The Vedic seers regarded birth first of all as murder. The primordial world was suffocating, too dense, slimy. It was the bed of a cosmic swamp. It was an immense curled-up animal that nursed life in its bowels. Until the animal’s jaws are shored open with a prop: then Dawn bursts out from the darkness and things are put into articulated order, spaced apart and breathing—they receive the “gift” of ṛta. That prop that forces the jaws to remain wide open is the axis of the world, it is the separation between sky and earth, it is the king with his arms raised as he is anointed in the rājasūya ceremony. Around this spins every wheel, divided into spokes, whereas in the beginning the wheel was single, immobile, and solid. Thanks to the god Varuṇa “the way of ṛta is opened up, to happily reach the other shore the road of the sky has become visible.” Varuṇa is the one who “raised up the prop in the bottomless space”; he who “prepared a vast way for the sun to follow.” But Varuṇa is also the place of origins itself, “he has measured the first creation” with the power that most belonged to him: māyā, “measuring magic,” according to Lilian Silburn’s illuminating translation. The snare with which he will punish his victims forever unites his two characteristics: Varuṇa is undifferentiated waters and Varuṇa is ṛta, differentiating order.
There are gaps in the fabric of the articulate. It eludes uterine anguish (root anĝh), it allows the membranes of the embryo to be abandoned, leading to birth, since birth is a violent separation from everything else, the severing of Varuṇa’s last snare: the umbilical cord. This metaphysical process becomes a story and it begins human history when Indra wanted to repeat Varuṇa’s exploit and thus take control, when he wanted “to distance the sky and the earth even farther.” Then Indra “struck a great blow at the serpent Vṛtra, who kept the waters hidden inside him, cloaked in darkness,” and he seized the soma. This is the archetype of every dragon-killing. T’ao T’ieh, Tiamat, the Minotaur, Marduk, Theseus, St. George—and so many others we come across. Indra’s violent exploit introduces a new sovereignty. Indra steals sovereignty from Varuṇa, but Varuṇa remains the source of all sovereignty, which has nothing to conquer but nurtures every conquest. The anointed king will sit on a throne that is addressed as “the navel and the womb of kingship, practically equivalent to Varuṇa’s watery residence.” But Indra who kills Vṛtra is also the king who is born—and abandons the remains of his placenta on an anthill, which here represents the matrix. For him these remains are now the evil (pāpman), since they would suffocate him in the life between heaven and earth. The hero murderer, who wants to be born, moves through the bowels of the monster, in the composite spirals of t’ao t’ieh before reaching its mouth, which will spit him out into the light. He is Theseus, who has to pass through the whole labyrinth before meeting the Minotaur face to face. The irreducible peculiarity of the labyrinth lies in the fact of being a continuous thread, a long snare coiled around itself. Like Varuṇa, who is articulation itself, but connected by an indissoluble nexus to an unarticulated origin; like the sūtra, the “thread” that “from the macrocosmic as well as the microcosmic point of view connects all states of existence with themselves and with their Principle,” the thread about which it is said: “he who knows this thread, this inner agent, knows brahman, knows the worlds, knows the gods, knows ātman, knows everything.” But to see the labyrinth from outside, and to kill it in the figure of the Minotaur, one must have penetrated as far as its center, which is the mouth from which one goes out into the space of isolated, separate things, arranged in a precarious manner: the space where the sacrifice must constantly weave an airy connection, between emptiness and emptiness. The hero who kills and at the same time is born is in danger of losing contact with his cosmic victim, with his enemy who is also the source of all power: with water. Goethe’s Mothers are a figure of Varuṇa. That is why birth is followed by baptism; that is why the heir to the throne is anointed in the ceremony in which he is consecrated king; that is why the young calf is licked by its mother immediately after birth, so as not to become dry, so as to recall the original water, Varuṇa’s “hidden ocean.”
