Free Ardor by Roberto Calasso Page A

have now become food. In the same way as man walks upright on two legs, they also walked upright on two legs.
    “Then the gods noticed that thunderbolt, i.e., that sacrificial post; they put it in the ground and, for fear of it, the animals became crooked and four-legged, and so they became food, as today they are food, because they gave in: this is why they immolate the animal at the post, and never without a post.
    “After having brought the victim forward and lit the fire, he ties the animal. This is why it is so: the animals did not originally submit to the fact of becoming sacrificial food, in the way that they have now become sacrificial food and are offered in the fire. The gods cage them: even caged in this way, they did not give in.
    “They spoke: ‘In truth, these animals do not know how this happens, that sacrificial food is offered in the fire, and they do not know that safe place [the fire]: let us offer fire in fire after having fastened the animals and lit the fire, and they will know that this is how the sacrificial food is prepared, that this is its place; that it is in the fire itself that the sacrificial food is offered: and they will then yield and be favorably disposed to being immolated.’
    “After having first fastened the animals and lit the fire, they offered fire in fire; and then they [the animals] knew that this is truly how the sacrificial food is prepared, that this is the place; that it is in the fire itself that the sacrificial food is offered. And as a result they yielded and were favorably disposed to being immolated.”
    It would be very hard to find another text that describes with such great precision, with such great pathos, the decisive step that formalized the slaughter of domestic animals: the establishment of the meat diet. It was a necessity, but above all a guilty act, an act of enormous guilt. To justify its necessity, form was given to the theological edifice of the sacrifice, a temple-labyrinth, full of passages and tunnels, with countless junctures. And the sacrifice was needed to incorporate the guilt within it, indeed it would intensify and preserve it, as if in a casket. That guilt alluded to another, more deep-seated guilt, a consequence of which would be the sacrifice: the guilt of imitation , of that distant decision that had led a species of beings who had been prey to assume the behavior typical of their predator enemies. The first act against nature that would one day be seen as human nature itself—no other species would be so bold.
    More than a “sick animal,” according to Hegel’s definition, man is an animal who essentially imitates (and imitation can also be seen as a human sickness). Man is the only being in the animal kingdom who has relinquished his nature, if by nature we mean that repertory of behavior with which every species appears to be equipped from birth. Strong, but not so strong that he didn’t have to recognize his own defenselessness in the face of other creatures—predators—man decided at a certain moment (which may also have lasted a hundred thousand years) not to fight against his adversaries but to imitate them. It was then that the being who had been prey taught himself to become a predator. He had teeth, not fangs—and his fingernails were not enough to rip into flesh. Nor did his body produce a poison, like snakes, who were formidable predators. He therefore had to resort to something no other predator had: the weapon, the instrument, the tool. This is how the flint and the arrow were created. At this point, through imitation and the production of tools, two important steps were taken—mimesis and technology—which the remainder of history would try to develop, up until today. Looking back, the upheaval produced by that first step—of mimesis, by which humans, of all creatures, decided to imitate precisely those who had so often killed them—is incomparably more radical and devastating than any subsequent step. A response to