Ka

II

Prajāpati was alone. He didn’t even know whether he existed or not. “So to speak,” iva. (As soon as one touches on something crucial, it’s as well to qualify what one has said with the particle iva, which doesn’t tie us down.) There was only the mind, manas. And what is peculiar about the mind is that it doesn’t know whether it exists or not. But it comes before everything else. “There is nothing before the mind.” Then, even prior to establishing whether it existed or not, the mind desired. It was continuous, diffuse, undefined. Yet, as though drawn to something exotic, something belonging to another species of life, it desired what was definite and separate, what had shape. A Self, ātman—that was the name it used. And the mind imagined that Self as having consistency. Thinking, the mind grew red hot. It saw thirty-six thousand fires flare up, made of mind, made with mind. Suspended above the fires were thirty-six thousand cups, and these too were made of mind.

Prajāpati lay with his eyes closed. Between head and breast an ardor burned within him, like water seething in silence. It was constantly transforming something: it was tapas. But what was it transforming? The mind. The mind was what transformed and what was transformed. It was the warmth, the hidden flame behind the bones, the succession and dissolution of shapes sketched on darkness — and the sensation of knowing that that was happening. Everything resembled something else. Everything was connected to something else. Only the sensation of conseriousness resembled nothing at all. And yet all resemblanees llowed back and forth within it. It was the “indistinct wave.” Each resemblance was a crest of that wave. At the time, “this world was nothing but water.” And then? “In the midst of the waves a single seer.” Already the waters were the mind. But why that eye? Within the mind came that split that precedes all others, that implies all others. There was consciousness and there was an eye watching consciousness. In the same mind were two beings. Who might become three, thirty, three thousand. Eyes that watched eyes that watched eyes. But that first step was enough in itself. All the other eyes were there in that “one seer” and in the waters.

The waters yearned. Alone, they burned. “They burned their heat.” A golden shell took shape in the wave. “This, the one, was born from the strength of the heat.” And inside the shell, over the are of a year, the body of Prajāpati took shape. But “the year didn’t exist” then. Time appeared as the organ of a single being, nesting inside that being, who drifted on the waters, with no support. After a year the being began to emit syllables, which were the earth, the air, the distant sky. Already he knew he was Father Time. Prajāpati was granted a life of a thousand years: he looked out before him, beyond the cresting waves, and far, far away glimpsed a strip of earth, the faint line of a distant shore. His death.

Prajāpati was the one “self-existing” being, svayaṃbhū. But this did not make him any less vulnerable than any creature born. He had no knowledge, didn’t have qualities. He was the first self-made divinity. He didn’t know the meters, not in the beginning. Then he felt a simmering somewhere inside. He saw a chant — and finally let it out. Where from? From the suture in his skull.

Born of the waters’ desiring, Prajāpati begat “all this,” idaṃ sarvam, but he was the only one who couldn’t claim to have a progenitor — not even a mother. If anything he had many mothers, for the waters are an irreducible feminine plural. The waters were his daughters too, as though from the beginning it was important to show that in every essential relationship generation is reciprocal.

The mind: a flow restricted by no bank or barrier, crossed by flashes that fade away. A circle would have to be drawn, a frame, a templum. “Settle down,” Prajāpati told himself. But everything pitched about. “Need a solid base,” pratiṣṭha, he said. “Otherwise my children will wander around witless. If nothing stays the same, how can they ever calculate anything? How can they see the equivalences?” As he was thinking this, he lay on a lotus leaf, delicate and flimsy, blown along by the breeze, which was himself. He thought: “The waters are the foundation of all there is. But the waters are the doctrine too, the Vedas. Too difficult. Who of those to be born will understand? Need to hide, to cover at least a small part of the waters. Need earth.” In the shape of a boar he dove into the deep. Surfacing, his snout was smeared with mud. He began to spread it out on the lotus leaf, with loving care. “This is the earth,” he said. “Now I’ve spread it, I’ll need some stones to keep it still.” He disappeared again. Then he arranged a frame of white stones around the now dry mud. “You will be its guardians,” he said. Now the earth was taut as a cowhide. Tired as he was, Prajāpati lay down on it. For the first time he touched the earth. And for the first time the earth was burdened with a weight.

