Ardor (51 page)

The antelope flees because the gods want to sacrifice it (the antelope, in fact,
is
the sacrifice)—and the antelope knows it is an animal that cannot and must not be sacrificed. The antelope has just two invisible counterparts: the predator and the hunter—two single beings who kill in a flash, with their claws or their arrows, without any ceremonial niceties. They are what is immediate. So the opposite of a throng of beings—the gods—who choose their victim and around it elaborate a long ceremony that has to be performed with a sequence of acts. But in the thinking of the ritualists, using the brilliant words of Malamoud, “when the sacrifice is executed—executed in the sense of carried out—there is an execution, in the sense of a putting to death, not only of the victim but of the sacrificial act itself.” This is why the antelope escapes from the gods. No one tells us what happened after, when the gods chased it. But one day they returned with the black antelope skin. They had killed and flayed it, as hunters do. From that moment on, they never went hunting again. They spent their time contriving and celebrating sacrifices. As for the officiants, they always had to gird their loins with a black antelope skin. Or at least to have one within reach and to touch it, as if to remind themselves of something. Or the person being initiated had to sit on it, as if contact with the ground had to be mediated by those animal hairs, in which they claimed to recognize the meters. Contact with the antelope skin did not only serve to recall that escape and pursuit which none have recounted. But also other pursuits, other flights, of which certain scenes have been described—or mentioned in passing. Two scenes stand out.

Praj
ā
pati approached the body of his daughter U
ṣ
as and, as he touched her, he was transformed into an antelope, as was she. It was then that Rudra shot him with his three-knotted arrow. It looked like a hunting scene—and at that moment Rudra became
m
ṛ
gavy
ā
dha
, “he who shoots the antelope.” Praj
ā
pati, who “is the sacrifice,” then rose, wounded, to the sky. He escaped from the gods, his children who had plotted against him. He escaped from Rudra, the Archer, who had shot him at the peak moment of pleasure. The antelope that was Praj
ā
pati ran away, too late, from an attack. This was not part of a ceremony: his children—now his adversaries—simply wanted to kill him, like one of the many beasts of the forest. The sacrifice ran off in the face of pure, instant killing, of the kind that strikes down its prey through the hunter’s hand. And it ran off too late. But Praj
ā
pati had his place to go to: an arc of sky, where he settled and formed a constellation: M
ṛ
ga, the Antelope, which the Greeks called Orion. And not just the prey but also the hunter went off toward the sky. The archer became Sirius, the antelope hunter. The three stars that the Greeks called Orion’s Belt formed the three-knotted arrow shot by Rudra. That scene therefore became the background for every other scene. And thus it could illuminate every scene: at night the Antelope, M
ṛ
ga, signaled the way, “track,”
m
ā
rga
, for its companions that roamed the forest. From then onward, no one has yet fully understood the meaning of that scene. Still we raise our eyes to contemplate it and discover something new.

So far as the story of men is concerned, one of the meanings was this: hunting is the background to sacrifice. Sacrifice is a response to hunting: it is a guilty act that is superimposed onto the guilt of hunting. Man sacrifices because he has hunted, because he hunts. And he hunts because he recognizes that killing is an irreparable and unsuppressible act, for at least as long as he has been eating meat, imitating the predators that once used to devour him. So he became more powerful, but he also forever exposed himself to the “greatest danger,” which is this: “Man’s food consists only of souls. All the beings we have to kill and eat, all those we have to strike and destroy to make our clothing have souls like us, which do not disappear along with their bodies and have to be pacified, so that they won’t take revenge on us because we have carried away their bodies.” This is what Aua, an Eskimo, told Knud Rasmussen with unequalled clarity. This was the mystery about which no one wished to talk. It raised too much terror—and nothing had managed to cancel it out. It was a blinding threshold, the place of guilt, where ceremonies drove people back each time to commit another guilty act—sacrifice—to heal the first guilty act: killing. The officiant who continually touches the skin of the black antelope throughout the ceremony, with no apparent reason, mysteriously retraces all this, as if the whole of human history were condensed into that gesture. His contact with the black antelope skin seems, above all, to hark back to that part of history that is most remote, most distant, most obstinate.

Then there was another antelope escape. It happened during the sacrifice of Dak
ṣ
a, the sacrifice that was the catastrophe latent in every sacrifice thereafter. Dak
ṣ
a, the officiant, had not wanted to invite
Ś
iva, the seducer and abductor of his daughter Sat
ī
. He wanted the sacrificial order to exist without this god who had gone beyond it. The missing invitation was the cause of the ruin. In all other ways, no one had ever been such an impeccable officiant as Dak
ṣ
a—and no sacrifice had ever been prepared with such care and such magnificence. But precision and strict order are not enough. To exclude is something that a sacrifice can never do. If the sacrifice does not embrace everything that exists, it is nothing more than a massacre. Or rather: it becomes a massacre. And so the gods, scourged by
Ś
iva’s fury, found themselves crawling across the ground around the altar, bleeding and suffering. The sacrifice then fled, in horror, together with the fire. This time it was not just because they were about to sacrifice the sacrifice but also because the sacrifice had failed, it had shown itself unable to support everything that is. And so it fled to the sky. Without the sacrificial fire, no rite would now be possible. The antelope was seen rising up from Dak
ṣ
a’s altar and rushing toward the sky and into the sky. But there it was reached, once again, by Rudra’s arrow. The sacrifice could be interrupted, suspended, it could escape: but it could not escape being killed. This was the message lodged with the arrow in the flesh of the antelope. A certain observation became inevitable at this point: there is always an urge to escape from the sacrifice. Either because the sacrifice is being performed or because it cannot be performed. Whatever happens, there is no way out of being shot by an arrow. Is this a return to hunting? Or an extension of the sacrifice itself? Is there any need to ask? All that remains is written in the sky—and there the arrow perpetually strikes the antelope. Under that image we live, witnesses to the escape and to the wound.

