The purpose of sacrifice is not to atone for guilt, as we read in the textbooks. Sacrifice is guilt, the only guilt.
Sacrifice is a guilt that elaborates itself. It transforms murder into a suicide. It transposes murder into the distant prospect of a suicide. So distant as to go back to the beginning. Where we encounter the divine suicide: the creation.
The foundation of sacrifice is this: that each of us is not one, but two. We are not a solid brick, but each of us is the two birds of the Upaniṣads, on the same branch of the cosmic tree: one eats while the other watches the one eating. The sacrificial deceit—that sacrificer and victim are two people and not one—is the dazzling, insurmountable revelation about ourselves, about our double eye.
History can be summed up as follows: for a long time men killed other beings, dedicating them to an invisible object; and then, from a certain point, they killed without dedicating this act to anyone. Did they forget? Did they regard this act of homage as pointless? Did they condemn it as repugnant? All of these possibilities had some relevance. Then the simple act of killing remained.
Creation is the body of the first victim. In the act of creation the divinity amputates a part of itself, abandoning it. From then on, all it can do is observe its amputated limb in the hands of necessity.
Quechcotona, in the Nahuatl language, means “to cut off someone’s head” and at the same time “to pick an ear of grain with the hand.” The perception of the origin of sacrifice is precisely that every picking is also a murder, that every killing is the separation of a thing from what is connected to it (and, moving step by step, this includes Everything). But life, if it wishes to be perpetuated, demands that something is picked. Sacrifice involves the first uprooting, the first detachment, the original decisio (from caedo, meaning to kill the sacrificial victim with spilling of blood) in a delicate, highly subtle, immense network that reconnects the hollow of the wound to Everything at the moment the wound is opened. It is possible to pick just an ear of grain, but the supreme increase of power is reached when the picking is also a killing. Instead of a blade of corn, to rip out the beating heart with the “obsidian butterfly” from the torso of a victim lying on his back: by tearing out that web that joins the heart to the rest of the body, around six to seven liters of blood spurt out. It is the surfeit of life, which in this blood alone promises to be everlasting.
The Vedic seers (ṛṣi), no less than the Aztec priests, had a supreme sense of precariousness. Every moment of time had to be torn away by force—with the violence, perseverance, precision of the sacrifice—before the sun stopped, before everything was once again lost in Ahi Budhnya, “the serpent that inhabits the depth of the sky,” the immense, amorphous darkness on darkness.
The Aztecs were constantly at war, but not out of any wish to conquer. For them, war served above all for obtaining prisoners, who then became sacrificial victims. Twenty thousand a year, on the calculations of some scholars. War was a by-product of sacrifice. When sacrifice was no longer an institution, it withdrew into its subordinate power: war. In August 1914 the entire liturgical apparatus of sacrifice was once again unpacked from the trunks. Bloody images were dusted down and given central place in homes and newspapers. In World War II, it would instead have sufficed to concentrate on one word: holocaust.
Experimentation is a sacrifice in which guilt has been expunged. The sacrificial pyramid, where blood has drenched the warm stones of the altar, becomes a vast slaughterhouse that extends horizontally in some nondescript corner of the city.
The slaughterhouses of Chicago, university laboratories, their corridors reeking of dismembered frogs, power plants camouflaged in the desert, are centers for one and the same cult. They distribute power thanks to a violent operation, a decision, where everything is focused on procedures, so that their control capability becomes ever more perfect. Hadn’t the Vedic seers already said that “exactness, reality is the sacrifice”? The more perfect the control, the richer the material that can be developed, the greater the power unleashed, the more uncontrollable its outcome.
In technology, the accursed share, the part of the fire, has become the immense experimental waste, dedicated to the unknown god, who is god of the unknown. And, just as in the sacrifice, it is precisely the part that is irredeemably destroyed that guarantees future life. Only research that goes on in the dark can give adequate nourishment to the process. Nothing is more laughable than disputes over the limits of experimental research. As if that which is based on breaking down the limit could map out an enclosure less vast than Everything without thereby negating itself. These are disputes stirred up by foolish and incredulous priests against the stern masters of the cult: as if a Brahmin had dared to question whether the gods demand sacrifice.
