After Golgotha, the victim was set loose from the sacrificial post. Christian concern for living creatures would demand only an immolation per figuras. But the miasma of the sacrificial victim had to be removed: such an agglomeration of nature, power, vulnerability, malediction, and healing virtue was no longer permissible. It had to migrate far away, leave the cities, roam the oceans, unknown lands, among wild beasts and composite beings. Every so often, it reappeared in the villages as the Wild Man. Pieter Brueghel paints him in one of his backgrounds with his hesitant paws and green pelt, as he advances toward a deceitful woman who tempts him with the offer of a ring. Behind him, an anonymous man points his crossbow to kill him—and the emperor holds up his sword. In the next scene, never portrayed by Brueghel or anyone else, the Wild Man is fatally wounded by the crossbow, with villagers surrounding him. A story invented by Boccaccio suggests that, in Venice, “a hunt is held in St. Mark’s Square,” where the prey is “a wild man,” who appears “smeared all over with honey and covered with down feathers,” with “a chain around his neck and a mask on his head,” while bluebottles and gadflies swarm about him, attracted by the honey. And thus sacrifice, though banished from society, was distilled into metaphor or moved back once more toward its origin: hunting. Now it would be evoked by the hiss of a deadly harpoon on the Ocean. It was left to wave-tossed ships to encounter the contagion of sacrifice. Generally one had to cross the line of the Equator and sail into the inverted world of the southern hemisphere. A gleaming white albatross took off from the emerald light of the ice, a messenger of that place that was going to receive and capture the Ancient Mariner (“The ice was here, the ice was there, / The ice was all around”). The powers of sacrifice are concentrated in the mass of ice and they send off the albatross, for it to be received on the ship according to the laws of hospitality, a last vestige of sacrifice. But with the shot from the Ancient Mariner’s crossbow that kills the albatross for no apparent reason, a reverse sacrifice takes place: Iphigenia had to be sacrificed to raise the wind, whereas here the killing of the albatross brings the air to a standstill. The ship stops and becomes spectral, captured by the immutability of literature, “as idle as a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean.” The sea itself rots from its very depths. What had given dignity to the Ancient Mariner’s gestures was his total whim. He was obeying neither a ritual nor even a cruel folk custom destined for the footnotes of a local scholar. Even the justification of the other sailors, who approve what he has done, since the albatross is said to be the harbinger of fog, is found to be ex post. The Ancient Mariner’s gesture is the sudden murderous response to the flapping of the albatross’s vast wings. In his automatic act, he cancels every past—and the past will return to haunt him, first as a curse, then as a gradual assimilation of the Ancient Mariner with the albatross, which he has now hung around his neck: and here memory returns to the origin, to the image of sacrifice as self-sacrifice, and thus of the killer as his own victim. The unexpected, unexplained shot from the Ancient Mariner’s crossbow is the first absolute image of evil that would accompany a century of Satanism for ladies.
Coleridge wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner following the advice of Thomas Burnet that is quoted at the beginning of the poem: “… ne mens assuefacta hodiernae vitae se contrahat nimis, et tota subsidat in pusillas cogitationes” “… so that the mind, preoccupied with everyday matters, does not shrink excessively and subside entirely into petty thoughts.” Civilization had already culminated in that most fluid and narrow-minded century in which Coleridge had been born, and it was now beginning to feel the weight of its own clutter, of the mental dross forever babbling around it, whereas the Whole had been banished for its lack of taste and restraint. Like the Vedic gods in the beginning, Transcendental Subjects felt oppressed by the lack of space. Coleridge’s albatross persuaded them that, wherever the Whole became visible again, a rash impulse was driving them to kill it. But the albatross was still too much like a symbol on paper. It merely foretold the reemergence of the Whole. The Whole: the Whale! Then the white wings stretched out over the immense wrinkled brow of Moby Dick.