* * *

Ś
iva, as successor of Rudra in another eon, maintains a close relationship with the antelope. He is accustomed to sitting on a black antelope skin. The antelope is the only animal, apart from the snake, that
Ś
iva keeps in contact with his body. In bronze statuettes, it is often to be found between the fingers of the god’s hand, ready to rush off. When
Ś
iva wanders in the forest as a beggar, an antelope often approaches him and raises its head toward him, and he offers it leaves with his left hand, while in his right he holds a bowl, which is the skull of Brahm
ā
. Like Rudra,
Ś
iva is called
m
ṛ
gavy
ā
dha
, “he who shoots the antelope,” but also
m
ṛ
g
ā
k
ṣ
a
, “he who has the eyes of an antelope.” He is the hunter and the prey. Not because anyone is able to strike
Ś
iva (how could they?), but because
Ś
iva is the totality of sacrifice: that which is performed according to the rites, close to the village, along with that which takes place according to no rules, in the forest of the world.

*   *   *

The journey of the black antelope was also the journey of a remote thought that crossed the passes of Afghanistan to settle on the plains of the Ganges. The Vedic people apparently wished to go no farther. They continued to worship a plant that grew in distant mountains. It was increasingly difficult to get hold of. Less and less frequently could they press its juices. Through that plant, they worshipped rapture. It was the ultimate thing to conquer.

Where the black antelope roams is civilization. And the black antelope has fled from the sacrifice, which is the foundation of civilization. Civilization thus extends as far as where a creature that has fled from civilization roams, a creature that did not want to be killed by civilization.

XXI

KING SOMA

Thousands of pages in the Br
ā
hma
ṇ
as, and all the hymns in the ninth cycle of the
Ṛ
gveda
, are dedicated to
soma.
Of the few
realia
mentioned in the texts,
soma
is the most present. We cannot be sure what it was, except for saying: it was a “juice,”
soma
, which produced intoxication. Attempts at identifying it, from the mid-nineteenth century up to today, have all been rather awkward and unreliable. Nor do they explain why
soma
was already spoken of in the Vedic era as something from the past, for which a substitute had to be found in the rites. But how can its intoxicating effect be substituted? This is one of the many sharp ironies that anyone venturing into the Vedic world encounters. Not surprisingly, it is ignored, intentionally or otherwise, by many scholars who continue to treat
soma
like an algebraic symbol. It is more important—they argue—to make a precise reconstruction of the rites that celebrated
soma
, and less important to know what exactly they celebrated. The moderns, as a rule, are proud when they make statements of this kind, since they are indifferent about substance in general and concerned only with getting the procedures clear. In this way they think they have risen high up the evolutionary ladder.

But not knowing what
soma
was is like not knowing what fire is. For Agni and Soma are two gods, but they are also a flame and a plant—and, through that flame and that plant, they are the only gods in a continual voyage backward and forward between earth and sky. Not to know any more about the plant called
soma
is a grievous gap in our knowledge.

The expanding of the mind caused by
soma
did not stop at the
flammantia moenia mundi
, the blazing walls of the world. It went beyond. The mind darted beyond every barrier and watched everything from high above: “I extend beyond the sky and this great earth,” proclaims Indra (or anyone who feels like Indra). And in the meantime, at the end of every stanza, he repeats, as an obsessive murmur: “Have I drunk
soma
?” The speaker is no longer part of the world, but observes it from outside, as if watching a game or a puppet show. Intoxication, omnipotence, effortlessness: “I want to put this earth here or there,” “Soon I want to push this earth here or there.” The Vedic ritualists measured power on this sensation. In normal life, they lived in temporary huts and migrated with their herds. But when they tasted
soma
, the whole earth and sky became their faithful subjects, ready to let themselves be shaped or annihilated by a sovereign touch. When they spoke of power, they did not mean empires, which they ignored, but that sensation of a single person, of every individual who had taken part in a
soma
sacrifice and had taken a sip from one of the rectangular wooden cups,
camasas
, in accordance with the rules of the liturgy.

Childlike and grandiloquent, Indra was the first to sing of
soma
—and only
soma
could inspire the fervor that allowed him to perform his heroic deeds. One of which was the capture of the
soma
itself, thanks to an inversion of time that was intrinsic in Vedic logic. One day the other gods spitefully refused Indra the
soma.
He had committed too many crimes, beginning with the beheading of the three-headed Vi
ś
var
ū
pa, who after all was a brahmin. But if Indra was to be refused the
soma
, then this should apply as much to the
k
ṣ
atriyas.
The juice that gives the feeling of sovereignty was forbidden to the king of the gods himself and to the men who modeled themselves on him.