A sacrificial act is any act where the person acting contemplates himself as he acts. The victim, the offering, is the one who acts. The sacrificer is the eye that contemplates him. For this reason, any act can be a sacrifice. For this reason, ancient society can be regarded, in the way it operates, as a “perpetual sacrifice,” according to the definition of René Guénon, who suggests it as something patently obvious: “Since sacrifice is ritual action par excellence, everything else shares in its nature and is to some extent an integral part of it, so that it necessarily determines the whole overall structure of a traditional society, where everything for that same reason can be regarded as being an actual perpetual sacrifice.”
The magnificent edifice of the Vedic sacrifice, this temple of temples, where every brick is a Borobudur of hidden galleries, decorated with bas reliefs invisible from outside, is insufficient to conceal, behind all its relentless affirmations, the place of doubt, a tiny wound in the intact skin of the horse that is to be killed on the altar: the existence of a victim that substitutes the sacrificer (yajamāna) himself. The only answer to the divine sacrifice of Prajāpati would be the suicide of the sacrificer. The response, instead, is the killing of a victim. “The victorious Horse went to its immolation, meditating thoughts addressed to the divinity,” and someone reassures it: “the axe will do no lasting harm to your body.” This concern about the victim’s consent is revealing: for it presupposes that such consent might not be given. But it is not a question here of discovering an ancient deceit, which would bring satisfaction to all the agents of Enlightenment, always ready to spot the smallest wrong (and the smallest good). If there are at least two beings present before the sacrificial post—the victim and the one who strangles it with a noose—this is because the substitution has already taken place in the mind. The very act of naming, in the arbitrary decision that allows the cancellation of a thing and its substitution with a sound, contains that primordial murder that the sacrifice exposes and, at the same time, attempts to heal. The fabric continually repaired by correspondences, the meanings attributed each time to the individual syllable, to the individual meter: all is a vast attempt to re-stitch the fabric around that minuscule tear produced by the word, by the mental image that cancels a presence to evoke an absence, by the sign: by all that which substitutes something else, and on which another magnificent edifice will be built, contrary to that of the Vedic sacrifice, which in its constant expansion seems to foresee it, and at the same time tries to conceal it, until the cycle stirs it in its present form, in us, around us.
That nature is measured out by returns, by the breath of time, is evidence of it being a sacrificial object. The world is a part that divinity has detached from itself, leaving it to live according to its own rules, and no longer according to divine arbitrariness. But the invisible cord between the divinity and creation isn’t entirely severed: the divinity can always take back its world and act brutally toward it: order can be stamped out, the stars might not return. Hence the sacrifice performed by men: the human offering (that part of life that is not left to live unless reabsorbed in the sky from which it descended) rises up along this same cord, which is then the column of smoke from the sacred pipe. By yielding part of the world to the divinity, the sacrificer wants the divinity to give him the rest of the world, and no longer to intervene there with its uncontrollable whim. The sacrifice is also trying to gain the divinity’s permission to use the world. The first consequence of forgetting sacrifice is that the world will then be used without restraint, without limit, without any part being dedicated to any other. But here, too, the end is superimposed upon the beginning, like a reflection, and therefore seen in reverse. Once the sacrifice has disappeared, the whole world, without realizing it, goes back to being an immense sacrificial laboratory. In a climate of uncertainty over everything, the only proposition that no one would dare put in doubt (since it is seen as obvious) is that the world lives inasmuch as it produces. It is the same obviousness that the Ṛg Veda recognized when it stated that the world lives inasmuch as it sacrifices. Just as, in the beginning, the divinity could only sacrifice itself since nothing else existed, so now the world sacrifices itself to itself (under other names), because the divinity has vanished. The unwitting sacrificers now resemble the Sādhyas, those mysterious “gods before the gods,” who then fell “since they regarded themselves as being above the sacrifice.” But it is also possible to fall by pretending that the sacrifice has been closed away in a room of the Musée de l’Homme.