Once past the equator of history, what used to be silence needs to be said with violence, in every detail: indeed, this alone is to be said. Now it seems radiant and isolated. Just as Sade’s loquacious protocol takes the place of the hierogamic cloud, so the slaughter of the whale replaces the brahmin’s silence in front of the suffocated victim. Pornography has more to do with a theological task than with Eros: all that is hidden must be revealed, secret languages must once again be illegible—no longer because they are secret but because they are offered to the eyes of everyone, and are now almost a part of the landscape. The 120 Days of Sodom establishes a serial order, which is the closest approximation, in the combinatory sky of the concept, to the periodicity of the Zodiac. And the search for Moby Dick follows the cycle of the constellations until Ahab readies himself for the final act of his hunt, trampling angrily on the quadrant, the residual sign of dependence upon the sky. At the center of these two ungodly circles is the epiphany of killing. In Sade, the young girls tormented by licentious excesses are thrown by Minski, the Muscovite ogre, into a courtyard of wild animals, “where they are devoured in less than three minutes.” And Juliette, who watches, assures us: “Je n’ai de ma vie perdu de foutre plus lubriquement”—“Never in my life have I had such a lubricious orgasm.” Melville goes further. While Sade makes only a brief mention of wounded flesh, before returning straightaway to the atrocious, long-winded conversation, further échauffée by the entertainment, Melville raises literature to the level of the slaughterhouse, taking it over a threshold never before crossed, writing down on the page what we always knew was going on, but off-stage and never put into words. “The ivory Pequod was turned into what seemed a shamble; every sailor a butcher.” Literature had flourished out of sacrifice, but it had never described the act of butchery, always preferring to draw a labyrinthine garland around that void. With Melville, butchery indeed becomes the center of the book. The Taylorist factory, which Sade had earlier evoked in the ferocious pace of The 120 Days of Sodom, now reappears in the task of slaughtering the whale, described with eager attention like that of Marcel at the Guermantes ball, but here carried out in the austral light, amid the stench and filth of the enormous carcass. Now, between the indifferent sea and sky, in the interminable vastness of the spaces, butchery, which in the city is hidden behind concrete walls, once again becomes a delicate severing of the cosmic elements: even the Arché becomes palpable, when the wild Indian Tashtego risks dying “smothered in the very whitest and daintiest of fragrant spermaceti; coffined, hearsed, and tombed in the secret inner chamber and sanctum santorum of the whale.” An image of the sweetest death, the fall “into Plato’s honey head.” And so, at the end of the dissection, when the usable material has been extracted from the slain animal and its beheaded body is returned to the waters, what we finally see is something inexhaustible, indelible, a “white phantom” that no human blade could diminish, nor even the beaks of birds and the teeth of sharks that rival man in the “horrible vulturism of earth.” The headless white carcass floats away. Soon we will meet it again under the name Moby Dick: “The vast tackles have now done their duty. The peeled white body of the beheaded whale flashes like a marble sepulcher; though changed in hue, it has not perceptibly lost anything in bulk. It is still colossal. Slowly it floats more and more away, the water around it torn and splashed by the insatiate sharks, and the air above vexed with rapacious flights of screaming fowls, whose beaks are like so many insulting poniards in the whale. The vast white headless phantom floats further and further from the ship, and every rod that it so floats, what seem square roods of sharks and cubic roods of fowls augment the murderous din. Beneath the unclouded and mild azure sky, upon the fair face of the pleasant sea, wafted by the joyous breezes, that great mass of death floats on and on, till lost in infinite perspectives.”
Giorgio de Santillana wrote: “When Marcel Griaule, who showed us the unknown civilizations of western Sudan, asked his local experts to tell him something about the inhabited land, to describe what they knew about distant places, he was surprised to see them always pointing to the sky. And finally he understood that for them the ‘inhabited land’ meant the area of the Ecliptic.” That wonderful “finally he understood” refers also to Santillana himself: as an agile gentleman of Western culture he had spent decades pursuing the victorious pathways of science, and had seen them culminate between Galileo and Leibniz. And now, gazing at the Creatures of the Zodiac, oblique over the horizon, he realized that pondus, numerus, mensura had previously illuminated and dominated another world, in an entirely different sense, beginning from a Zero Time that he tended to date back to when the equinoctial Sun rose in Gemini, around 5000 B.C.E. He began then to pursue the celestial paths of that other science, fondly collecting fragments from mythographers and from ancient singers. One day he reopened Ernst Cassirer’s book on “symbolic forms,” the great scholar’s most detailed work, which had long been a guide for him. He realized that almost nothing in those pages remained valid. Something similar happened to Frances Yates: she had begun studying Giordano Bruno shortly before World War II, particularly because he belonged to the Italian Renaissance—two words that thrilled her, as they did many other young English devotees of culture. She had originally planned to translate La cena de le ceneri “with an introduction emphasizing the boldness with which this advanced philosopher of the Renaissance accepted the Copernican theory.” But there was something in that valiant knight of Modernity that she found unconvincing: “was the Copernican theory really the subject of the debate or was there something else implied in it?” She spent much time studying Bruno’s mnemotechnical writings without being able to say what they were about. When she finally grasped the clavis, she immediately saw the Beasts of the Zodiac emerge and conceal themselves on the wheels of memory. The oblique band of the Ecliptic once again revealed the stories that the Dogons read there: “Wanting to explore their geographic horizon, [Griaule] tried to discuss the inhabited lands, what these tribesmen knew about the world around them. But soon he saw them once again pointing up, and showing him boundaries in the sky. And he realized that for them the idea of ‘inhabited lands’ referred to the area of stars between the two Tropics: a 47-degree band in the sky, lying on both sides of the Equator. Those are the true and only ‘inhabitants.’”
