Ardor (29 page)

Unwieldy, solemn, perfectly right. The French school, in truth, from Sylvain Lévi to Mauss, Renou, Lilian Silburn, Mus, Minard, and Malamoud, hadn’t felt the need to issue such a declaration of principle. They all knew that the Br
ā
hma
ṇ
as were an immense and largely unexplored mine of thoughts—and they were not concerned about declaring it. They concentrated instead on the task of bringing the texts to light and connecting them to one another. But we know that German science always needs legitimation. And so, on that July day, Karl Hoffmann assumed the responsibility of formally accepting, after almost three thousand years, the formless and semiclandestine corpus of the Br
ā
hma
ṇ
as among those works of thought that can be classed as indispensable to humanity. It was as if a group of patients had suddenly been moved from a mental hospital to an academy.

*   *   *

During the early years of the twentieth century, anthropologists were divided in two rival camps: one declared that ritual preceded myth, the other that myth preceded ritual. Childish squabbles—as became apparent a few years later. Mauss saw it as such from the very beginning. For him it was clear that “myth and ritual cannot be dissociated except in the abstract”—and he wrote this in 1903. The important thing was not to set illusory, unfounded precedents—on one side or the other—but to show “the interpenetration of ritual and myth, to reveal the living organism which they form through their union.” And thirty years later he would devote an entire course, using Strehlow’s evidence from Australia, to illustrate cases of perfect interdependence between ritual and myth, that showed “their solidarity, their intimacy.” On the one hand, ritual appeared each time as a “dramatic representation (verbal and physical) of myth,” whereas myth, if construed as a simple story and “detached from its cult necessities,” ended up revealing itself to be “without real foundation, without practical essence and without symbolic flavor.”

But it was exactly this that required an explanation. Why do particular gestures have meaning only if they are based on a story? Why do particular stories need to be told through particular gestures? Here we approach a riddle that lies hidden in the depths of the mind. It is the riddle of the
simulacrum
, of the
eíd
ō
lon
, of the image that
must
become visible in order to be effective. This is a characteristic not just of certain cultures, but of whatever culture, in the same way that Pythagoras’s theorem, though formulated in Greece at a particular time, and in Mesopotamia even earlier, did not belong only to the Greek or Mesopotamian cultures, since it is universally applicable. Yet a certain degree of lucidity has to be achieved in a particular place and at a particular time over certain relationships. What Mauss described as the necessary “intimacy” between myth and ritual, the interaction between liturgy and story, had perhaps never been so clear and so effectively put into action as in the time and in the doctrine of the Br
ā
hma
ṇ
as. It should not, therefore, be a case of anthropology bending benevolently over the Br
ā
hma
ṇ
as to extract some still useful relic from the jumble. But the Br
ā
hma
ṇ
as themselves might help anthropology to recognize something on which its whole practice is based.

X

THE LINE OF THE FIRES

Man’s initial state is formless, opaque, composite, and also “impure.” Man is a being who “speaks untruth.” He could carry on living like this, though leaving no significant trace. Otherwise he must compose a series of connected gestures that make an “action,”
karman.
The quintessential action, the one that presupposes and assures that gestures have a meaning, is the sacrificial work.

But what is the origin of this work whose first peculiarity is that of being the model for all other work? Desire. Not a general, roving, multifarious, shifting desire—for “mortal man has many desires” and this plurality of desires dwells unremittingly within him from the first to the last moment of his life—but a
single
desire that seeks to detach itself from every other, to break its ties with the mesh of other desires and find the path to fulfillment. How? By becoming a “vow,”
vrata.
Entering a vow is like entering another space, that of detached desire, which binds itself, barricades itself from the outside world, and builds a sequence of gestures within the new space that reaffirm it each time. What then is the first of these gestures? To touch water. But not anywhere. To touch it on a point of the invisible line that joins the
ā
havan
ī
ya
fire and the
g
ā
rhapatya
fire. This is the
line of the fires.
The
g
ā
rhapatya
, “domestic,” hearth is circular, sited to the west. There the fire is lit. There burn the embers with which the other fires will be lit. Not far away, to the east, on any type of ground, freshly swept with
pal
āś
a
branches (
Butea frondosa
, Flame of the Forest, but it should also be thought of as
brahman
), a square hearth is built, called
ā
havan
ī
ya.
On this fire the oblations will be offered—and it can be lit only with an ember taken from the
g
ā
rhapatya
fire. The
ā
havan
ī
ya
fire is the sky, the
g
ā
rhapatya
fire is the earth (and it is circular since the earth is a circle at the center of other circles.) Between the two fires is the atmosphere, where we breathe, where we act. In the middle there is also “the trunk of the body,” where the heart, life, beats. There are other fires, but these two must be set up first:
ā
havan
ī
ya
and
g
ā
rhapatya.
They provide the tension on which everything rests. Everything is supposed to happen on the invisible line that connects them. The miracle behind everything else can happen only here—only here can things acquire meaning. If man wishes to escape from the untruth in which he is born, and in which he is destined to remain, he must tread that line, touch the water there and formulate a desire. In this way he will
enter the vow
, enter the hazardous state in which truth can be spoken, in which desire can be fulfilled, in which the gesture assumes a meaning. If every sacri
fi
ce is a “ship that sails toward the sky,” the two fires,
ā
havan
ī
ya
and
g
ā
rhapatya
, will be the sides of that ship, the limits within which the pilot (each and every sacrificer) must move, from the moment in which he begins to carry out certain movements: those movements, if they take place
between the two fires
, acquire a meaning that separates them from the ebb and flow of human actions.

