Ardor, p.2
Ardor, page 2
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Among all those who belonged to the Indus civilization, we know one name alone: Su-ilisu, an interpreter. He appears as a dwarf, or a child, on an Akkadian seal. He is sitting on the lap of a person wearing rich, heavy ornaments. The words carved over the image read: “Su-ilisu, translator of Meluhha.” Other seals speak of merchandise from Meluhha, from that Indus civilization whose territory was bigger than that of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Persia, and which lasted at least a thousand years, finally dying out, for reasons entirely unknown, around 1600 B.C.E. The names are lost. The only one that remains is that of Su-ilisu, interpreter of a language that still resists all attempts to decipher it—assuming that it is a language, a point over which there is still dispute.
For several years there have been feverish attempts to unearth horse bones in the Punjab. Brandished as blunt weapons, they were supposed to have been used to defeat and disperse the odious Indo-Europeans who were said to have come from outside, from beyond the Khyber Pass. Thus it would be proved that their innovation—the horse—was already to be found in those regions. For—according to some—all that is most ancient and memorable must necessarily grow on Indian soil. And the undeciphered script of Harappa should already contain quite enough to make it clear that Sanskrit and the Ṛgveda descend from there. None of this has been supported by the archaeological evidence, and it goes against what is said in the Vedic texts. The soma, whatever it might have been, grew in the mountains, which aren’t part of the landscape of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro. As for warriors riding on chariots with horses, there is no trace of them in the seals of the Indus civilization. If one compares it with the Ṛgveda, it is difficult to avoid the impression that they are two parallel worlds. And yet they must have come into contact in some manner. But in some manner that still remains unclear.
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In Vedic India, history was not something worthy of note. Historiography makes its appearance much later, not just many centuries after Herodotus and Thucydides, but at the time when the medieval chronicles were being written in the West. The chronology to which the ritualists refer is generally a time of the gods and of what took place before the gods. Only in rare cases is reference made to something “antiquated,” so as to indicate a passage to the time of mankind. And invariably it relates to changes within a ritual. For example, in the most complicated and impressive ritual, the aśvamedha, the “horse sacrifice”: “That aśvamedha is, so to speak, an antiquated sacrifice, for what part of it is celebrated and what part not?” After having followed the meticulous, bewildering instructions on the hundreds of animals to be sacrificed during the aśvamedha and on the various ways they had to be treated, on the beads to be threaded into the mane of the horse and on the “ways of the knife” that had to be followed when cutting into the flesh of the horse, making a sudden change of course it is said that the “aśvamedha is an antiquated sacrifice” (or “abandoned,” utsannayajña). Perhaps the speculations of the liturgists already related to a glorious lost past, when there was still a perfect link between the chants, the numbers, and the animals killed. Perhaps they already felt like seventeenth-century scholars waging a war of quotations over some long-gone event. But the fewer the references to the pure, corrosive sequence of time, the more devastating are their effects. And any attempt to establish an immediate, simple, and unambiguous relationship between the texts of the Vedic ritualists and any factual reality will appear all the more futile. Unlike the Egyptians, the Sumerians, or the Chinese of the Zhou dynasty, they avoided linking events to the years. Verum ipsum factum did not apply. Liturgical acts were the only factum connected to a verum. All that was carried out before and outside the ritual belonged to the vast frayed realm of untruth.
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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 paśu, 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 Ṛgveda 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 Ṛgveda, 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 Āryas 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 evaṃ 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 dhī? 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 Saraṇyū and the Aśvins—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, eídōlon), the reflection (chāyā), 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 ṛṣis often spoke, in the hymns of the Ṛgveda, 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 Kathāsaritsāgara, 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 Āryas 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 Ṛgveda 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.
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When Louis Renou published his first translations of the Ṛgveda in 1938, he quoted the words of Paul-Louis Couchoud as an epigraph to the Introduction: “Poetry was on the wrong track, [Mallarmé] said with a smile, ‘starting from the great Homeric deviation.’ And if anyone asked him what there was before Homer, he answered: ‘Orphism.’ The Vedic hymns … have something to do with Mallarmé’s Orphism.” Renou didn’t return to this theme in the Introduction, nor did he mention Mallarmé again. But epigraphs are the locus electionis of latent thoughts. That was the right place to suggest that the history of poetry did not end with Mallarmé, but had been Mallarméan at birth. “The Orphic explanation of the Earth,” the ultimate definition of poetry according to Mallarmé, does not apply so much to the late Orphic hymns, but above all to the Vedic hymns from which, a few streets away from rue de Rome, Abel Bergaigne was already unraveling the endless tangle of images. In order to feel the Mallarméan resonance it is enough to open the hymns at random, for example at the beginning of 4.58, the hymn to ghṛtá, ghee, the clarified butter used in rituals. This is how Renou translated it in 1938: “From the ocean the wave of honey has surged: with the stalk of the soma it has assumed the form of ambrosia. This is the secret name of the ghee: tongue of the gods, navel of the immortal.”
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For a Westerner trained in philology, it is hard to think of anything more frustrating than Indian history. Quicksand in every direction. Dates and figures never certain. Here the centuries move back and forth as months do elsewhere. No passage is entirely convincing. What brought about the passage from the Ṛgveda to the Brāhmaṇas? And why from the Brāhmaṇas to the Upaniṣads? And from the Upaniṣads to the Sūtras? Every literary genre is already sketched out in what came before. Or else it stands in contrast with what came before. Alternatively—and this is the most disconcerting case—the two genres coexist. How can we unravel this knot? Or how, at least, can we fathom its densest part? The path that takes us farthest is still the self-referential one. The Ṛgveda has to be understood through the Ṛgveda—and nothing else (as in Bergaigne and in Renou). The Brāhmaṇas are understood through the Brāhmaṇas—and nothing else (as in Lévi and in Minard). Meanwhile the passage from the Ṛgveda to the Brāhmaṇas is still uncharted, or barely explored terrain. As if understanding Homer made it impossible to understand Plato—and the other way around. Whereas the whole of Greece must inevitably be seen as stretching between Homer and Plato.
