Free Ardor by Roberto Calasso

disappeared serves to give sustenance to something else, in the invisible. This was the lesson that Varu ṇ a sought to give his son.
    It is easy to imagine from the story of Bh ṛ gu how the Vedic seers were skilled in detecting evil with supreme ease. Evil for them was already apparent at the moment when an axe first struck a tree or a hand uprooted a plant. It was metaphysical evil, inherent in everything that is forced to destroy a part of the world in order to survive, therefore above all in mankind. Compared with the moderns, who tend to limit evil to intentional acts, the Vedic seers had a conception of evil that covered a far wider area. And it included certain involuntary acts, as well as acts that just cannot be avoided if mankind wants to survive—for example, the act of eating. Evil is therefore everywhere and in everything. This explains why sacrifice is also everywhere and in everything. Sacrifice is the act by which evil is brought to consciousness, using an art learned from “he who knows thus.” That process in which evil is repeated and is directed, in its entirety, toward consciousness, through gestures and formulas, is the supreme remedy we can use in combating evil. Otherwise, all that remains is the mechanism revealed during Bh ṛ gu’s journey. Those who eat will be eaten. Those who slaughter will be slaughtered. Those who eat food will themselves become food.
    The widespread atrocities, the endless and unrestrainable alternation between devourer and devoured, that Bh ṛ gu had encountered during his wanderings to the four corners of the world—and which his father, Varu ṇ a, taught him to overcome through the practice of sacrifice—never disappear, but indeed become threateningly apparent during the performance of the sacrifice itself. The sacrificial flames are like eyes, “they fix their attention on the sacrificer and focus on him.” What they would most desire is not the oblation, but the sacrificer himself. In front of the fire, the sacrificer feels he is being observed, stared at. The eye that is studying him is the eye of the fire. Before he himself formulates a desire, he feels it is the fire that desires him, his flesh. Here occurs the substitution, the redemption of Self: a last, swift operation to which the sacrificer resorts so as to offer the fire something instead of himself. The sacrificer offers food to avoid becoming food himself.
    Bh ṛ gu encountered during his terrifying journey a world in which animals devoured people. But this wasn’t just a reversal of the order. It was also a lightning glimpse of the history of humanity, as if someone had at last taught Bh ṛ gu about some of his forebears. The period during which men, rather than devouring, were devoured is none other than the first, very long chapter of their history. Varu ṇ a wanted his son’s education to include this vision of the past, in the same way that a young boy might be sent to a good college to learn his country’s history. The Vedics were also this: they ignored history, more than any other people—but they remained in contact, more so than any other people, with remote prehistory, which showed through in their rites and in their myths.
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    In the Vedic landscape there is one object that evokes terror and veneration: the sacrificial post. Of all the emblems of that time, it is the only one still visible. In certain Indian villages, even today, a piece of wood can be seen sticking out of the ground, for no apparent reason. Madeleine Biardeau has found many of these in various parts of India, noting that they are that “post,” y ū pa , the “thunderbolt” of which the Vedic ritualists spoke. But why a “thunderbolt”? To understand this, we have to go back to a distant story:
    “There are an animal and a sacrificial post, for they never immolate an animal without a post. This is why: animals did not originally submit to the fact of becoming food, in the way that they