Ardor (11 page)

Vedic India is the only place, throughout world history, where the following question has been asked: why is it true that “man should not be naked in the presence of a cow”? People seem to have had no concern about the question, either in ancient times or today. But the Vedic ritualists did. They also knew the answer: because “the cow knows it is wearing his [man’s] skin and runs away for fear that he might want to take it back.” And they then add a note of charming frivolity, based on another disconcerting observation: “Cows are therefore trusting when they approach those who are well dressed.” Perhaps only Oscar Wilde, had he known it, would have been able to comment with authority on this reason for
dressing well.

As for the Vedic ritualists, they gave it credence through a story that others would one day have called a myth, but which in their words sounded like a dry, anonymous account of how things began. Everything started when the gods, watching events on earth, realized that the whole of life was supported by the cow. Men were its parasites. One of the gods—we don’t know which—urged humans to allow their skin to be used to cover the cows. So the gods flayed man. If we try to go back to the very beginning, this is therefore the natural human state: the Flayed Man, as in sixteenth-century anatomical drawings. Unlike the naïve positivists, who presented primordial man in natural history museum display cabinets with a monkey-like covering of hair, the Vedic ritualists saw him not as the mighty lord of creation, but as the being who was most exposed, most easily vulnerable from the world outside. For them, man didn’t just conceal a wound, but was a single wound. They wanted to add an eloquent detail: man is a hemophiliac by vocation, as even a blade of grass can make his blood gush forth.

Among the many characteristics that distinguish man (depending on the point of view: he is the only one who speaks, the only one who laughs, the only one who cries, the only one who celebrates sacrifices), the fact that he is the only creature who feels the need to dress is generally seen as the clearest sign of his inextricable link with artificiality. But, here again, the Vedic ritualists thought differently—and refuted in advance all those who came later. According to them, when at the beginning of the rite of “consecration,”
d
ī
k
ṣā
(which is also an initiation), the sacrificer wears a linen robe, at that moment “he wears his own skin.” Only then does man regain his “completeness.” Only then does he return to that which was his original state.

This is a complete reversal of the current view: here artifice indicates the reconquering of nature as something whole. But it is still a temporary reconquest since, at the end of the liturgy, man will have to free himself of all the objects (and garments) he has used during the rite, thus returning to his condition of being impure and flayed.
Naturalness
is a temporary state, linked to a garment and a certain sequence of gestures (the rite).

*   *   *

Anointing
was one of the most frequent gestures in rituals, in places far and wide, right up to the ceremony that consecrated Western kings. But none of the explanations given for it is as wild as the one offered by the Vedic ritualists. It presumes that man starts off, not from nothing, but from less than nothing. His original condition is not just that of an impure being, immersed in untruth. In the beginning, man doesn’t even have his whole body. Before he begins to act, someone has acted on him, flaying him. Man, in the beginning, is therefore a single sore. The wound, for him, is not one injured part of his body, but the totality of his body. The anointment covers this edgeless wound with a soft, wet, invisible film that makes movement and life possible. To understand the immensity of the ritual work, and its meticulous obsessiveness, it has to be placed in the context of this human condition at the very beginning, which is one of complete helplessness and pure pain. And only this can justify it.

*   *   *

If people at the very beginning (in other words, people who had not yet instituted sacrificial rites) were flayed and suffering beings, lacking in “completeness,” the decision to kill oxen and cows could only seem like a blasphemy. They looked upon those tame and mighty animals who grazed everywhere, protected by their magnificent hide, as a living provocation, rather like certain rich people who flaunt jewelry bought at auction from families that have fallen on hard times. Wrapped in improvised clothing, so as not to raise suspicion, men approached the animals and killed them. They had decided to put an end to the lives of those beings who until then had been a support for life itself. Sacrifice, the theory and practice of sacrifice, was a long, exasperated, captious, daring reworking of that gesture into actions, into formulas, into chants. People now went about in linen robes: it is said that the warp and weft of the cloth belonged to Agni and V
ā
yu and that “all the divinities had a part” in producing them. The same gods who had flayed them in the first place now took pains to protect them.

*   *   *

The most widespread objection to modern vegetarianism goes like this: you avoid eating beef, but the hides are used to make your shoes, your belts, your clothes. How can you be consistent in claiming to condemn the killing of these animals, which is also being done to clothe you? There is no convincing solution to this question—and the answer given by those who declare they wear only cord or plastic shoes or cloth or metal belts is simply pathetic. The industrial production cycle is much more sophisticated—and there is no way of totally avoiding contact with the secondary products of meat slaughter.

The Vedic ritualists did not find themselves in this dilemma, but knew perfectly well that the act of eating animal flesh was a
crux metaphysica
that might not even have a solution. And it is precisely here that Y
ā
jñavalkya stepped in.

We are in the third
k
āṇḍ
a
of the
Ś
atapatha Br
ā
hma
ṇ
a
, in a part of the work that, according to tradition, was written by Y
ā
jñavalkya himself. But, exactly as would happen in the
Mah
ā
bh
ā
rata
, where Vy
ā
sa was the author and occasionally appeared as a character, so too in that Br
ā
hma
ṇ
a, composed in the form of a treatise, Y
ā
jñavalkya manages several times to find his way into various scenes, always in crucial passages. Always with sharp, abrupt comments, like Marpa with his cane, ready to use it to wake up the pupil who would one day become Milarepa.

