Ardor (53 page)

“G
ā
yatr
ī
flew toward Soma, sent by those two. While she was carrying him away, the Gandharva Vi
ś
v
ā
vasu stole him from her. The gods realized this: ‘Soma has been carried away from yonder, but he does not come to us, for the Gandharvas have stolen him.’

“They said: ‘The Gandharvas are fond of women: let us send V
ā
c to them and she will return to us with Soma.’ They sent V
ā
c to them and she returned with Soma.

“The Gandharvas pursued her and said: ‘Soma for you, V
ā
c for us.’ ‘So be it,’ said the gods. ‘But if she prefers to come here, do not take her away by force: let us woo her.’ And so they wooed her.

“The Gandharvas recited the Vedas to her, saying, ‘See how we know them, see how we know them.’

“The gods then created the lute and sat playing and singing, saying: ‘Thus we will sing to you, thus we will amuse you.’ She [V
ā
c] turned to the gods; but, in truth, she turned to them frivolously. Since, to go toward the dance and the song, she went away from those who sang hymns and prayed. And so even to this day women are only frivolous beings: for it was in this way that V
ā
c returned, and other women do as she did. And it is for this that they most readily take a fancy to he who dances and sings.

“And so Soma and V
ā
c were with the gods. Now, when someone buys Soma to obtain it, it is to sacrifice with the [Soma] obtained. He who sacrifices with [Soma] not bought, sacri
fi
ces with Soma that is not truly obtained.”

Here is the story of the conquest of Soma, the basis for every liturgical act, told with the usual sobriety and making punctual reference to another passage—much as a Western scholar could do—where there is a full account of the story of Supar
ṇī
and Kadr
ū
. What would the rite be if it didn’t have this radiant substance at its center, which is also the most sought-after celestial guest on earth? The gods are the first for whom life would lose all meaning without him. But the gods, alone, would not be able to capture Soma. They need the help of a being that is both a meter and an animal: G
ā
yatr
ī
, who appears as a large bird. The power of form was never, and will never again be declared as boldly as in this passage: the gods could not have taken off from the earth without the help of a sequence of twenty-four syllables, which is a living being. The story of how the capture took place will continue later on. Here the emphasis is on what happened
after
the capture. First, the celestial obstacle: the Gandharvas, who live in the heavens, do not let Soma escape. Vi
ś
v
ā
vasu snatches him from G
ā
yatr
ī
. Once again, the gods wouldn’t know what to do without the help of another female being: V
ā
c, Speech. The story that follows is not just a primordial comedy of the sexes, that perhaps only Aristophanes would have known how to stage with equal skill. Here it is a metaphysical game—and for the first time, with great clarity and concision, an equivalence is established: Speech-Woman-Money. Lévi-Strauss would reach the same conclusion in
Structures élémentaires de la parenté.
And didn’t Western science, in its most noble form, speak through him? It is an equivalence full of ambiguities and pitfalls. But also of immense power. And the access path to all modernity: all that is needed is for exchange to expand and free itself from all respect—and we will be in the new world, preordained and perhaps even outlined in the mould of antiquity. This alone would be extraordinary: but even greater is the corrosive criticism that the civilization founded on
brahman
exercises here upon itself. If the frivolous V
ā
c had not gladly agreed to be used as barter, like a
putain au grand cœur
; if the gods—to heighten even more the outrageousness of the scenario—had not chosen to dance and sing to get her back, rather than chanting the Vedas, as the Gandharvas do, touchingly in their innocence, then Soma, the hypostasis of the Vedas, would never have reached the gods. Lastly, if Soma had not been bought—as the ritualist punctiliously states at the end—then it would not be the real Soma, the effective Soma, the Soma “obtained” that makes it possible to “obtain.” The deliciously erotic and mocking scene of the contest for Soma between the innocent Gandharvas—as innocent and fond of women as only celestial beings can be—and the wily gods is also the scene that introduces us to the realm of the value of exchange, all too familiar to any modern reader. There is no interval between the eventful arrival on earth of Soma, a self-sufficient and radiant substance, and the universal establishment of exchange, where Soma even takes on the role of hidden guarantor and surety, like gold to currency for Marx. The archaic and the ultramodern are here described at the same time, in the same terms. Perhaps this is the secret of the G
ā
yatr
ī
meter.

*   *   *

The text of the
Ś
atapatha Br
ā
hma
ṇ
a
had already told us: “In the chapter on the
dhi
ṣṇ
ya
fires it is said how the affair of Supar
ṇī
and Kadr
ū
came to pass.” At last we reach it—and we read this:

“Now Soma was in the heavens and the gods were here [on the earth]. The gods desired: ‘Would that Soma might come to us; we could sacrifice with him, if he came.’ They produced two apparitions, Supar
ṇī
and Kadr
ū
; Supar
ṇī
in truth was V
ā
c (Speech) and Kadr
ū
was this [Earth]. Disagreement broke out between them.

“They then argued and said: ‘Whichever of us can see farthest will have the other in her power.’ ‘So be it.’ Kadr
ū
then said: ‘Look over there!’

“Supar
ṇī
then said: ‘On the yonder shore of the ocean there is a white horse by a post, I can see it, do you also see it?’ ‘Of course I see it!’ Then Kadr
ū
said: ‘Its tail hangs down [from the post]; now the wind blows it, I see it.’

“Now, when Supar
ṇī
said: ‘On the yonder shore of the ocean,’ the ocean in truth is the altar, with this she meant altar; ‘There is a white horse by a post,’ the white horse, in truth, is Agni and the post means the sacrificial post. And when Kadr
ū
said: ‘Its tail hangs down; now the wind blows it, I see it,’ this is none other than the rope.