The law is always double: law as a rule of the world, law as a rule between people. The first belongs to Varuṇa; the second to Mitra. Each has its regulation, its crimes, its punishments. Their action can be concordant—and then the two gods complement each other perfectly in their dual unity: Mitra-Varuṇa. The civilizing sweetness of Mitra, “everyone’s friend,” can exist only insofar as it is silhouetted against the dark and distant background of Varuṇa’s sovereignty. “Mitra is this world, Varuṇa is the other world,” as the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa clearly states. Mitra is the world of men, Varuṇa is the rest that perpetually surrounds it, that can encircle it like a snare. By gradually ridding themselves of the world, and of the terror that comes from it, creatures united by the social contract are led to recognize Mitra alone, who is first and foremost god of the contract. And so that single law—which was Stifter’s “meek law” so long as it coexisted with the order of Varuṇa—became gradually unperceivable, since around it was the ever greater, overwhelming presence of its divine companion. Meanwhile, Varuṇa’s snares continued to clasp their victims, victims now unaware of the fathomless place from which the snares had been thrown, unaware even that these were sentences passed by a law no one could any longer decipher.
In the end, the most ingenuous and the most important question has to be asked: are the Vedic connections (bandhus) real? Studying them, we gradually reconstruct their marvelous web, which extends over everything. And the epoch in which we are born compels us to see them as an immense matchstick cathedral, perfectly superfluous. We know that life reproduces itself anyway, even without their help. Still, we feel an irresistible attraction to that all-enveloping depth of resonance. And, whatever we think, at a certain point we realize we are inadvertently using some part of that submerged mantle. The only form of life that succeeds in totally rejecting Vedic connections is that of Jeremy Bentham, our Pharaoh, now a mummy in London. An unperceptive life. Vedic connections are grandly superfluous, Bentham is grandly inadequate. We waver in the middle.
Nothing is so repugnant—or so pitiful—as the language of sacrifice on the lips of someone who ignores its principles. Nothing is so devastating as the act of sacrifice in the hands of someone who ignores its principles. Nothing is as irrepressible as the return of sacrificial words and actions in someone who ignores its principles.
Varuṇa is the origin that prevents life and without which life cannot be lived. One has to throw off Varuṇa’s snares to begin living; to continue living one must be anointed, moistened by his primordial liquid.
After years of research, two great scholars spoke about the Vedic seers as follows:
Lilian Silburn |
J. C. Heesterman |
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“In the eyes of the Vedic ṛṣis the immediate, the primordial, has an amorphous, multiform, precarious aspect. The succession of days is not guaranteed, cosmic stability must be constantly consolidated. The Vedic cosmos is in effect a painful cosmos of anxiety, contraction and narrowness (aṃhas), which takes the form of darkness (tamas) and flux (salila), in the image of the dark sea of the origins, the limitless, measureless, formless arṇava that threatens to engulf everything. … “For the ṛṣis of the Veda nothing seems certain: neither human life, nor the sunrise, nor the falling of the waters. This is why most of the hymns of the Ṛg Veda follow one single pattern: the god invoked is reminded of the charitable undertaking that he once performed in favor of some other cosmic or sacrificial figure and, during the last two verses, he is implored to perform that same undertaking once again at dawn that day, since protection is generally being sought from the anxiety that goes with the absence of the prop during the night.” |
“To the Vedic thinker the whole universe was constantly moving between the two poles—of birth and death, integration and disintegration, ascension and descent—which by their interaction occasion the cyclical rhythm of the cosmos. In this world of floating forms there are no hard and fast lines; conceptually different entities and notions interchange with bewildering ease. All things, entities, notions, powers are connected with each other. Nevertheless, this world is not the chaos it seems to be at first sight. The point at issue for the Vedic thinker is not to disentangle and differentiate conceptually different entities and notions but to realize, to know, their connections (bandhu). In the course of this process the connections converged more and more and in the end, as is shown in the upaniṣad texts, the intrinsic coherence of the universe was formulated in the ultimate connection tat tvam asi [this you are]. In principle this identification of man with the cosmos is present in ritualistic thought. The place of sacrifice is by virtue of the code of connections identical with the cosmos: the three fires are the three divisions of space, the course of the sacrifice represents the year. On the place of the sacrifice the cosmic drama of death and rebirth, integration and disintegration, ascension and descent, is acted out and, reversely, through the same code of connections brought to bear on the macrocosm. In the center of this sacrificial world stands the sacrificer for whose benefit the cosmic processes are set in motion by the ritualists, who know the connections. Thus the whole world is centered upon the sacrificer, who ‘becomes all this’ and represents in his person the cosmic drama.” |