Going back in history, we realize that guilt and evil recede more and more from the bad intentions of a single man and assume the august reality of numbers. Original sin becomes a mathematical and divine fact, an occurrence in coelestibus, like all occurrences that are worthy of discussion. Measured in time, there are three forms of the evil, of the guilt, of the irresolvable disorder that accompanies us. And here is the probable sequence in which they were discovered:
Obliquity of the Ecliptic (in the chi—χ—formed by the Demiurge in Plato’s Timaeus, the Ecliptic is the axis of the Other, in respect of the Equator, which is the axis of the Same; the obliquity of the Ecliptic brings the drama of the seasons, now removed from the eternal, symmetrical balance of the equinoxes, which we would have if the angles were correct, right angles: that drama will be the basis for every rise and fall, for every adventure, for every journey; it is the original disorder of the world);
Precession of the Equinoxes (it reveals evil even more clearly, insofar as it is that retrograde movement, left to itself, that takes advantage of divine weariness, as Plato brutally explained in his Statesman: “Listen then. At certain moments the god guides all of this in its rotating course; but at other moments, when the allotted periods of time have reached their measure, he lets it go, and then everything starts rotating on its own in the reverse direction, since it is a living creature and has received intelligence from he who fashioned it in the beginning. Now this disposition to retrograde movement is an inherent part of its nature”—and this is because “the being we call heaven and earth,” however hard it tries, cannot be entirely free from change and so it has been given that “retrograde circular movement that deviates as little as possible from its own movement.” A consequence of these two contrary cosmic movements is the division of time into different eras through the continuous, slow shift of the celestial points of reference, hence the succession of worlds that burst into flames or are submerged by water);
Incommensurability of 
(Simone Weil described it as “the drama of incommensurables”: but she added that the outrageousness of this discovery, “far from being a defeat for the Pythagoreans, as is so innocently imagined, is their most marvelous triumph”: she uses the image of a pair of scales with, on one dish, two cubes of side 1 and, on the other, one cube whose side is equal to the diagonal of the other two: equilibrium is impossible and no weight, whether added or removed, will ever make it possible).
Sacrifice recognizes the noncorrespondence between discrete and continuous; but at the same time it recognizes the necessary bond between the discrete and the continuous: the bond is the victim. The victim fills the gap between the discrete and the continuous. But, precisely because it fills it, it has to be destroyed. And the world then returns to marking itself out in parallel series of the discrete and the continuous—the wheel divided into 360 segments, gods, days, degrees, goes on rotating above the solid wheel of Vṛtra.
Guilt, and eventually Christian sin, descend from ritual inexactitude like the cadet branch of a noble family. Ritual is the kairòs that extends over every portion of time. This heightened precision, this keen perception of order, outside which every delay and every hesitation is guilt—the evil to which all evil can be traced—arises from a long, desolate exploration of experience: in no part of it had anything identical or perfectly regular ever appeared. Only certain minuscule points in the heavens moved along unchanging paths. That was order. All the more disturbing was the discovery that, there too, something was not quite right—or rather, it was right but had slightly moved, by reason of the Precession. Or else it was the calendar calculations that left something over, an unexplained lump of time: an excess that, here too, had to be dealt with in some way. The accursed share was nesting among the celestial spheres.
There are two kinds of substitution: one says a stands for b, and implies that a cancels b, it kills it, sometimes to discover how it works; the other says: a stands for b, but in the same way that a fragment of granite stands for the mountain from which it has been separated. In these two kinds of substitution there is a Y-shaped fork that had long wandered in the cosmos and is now portrayed in the amygdala of the mind. The symbol—not that of the linguists but that of the Mysteries—belongs to the second kind of substitution, always returning to superimpose itself on an invisible mountain. The fact that the symbol is a discontinuous ripple forever facing the continuous is made clear in the origin of its name: symbolon is the putting together of two broken halves of a piece of wood or pottery; in this way it returns to being a smooth and solid surface, barely incised by a crack across it. More than substitution, to which it must nevertheless pay homage, the symbol reveals interpenetration, the indissoluble superimposition of things: symbol is a specter that enters another specter, mingles with it, merges into it, disappears. The symbol drags behind it, as a catena aurea, all that it has crossed.
