology bending benevolently over the Brāhmaṇas to extract some still useful relic from the jumble. But the Brāhmaṇas themselves might help anthropology to recognize something on which its whole practice is based.