If industry is a sacrificial laboratory, the prestige value of the New means that any given object is a fragrant residue of the sacrifice. An unknown quantity of material has been burned in order to produce it. The New is that part of the victim that the gods haven’t touched at their banquet. The gods devour the precious prototype and leave men with the limitless copies. This is why industry is based on reproducibility. But the film star is a catasterism, raised into the heavens after being devoured by the gods.
Seen from outside, the actions of beings who are not enlightened, even though they obey ritual order, are entirely indistinguishable from those of enlightened beings. They eat, fight, sacrifice, make love—with just the same gestures. The only, invisible, difference is the detachment of enlightened beings from the fruit of their action. According to the Bhagavad Gītā, the action must be performed by everyone, enlightened or not: first, because the action is nevertheless carried out within us at every moment (“Never in fact can anyone remain, even for a single instant, without performing some action; since, even without willing it, each is compelled to act by reason of the qualities [guṇas] that constitute nature”). Even when we are totally still, our breathing continues: in breath there is sacrifice, in sacrifice there is the world. Second, the action must be performed because obedience to ṛta, to order (as sacrificial action), helps to turn the wheel of cosmic articulation (“And so the wheel turns”). Those who act without being conscious of the action will also turn the wheel, but in the direction that leads to the undifferentiated: “The worlds would collapse if I do not perform my action. I myself would be the cause of universal confusion and I made these creatures perish.” With lucid terror, the Hindu seer could see the threat of a return to the undifferentiated, into which every other threat flows—and at the same time he knew that the necessary action, even if conscious, cannot lead to release, unless that mysterious element of detachment is acting in it. The ṛṣi gave the highest meaning to action: he stated that without its perpetual support the world could disintegrate in an instant, but at the same time he stated that action is a thing from which one has to separate oneself: through detachment.
There is a path of action and a path of consciousness of action. The latter, which is the Esoteric, presupposes the path of action—which is the Exoteric—as its figurative casing. All gnosis is an emphasis on the path of consciousness of action: the path of thought, of knowledge. The formula that points to this path is that found repeatedly in the Upaniṣads: “He who knows thus.” A vast, indiscernible distance is then established between someone who acts thus and someone who acts in the same way but is “he who knows thus.” Today we are in a situation of forced esotericism, since the way of action has been canceled out, since there is no longer a required action for each moment: all actions can be performed at any moment, there is no longer any awareness of their articulation except insofar as they accumulate in simultaneousness or in an indefinite juxtaposition. Here the esoteric comes up against its greatest risk: the only way of knowing is esoterically, and many people think esoterically without being conscious of it: this is the supreme evil, the challenge and the parody of Inversion, the parody within which all gnosis is obliged to move, sometimes even disguising itself as unconsciousness in order to pass unobserved and thus avoid being caught. But at the same time the Esoteric is now tempted by its remotest, ever latent, experience, which finally surfaces: to take everything as support (figurative casing) for knowledge, and no longer just those actions that belonged to the order of the sacrifice, the calendar, the cycle. To take all dispersion, all fragmentation as support. This delicate, vertiginous transition recalls what had happened in the Forest Doctrine, the boldest part of the Vedic texts, where it was suggested that, since everything is a sacrifice, one need not even perform it within the community, but could go into the forest and observe it there as an act that is performed all the same, in every moment, in our physiology, in our breathing, in the same way that everything today could be described as a moment in the cycle of production and consumption.
It is said that sacrifice is the origin of exchange: but exchange is the set in which sacrifice is a subset: and exchange, in turn, is included in another category—substitution—which alone makes it possible: this stands for that: the one who gives this takes that.
Substitution does not originate in the faculty for giving names (and thus substituting them for things) but in that irreducible and all-encompassing faculty for forming mental images; invisible, occasional, impermanent entities, states of consciousness that overlap with what is perceived—or that even substitute it, canceling it. Here we are present at the original bifurcation of the mind; here the two birds of the Upaniṣads come down from the sky to perch on the same branch—the bird that eats and the one that is constantly compelled to perceive (nourish itself), receiving stimuli. The other, the bird that watches it, is superimposing its own gaze on the gaze that the other bird is directing at the world.