Everything changes according to whether or not one accepts the “sacrificial interpretation of life,” a formula tucked away in a short review by Guénon in Études traditionnelles of a paper by Ananda Coomaraswamy. According to that interpretation, “actions, having an essentially symbolic character, have to be treated as supports to contemplation (dhiyālamba), which presupposes that every practice implies and includes a corresponding theory.” Every practice, every gesture, voluntary or involuntary: what is indeed more sacrificial than breathing? Every instant is now being held in an invisible clamp that forces it into a perpetual oblation. But, if nothing is offered, if sacrifice is discounted as a superstition, what will happen? “Revolution, through sacrifice, confirms superstition,” warns Baudelaire. Without being named, sacrifice continues to demand its victims, once again it’s nomadic and moves its places of worship everywhere. Why? Perhaps reason, which has banned sacrifice, is not powerful enough to stamp it out? Or is it perhaps the case, as Baudelaire claimed, that “superstition is the depository of all truths”—and truths come out in the end, like the traces of a crime?
The threefold deception of sacrifice. There is a deception toward the gods, through the substitution of the victim; there is a deception toward the victim: the knife is concealed among ears of corn, for it is feared to the very end that the victim might rebel; there is a deception toward men on the part of the gods, who demand the sacrifice so that life may be guaranteed—and yet, in the act of sacrifice, they allow death to be confirmed.
The rice thrown at newlyweds can be traced back to the grains of barley scattered over the victim, which can be traced back to the stoning of the victim, the safest way of killing, since there is no need to even touch the victim.
The step from sacrifice to experiment. Sacrifice: all is based on the presumption of an Other, of many invisible Others, who respond to the right action. That which is offered, irrevocably, is equivalent to declaring a willingness to listen, the expectation of an answer, that ought to be constantly repeated. Experiment: based on the presumption that the right action occurs through accumulation. A thousand actions are tried out, in uncertainty and in the dark, only one of which will be the right action. All the others, with the wastage of energy they entail, are lost, in homage to an unknown entity. The application of the right action to the world, the possibility of perpetually repeating it, will then lead to a growth of power that corresponds to life heightened by sacrifice.
People criticized Guénon for writing like a bookkeeper of metaphysics, with no enthusiasm, with no heart. They thought he lacked inspiration. But Guénon was simply obeying “the esoteric, and more particularly the Rosicrucian precept according to which it was better to talk to every person in their own language.”
Let us erase the names of gods, founding myths, ritual precepts: what is left of the sacrifice? The difference between the discrete and the continuous, between rational numbers and real numbers—and the recognition that continuous and discrete have to remain linked.
The perception on which every mythology is based: the cycle. And the cycle is written in the heavens, in the return of the constellations. The terror of killing is, above all, a terror that there is no cycle, that the animal will not return, that the star will not reappear. The slight disorder we observe in the heavens (obliquity of the Ecliptic, Precession of the Equinoxes) corresponds to the immense disorder on earth (death).
Technology takes the place not of magic but of sacrifice. Like sacrifice, it is first and foremost a way of controlling danger, which means not just violent conflict within society, but the destructive and self-destructive power within life itself. Plague stands for the conflict between men in the same way that conflict between men stands for plague. Sacrifice requires perfect awareness of destruction: if this clear-sighted attention is missing, there is no sacrifice. For technology it’s enough to justify with claims about its practical utility.
Bureaucratic procedures are used in Kafka not to throw light on some degenerating state of the law, but on its first emergence, its first emergence from the marshy waters, when the abstract and the arbitrary shone in all their extraneousness in the face of Nature, which in those same times became the Village and agreed to serve at the inn the tired lords who, now and then, came down from the Castle.
The “force field between the Torah and the Tao,” which was how Walter Benjamin described Kafka’s place, was also Benjamin’s own place. But it certainly wasn’t a psychological or speculative place: it was the saturnine residence, the celestial area, in which ṛta and the “hidden ocean” coexist, where the Law is submerged in the fluidity of the Waters. On the bottom lies xvarnah, the radiance of Glory, exiled in the world, which Benjamin recognized in the aura.
In a letter to Robert Klopstock, Kafka proposes two versions of the story of Abraham: “I can imagine another Abraham, who surely would never manage to become a patriarch, or even a ragman: this Abraham would be as prompt as a waiter to comply with the request for the sacrifice, but he would still never manage to perform the sacrifice because he can’t get away from home, he is indispensable; he is needed to run the house, there’s always something to be looked after, the house is not in order, but if the house is not in order he cannot leave until it’s sorted out, the Bible itself confirms it, for it says: ‘He set his house in order’ and Abraham already had an abundance of everything; if he hadn’t had a house, where would he have brought up his son, and on what beam would he have placed the knife?