The dried slime covering the lotus leaf set in a thin layer. Yet it sufficed to give some impression of stability. The white stones sketched out an enclosure, allowed one to get one’s bearings. It was this, more than anything else, that was reassuring, that invited thought. Beneath, immediately beneath, flowed the waters, as ever.

While Prajāpati’s back lay glued to the earth, time stretched out within him. One by one, his joints were coated, inside and out, by a corrosive patina: past and future.

In his solitude, Prajāpati, the Progenitor, thought: “How can I reproduce?” He concentrated inside, and a warmth radiated from within. Then he opened his mouth. Out came Agni, Fire, the devourer. Prajāpati looked. With his open mouth he had created, and now an open mouth was coming toward him. Could it really want to eat him, its own creator, so soon? He couldn’t believe it. But now Prajāpati knew terror. He looked around. The earth was bare. Grasses, trees, they were only in his mind. “So who can it want to eat? There’s no one but me,” he repeated. Terror left him speechless. Then Prajāpati knew the first anguish and the first doubt. He must invent a food for the creature he had made if he wasn’t to end up in Agni’s mouth. Prajāpati rubbed his hands together to conjure up an offering. But all that appeared was some soggy stuff, matted with hairs. Agni wouldn’t want that. He rubbed his hands together again — and out came a white, liquid substance. “Should I offer it? Or maybe not?” thought Prajāpati, paralyzed by terror. Then the wind rose and a light filled the sky. Agni devoured the offering and was gone.

Prajāpati sensed he had a companion, a “second” being, dvitīya, within him. It was a woman, Vāc, Word. He let her out. He looked at her. Vāc “rose like a continuous stream of water.” She was a column of liquid, without beginning or end. Prajāpati united with her. He split her into three parts. Three sounds came out of his throat in his amorous thrust: a, ka, ho. A was the earth, ka the space between, ho the sky. With those three syllables the discontinuous stormed into existence. From eight drops were born the Vasus, from eleven the Rudras, from twelve the Ādityas. The world, which didn’t yet exist, was already full of gods. Thirty-one born from as many drops, then Sky and Earth: which made thirty-three. Plus there was ka, the space between, where Prajāpati was. Thirty-four. Silently, Vāc slipped back into Prajāpati, into the cavity that was ever her home.

When creating the gods, Prajāpati decided to issue them forth into this world because the worlds below, in the depths of the sky, were pitted and impracticable as a dense thicket. The earth had the advantage of being insignificant. Everything still to be built. There was a clearing — and the wind whistling through empty space.

But no sooner had they appeared than the gods were gone. To seek the sky? They took no notice of the Progenitor. They turned their backs on him at once. The earth was just a point of departure, beneath consideration, a desolate way station. Prajāpati was left behind, alone again, last not first. Something held him back, something still there waiting for him: Mṛtyu, Death. One of his own creatures.

In the dusty clearing, Prajāpati watched Death. Death watched Prajāpati, symmetrical, motionless as his adversary. Each was waiting for the right moment to overcome the other. Prajāpati practiced tapas. He generated heat within himself. Now and then, in that dark period of silent affliction, Prajāpati raised his arms. Upon which a globe of light would rise from his armpits and shoot off to bury itself in the vault of the sky. So the stars were born.

The first equivalences were the sampads that flashed across Prajāpati’s mind as he was dueling with Death. A sampad is a “falling together,” a chain of equivalences. How did they reveal themselves? Prajāpati was staring straight ahead, at Death. All around him, the world. The two combatants gazed at each other, studied each other. But didn’t move. Each was surrounded by a supporting army. Wooden spoons, a wooden sword, sticks, bowls: such was Prajāpati’s army. Frayed and frail. Around Death were a lute, an anklet, some powder puffs for making up.

