carefully—and far exceeded the extent of their hunger. They ate for the pleasure and sense of supremacy felt by those who eat dead flesh.
Yet it was not dead flesh. When they laid the skewers on the fire, they realized those pieces of flesh were moving, as if they were breathing. And above all, they gave out a deep, endless sound. No one else witnessed that scene of supreme horror. There was only one outside observer, the only one who watched and did not eat: Odysseus. It was then that their destinies broke apart forever. Odysseus had suddenly become the lone man (“I am one against many, and you force my hand,” he had said to his companions, heralds of the whole of humanity). He knew he would continue to live among those who kill life. But he would no longer have any fellow travelers. They would soon all be drowned. Odysseus’s only company then was the gleaming-eyed goddess, Athena.
* * *
Men today, who recoil from sacrifice, bow their heads when faced with the self-sacrifice of a god who creates the world (Praj ā pati) or who saves it (Christ). Self-sacrifice is the very essence of the sublime, heroic gesture. Abnegation marks nobility of spirit.
But, apart from the gods, self-sacrifice is also practiced by the animals. There is much evidence, above all in central and eastern Asia, of animals who yield to the hunter to be killed. They are moved to pity by his hunger and offer themselves to his arrows. The supreme gesture belongs to gods and animals. Men can only imitate them.
IV
THE PROGENITOR
The god at the origin of everything didn’t have a name but a title: Praj ā pati, Lord of the Creatures. He discovered this when one of his sons, Indra, told him: “I want to be what you are.” Praj ā pati asked him: “But who ( ka ) am I?” And Indra answered: “‘Exactly what you just said.’ So Praj ā pati became Ka.”
Indra wanted his father’s “greatness” or, according to others, his “splendor.” And Praj ā pati had no difficulty in divesting himself of it. So Indra became king of the gods, even though Praj ā pati had been “the sole lord of creation.” But it was neither “greatness” nor “splendor” that made Praj ā pati the “god alone above the gods,” a formula that smacks of incompatibility only for latter-day readers in the West. What Praj ā pati could not renounce was something else: the unknown, the irreducible unknown. At the moment in which he knew he was Ka, Praj ā pati became guarantor of the uncertainty involved in questioning. He guaranteed that it would always remain. If Ka didn’t exist, the world would be a sequence of questions and answers, at the end of which everything would be fixed once and for all—and the unknown could be erased from life. But since Praj ā pati “is everything”—and Praj ā pati is Ka—there is a question in every part of everything that finds an answer in the name of everything. And this in turn takes us back to the question, which opens onto the unknown. But this is not an unknown that is due to the inadequacy of the human intellect. It is unknown even for the god who includes it in his name. Divine omniscience does not extend to itself.
No wonder the gods, sons of Praj ā pati, increasingly ignored their father, to the point of forgetting him. For a power to be exercised, it has to be based on certainty. And Praj ā pati, though he was the one “whose commandments all the gods acknowledge,” had delegated the exercise of his sovereignty without raising any resistance. He had kept back for himself only the unknown, which was encapsulated in his name. An unknown that surrounded every certainty like an undrainable ocean lapping an island. For the administration of ordinary life, the preeminence of the unknown was a danger—and had to be obliterated. For the fathomless life of the mind—at the point where the mind reconnected with its origin, Praj ā pati—it was the very breath of life. In
Yet it was not dead flesh. When they laid the skewers on the fire, they realized those pieces of flesh were moving, as if they were breathing. And above all, they gave out a deep, endless sound. No one else witnessed that scene of supreme horror. There was only one outside observer, the only one who watched and did not eat: Odysseus. It was then that their destinies broke apart forever. Odysseus had suddenly become the lone man (“I am one against many, and you force my hand,” he had said to his companions, heralds of the whole of humanity). He knew he would continue to live among those who kill life. But he would no longer have any fellow travelers. They would soon all be drowned. Odysseus’s only company then was the gleaming-eyed goddess, Athena.
* * *
Men today, who recoil from sacrifice, bow their heads when faced with the self-sacrifice of a god who creates the world (Praj ā pati) or who saves it (Christ). Self-sacrifice is the very essence of the sublime, heroic gesture. Abnegation marks nobility of spirit.
But, apart from the gods, self-sacrifice is also practiced by the animals. There is much evidence, above all in central and eastern Asia, of animals who yield to the hunter to be killed. They are moved to pity by his hunger and offer themselves to his arrows. The supreme gesture belongs to gods and animals. Men can only imitate them.
IV
THE PROGENITOR
The god at the origin of everything didn’t have a name but a title: Praj ā pati, Lord of the Creatures. He discovered this when one of his sons, Indra, told him: “I want to be what you are.” Praj ā pati asked him: “But who ( ka ) am I?” And Indra answered: “‘Exactly what you just said.’ So Praj ā pati became Ka.”
Indra wanted his father’s “greatness” or, according to others, his “splendor.” And Praj ā pati had no difficulty in divesting himself of it. So Indra became king of the gods, even though Praj ā pati had been “the sole lord of creation.” But it was neither “greatness” nor “splendor” that made Praj ā pati the “god alone above the gods,” a formula that smacks of incompatibility only for latter-day readers in the West. What Praj ā pati could not renounce was something else: the unknown, the irreducible unknown. At the moment in which he knew he was Ka, Praj ā pati became guarantor of the uncertainty involved in questioning. He guaranteed that it would always remain. If Ka didn’t exist, the world would be a sequence of questions and answers, at the end of which everything would be fixed once and for all—and the unknown could be erased from life. But since Praj ā pati “is everything”—and Praj ā pati is Ka—there is a question in every part of everything that finds an answer in the name of everything. And this in turn takes us back to the question, which opens onto the unknown. But this is not an unknown that is due to the inadequacy of the human intellect. It is unknown even for the god who includes it in his name. Divine omniscience does not extend to itself.
No wonder the gods, sons of Praj ā pati, increasingly ignored their father, to the point of forgetting him. For a power to be exercised, it has to be based on certainty. And Praj ā pati, though he was the one “whose commandments all the gods acknowledge,” had delegated the exercise of his sovereignty without raising any resistance. He had kept back for himself only the unknown, which was encapsulated in his name. An unknown that surrounded every certainty like an undrainable ocean lapping an island. For the administration of ordinary life, the preeminence of the unknown was a danger—and had to be obliterated. For the fathomless life of the mind—at the point where the mind reconnected with its origin, Praj ā pati—it was the very breath of life. In
Similar Books
