Leo Frobenius set out on his fifth African expedition in early 1912. He had only just returned from Africa: “All I needed was three days in the Tyrol to embrace my young daughter, my wife and my brother, and then straight back to Africa, but this time to the eastern part.
“Suez—
Port Sudan—
Khartoum—
El Obeid—
“And here we are—and once again we’re swimming in happiness.” He was searching for the passage to the lost mines of Hophrat-en-Nahas. They reached El Obeid as preparations were under way for a solemn celebration in honor of Lord Kitchener and Sir Reginald Wingate. Frobenius was not expecting this; his thoughts were quite elsewhere. But for the celebration, the “great man of For” had sent to El Obeid “ambassadors and gifts and a miscellany of other things … A miscellany! For example, a very old camel driver called Arach ben Hassul, who carries in his heart the most wondrous legend of the past. The legend of Kasch or Napata.—Now you’re all ears, my friend, aren’t you?—It’s quite crazy! Served on a plate, in little more than half an hour, knowledge going back a thousand years!—After all our discussions on these matters, you’ll immediately understand, of course, what it means to me if this old bearer of myths can say how it happened that a king of the East sent one of his messengers to the Court of Napata, and this messenger tells wondrous tales and then changes the form of the State. The king from the far East, over the sea!—it could only be some place in the Indian Ocean. Would it be better, perhaps, in future to call the Indian Ocean the Kaschitic Ocean?”
And so it happened that the camel driver Arach ben Hassul told the tale of the ruin of Kasch: “… ambassadors and representatives came from all regions to pay homage. They also included inhabitants from For. They stood out from everyone else for their splendid camels, and there was even to be a camel race. An old man, a great expert, had come to Obeid to look after these racing camels; his name was Arach ben Hassul, whose ancestors had belonged to an ancient guild in Kordofan that worked copper. Long extinct in that land, the guild’s last descendents live in Dar For … No less extraordinary than the man himself was his way of revealing his knowledge. For seven days he remained seated with the others, among the storytellers who had gathered around me. For seven days he sipped his coffee like the others. For seven days he spoke no more than a few words of salutation when he came and left. To every question on ancient matters he answered: ‘Don’t know.’ For seven days he remained listening to the stories recorded in this volume [the fourth volume of Atlantis, where the story of the ruin of Kasch was published for the first time], in deep concentration and inconspicuous, apart from the way in which he paid attention.
“But on the eighth day he stood up, ran his hand down his face from his eyes to his chin, and said: ‘I speak.’
“After which he climbed down from the angareb, sat on the ground, and asked the storytellers from Kordofan: ‘Do you know what you are recounting to the taleb? You don’t. It is difficult to know.’ Then he drew a line in the sand and said: ‘This is For.’ He drew another line and said: ‘This is Napht. For was son of Napht.’ He drew another line and said: ‘This is Habesch. Napht was son of Habesch.’ He drew a fourth line and said: ‘This is Kasch. Habesch and his brother Masr were sons of Kasch. Kasch was the mahdi of Kordofan. He came from far away, across the sea. The stories you are telling are stories from the time of Kasch, and among these stories there is another story, which however you cannot understand, since everything at that time was different from today. Today in Kordofan there are trees scattered here and there, but at that time there were many, many trees. Today in Kordofan there are barren fields, at that time they were fertile. Today in Kordofan there is little rain, at that time there was plenty. Today in Kordofan there are a few small villages. At that time there were great cities, larger than in Egypt. Today in Kordofan there is no one left who can work copper and gold and iron and brass. At that time all the copper, all the gold, all the brass in the world came from Kordofan. At that time Kordofan was ruled by great melek (kings), and all peoples brought gifts to the melek. Your stories have come down from that period, and there is a story about how those stories were told. But you could not understand it.’”