How long would this tension last? As he waited, Prajāpati ran through everything that served as a frame to Death, a frame that amounts to everything that is. It was a long way to run. He penetrated the frame, in its scrolls and flourishes — and the density of decoration would sometimes hide Death from him. He thought: “This is like that, this corresponds to that, this is equivalent to that, this is that.” A vibration, a tension, a euphoria flooded his mind. If this is that, then that corresponds to this other thing — he went on. Slender bonds wrapped themselves like ribbons around this and that. The bonds stretched, invisible to many, but not to the one who put them there. With a sentinel’s eye, Prajāapati went on watching Death. But with the eye that wanders, that evokes images, numbers, and words, he went on getting things to “fall together,” sometimes things that were far apart, getting them to coincide. And the further apart they were, the more exhilarated he felt. The existent world — prickly, numb, empty — let itself be covered, taken, gathered, enveloped, in the mesh of a fabric. Oh, still a loose mesh, for sure… Yet this made it all the more exciting, that the mesh was at once so loose and so fine, as though to avoid upsetting the blind breathing of the whole. But Death? Still crouched there, waiting. Prajāpati thought: “If he kills me, what will be left?” Until now, this thought had terrified him. Prajāpati knew that everything proceeded from himself. Imagining himself as not existing meant imagining all existence nonexistent. But now he looked around. Then he saw himself from without: an exhausted, weary, wrinkled old being. All about him, everything was still new, so that looking around he could now see how every dapple of vegetation, every outline of a rock, concealed a number, a word, an equivalence: a mental state that clung and mingled with another state. As if every state were a number. As if every number were a state. This was the first equivalence, origin of all others. Then Prajāpati thought: “If I were gone, perhaps these things would no longer fall together? Perhaps the sampads would dissolve? But how could Death hurt the equivalences? How could she strike them?” Where was their body, for her to wound? They occupied no space, they couldn’t be touched. They surfaced in the mind, but where from? As he thought all this, Prajāpati felt a fever, release. He thought: “If the sampads elude me, who am myself thinking them, they will be all the more elusive for Death, who knows nothing of them. Death can kill me, but she cannot kill the equivalences.” He wasn’t aware that a clear, dry voice was issuing from his mouth. He was speaking to Death, after their long silence. Prajāpati said: “I’ve beaten you. Go ahead and kill me. Whether I am alive or not, the equivalences shall be forever.”

In the end, Mṛtyu withdrew to the women’s hut at the western edge of the sacrificial clearing. He was beaten, humiliated, but not entirely undone. Prajāpati stared out at the empty arena, the clumps of shriveled grass around the edges. He knew now that this solitude, every solitude, is illusory, is inhabited. There is always an intruder — a guest? — hiding in the women’s hut.

The brahmans of the Vedic period followed the example of Prajāpati, who had dueled long with Death, vying with him in sacrifices — Prajāpati, who had been about to give up the game for lost, exhausted, inadequate, when the sampads flashed across his mind, numerical equivalence, geometry stamped on light, and then he saw how the vast dispersion of all that lived, but above all that died, could be articulated in relationships that did not deteriorate. What the mind sees, when it grasps a connection, it sees forever. The mind may perish, together with the body that sustains it, but the relationship remains, and is indelible. By creating an edifice of such connections, the brahmans imagined, as their forefather Prajāpati once had, that they had beaten Death. They persuaded themselves that evil was inexactitude. And thus died the more serene.