What happens after the passage where people had been flayed and their skins now clothe cattle? This is by decree of the gods. It follows that if people are not allowed even to show themselves naked in front of cows so as not to frighten them, they certainly won’t be allowed to kill them, let alone eat them. Here we find ourselves close to the origin of the prohibition on meat-eating in India. From here an uninterrupted line leads us to the cows wandering in the city traffic or lying pensively on temple steps. And yet didn’t the same Vedic ritualists spend their time meticulously describing animal sacrifices in which a part was then offered to the gods and a part was eaten by the officiants?

The point was very delicate—and had to be resolved by Y
ā
jñavalkya. First, according to the text, an officiant takes the consecrated person—who now wears a linen robe and so once again has a skin—into the hut built in the sacrificial area. And immediately after, it adds the requirement “that he [the consecrated person] shall not eat cow or ox; for the cow and the ox certainly support everything here on earth.” Once again, a decision from the gods had to be sought. They said: “Certainly the cow and the ox support everything here; come, let us bestow on the cow and the ox whatever strength belongs to the other species!” It wasn’t therefore just the human hide that had been transferred to cattle. But strength in general, dispersed throughout nature. So cows became a concentration of everything. To kill them would have meant killing everything. “If someone were to eat an ox or a cow, it would be as if, so to speak, he were to eat everything or, so to speak, as if he were to destroy everything.” Already the insistence—twice in two lines—on the particle
iva
, “so to speak,” warns us that we are in a highly fraught and dangerous area. The tone is serious—and immediately afterward there is a resounding threat, one of the earliest formulations of the doctrine of reincarnation: “One [who acts] thus could be reborn as a strange being, as one of evil repute, as one of whom it is said: ‘He has caused a woman to abort’ or ‘He has committed a sin.’ So he must not eat (the meat of) an ox or cow.”

The words are short, abrupt, they do not seem to allow for any reply. But they are turned on their head in the next sentence: “Nonetheless Y
ā
jñavalkya said: ‘I, for my part, eat it, provided it is tender.’” The text then moves on, without any comment. Y
ā
jñavalkya’s metaphysical probe had touched a point that is usually avoided: there is a
pleasure
in eating the flesh of dead animals that is deeply physiological, just like sexual pleasure. In that case too, pleasure and guilt come together—and remain inseparable. When we go back beyond a certain threshold in phylogenesis, there is no escaping these simultaneous conflicting drives, which are not yet feelings but dark and highly powerful imperatives: allusions to our most distant memories, from which, however, we are separated by an insuperable barrier, like dreams that have been blotted out.

What conclusions can be drawn from all this? The doubt cannot be solved. The teaching set out in the
Ś
atapatha Br
ā
hma
ṇ
a
seems to require abstinence from meat, with various arguments and a severe tone. Yet the supposed author of the text breaks in impetuously and insolently to say the opposite. What would be the right doctrine?

*   *   *

Guilt connected to sacrifice—guilt about killing and destruction in general: more fundamentally,
guilt about what disappears
—extends not just to animals, but to the plant world, so as plants and trees can be saved by sacrifice.
Everything
is killed, starting from the sacrificer, who has just—temporarily—avoided it, when “Agni and Soma have taken he who sacrifices between their jaws,” and starting from Soma himself, who will be killed by the pestle in the mortar. Others will eventually be tied to the “post” before being killed. And for each victim the event is described through euphemism: the sacrificial killing is called “appeasement.” During the sacrifice, the officiant speaks to the sacrificial horse using words of high, visionary, tender lyricism, promising that no harm will come to it and that it will follow the path of the gods, in the same way as Siberian hunters speak with gentleness and devotion to the bear they are about to kill. Something similar happens with the tree. The officiant is even required to reassure it: “This sharp-edged axe has led you toward great bliss.” The reference to “bliss” is meant to mitigate the impact of a “thunderbolt”: “for the axe is a thunderbolt.”
Thunderbolt
is everything that has an absolute power. But the ritualists were too subtle to define only certain potentially lethal arms in this way: “the razor is a thunderbolt,” but it is also true that “water is a thunderbolt,” and “ghee is a thunderbolt,” in the same way that “the tree they cut down to make the sacrificial post is a thunderbolt” and “the year is a thunderbolt.” And one day it happened that “the gods perceived that thunderbolt: the horse.” In the case of the tree, of that “lord of the forest” which is chosen for the sacrifice of
soma
, the mitigation of guilt will be achieved above all by placing a blade of
darbha
grass on the trunk. It would be foolish to mock the meagerness of such means. A tuft of
darbha
grass alone can purify the face of a “consecrated one,” a
d
ī
k
ṣ
ita
, one who can therefore perform a sacrifice: “For impure, indeed, is man; he is foul within, in that he speaks untruth; and
darbha
grass is pure.”

Choosing the tree to cut down, from which to make the
y
ū
pa
, the sacrificial “post,” which in itself epitomizes the totality of the sacrifice, is like choosing any other victim: it is the act in which the mystery of election is revealed. The ritualist therefore considers it with great care, so that the sacrificer must bring all his keenness into play. What tree will he choose? Not the closest one in the forest. That would be too crude and too simple. It would be as if all you had to do was take one step forward to be chosen—and one step back not to be. But nor will the sacrificer choose the tree farthest away. The last would then be the most likely—and all, if they wanted to avoid being chosen, would rush to the most conspicuous positions. Here again the choice would lose its mystery. No, the sacrificer will choose “on the nearer side of the farther” and “on the farther side of the nearer.” And where in the forest does
the farther
begin? Where does
the nearer
reach its limit? No one can know this. Not even the sacrificer, until that inscrutable moment when he will say to the tree, in that grim, unctuous tone that all victims recognize: “We favor you, O divine lord of the forest.”