Ardor (3 page)

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Vedic India is founded on a rigorous exclusivity (only those who take part in the sacrifice can be saved) and at the same time on a need for total redemption (extending not only to all humans, but to all living beings). This twofold claim, which will sound unreasonable to the other great religions (which are more closely bound to secular good sense) reappears in the picture of an ancient, endless feast: “But those creatures that are not admitted to the sacrifice are lost; he therefore admits to the sacrifice those creatures here on earth who are not lost; behind mankind are the beasts; and behind the gods are the birds, the plants and the trees; and so whatever exists here on earth is admitted to the sacrifice. And verily, both gods and men and their forebears drink together, and this is their feast; in ancient times they drank together visibly, but now they do so in the invisible.”

Nothing else was as serious, for gods just as much as for men, as being excluded from the sacrifice. Nothing was so certain to bring loss of salvation. Life, alone, was not enough to save life. There had to be a form, a sequence of gestures, a constant endeavor to avoid perdition. And for salvation to happen, it had to extend to everything, it had to carry everything with it. There was no salvation of the individual—being or species. Behind mankind could be glimpsed the incalculable multitudes of beasts, united with man by their being
pa
ś
u
, potential sacrificial victims. Whereas behind the gods rustled all the trees and shrubs, with their inhabitants, the birds, which had easier access to the sky.

This overwhelming vision is offered in few words—and has no equivalent in any of the other great ancient civilizations. There is no trace of it in any Greek (not to mention Roman) texts, it is certainly not a biblical view (where man, since the very beginning in the Garden of Eden, is branded as the dominator), nor in any Chinese texts. Only the cruel Vedic people, as they relentlessly devoted themselves to bloody sacrifices, thought about how to save the trees, the plants, and all other living beings, together with themselves. And they thought it could be done in only one way: to admit all those creatures to the sacrifice. They also thought it was the only way of overcoming the toughest challenge—the perpetuation of that invisible feast which had once been visible to all, and in which all took part.

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As we become more familiar with the Vedic world, we soon have the impression of finding ourselves in a self-sufficient, self-segregated world. Its neighbors? What was there before? How was it formed? There is room for doubt on everything. This explains a certain perverse pleasure among the great Vedists about the object of their studies: they know that once they have entered, they will never leave. A master like Louis Renou made an implicit reference to this in 1951, on one of the rare occasions when he allowed himself to speak in general terms: “Another reason for this decline in interest [for Vedic studies] is the isolation of the Veda. Nowadays our attention is centered on cultural influences and points of contact between civilizations. The Veda provides little of this sort of material, for it developed in isolation. Yet perhaps it is really more important to begin by studying certain individual manifestations in and for themselves, and to examine their own internal structure.” But this is exactly what Abel Bergaigne, founder of the glorious dynasty of French Vedists, was doing back in the nineteenth century: studying the
Ṛ
gveda
as a complete world in itself, which found justification in itself alone. An inexhaustible study, as Renou himself well knew: he was to publish seventeen volumes of his
Études védiques et paninéennes
, in which he gradually translated and interpreted the hymns of the
Ṛ
gveda
, considering them each time from varying angles, but without ever completing the task. Neither Egypt, nor Mesopotamia, nor China, nor least of all Greece (with its provocative lack of liturgical texts) can offer anything even remotely comparable to the Vedic corpus in terms of the rigor of its formal structure, its exclusion of all reference to time—whether as history or chronicle—the intrusiveness of its liturgy, and, finally, in terms of the refinement, profusion, and meticulousness of the internal links between the various parts of the corpus.

There have always been, and continue to be, plenty of strongly held theories about the origins of those who described themselves as
Ā
ryas and composed the Vedic corpus
.
But the enormity and uniqueness of their
textual
undertaking is all the more remarkable if the description of their historical existence is reduced to the few certain elements, as Frits Staal once formulated them: “More than three thousand years ago, small groups of semi-nomadic peoples crossed the mountain regions that separate Central Asia from Iran and the subcontinent of India. They spoke an Indo-European language, which developed into Vedic, and imported the rudiments of a social and ritual system. Like other speakers of Indo-European languages, they celebrated fire, called Agni, and like their Iranian relatives, they adopted the cult of
Soma
—a plant, probably hallucinogenic, that grew in the high mountains. The interaction between these Central-Asian adventurers and earlier inhabitants of the Indian subcontinent gave birth to the Vedic civilization, named after the four Vedas, oral compositions that have been transmitted by word of mouth up to the present day.” These words of Staal, in their spareness of tone, as though written to meet the requirements of a popular encyclopedia, transmit something of that wonder that anyone should feel before the unprecedented and unparalleled undertaking of these (few) “Central-Asian adventurers.” From the very beginning, it was an undertaking concerned not so much with territorial conquest (unclearly definable, unimpressive, not supported by any strong political structure, lacking even the invention of the “city,”
nagara
, a word that is more or less absent from the oldest texts—and in any event does not correspond to any documentable evidence: there is no trace of any Vedic city). Instead, it involved a
cult
, closely bound up with texts of extreme complexity, and an
intoxicating plant.
A
state of awareness
became the pivot around which turned thousands and thousands of meticulously codified ritual acts. A mythology, as well as the boldest speculation, arose out of the fateful and dramatic encounter between a liturgy and rapture.