To bring forth “this,” idam, was a long torment for Prajāpati. And likewise to have it become “all this,” idaṃ sarvam, including the flies and the gadflies for which he was later reproached. Little by little he was overcome by a tremendous lassitude. A being would appear, and immediately some joint of his would come loose. The lymph shrank in his body like water in a puddle under a scorching sun. As his joints were coming apart, came apart, one after another, he gazed at bits of himself, spread out on the grass, like alien and incongruous objects. Suddenly he realized that all that was left of him was his heart. Beating, begrimed. As he struggled to see himself in that scrap of flesh, he realized he no longer recognized himself. He shrieked like a lunatic: “Self! Self, ātman!” Impassive, the waters heard him. Slowly they turned toward Prajāpati, as though to some relative fallen upon hard times. They gave him back his torso, so that it might once again protect his heart. Then they offered up a sacrificial ceremony to him, the agnihotra. It might turn out useful, someday, they said — if Prajāpati should ever wish to reassemble himself in his entirety.

As his children were hurrying away, Prajāpati had glimpsed a head of tawny, waving hair, a white shoulder, a shape that cast a spell. “Oh, if only she would come back…,” he thought. “I would like to join myself to her…” Everyone else had gone. Generating creatures seemed the most pointless of procedures. Before they appeared, he experienced a tension, a spasm within. But the creatures appeared only to disappear, in a cloud of dust. Then, in his loneliness, Prajāpati took a bowl and filled it with rice, barley, fruit, butter, honey. He looked like a beggar fussing with his few belongings. He offered his bowl to the void. “May that which is dear to me come back into me…,” he whispered. It was a windless night. Directly above the bowl he had placed on the ground trembled the light of Rohiṇī, the Tawny One, who ever so slightly shook her hair. One day they would call her Aldebaran.

One question tormented the Progenitor: Why were his children so irreverent, why had they fled from him? And the gods too, why did they pretend not to know him? There was no one to explain, everybody had gone. Prajāpati was left with the corrosive sensation — something that had always dogged him — of not really existing. He looked around in perplexity. All creatures were sure they existed except him, who had given them their existence. Without him, “this” would never have been, but now he felt superfluous in respect to the world, like milk spilled while being carried from one fire to another, milk that one then tosses away on an ants’ nest. Scarcely had he given birth to the other beings when Prajāpati realized he wasn’t needed.

The world was dense. Prajāpati empty, feverish. He lay on his back, unable to get up. Even his breathing grew heavier. He felt all the breaths that had animated him drift away and disappear. There were seven of them, and he bade farewell to each one, calling them by name. He felt he had “run the whole race.” No one came near to moisten his lips. The gods left Prajāpati to die like an old man people have no more time for than a bundle of rags.

Of all Prajāpati’s body, the only part left attached was the sacrificial stone. It alone stood upright amid the desolation. In the silence, the wind blew little eddies of sand off it. There was no end to them. That sand is what has been lost of Prajāpati, forever.

What did Prajāpati look like when he was torn apart at the joints and scattered throughout the world? To one side there was a cold, empty cooking pot.

That was Prajāpati.

When Prajāpati was exhausted, a white horse appeared, its muzzle bent to the ground. For a year it never lifted that muzzle. Slowly, from the horse’s head, aśva, a fig tree grew, aśvattha. The white horse, the fig tree: Prajāpati.

The gods were too plainly present to understand their Father, Prajāpati. They existed — that was all. They told the truth. They weren’t complicated enough. They didn’t know the death that “doesn’t die, for he is within the immortal.” They didn’t grasp the skein’s loose end dangling from the asat (which, whatever it may be, is the negation of what is: a-sat). Prajāpati thought he would never speak to anyone now. But one day one of his sons, the most solitary and melancholy, eyes gray and distant, came to speak to the Father instead of running away from him. It was Varuṇa. He said: “Father, I want to be your pupil. I want sovereignty.” At the time Prajāpati was a dry old man who talked to himself and to animals. He laughed when he heard the word “sovereignty.” He said: “Son, you saw how much your brothers and sisters respected me. I was lucky they didn’t trample all over me. I know only what is of no use to you people…” “The only thing I care about is what you know,” said Varuṇa, undaunted. “Teach me for a hundred years.” The years passed swiftly and were the happiest of times for Father and son. When Varuṇa went back to his brothers, they got up from their seats, baffled and afraid. “Don’t be afraid, we are equals,” said Varuṇa. “The sovereignty you see in me is in you too. The only difference is that you don’t know it.”