Louis Dumont, in a memorable essay of 1959, recognized the saṃnyāsin, the Indian “renouncer,” as being the first example of the individual, in a sense that, after many experiences, has reached the present-day West. But, perhaps out of an excessive respect for Weber’s theory of ideal types, Dumont’s essay strongly emphasized the contrast between saṃnyāsin and brahmin, content even to see that contrast endorsed by what are today classic images of them: on the one hand “the emaciated figure of the saṃnyāsin, with his bowl, his stick and his orange robe”; on the other “the brahmin, whom we might characterize as he is seen on the northern gateway of the Great Stupa of Sanchi (Vessantara Jātaka), a figure with a protruding belly who displays an inimitable blend of arrogance and greed.” What clearer, more radical contrast could there be? But how much is that image of the brahmin due to the malevolent priests of Cecil B. De Mille, and to the urging of the kaliyuga? If we go back to the evolution of the Vedic sacrifice, everything in that tangle is once again called into question; the transition and the contrast no longer seem so sharp. In the end, the saṃnyāsin might appear to us as the extreme outcome of the Vedic sacrifice, imbued with all its lymph, harbinger of events unprecedented—first of these Buddhism—but which can only be understood by entering and losing oneself once again “in the forests and ravines of the sacrifice.”
“Through the cracks, as it were, of the closed ritual system,” Heesterman, in a compelling study à la Mauss (and Granet), has managed to glimpse the outline of a preclassical phase of Vedic sacrifice. His stereoscopic view makes it possible to separate and organize onto different levels the traces of the evolution of Vedic sacrifice, a wonderfully complex and articulated form, the archetype of all articulation. The liturgical cornerstone of the classical sacrifice is the relationship between the yajamāna—the “sacrificer,” who provides the offerings, gives his ritual fee (dakṣiṇā) to the officiants, and will collect the fruits of the sacrifice—and the brahmin, the supreme authority in the ceremony. It is a relationship of delicate and tortuous complementarity, of inextricable complicity, of hidden opposition, such as to warrant a place of its own among the hundred and one values of the genitive case listed by the grammarian Patañjali: the srauva (liturgical) value, which reminds us that “the sacrifice is unquestionably a relationship between mortals and immortals, between mortals and the dead, but it is also an interpersonal and social relationship between mortals themselves.” Behind this relationship can be glimpsed various aspects that Heesterman has linked to another, older image: that of deadly rivalry, since the dispute is about death. In the sacrificial giving there is a twofold gesture: a giving by the yajamāna to the Invisibles and a giving by the yajamāna to the visible brahmin, who assists him in the ceremony. And the brahmin receives two gifts from the yajamāna: the “wounded part of the sacrifice, the part of Rudra,” the point of the victim’s body that has received the mortal wound, as small as a berry; and the dakṣiṇā, which Bloomfield—following as always the picture of mean and eager priests—wanted to translate as baksheesh. The yajamāna’s sacrificial gift to the brahmin is the prototype of the poisoned gift: it is a gift of that which is most dangerous, which contains the danger itself: death. And this is true not only for the “wounded part,” but for the dakṣiṇā, which is likened to the dismembered body of Prajāpati. The sacrificial benefactor, through his giving, is therefore primarily freeing himself of the daunting surplus of life, whose weight falls upon the brahmin. This gift is a challenge and a trap—and behind that gesture Heesterman outlines a different scenario: the sacrificial area is the area of a violent conflict and, at the same time, a table to which the guest is invited. Every sacrifice is an ordeal, an uncertain clash of forces, exposed to the breaths of heaven, ordered according to a cycle that knows two dramatic points of reversal: the two equinoxes. The person sacrificing shows how long he can remain in contact with the “part of Rudra” (a variant of the “accursed share”), and how he can rid himself of it. But as Mauss first recognized, it is crucial to know how to enter the sacrifice, but equally crucial to know how to leave it. The dakṣiṇā, this holy fee, “is the price to be paid for the profane body of the sacrificer to return to its owner,” to enable the yajamāna to return unharmed to ordinary life. In it we recognize traces of the preclassical sacrifice as an appalling game of tag. In reconstructing the scenario of that phase of sacrifice, Heesterman radically alters our image of the brahmin: the purest of beings was therefore originally the opposite: he was the one who absorbed within him all impurity, accepting it as a gift passed to him from the impure yajamāna. The brahmin is “the bhiṣaj, the healer of the ritual, but this must originally have referred to the healing of death. Since the classical ritual does not admit of impurity but only of infractions against a correct execution of the ritual, the brahmin’s function was transformed into that of redressing ritual faults. In the preclassical system, then, his role was that of taking over death and impurity.”