Years later, Frobenius reflected on what Arach ben Hassul had said: “The storyteller began by saying that For (the first lord of Dar For) was son of Napht, and Napht was son of Habesch (Abyssinia), but Habesch and his brother Masr (Egypt) were said to be sons of Kasch. It is not hard to realize that Napht or Napata was the first lord of what is today Nubia (which reached its height at one time with Meroe). But it is very curious that Kasch (which inevitably brings to mind the Kushites of the Egyptians, and of the Torah) is specifically described as lord of Kordofan, hence of a region that today is a desolate land that has become the home of nomadic marauders of more or less knightly tradition.” El Obeid, the largest city of Kordofan, was where Frobenius had heard the story of the ruin of Kasch. There the men sit for hours in coffee shops and talk about prices and harvests. Nothing else seems to exist for them, nothing seems to have happened before those monotonous conversations of theirs. “I have never been to a region of Africa where the landscape is so uniform and speaks so little of the past as in this central region of the lands of the Nile. And I have never seen a population that has such a scarce insight into things, that is so unmoved, so indifferent to questions about where we come from and where we are going.” But that desolation, which separated ancient times with a thick veil, was one day visited by the breath of stories: that breath came from “eastern Kasch,” from Arabia felix, and perhaps even farther away: from the western coasts of India. One day it had brought the doctrine about the ritual killing of the king, one day it brought the story of the ruin of Kasch and the aroma of the Thousand and One Nights.
Years later, Frobenius reflected on the “paideumatic” phase to which the history of the ruin of Kasch belongs: “The legend of the ruin of Kasch has to be late, very late. It is the memory of a state of things long vanished: a memory of that time when men, with total abnegation that went as far as sacrificing themselves, ‘enacted’ the destiny of the stars. It belongs, however, not to the age when that attitude was flourishing but to the time when it was already on the wane—when this feeling in men had become dim and everyone was beginning to yield to the need to form concepts, at the expense of their vitality. All in all, this is already a depiction. The idea of what is historical has taken life here. This creation portrays, to some extent, the process with which crucial parts of the field of civilization have dissociated themselves from everything else and have entered into profanity. It is a most singular creation, and I am unable to quote anything else like it in any part of world literature.”
This is the story about the passage from one world to another, from one order to another—and about the ruin of both. It is the story of the precariousness of order: of the old order and the new. The story of their perpetual ruin.
Scheherazade, Far-li-mas: the stories postpone death, but they don’t suspend it. What they suspend is the death sentence.
Joseph de Maistre is one of the priests of Naphta.
When men played the role of the stars, they were strangled with a black noose.
The law can be observed by a single subject. Sacrifice requires a dual subject. In the law we therefore recognize the exotericism of sacrifice. In its esoteric ground, the sacrifice can yield only to the story, which defeats it in the ordeal. The story is the esoteric of the esoteric, the secret of the secret: it teaches how to live outside the cycle, in the hashish-like suspension of the word. It is the way of life revealed after the defeat of the sacrifice—and yet it maintains the gesture of the sacrifice, diluted in every gesture. But that is not enough to save Kasch, indeed it hastens its ruin. For many generations the priests had strangled the king after studying the stars, for a few years the inhabitants of Naphta survived on the memory of Far-li-mas’s words, before Naphta was destroyed. “Nothing is left of Naphta, except Far-li-mas’s stories, which he had brought with him from the land beyond the eastern sea.”
From a distance, Far-li-mas and Sali seem like the heroes of a new order based on the revolt against sacrifice. From close up, Far-li-mas and Sali are elements of the sacrifice that defeat other elements of the sacrifice. They shift the weight and emphasis. They are unraveling the knot of communion and expulsion, of hierogamy and assassination, in an entirely new way. For the story to succeed in supplanting the blood sacrifice it has to contain something in it that is no less powerful than soma, the mysterious substance of Vedic sacrifice. And soma is the word of Far-li-mas. Hierogamy is the coupling of Sali and Far-li-mas “wrapping their arms and legs around each other in the midst of so many sleeping figures.” Sacrificial expulsion is the death of the priests, struck down by Far-li-mas’s ordeal by word. To escape from the constraint of the blood sacrifice, Far-li-mas and Sali vary the ancient sacrificial story of Mo-ye and Kan-tsiang:
“Mo-ye and Kan-tsiang, male and female, are a couple of swords: they are also husband and wife, a couple of metalworkers.