Prajāpati’s numbers were thirteen, seventeen, thirty-four. Thirteen and seventeen were the numbers of surplus, that extra above a whole (twelve, sixteen) where Prajāpati found refuge. Everyone was careful to avoid them. Nobody wanted to meet him. Indeed, so determined were they not to that they forgot that they would meet him in those numbers. They avoided them and ignored him without even asking themselves why. But what of thirty-four? There were thirty-three gods. Prajāpati came before the gods and after the gods. In front of them and behind them. Always a little to one side. He was the shadow that precedes the body. The gods were born of him, but they didn’t want to remember that “all the gods are behind Prajāpati.” Transported by sacrifice, intoxicated, the gods conquered the sky, as if it had always been theirs. They didn’t design so much as a glance at the earth, where Prajāpati was left behind, a herdsman abandoned by his herd.

Unlike the gods, who have a shape and a story, or even many shapes and many stories, who overlap perhaps, perhaps merge together, or swap over, but always with names and shapes — unlike the gods, Prajāpati never lost his link with the nameless and shapeless, with that which has no identity. They didn’t know what to call him, apart from Lord of the Creatures, Prajāpati — and even that was too definite. Behind that, his secret name was Ka — Who? — and that was how he was invoked. Prajāpati was to the gods as the K. of Kafka’s The Trial and The Castle is to the characters of Tolstoy or Balzac. His stories were always the stories of a stranger, unknown to gods and men, the origin of gods and men.

No one was more uncertain about his own identity than Prajāpati. He who gave names to others found his own name undermined by the interrogative and indefinite: Ka. Anirukta, aparimita, atirikta: “inexpressible,” “boundless,” “overflowing”: that was what they called him. Even those who knew him best never saw his extremities, which ever receded — and were finally lost in infinity. Perhaps that was another reason why none of his children thought of making a portrait of their Father. When they celebrated or invoked him, the only sound was an indistinct murmuring. Otherwise they worshiped him in silence. They said the silence belonged to Prajāpati.

Prajāpati was mind as power to transform. And to transform itself. Nothing else can so precisely be described as overflowing, boundless, inexpressible. Everything that exists had been in Prajāpati first. Everything remained attached to him. But it was an attachment that might well go unnoticed. Where was it? In the mind, buried in our being like a splinter no one can dislodge.

Although Prajāpati liked to tell himself that the gods had deserted him at once, without any consideration for their Father, there had been a moment when some of them asked him the question he least wanted to hear: “When you created us, why did you create Death immediately afterward?” On that occasion Prajāpati answered by going straight into detail and avoiding the crux of the question: “Compose the meters and wrap yourselves in them. That way you’ll be rid of the evil of Death.” Then he explained how the best meter for the Vasus was the gāyatrī and the best for the Rudras the triṣṭubh. These gods immediately composed the appropriate meters and wrapped themselves in them. Then the Adityas started up with the jagatī meter. By now they were all busy earnestly talking about problems of meter. As if the whole world were a question of alternating meters. The meters were like sumptuous garments. By wearing them, placing one over another, the shape of the body was hidden. Thus they believed they could hide their bodies from Death. Suddenly, they had the intoxicating sensation that they were sufficient unto themselves. Even their harrowed, mysterious Father ceased to be of interest. They didn’t remember that Prajāpati hadn’t answered their question, “Why?” And in the end even Prajāpati himself felt that he had answered the question — that he had offered the most effective help. But they deserted him all the same. Mean-while Death could still see their bodies, as though they were immersed in transparent liquid.

