Ka

III

The Father saw the dawn. He saw the beauty of the Daughter rising. In the first cold light he was filled by a flame, to the tips of his fingernails. The flame beat there like a wave on rocks — then retreated. Now, in that leaden light, he wanted to go further. But was there a further? Had there ever been one? It was the body of Uṣas, Dawn, first white, now pink, that offered itself to the Father, as the light climbed upward.

The Father desired. This was no longer the heat he lived by, the furnace within that lit up the cavern of the mind. No, this heat was already darting out from his body, licking along Uṣas’s soft skin. The Father got closer and closer to the Daughter, in silence. But why did Uṣas suddenly have the hide of an antelope? The Father was aware of raising antelope’s hooves toward her, to caress her. A stronger light mingled with the radiance of the dawn, a light that emanated from the Father, but dazzled him too. He wasn’t sure whether he was embracing Uṣas’s breasts or the soft fur of an antelope. Prajāpati wrapped himself right around the Daughter, penetrated her, just as she hitherto had nestled in him. For the first time the Father’s phallus opened a path into the darkness of Dawn. Neither spoke. Dawn and heat were superimposed, one on the other, coinciding, as if inside and outside were the same cloth, faintly stirred by the wind. Around them there had never been anything distinct, only now did it seem that an outline began to form. The heat grew, almost to incandescence. All that could be sensed was the breathing of Prajāpati and Uṣas, the almost imperceptible movement of their bodies glued together.

Slowly a dark figure detached itself from the shadow, an archer. His was the first profile, of a darkness that a blade of light was carving out of darkness. He bent his bow. The more he bent it, the more the twined bodies were flooded with incandescence. Rudra yelled as he let fly his arrow. Like a flash Prajāpati withdrew from Uṣas. The arrow pierced his groin, opening a wound no bigger than a grain of barley, while his phallus squirted its seed onto the ground. Prajāpati’s mouth foamed with anger and pain. On her back, almost imperceptibly, the abandoned Uṣas trembled.

Such was the scene that lies behind all other scenes, the scene every other scene repeats, alters, distorts, breaks up, reconstructs, for it is from this dawn scene that the world descends. Were there witnesses? All around was nothing but emptiness — and a gust of wind. Yet there were those who saw, silent and greedy-eyed: thirty-three (or three hundred and thirty-nine? or three thousand, three hundred and thirty-nine?) gods crowded the balconies of the sky. They exchanged glances, annoyed. They said: “Prajāpati is doing something that’s never been done before.” They looked around for someone able to punish him. None of the gods had the power to strike Prajāpati. They exchanged glances again, conspiracy in their eyes, all thinking the same name, never pronounced: Rudra.

The gods harbored an ancient rancor toward Prajāpati. They didn’t understand this solitary, suffering father whom they were constantly obliged to heal through sacrifice. Above all they couldn’t forgive him for having generated Death. For though the gods were the first to gain the sky and had fed ever since on amṛta, the liquid that is the “immortal,” they knew that one day, however immensely far off, Death would catch up with them. They were terrified of blinking their eyelids, because they knew that anything that blinks dies. With staring eyes, they watched the hard stones of their palaces, waiting for a veil of dust to settle there, harbinger of earth and death.

When they saw how Prajāpati was gazing at Uṣas and how Uṣas was responding to that gaze, coating herself in a rosy moistness, the gods were appalled. Not because Uṣas was his daughter. All women were his daughters. But because Prajāpati was the other world. He could generate, but that was all. To touch one of his own creatures, to penetrate her: that would throw every order out of order, would negate the whole world order, of which the gods considered themselves the guardians, even in opposition to their Father.

The first thing the gods thought of was to terrify the Father. They wanted to stop him from touching the Daughter at all costs. Like shrewd surgeons they extracted the most ghastly shapes from inside themselves. Then they put them together to make Rudra. This way the Father would be forced to confront the dreadful side of existence. Infatuation wasn’t everything. Prajāpati couldn’t just abandon himself to that illusion, after having generated them together with Death. Rudra’s sharp cry rang out. That sound that pierces all others. “You’ll remember this, Father,” the gods thought, pleased with their revenge.