Every act can be seen as a sacrifice if the process of giving and taking—the metabolism inscribed in every gesture—is found within it. Sacrifice, then, is every act leading to the consciousness of such a process.
THE SENATOR FROM ST. PETERSBURG: You arrogant orphans of ritual, and ultimately of ceremony: haven’t you realized you find yourselves in the situation most deceptively close to the beginning? Mental sacrifice—the only one you could know—was the esoteric image of that slaughterhouse that was assembled on the altar of offerings. You need no longer see Prajāpati dismembered and emptied over all the regions of the world; nor the nameless man, from whom to tear the single heart; nor the animal that peers at you with eyes almost human, waiting for the knife; nor even the plant that is liquid fire. Silent, motionless, engrossed, you can proceed to that invisible act from which all else follows, that offering of self to Self, which alone still softens the turning of the wheel. And nothing then prevents you from continuing in society, like the Neva that continues to flow behind us as we speak. You well know, of course, that the waters from above do not respond to the fire of the sacrifice, you have given up that Vedic arithmetic that allowed you to follow the course of the cosmic game. And yet, if you do not carry on sacrificing, ignorant of everything and perhaps of yourselves, your thought will be that of the meek rabble that relentlessly pour out the rosary of opinions. An even more mysterious constraint will clutch you at the throat and will drive you to identify yourselves with things that, in the end, are unimportant: for example, you yourselves. Even when you’re alone, a crowd of voices will haunt you, like at the Café du Commerce. And very few of you will rise even to the insolence of the libertine, accustomed to exchanging thoughts for flimsy jabots. Obeying a despot you have never seen, you will end up realizing that living is too costly.
The most shameless metaphors are those that once fixed the poles in world order. Woman-cow, man-bull are evidence of this, as well as disdain for the civilization of the goddess. Industry does not seek to cancel out tradition, as a reactionary theory claims; on the contrary, it brings it to fulfillment, in a traffic of archetypes. To this end it hides the foundation of tradition, the sense of the continual attack on order, that rituals were meant to heal thanks to an uninterrupted exchange, where what had just been the subject of wrongful and inevitable appropriation was given in offering. The sacrificial exchange is contradictory because it denies the very principle of exchange, the unit of measure, which is not given in common to human language and the elements of nature. Myth established the impossible symbolic system that had to allow exchange. Thanks to this impossibility, exchange was saved from the guilt that taints its origin. Since what kitsch reveals is not just the cutting off of natural relationships: it is the curse that transforms the primal moment of violation—when relationships were given a name—into a perpetual nightmare. Ignorance of this guilt is the foundation of industry: what exists is therefore a chain of messages, equal by right, convergent in meaning, varied in form. But there are no people who exchange them, nor anything that proposes them. This can be an image of the Word. Industry therefore has to be thanked: knowledge can only come per speculum in aenigmate, through a glass darkly.
CHEVALIER DE B***: During my adolescent years, as I was passing through what you call the “storms of the revolution” in my country, I believe I established one thing above all: I now know that our greatest and certainly our wiliest enemy is society, the very idea of it. At one time it was happy to represent itself as a large body, a giant troubled by occasional torments. Today it has engulfed the subterranean and celestial seas, from the Yellow Springs to Eridanus, it has incorporated stars and magma, it has amalgamated all that exists within itself. The primordial giant, the Great Animal that Plato had already dreamed of, will seem like miniature Sèvres carafes in front of the enormous glass bubble into which society has put the world: everything is a seedling in its greenhouse.
The foundation of inversion: society is able to absorb within it all divine as well as natural images: all that which stood in front of society, from which society was detached, with which it negotiated at every moment of its life: the triple hub that connects the wheel of the articulated to the threefold pada, from which the unarticulated descends, from which it depends, to which it returns. Transitions: Durkheim’s formula—“the religious is the social”—is the sign that this engulfing society already exists, indeed it is clear to see, so that it can be presented as a scientific hypothesis. With Simone Weil there is the first revolt against this secular form of religion—a revulsion emerges along the same lines as that of Lucretius for the “copious blood of quadrupeds sprinkled over altars.” With Simone Weil there is the first recognition of the most insidious peculiarity of society: the “mystery” through which there exists “an apparent kinship between social and supernatural”: this is the first statement that, as a consequence, the only idolatry is now that which bows to society, the only enslavement is “enslavement to society.”