“Kan-tsiang, the husband, having received orders to forge two swords, set to work, but failed to fuse the metal after three months of trying. When his wife, Mo-ye, asked the reason for his failure, he at first avoided answering. She insisted, reminding him of the principle by which the transformation of holy material (which is the metal) demanded (the sacrifice of) a person. Kan-tsiang then told how his master had succeeded in carrying out the fusion only by throwing himself and his wife into the furnace. Mo-ye declared herself ready to give her body, if her husband would have his own body fused.
“Mo-ye was a good wife. She, no less than her husband, deserved to give her name to one of the swords. Her devotion was total. But it did not go as far as having her body immediately consumed. Like Yu the Great, T’ang, and the Duke of Cheou, the husband and wife cut their hair and trimmed their nails. Together, they threw the nail trimmings and hair into the furnace. They gave part to give the whole.
“As the couple were performing their act of devotion, Yin and Yang mixed their breaths to help along the fusion: the bellows were worked by three hundred VIRGIN girls AND boys.
“Another author repeats this number of three hundred; according to him, VIRGIN girls ALONE were called to procure the breath.
“Mo-ye, according to one version, performs the act of devotion ALONE. She throws herself into the furnace. That was a story of holy union, a marriage with the god of the furnace.” The Chinese irony of the nails and hair in the furnace doesn’t hide the original form of the sacrifice: hierogamy and suicide. Sali and Far-li-mas, skilled smelters, separate the elements of the sacrifice. They couple among the sleepers, protected by the veil of the word. And they let the priests be killed, struck down by the word of the ordeal, as by the sword that the sacrifice helps to fuse. The lifeless corpses of the priests substitute those of the hierogamic couple in the furnace, as though they were the nails and hair of Mo-ye and Kan-tsiang.
Sali and Far-li-mas defeat the priests because they remain awake, he narrating, she listening. All is shifted into the simple act of consciousness. In the old order of sacrifice, the post to which the victim was tied existed in the mind and in the world. And there was no possibility of distinction. Everything now goes back to being invisible: the sacrificial offering is the story. What remains visible is the conflict with the previous order, which finds its last victims in the priests. The sacrifice is reabsorbed into perfect wakefulness.
At Naphta there is an ordeal between the order of the blood sacrifice, dependent on stars in the sky, and the order of a life without attachments, which speaks in the stories of Far-li-mas and will be camouflaged in history. In the ordeal, Far-li-mas wins—and history begins. But it is a short-lived victory, a victory for a single dual subject: Far-li-mas and Sali. In truth, both orders are condemned to ruin.
Far-li-mas does not oppose the sacrifice: when Akaf announces that he has chosen him as a “companion in death,” Far-li-mas is not frightened. The frightened one is Sali—the victorious Antigone and African Eurydice. And Far-li-mas recognizes in her a “will” that seeks a new “way.” Far-li-mas’s surging “gift of storytelling,” overwhelming only to the point of intoxication, substitutes the “writing in the sky” that dictates the rise of nature and the recurrence of assassinations. As Sali has told the priest, “life on earth”—fluctuating, changeable, with no preestablished order, like the stories of Far-li-mas—has been proved to be a work “greater” than the “writing in the sky.” Sali’s “way” is in an indelible phrase: “From that day no one else was killed at Naphta.”
“If one night we see nothing, we have to offer a sacrifice,” say the priests of Naphta. The priests look at the sky in order to read in it the sign of the sacrifice. And they perform a sacrifice when they cannot read the sky. Sacrifice is the end, sacrifice is the means. Sacrifice is what is read and what makes it possible to read. This is the vibrant circle of the old order.
The subject that escapes death in the sacrifice is a dual subject, just as the subject that had constituted the sacrifice was dual. Akaf is saved only through Far-li-mas, his “companion in death,” the Upaniṣadic bird that contemplates, and here tells stories. And Far-li-mas is saved only through Sali, who finds the “way.” Hierogamy is the seal of the dual subject.