Encapsulated in the evolution of Vedic sacrifice, like a sphere of maximum density, is much of what would later appear elsewhere, diluted over the centuries. The brahmin, who originally sustained the whole weight of impurity, becomes the immaculate specialist in silence, who intervenes only to correct the officiants’ errors. This is the passage that will be presented in the West, amid much philosophical clamor, as a transition from the tribal world of sacrifice to the world of law in the polis. For the Hindus, who were less overweening and less casual in getting rid of the world, it was merely a shift in ritual practices. But this passage created the conditions that led to the development of the figure of the saṃnyāsin, the renouncer who is the first to abandon the ritual scene.
For Dumont, this being who lives at the edge of society, this first “individual-outside-the-world” is the quintessential innovator of Indian thought, indeed “responsible for all the religious innovations that India has known.” He is the eccentric figure who will end up destroying every holistic framework from within, and will eventually become the “individual-in-the-world,” and thus the very model of modern Western man. Intricate, ironic routes. But, as Heesterman has shown, the saṃnyāsin certainly is not a figure who abruptly distances himself from the world of sacrifice and opposes it. On the contrary, the saṃnyāsin is the perfect result of the long, subtle, painful evolution of that world.
If the Vedic sacrifice is the most impressive, most coherent, most meticulous attempt to affirm the Whole of the world, the very rigorousness of this undertaking produces an overwhelming anxiety. The Vedic sacrifice proclaims itself in thousands of rules, in thousands of connections, in thousands of mythological details. But the more the texts build up, the more detailed the system of actions becomes, and the greater the sense of powerlessness and exhaustion. The sacrifice, which seeks to structure the world so as to make it habitable, tends to invade every fraction of time the world offers us. The foundation of sacrifice is desire, the desire for a result that is the world itself, but analysis reveals that desire inevitably constrains and suffocates, like the three membranes that threaten the newborn infant, like the excessive fullness of the undifferentiated, from which the sacrifice seeks to release us. In those three membranes cast off in the ceremony, those sacred remains of the sacrifice that contain the germ of the world in a future cycle, the brahmin ends up seeing the world itself. At that moment a further, dizzying possibility emerges: no longer constructing the world, but obtaining release from it. This is the origin of renunciation. Hidden in the forest, the brahmin turned saṃnyāsin will no longer attempt to establish the world, but will seek mokṣa, “release from the world.” The obscure birth of Buddhism emerges then as the last act in the evolution of Vedic sacrifice.
The decisive step is the renouncer’s choice not to eat animal flesh. The majesty of the sacrifice survives just as long as a creature is killed on the altar. If this doesn’t happen, the sacrifice is promptly transformed into moral law. But the peculiarity of the saṃnyāsin is that he renounces something—killing—even though he recognizes it as the foundation of order. His choice bears no trace of the Enlightenment rejection of the malign religio—as in Lucretius—but the decision to remain in an existence before life, which may eventually be transformed into an existence beyond life.