Thus on greeting the Buddha: “Seashell? milk? moon? jasmine? crystal? snowflake? linen cloth? pale cloud? oh whiteness! oh roar of laughter! a row of sunshades rise to the clouds! his adorable parasols light up the world; three tens of gods, wondrous birds, Blessed, cantors of paradise take pleasure in it. Bow down to adore him ceaselessly, the Buddha, kinsman of the Sun!” When the Buddha persuaded the five monks, his first followers, that he was the awakened one, he immediately compared himself with “a wild deer who lives in the forest and roams its slopes; confidently it walks, stands or lies down, confidently it rests: it is out of the trapper’s reach.” The first image of release given to the Buddha is that of the victim who has escaped from the sacrifice, of the prey escaped from the hunter.
The passage from the Vedic world to the Buddha is a passage from hunger to thirst: for the ṛṣis (seers) “in the beginning everything was cloaked by death, as hunger is death”; for the Buddha, in his discourse at Benares, all that has to be avoided is “thirst.” Hunger belongs to the metaphysics of sacrifice, it is the hub around which it revolves; thirst belongs to the metaphysics of the forest, which has escaped the sacrifice but discovers that this is not enough to escape desire. The Buddha discovers that desire is not necessarily linked to killing—or rather, that the killing continues even in the most inoffensive act. His discovery continues, and almost impiously reveals, what the Brahmin turned saṃnyāsin (renouncer) had already revealed. Having withdrawn into the forest, far from the sacrificial post, the saṃnyāsin had discovered it is not enough to free oneself from sacrificial action: every instant of life is an act, and behind each act there is a desire, in the same way that behind the sacrifice there is the desire for the fruit of the sacrifice. Now, with the Buddha, the karman (action) is no longer primarily a sacrificial act, but a bare action of whatever kind. The idea that all resounds in Universal Interdependence, the Vedic string of identifications—this is that, which is that, which is this—is suddenly silent. Now the names of various interwoven threads appear unimportant, fortuitous, short-lived. All that matters is their single constant characteristic—of being constricting woven threads. This is pratītyasamutpāda (dependent origination): the all-enveloping net of the sacrifice, but no longer resonant with harmonics. When touched, it emits a hollow sound, it no longer signals the sympathy between its parts, but only its own immense existence. For the ṛṣis, the interdependence of everything was won, was constructed, with the sacrifice; for the Buddha, interdependence has existed forever and is insignificant: why celebrate it, why help still to weave it, if all that’s required is to meticulously unpick it, thread by thread, with the same precision as the Vedic seers in the opposite action, in order to slip through the mesh of the net?
The relationship of science with the unknown resumes and modulates the relationship of the Vedic Brahmins with their many gods. The existence of the unknown demands a continual, huge dissipation of energy, of life. And the benefit of this sacrificial work, from which every opus derives, is the occasional discovery, a gift granted by the unknown to its priests. And, just as the Vedic gods feared that, through sacrifice, the priests would indeed become immortal, following the path of the gods themselves, who in the beginning had also become immortal through sacrificing, likewise the unknown can fear that such a profusion of offerings is not a repeated gesture of homage but the prelude to some act of overcoming. And yet science, as well as being eager and astute, is also modest and shortsighted—and this reassures the gods who now hide behind the unknown as if it were the acronym of an association. Science wants only one kind of gift: it wants facts that are verifiable, controllable, and repeatable. And, during their long history, the gods hidden in the unknown know that the most valuable gifts do not belong to that category: happiness, above all, is unverifiable, uncontrollable and unrepeatable. Prometheus’s fatal trick is once again played out: men make sure they get the fat part of the offering, that core of energy that nevertheless brings hunger and death. The gods agree to be deceived, with a slight hint of sarcasm: they will have only the smoke of the sacrifice, those uncontrollable aromas, scattered in the air, which are nevertheless pure pleasure and do not bring hunger and death.