The state of the world cannot be seen during the day, but at night, observing the positions of the stars. And at night Far-li-mas tells his stories: the priests—whose task it is to keep awake and dedicate their vigil to the contemplation of the sky—fall asleep, overwhelmed by the words spoken by Far-li-mas, while his gaze joins that of Sali in perfect wakefulness. The breath of history can be felt in this double course, from sleep to wakefulness and wakefulness to sleep.
The end of the priests killed in the ordeal is just as impressive as the crudeness and swiftness of the ruin of Naphta after Far-li-mas. Envious neighbors overpower and destroy Naphta, which has meanwhile become a prosperous trading center. There is nothing more to say. The old order had ended instead among visions that swelled men’s hearts like the Nile.
Once the priests become victims, at the center of the sacrificial circle formed by thousands and thousands of people, the king’s veil is lifted. Fruit of this last sacrifice are the plants that Akaf and Sali sow after the death of the priests, and which immediately sprout. The veil that is lifted from the king is now the sign of entry into the order of overt, unprotected esotericism, abandoned to the raging flux of events.
The ruin of Kasch takes place after the death of King Akaf. And Akaf, while not sacrificing himself, had maintained the practice of sacrifice until the end. But Far-li-mas cannot perform the sacrifice: he is neither priest nor king: he is just the other part of the last king. The kings have become extinct with Akaf, the priests have had to die in the ordeal. The king who is not sacrificed is the last king. He cannot pass his life on to a successor. It is the reverse of the modern situation: Louis XVI, the first king to be sacrificed (Charles I doesn’t qualify as an example) marks the end of royal sovereignty.
Far-li-mas marks the beginning of another reign: the reign of the word, after that of bloodshed. It is a reign that does not kill by way of ritual, but stirs death through a rapid, indomitable disorder that supervenes. The words of Far-li-mas replace the sacrifice: like the sacrifice, they have the power to command obedience: but they don’t have the power to establish time cycles. Time is now just the swing of the pendulum between one empty flow, devoid of attachments, and the suspension caused by the drug of the word. Far-li-mas’s words have a power of their own, but they cannot reflect the position of the stars.
Far-li-mas manages to postpone death: it will no longer be blood sacrifice, but it will be the dark and all-consuming ruin of Kasch. Yet one thing escapes that ruin: his words. Under the reign of the priests, nothing would have escaped. The divine hand would have destroyed the realm in silence. But one voice still tells the story of the ruin of Kasch.
The story of the kingdom of Kasch teaches how sacrifice is the cause of ruin and also how the absence of sacrifice is the cause of ruin. This pair of simultaneous and contradictory truths points to a single and darker truth, which rests in the stillness: society is the ruin. And from this obscurity we are pointed to something else, in the background: society is the ruin because it reverberates the sound of the world, its incessant devouring whirr.
In storytelling there is something profound that resists the sentence of death, that goes beyond its coercive aspect, that escapes the downward thrust of the knife. Storytelling is a way of moving ahead and looking back, a surging movement in the voice, a perpetual breaking down of borders, a way of circumventing sharp spears.
The ruin of Kasch is the origin of literature. Soma is the origin of sweetness.
The Ruin of Kasch is one of the stories of Far-li-mas.
Far-li-mas’s stories have the effect of soma, they act like the honey of the sacrifice, its fruit. In spreading the honey of the sacrifice, Far-li-mas defeats the blood sacrifice. But that honey ends with him: once the cycle of the stars has been abandoned, there is no more certainty about the soma. It is now an erratic gift. After the death of Far-li-mas, Naphta will go to ruin. And his stories will be all that is left to nourish the arid, avid body of history. Nothing is said about a successor to Far-li-mas. That would take us into literature.
“The king of Chou was seated with the prince of Fan. At a certain point the king of Chou’s courtiers announced that the princely state of Fan had been three-times lost. The prince of Fan told the king of Chou: ‘The ruin of my princely state is not enough to destroy its existence.’ If the ruin of Fan was not enough to destroy its existence, nor would the existence of Chou have been enough to preserve that realm. Looking at things in this way, the principality of Fan could not be said to be affected by its ruin any more than the kingdom of Chou could call itself safe.”