For the Vedic seers, sacrifice coincided with the uninterrupted construction of the world. Its basis was desire, its purpose the fruit of desire. The actions were linked together in a cosmic game of giving and receiving. The crudely legal Roman concept of do ut des had its counterpart here in the dadāmi te, dehi me (“I give to you, you give to me”) pointed out by Mauss. But at that time the destiny of the whole of existence was placed at risk on every occasion, and not just the fortune of the individual. Precisely because the Vedic seers had thrown themselves into this boundless expansion of desire and its fruits, the later upaniṣadic speculation, sealed eventually in the Bhagavad Gītā, could reach the discovery that is the indelible mark of India: detachment, the metaphysical name for renouncing the fruit of sacrifice.
Sacrifice as action (sacra facere) is limited at first to the single act of the brahmin: eating the dangerous part of the victim, the “wounded part.” It is finally canceled out as a visible act by the renouncer, who refuses to have any contact with the killing. But from the renouncer, from the “individual-outside-the-world,” who is still obedient to the sacrificial approach, a path will be traced, through a series of circuitous routes, which Dumont has just begun to reconstruct, to the “individual-outside-the-world” of Christianity, and from him to the “individual-in-the-world” eventually outlined by Calvin, who contains “in himself, concealed in his inner constitution, an unperceived element of otherworldliness.” This paradoxical heir of the Vedic renouncer is none other than the modern Western individual who, having come back into the world, will end up using it in an unscrupulous and unprecedented way.
From the sacrifice, through the brahmin, to the renouncer. From the renouncer, through the individual, to technology. The process that had begun as an act of supreme affirmation of the world (and devotional empire over the world) in the doctrine of the Vedic seers, and had then been reduced to the analytic negation of the world (with the Buddha), is once again expanded, transforming the renouncer, the “individual-outside-the-world,” into the emancipated and enlightened “individual-in-the-world” and, through him, into the anonymous subject of technology, concerned with dominion, control, affirmation—of what, however, is unclear, since quanta have meanwhile dissolved the world beyond any possibility of localization.
The name of the new sacrifice will now be experiment. The sacrificial attitude continues to operate in it, but unrecognized and unaware: wherever it surfaces it is rightly dismissed as a remnant of the past.
In the Western world, governments and newspapers very often talk about “sacrifices” when drastic economic measures are required. The word is now used almost as often as technical terms like “inflation.” It is one of the many signs of an archaic presence. “Sacrifice,” in its current usage, is a cover word for a series of economic interventions that involve individuals forgoing certain benefits. But in this definition, the word loses its irreducible meaning: destruction. Here, nothing has to be destroyed. It is supposed that the goods to be renounced will go, the more the better, to meet other purposes. Part of the money that would have been squandered away—for leisure and pleasure—will go to replenish the funds of the State. The use of the word sacrifice would thus be incongruous, if it wasn’t adopted to emphasize how the supernatural counterpart of the individual is society itself: supernatural since it is able to utilize, to make productive in the realm of the visible, what is taken from the individual. At the same time, a real sacrifice goes on, a sacrifice that involves destruction, and which is happening uninterruptedly on the planet: sacrifice through experiment. Here it is presumed that every metaphysical memory of sacrifice is canceled out: in such an extreme way that, through some sinister lapsus, in laboratory jargon, when animals are eliminated after being used in experiments, they are described as “sacrificed.” But the same scientist who uses these words, once out of the laboratory, will fail to give any credence to the word sacrifice: he will regard it as a superstitious remnant, while economists feel no embarrassment about using it. The world is held in this silent grip between a sacrifice that is performed unnamed and a sacrifice that is continually named but is fictitious. Until one day the differences and contradictions in the use of the word sacrifice are blotted out: with war, the most lavish experiment of all. “Sacrifice” then occupies even more newspaper headlines than during economic crises—and everyone knows it involves blood, destruction, and death. Uniformed soldiers are interviewed and declare themselves ready for the “supreme sacrifice.” The whole nation declares itself ready each day for “sacrifice.” Finally, what remain are the monuments to fallen soldiers.