The renouncer (saṃnyāsin) seeks release (mokṣa) from the world: the gnostic condemns the elements of the world (stoicheīa toū kósmou): the libertine uses the world open-mindedly: anonymous technology uses the world as its material. The renouncer is an orthodox: the gnostic is a heretic: the libertine an atheist: anonymous technology believes in itself. An illegitimate lineage that runs the world.
The whole history of modern philosophy is deeply troubled by sacrifice, by its terrible truth: Hegel’s dialectics is a transcription, an adulterated translation of sacrifice; Schopenhauer is the Western saṃnyāsin, the renouncer, and always therefore associated with sacrifice; Abraham is the sacrifice around which Kierkegaard’s thought revolves; and Dionysus (and the Crucified, with which he signs two “letters of insanity” on January 4, 1889, in Turin) is Nietzsche’s sacrifice. Yet sacrifice is absent from the epistemological line that comes down from Kant to the Vienna circle by way of the formalization of systems: but here knowledge is assumed to be a prosthesis, to be offered to science: it fails to admit that this prosthesis will then be offered by science to technology, so that technology can sacrifice under the name of experiment, and the sacrifice is ultimately multiplied in production.
There’s a wisdom of the officiant and there’s a wisdom of the victim. The two gradually draw apart in history. From the wisdom of the officiant comes the sovereignty of the subject who builds the edifice of knowledge for himself. From the wisdom of the victim come the three words of Aeschylus, “tō páthei máthos,” “learning through suffering,” which allude to the passion for initiatory knowledge. The scandal of Christ is that he was priest and victim at the same time, as in the beginning, joining the two paths together in him.
When Descartes speaks about the negligible, we know that this is the victim: the part cut away from order, condemned now not to exist, killed without being given. Simone Weil wrote: “… the notion of negligible marks the transition from finite to infinite.”
The roar of applause covers the cries of the victim. When the celebrity or the politician is murdered for being “too famous,” the assassin is described as mad. But his madness reveals the origin of the applause.
The thorn of the sacrifice is the choice of the victim. The Vedic network of correspondences embraces everything and connects everything with everything: countless texts repeat that the officiant is the victim, just as the bricks of the altar are intense thought. But at the end of the ceremony, the officiant returns home, while the victim remains dead on the altar. That which is killed in the victim is irreplaceable, unique: that fading singularity that slips through the mesh of correspondences, that small wrinkle around the eyes of the Tollund Man, hanged thousands of years ago and preserved intact in the blue clay of Denmark. Iphigenia, offered as a sacrifice in Aulis (a fresco at Pompey shows her being dragged to the altar, her breasts exposed and arms raised heavenward, the knife of the sacrifice already visible above her), ends up as a priestess in Tauris: in the myth, the victim who has a name becomes wrapped by the divinity in a cloud of euphemism to heal the incurable wound. Here, too, the immense lucidity of the myth is apparent: the knowledge that no theology, no connexio can ever heal the killing. With those victims who become stars in the sky, or those whom the gods carry off to heaven or save at the last moment, myth gives way to fairy tale, as in its beginning and its end: once upon a time is followed, all of a sudden, by and they all lived happily ever after. When no god carries it up into his cloud, that single body is left slaughtered on the altar, unmentioned but implicit, and discernible in the crystalline air of exemplary gestures.
The theory of sacrifice makes all repeatable and reversible acts—breathing, lovemaking, music—revolve around two irreversible acts: eating and killing. These are the two acts in which the arrow of time inflicts a wound that never heals. Around that wound, the cosmic curtain now rises, the vast fabric that connects everything with everything, that repeats everything in everything. But its secret is that small rip at its center: the open wound in the victim, life with no palpable return. The perception of the irreversibility of time, which in the ancient world is the esoteric of the esoteric, the secret of the secret, the ultimate tremendum, becomes most obvious and widespread in the new world. Once again the world without gods turns out to be the world of compulsory esotericism.