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Ya eva
ṃ
veda
, “he who knows thus,” is an oft-recurring formula in the Veda. Knowing—and knowing
thus
, in a certain way that was distinct from all other knowing—was evidently something most important for Vedic men. Power, conquest, pleasure appeared as secondary factors, which were part of knowledge, but certainly couldn’t supplant it. The Vedic vocabulary is extremely subtle and highly distinctive in defining everything to do with thought, inspiration, exaltation. They practiced the discernment of spirits—as certain Western mystics would say many centuries later—with an astonishing assurance and perspicacity that make any attempt at translation look clumsy. What is
dh
ī
? Intense thought, vision, inspiration, meditation, prayer, contemplation? From time to time, all of these. And in any event the assumption was the same: the supremacy of knowledge over every other path to salvation.

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Why were Vedic men so obsessed by ritual? Why do all of their texts speak, directly or indirectly, about liturgy? They wanted to think, they wanted to live only in certain states of awareness. Having rejected all else, this remains the only plausible reason. They wanted to think—and above all: they wanted to be aware of thinking. This happens, for example, in performing a gesture. There is the gesture—and there is the attention that is concentrated on the gesture. Attention gives the gesture its meaning.

Ancient Rome was also a highly ritualistic society, but ritual never became so radical. In Rome, over and above ritual was practice, the ability to deal with situations as they arose. Ritual was thus channeled into law,
fas
was absorbed—or at least attempts were made to absorb it—into
ius.
But for the Vedic people, the highest concentration of thought was into gesture—and for no ulterior purpose. To think
brahman
, which is the
extreme
of everything, means to be
brahman.
This is the underlying doctrine.

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The more arguments rage over secularization, the easier it is to forget that the West, if that is what we want to call something which was born in Greece, has been secular from the very beginning. Without a priestly class, exposed to the continual risk of being excluded from the light, with no prospects of reward or redemption in other worlds, the Greeks were the first wholly idiosyncratic beings. This resonates through every verse of Sappho or Archilochus. And that which is idiosyncratic acts as the very backbone of secularity. How then do we explain the unbridgeable distance between modernity and the ancient Greeks? The Greeks knew who and what their gods were. More than believing in their gods, they met with them. For the Greeks, an
átheos
was, above all, someone who is abandoned by the gods, not someone who refuses to believe in them, as the moderns proudly claim—though they cannot avoid fashioning their secular institutions using theological categories. But the sacred, if surreptitiously injected into secularity, becomes a poisonous substance.

Vedic India and ancient Greece mirror each other. In India: all texts are sacred, liturgical, of nonhuman origin, kept and transmitted by a priestly class (the brahmins). In Greece: all texts are secular, often attributed to authors, transmitted outside a priestly class, which does not exist as such. The Eumolpidae, the family who supervised the Eleusinian Mysteries, were not expected to compose texts. When certain figures converge—as in the case of Helen and the Dioscuri, which bears a remarkable similarity to the stories of Sara
ṇ
y
ū
and the A
ś
vins—that affinity indicates that we are approaching something inextricably ingrained in the experience of every mind. They are all stories focusing on the
simulacrum
(
ágalma
,
eíd
ō
lon
), the
reflection
(
ch
ā
y
ā
), and the
copy
(twin resemblance). Stories around stories, since the stories are woven with simulacra and reflections. It is the mythical material that reflects on itself, in the same way that the
ṛṣ
is
often spoke, in the hymns of the
Ṛ
gveda
, about the verses they were composing. They are moments in which the many whirling rivers of history seem to flow into the same ocean, the ocean that provided the title for a collection of stories that is India’s counterpart to the
Thousand and One Nights
: the
Kath
ā
sarits
ā
gara
, the Ocean of the Rivers of Stories.

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Quite a number of scholars have recently toned down their descriptions of the Vedic people so far as they could, for fear of being accused of presenting them as blond Aryan predators. They are no longer conquerors who burst forth from the mountains, laying waste to the kingdom of the indigenous tribes and cruelly subjugating them. They are now a group of migrants who filter down to new lands, a few at a time, meeting hardly any resistance, since the previous Indus civilization was already extinct, for reasons that have still to be discovered. A proper correction, supported by the scant archaeological evidence, but one that sometimes arouses a suspicion of excessive zeal. And, to remove any inappropriate scruple, it is enough to recall, in the words of Michael Witzel, that “the Nazis persecuted and murdered hundreds of thousands of the only true Aryans in Europe, the (Rom, Sinti) gypsies. It is well known that they speak an ancient neo-Indian language that has close links with the modern Dardic, Punjabi and Hindi languages.”

The
Ā
ryas may not have thrown themselves into crushing conquests, but the realm of imagery, at least, is captivated by the thunder of their horses and their war chariots, unknown before then in the lands of the Indus. As in a cloud of luminous dust, they were preceded by the ranks of the Maruts, the “storming sons of Rudra.” This is how the hymns of the
Ṛ
gveda
describe them: “Come, O Maruts, with your chariots made of thunderbolts, laden with songs, laden with spears, with horses like wings! Fly to us like birds with the noblest drink, you of beauteous magic!”; “The earth shakes in fear before their surge: like an over-laden ship, quivering”; “Even the vast mountain has taken fright, even the ridge of the sky shakes at your fury. When you Maruts sway armed with lances, you flow like water in the same direction.” It is difficult to think of those who sang of the Marut exploits as mild seminomadic shepherds, worried only about their herds and transhumance. Splendor and terror were with them when they were accompanied by the Maruts, with their flashing lances on their shoulders, studded with colorful decorations, with gold coins fixed to their breasts, united, compact, as if they were all simultaneously yielded up from the sky.