The scene has to be observed from the viewpoint of the gods. Before a man (any man) crosses the line of the fires, the gods ignore him. Then, “having walked around the
ā
havan
ī
ya
fire, from the east, he passes between it and the
g
ā
rhapatya
fire. For the gods do not know this man; but when he now passes between the fires they know him and think: ‘This is he who is about to make an oblation to us.’” When the ceremony begins, the man must first make himself recognized. The gods, until then, seem not to notice him. His destiny seems unimportant to them, his essence—undefined. They are huddled around the altar, but this is all they know about the earth, and all that interests them. So to make himself noticed, and then recognized, the man passes between the two main fires. That is the line on which tension vibrates, giving meaning. When the gods see someone crossing it, they immediately know something is going on. At that moment the man is recognized and finally exists. And he exists only so far as it is he who will present an offering. Man’s original lack of substance is gone and he becomes a being with whom the gods will deal. This is how relations between men and gods are established.

The sacrificer’s first concern will still be not to act in vain: the oblations are offered, the complex liturgical machinery is set in motion, but the gods can still ignore him. They may not recognize the sacrificer. More than the Hegelian recognition between master and servant, Vedic men were worried about the recognition between gods and sacrificer. Hence the excited dialogue between
adhvaryu
and
agn
ī
dh
, his assistant, who is responsible for lighting the fire: “‘Has he gone,
agn
ī
dh
?,’ and with this he means: ‘Has he really gone?’ ‘He has gone,’ replies the other. ‘Ask that they listen to him.’” The officiants are those who are already familiar with the world of the sky. This is the basis of their existence. What is more, they depend on the ritual fees they receive from the sacrificer, who is, however, an ordinary man, someone whom the gods may even ignore.

The dialogue between the officiants takes place on a barren open space, marked out by three fires. The officiants had to understand whether the rite was
successful.
But how? By talking about the invisible, about something that was happening—perhaps—between the gods, between them and the sacrificer, along that aerial track which was the sacrifice. At that moment they might have seemed absorbed in monologues, participants in an identical hallucination.

*   *   *

According to Coomaraswamy, “the oldest Indian type of sacred architecture, both enclosed and roofed,” is the
sadas
, the hut where the sacrificer or the initiand spends the night before starting the liturgical acts. “A place ‘apart’ (
tiras
,
antarhita
) to which the gods resort.” A place that helps us to understand the reason for every closed space: for “the gods are segregated from men, and thus secret also is this which is closed on every side.” The sacrificer sleeps there and, so long as he is there, “truly he comes close to the gods and becomes one of the divinities.” But nothing is permanent: soon after the rite, the hut will be demolished. And yet it is in this empty, fragile, and makeshift place, before even the temple came into being, that contact is made with the gods. Emptiness and separation from the rest of the world are enough. The first image of what will one day be the
study
, not just of St. Jerome, but of every writer: that room which is a witness to writing and protects it with “the cloak of initiation and of ardor.”

*   *   *

It is a premise of Vedic sacrifice that only while man is preparing and celebrating it can he become something more than human. It doesn’t matter what he does up to the moment when the fire is set up: he will still just be human. So the night before the
agny
ā
dheya
, the “setting up of the fires,” he doesn’t even have to remain awake: “Until he has set up a fire of his own, he is simply a man; so he can also sleep, if he so wishes.” Certainly, as it says a little earlier, “the gods are awake”—and coming close to the gods implies participation in their vigil. But it would be pointless of him to do so unless he has his own fire, unless he enters into that opus which is the sacrifice. Wakefulness is the pivotal point of the Vedic world. But it operates only within the uninterrupted work that begins when he sets up his own fire. In any event, Vedic men knew that every evil sprang from a troubled state of mind. They wanted their enemies or rivals to be afflicted by “bad dreams” before every other infirmity (which they listed: “lack of offspring, homelessness, ruin”).