Prajāpati’s children thought about the Father. They hadn’t wanted to know him. Now they felt his absence. His legacy to them was everything there was, but a fragmented, elusive everything. Only Death, who was part of that legacy, was everywhere. He dwelled in every moment of the year, a flood that swept over them. They tried rites, they tried the agnihotra, they tried sacrifices to the new moon and the full moon, offerings to the seasons, animal sacrifices, soma. They measured their gestures, their words. But to no end. Then they remembered how Prajāpati, the death rattle in his throat, had called upon Agni, the firstborn. The two had whispered a few words to each other, but no one had heard. Thoroughly ashamed of themselves, and taking Agni as a go-between, they went down to talk to Prajāpati.

Unrecognizable now, overgrown with vegetation, the Father said: “You do not know how to recompose me in all my forms. You go to excess or you fall short. As a result you will never be immortal.” He fell silent, while the gods were overcome by despair. Then Prajāpati spoke again, with the calm, sober voice of a learned master builder. “Take three hundred and sixty border stones and ten thousand, eight hundred bricks, as many as there are hours in a year. Each brick shall have a name. Place them in five layers. Add more bricks to a total of eleven thousand, five hundred and fifty-six…” That day Prajāpati announced how the altar of fire was to be built.

Prajāpati’s children, gods first, then men, realized that day that, in order to live, one must first of all recompose the Father and recompose oneself, rebuild one’s own body and one’s own mind piece by piece. For if Prajāpati had been scattered and spread across the entire world, how could they — the dust of his bones — claim not to be scattered and spread? Only by patiently sewing, weaving, and tying things together could they expect to acquire a mind — hence a power of attention, rather than a blind vortex — and a body, rather than just limbs bereft of their lymph. This preparatory task would be the task. It would take time, it would take all time. Every one of the three hundred and sixty days of the year. Every one of the ten thousand, eight hundred hours of the year (if by “hour” we mean a muhūrta, which lasts forty-eight minutes). And then? Preparing life took up every hour life offered. When the time was up, the task began again. An empty clearing, a stick scratching marks in the earth.

This was what they must do: build a huge bird — a bird of prey: an eagle, a hawk — of bricks. How else could they conquer the sky? And here a false etymology, ever friend to thought, came to their aid. Brick, they said: citi. Bricks in layers. But what is citi? It’s cit, which means “to think intensely.” Every brick, baked and squared, was a thought. Its consistence was the consistency of their attention. Every thought had the outline of a brick. It wouldn’t disappear, wouldn’t let itself be swallowed up in the mind’s vortex. Rather it became something you could lean on. Something you could place a next thought on — and slowly, crisscrossed with joints, a wall was raised. That was the mind, that was the body: the one and the other rebuilt, with wings out-spread.

This is what they thought:

“True, we live in a blurred and disjointed state. True, what happens inside these boxes of bone that are our heads leaves no trace on the hard, rough material in which we move. And it’s also true that unreality cloaks both ourselves and the things we touch, as if this were the normal state of being. But when we wander about this torpid plain, we do find, here and there, certain places that vibrate like nerves, certain sounds that peal with clarity, almost as though they meant something, and sometimes an emotion will flood through us, as though we had recognized something. Why so? We live in the broken body of Prajāpati, but we will always be tiny ourselves: only an immensely long voyage, if ever we could undertake such a thing, would allow us to glimpse the white cliff that is the further shore of a broken joint. If life is thus, must we then resign ourselves to this opacity, pierced through though it may sometimes be by the pinpoints of these vain reminders? We were warriors once, violent warriors. But no conquest ever helped us rend that blur. So one day we decided to concentrate all our fury in just one patient, grueling task. As long as time itself. Building the altar of fire.

“To arrange ten thousand, eight hundred bricks, one must start from the edge, from the frame of everything: of the world, of meanings. Start from the place where naturally we are. And the beginning will have something incongruous and obsessive about it: a few stones placed beside an empty clearing. But once formed, a frame evokes a center. And that was the fire of our minds: invisible right to the last step. It had to lie at the center of time, of the endless hours that surrounded it; at the center of the intense thought that made the bricks, that was those bricks laid one upon another. When they reached that point, touched that center, it would, as through a bundle of nerves, affect everything, as far as the furthest of the bricks, as far as the tip of the eagle’s wing, as far as the most distant of days. That is what is meant by the altar of fire. But did this come to pass? We shall never be able to say. Why not? When we arrived at that point, time had run out, the year was gone. We would have to begin again, on another clearing, with other sticks, other bricks.