… … …
“And then another Abraham. One who really wants to carry out the sacrifice in the right way and has rightly understood the meaning of it all, but cannot believe it’s really up to him, this repulsive old man and his son, that dirty youth. He has no lack of true faith, such faith he has, he would sacrifice in the right state of mind, if only he could believe it was really up to him. He’s worried about setting off by horse as Abraham with his son, but being transformed along the way into Don Quixote. The world would then be horrified if it had seen Abraham, yet this Abraham fears the world would die of laughter at seeing him. But it is not the ridiculous in itself that he fears—or rather, he fears that as well, especially of everyone laughing together—but above all he fears that such ridicule will make him even older and more repulsive, and his son dirtier, even more unworthy to be called. An Abraham who comes without being called! It’s rather as though the best student had to solemnly receive a prize at the end of the school year and in the midst of the silence of anxious expectation the worst student came forward from his dirty back bench, because he’d misheard his name, and then the whole class bursts out laughing. And perhaps he hadn’t even heard wrongly, perhaps his name had actually been called out and it’s the teacher who wants the award for the best also to be a punishment for the worst.
“Terrible things … That’s enough.”
In a letter to Gershom Scholem, a few months before his death, Walter Benjamin referred to his final discovery on Kafka: “… I think that the key to Kafka would fall into the hands of the one who is able to extract from Jewish theology its comic aspects. Has there ever been such a man? or perhaps you could be him?”
Rancé remarked in his letters, with his usual bluntness, that we must all think of ourselves as sheep to the slaughter, tanquam oves occisionis. Victor Hugo: “The gospel makes God a shepherd. The Trappist makes him a butcher.” But shepherds, who protect their flock, gradually slaughter them. The secular practice of euphemism, exemplified here by Hugo, offers only an idyllic image of the shepherd. To someone (like Hugo) who is placed outside sacrifice, no criticism of sacrifice can undermine the obligation to kill, which remains, unspoken, with its power intact. Only certain Altaic peoples, shepherds and farmers who practice sacrifice, have been able to transform the most radical criticism of sacrifice into ceremony. “It was the custom of the Tatars of the Minusinsk region to sacrifice a live horse to the god of thunder. After stopping to pray at the place of sacrifice, they remove the horse’s reins and let it run away. From then on, the horse is free and cannot be touched. The Buryats also place a bowl of milk on the back of these animals consecrated to the thunder. The priest officiating at the sacrifice sprinkles milk over the animal’s back, and at the same time in the four celestial directions. He has the horse censed with burning grass and the bark of a resinous tree, then ties ribbons to its mane, and finally the horse is sent off into freedom. At the place where the bowl of milk falls from the horse’s back, prayers are given for health and success. From that moment, an animal consecrated in this way is no longer used for the service of man. When the animal dies, its mane and its tail are cut off and tied to another horse, which must then substitute the previous one.” The untying of the knot of life, which takes place with the killing of the dressed sacrificial victim, can only be opposed with equivalent force by another untying: that of the reins of the captive horse, which frees life into life. But this, which is the only adequate opposition to the sacrifice, occurs within the sacrifice itself, it treads the same ground, wears the same ribbons, repeats the same gestures to the very end: the hands that were about to carry out the strangling now carry out the gesture of untying the reins. The horse vanishes into the taiga, or continues to follow the herd, but as if it were invisible, since no one can touch it and least of all use it. No one can sell it, no one can buy it. That white horse is the Double of all horses, which grace permits to be seen beside the others: but the Double cannot be used, the Double can only be unleashed. On the site where the reins have been removed, everything remains as if the lifeless body of the victim were present: the smoke of spruce lingers in the air, since this is a place governed by the principle “there is no smoke without god,” the milk bowl has fallen to the ground, showing divine favor or disfavor according to how it lies. Even the ribbons on its mane camouflage the freed horse as the sacrificial victim. But there is a final vertiginous step, with which the ceremony of the consecrated horse responds to the metaphysics of the sacrifice: when the freed horse dies, its mane and tail are cut off and attached to the one that substitutes it. This is the heart of the sacrifice: substitution—and this mortal machine is reversed in a pledge of eternal life: by substituting one for the other, the white horses, over the course of the generations, are like a single one, which never dies. This is the extreme point at which sacrifice has been reversed: achieved in a remote time, in an area of Asia dotted with shamanic relics, where white horses are consecrated to the thunder. The next step has never been taken. No man has ever felt the hands of other men untying the invisible reins that are strapped around his neck. No one has ever been totally freed from the use of other men. And the fact of “being used for the service of man” is steeped in the poison of exchange, which slowly, or sometimes abruptly, kills.