“Supar
ṇī
then said: ‘Come, let us fly there to see which of us has won.’ Kadr
ū
said: ‘Fly there yourself, you say which of us has won.’

“Supar
ṇī
then flew there; and she saw that all was as Kadr
ū
had said. When she returned, she [Kadr
ū
] said to her: ‘Have you or I won?’ ‘You!’ she replied. This is the story of Supar
ṇī
and Kadr
ū
.

“Then Kadr
ū
said: ‘I have won your Self (
ā
tm
ā
nam
); over there is Soma in the heavens; go and fetch him for the gods, and with this redeem yourself from death.’ ‘So be it!’ replied [Supar
ṇī
]. Then she produced the meters; and G
ā
yatr
ī
seized Soma from the sky.

“He [Soma] was closed between two golden cups; the sharp edges closed together at every blink of an eye; and those two cups were, in truth, Consecration and Ardor (
tapas
). Those Gandharva guardians watched over him; they are these hearths, these fire-priests.

“She [G
ā
yatr
ī
] snatched one of the cups and gave it to the gods. This was the Consecration: and so the gods consecrated themselves.

“Then she snatched the other cup and gave it to the gods. This was Ardor: and so the gods practiced ardor, namely the
upasads
[triple offerings of ghee to Agni, Soma, and Vi
ṣṇ
u], for the
upasads
are ardor.”

What Kadr
ū
(Earth) sees and her sister Supar
ṇī
(Speech) does not see—in the far distance beyond the ocean where that horse appears who is Agni—is the rope that ties the horse to the sacrificial post: “None other than the rope.” Speech, in comparison with Earth, is she who does not see with total precision. And total precision is a rope that is tied to death. And so Kadr
ū
challenges her sister to carry out the very action that can redeem her from death: the theft of
soma.
It is as if Kadr
ū
had said: Since you are like this—and you do not see what ties you to death—you have to fly off into the heavens and carry out that brave task which alone can redeem you from death. Otherwise, not seeing the rope that ties you to the sacrificial post means being already dead—or at least having lost your Self.

*   *   *

Existence becomes complete only in the presence of
soma.
The story of the abduction of
soma
is therefore, so far as humans are concerned, the basis for everything else. A story of release and at the same time of redemption, of a gift which is at the same time the extinction of a debt. It is no surprise, then, that the story of Supar
ṇī
holds within itself the principle that has governed everyone’s life since then: “As soon as he is born, man is born as a person owing a debt to death; when he offers sacrifices, he redeems his person from death, in the same way that Supar
ṇī
redeemed herself for the gods.” These few lines explain with great clarity the reasons behind the radically different assumptions that separate Vedic India from the West. Or at least from the unspoken assumption that, after long elaboration, has ended up becoming Western
good sense
: that vision of man as a
tabula rasa
, the wax tablet to which Locke referred. This is the only assumption that allows the complicated mechanisms of society to operate (and for what else—some say—is thought required?). Certainly, the West is also Plato, for whom an equivalent to Vedic “debt” is the recovery of memory. But here we are talking about assumptions that support living in society. And, in particular, of those that are only rendered explicit with the beginnings of the modern age (starting with Locke). At that moment, what had previously worked covertly becomes evident. And it converges in the principal idea of empiricism: the individual as an entirely unprejudiced perceptive apparatus, a being that takes form on the basis of what gradually has an impact on his senses—and nothing else.

“Debt,”
ṛṇ
a
, is a key word for Vedic man. His whole life is a continual attempt to settle four debts that weigh upon him from birth: debt to the gods, to the
ṛṣ
is
, to his ancestors, to men. They will be paid off, respectively, through sacrifice, through studying the Veda, through procreation, and through offering hospitality. The fact that there are four debts must not lead to confusion. They originate from one debt alone—the debt toward death and its god, Yama. Yet the text here doesn’t name the god, but speaks only of “a debt toward death (
ṛṇ
a
ṃ
m
ṛ
tyo
ḥ
).”

Life is an asset that death has left in trust for all humans (to be used while it lasts). An asset whose restitution death requires, making man return to death. This is the basis of every life, its innate imbalance. But to this imbalance there is a counterbalance, from the part of the gods: when man offers the oblation to certain divinities, “whoever the divinities are, they consider it as a debt for them to fulfill the desire of the sacrificer at the moment in which he makes the oblation.”

Here, another key word appears:
ś
raddh
ā
, “trust in the effectiveness of ritual.” Which is the Vedic way of expressing our “belief.” And above all, as Benveniste observed, “the exact formal correspondence between the Latin
cr
ē
-d
ō
and the Sanskrit
ś
rad-dh
ā
is the proof of a very ancient heritage.” The sacrificer, with his defect as an innate debtor, faithfully offers the oblation, in the belief that at that same moment the gods will begin to recognize they have a debt to him. Only the institution of a double obligation—of people to the gods and of the gods to people—ensures that flow which is life itself. By obtaining a credit with the gods, man (namely the sacrificer) delays, postpones, defers the moment when he will have to settle his debt with death. Every action is founded on this double imbalance. On the basis of this imbalance every action acquires meaning.

Malamoud observes that the word
ṛṇ
a
, “debt,” apparently has no etymology. The four innate debts, and the very notion of debt, are presented baldly, without explanations—and are destined to go far, remaining alive and powerfully felt much later on, in the world of
bhakti
, of “devotion,” which claims to do without ritual orthodoxy. To this Malamoud adds, by way of a parallel, that “there is no mythology of indebtedness.” This is surely true, in fact, though with one exception: the story of the two sisters Kadr
ū
and Supar
ṇī
(or, in other texts, Vinat
ā
) and the capture of Soma—a story that is, by no coincidence, the basis for all other Vedic stories. That story is enough to establish the perpetually unequal system of exchange between men and gods. But also between life and death.