“Apart from the building of the altar of fire, no sacrifice will ever be enough to make us immortal, because each uses too many elements or too few. They don’t have the right number. And the right number is the one that corresponds to the wholeness of time: ten thousand, eight hundred bricks, as many as there are hours in the year, which is Prajāpati.

“But what gives us this faith, śraddhā, in number and building? Seen from afar, we must look like bricklayers gone mad. From close up, we are a challenge to find a sense in what we do. There’s a moment when we scatter sand on the altar. Why sand? ‘It’s the part of Prajāpati that was lost.’ A vast and numberless part. Who could ever count it? When Prajāpati came to pieces, most of him was lost. And, ‘Prajāpati is the whole brahman,’ the texts tell us. That dust, sole inhabitant of the heavens, reminds us how much has been lost.

“We are devotees of the distinct and the articulate, but the infinite festers in our bones. We must circumscribe it, as our skin circumscribes a weave of stuff in which we might otherwise lose ourselves, and which includes, among other things, death herself. Yet this is the only way to live. We are not so ingenuous as to imagine that our building is sound. There is nothing more flimsy and fragile than sacrifice and the place of sacrifice. If it is to work, it must be wrapped in the cloud of the immeasurable and enclose the immeasurable within itself. The greatest must be contained and embraced in the smallest. Thus the sand. Thus the silence, which gives rhythm to the rites. Thus the murmuring that sometimes goes on behind. The sand, the silence, the murmuring: emissaries of the incommensurable. A gesture to that part of Prajāpati we can never reconstitute. Amorphous, inexhaustible.”

In the beginning, Prajāpati didn’t know who he was. Only when the gods issued from him, when they took on their qualities, their profiles, when Prajāpati himself had shared out their shapes, forgetting none, sovereignty and splendor included, only then did the question present itself. Indra had just killed Vṛtru. He was still shaken by the terror of it, but he knew he was sovereign of the gods. He came to Prajāpati and said: “Make me what you are, make me great.” Prajāpati answered: “Then who, ka, am I?” “Exactly what you just said,” said Indra. In that moment Prajāpati became Ka. In that moment he understood, understood it all. He would never know the joys of limitation, the repose in a straightforward name. Even when they had recomposed him, in the ten thousand, eight hundred bricks of the altar of fire, he would always be a shape shot through by the shapeless, if only in those porous stones, svayamātṛṇṇa, avid of emptiness, that were placed at the center of the altar and allowed it to breathe.

Home of the dark germination of all that is, Prajāpati could hardly have an identity comparable to those who issued from him. Yet, in time, he would take his place alongside them — a god like any other, to whom victims are sacrificed, oblations dedicated. Spared the burden of bringing it about, he observed life more calmly now. It relaxed him to mix with the other gods, to lose himself among them. He liked the lower ranks best. Life was a spectacle that no longer depended on him. He loved to watch it, but would still get pains in all his joints whenever he was grazed by the wing of a desire. Which was little more than a memory now. For even desire had migrated into innumerable others. So Prajāpati waited for the moment when he would be forgotten. It began imperceptibly: long liturgies, lists of gods, from which his name would suddenly be missing. Gestures forgotten. Offerings overlooked. Were they considered superfluous, perhaps, for a god so discreet as not to demand them? For a first, long moment, no one noticed, in the celestial crush, that Prajāpati was gone. Everything went on as it always had, no function faltered. For a long time nobody realized, until one evening, as the shadows drew in, someone began to tell the legend of the beginning. At which, once again, there emerged, if only in words, the image of an elusive, indistinct, faceless figure, who had no name, and whom they could only call Prajāpati, Progenitor.