The obscure Rudra, still lurking in that undifferentiated fullness that precedes all creation, in that state of being at once implicit and closed in upon himself, agreed to split into a double that turned to face an external progenitor, indeed his own eventual progenitor, Prajāpati. And Prajāpati opened his eyes on the indistinct, recognizing it as his own kin, the substance whence something would detach itself to exist separately. He felt his own daughter Uṣas issue forth from him, spreading first light across tremendous expanse. Then Prajāpati discovered the unprecedented pleasure of one who looks at something he does not possess. For the daughter now stretched out across all that was shapeless, was certainly not the same daughter who had dwelled within him. She was a stranger, the first foreigner. Prajāpati burned. From the tips of his toes to the hair on his head, something was rising within him, transforming and baking him, bringing his body to a state of readiness, as though for something other. Suddenly he realized that this fire was flickering out of him, toward the Daughter.

As Prajāpati moved his antelope hooves (and he hadn’t even noticed the metamorphosis) toward Uṣas, fullness became aware of a breach being opened within, of an airy space, a void between the Father’s body and the Daughter’s. In that same void quivered Rudra’s arrow, the arrow the Archer was, shortly afterward, to let fly at Prajāpati. Shortly afterward: that delay, that interval, was time, all time, all the time there would ever be, all of history, all the stories that would invisibly cloak all existence. It was the precondition of every claim to existence. That arrow reasserted, even as it punished, the breach that had been opened in fullness. It transformed the void, once and for all, into a wound.

Prajāpati’s impulsive gesture, when he turned toward a still unfinished world, was a desire and a letting fly, a hiss. Visṛj-, sṛj-: those are its verbs. In sṛj- there was the letting fly, the spurting forth; in vi- the pervasive spreading out, in all directions. When Rudra let fly his arrow at Prajāpati, who spurted his seed toward Uṣas, this first of all actions likewise split apart. Even in the instant itself, even in that first instant, nothing would ever be one alone. As Prajāpati spread his seed in the void, the arrow opened a wound in his groin, a rift that looked forward to all other rifts. Through that metallic point, the barely created world penetrated he who had created it. It turned against the Father, injected its poison into him. To the fullness that turned impulsively outward corresponded a tiny void that was forming within that fullness.

Time entered upon the scene between the surfacing of intention and the act that followed it. As long as there is only mind, intention is action. But, as soon as there is something outside mind, Time slips in between intention and act. And then one escapes forever from the mental universe through a breach that is still open, like an open wound, in Prajāpati’s groin.

Why did anything happen? Rudra, the obscure Archer, was guardian of the fullness that lacks nothing. But the fullness burned. And burning, it conceived the excitement of there being something it did lack, something on which to throw itself. Burning can easily generate hallucination. One begins to think that all does not lie within one’s own fire, but that something exists outside, that an outside exists somewhere over there. A white substance, the best to burn. One day they would call it soma. And that becomes the object of desire, that cold, external, intoxicating being whom the fire has yet to scorch.

Fullness had to be wounded, a breach of dispossession opened. Later that breach would be encircled, closed, albeit slowly, by the same power that had produced it, the same power from which it was born — Time, he who demanded but a single idol for his celebration: the arrow. In the compact surface of existence, that breach, that void, amounted to no more than a tiny crack, no broader than a grain of barley, like the wound that Rudra’s arrow opened in Prajāpati’s groin and that was never to close. But the idea that in some future time that tattered edge of bleeding flesh might close was enough to suggest the possibility of a higher level of fullness, something in respect to which the fullness of the beginning seemed crude and stifled. It didn’t matter whether that further fullness turned out to be — as indeed it would — unattainable. Its flickering image blotted out any desire to return to the earlier fullness.

When the ātman, the Self that observes the I, decided to create something distinct, a nature that would obey nature, it stretched a veil of opacity across the world. This was to be the great secret, the ultimate gamble, the novelty that would forever prevail, that the world should not communicate with the mind from which it had issued. But whether out of antique intimacy or mere amazement at the sight of that alien and, at last, unknown being, before abandoning it to its own devices, the mind went after the world, as if still in a position to caress it. Such was the incest of Prajāpati and Uṣas.

The Father lay on his back, dying. He was no longer an antelope now. He was a man again. A trickle of blood striped one thigh. The obscure Archer watched him. “Give me a name,” he said. “You are Bhava, Existence,” said Prajāpati, the rattle at his throat. “It’s not enough,” said Śarva, the Archer, “give me another name.” “You are Sarva. Everything,” croaked Prajāpati. The Archer demanded other names. One by one they issued in sobs from Prajāpati’s mouth, which was foaming blood. “You are Pásupati, you are Ugradeva, you are Mahādeva, you are Vāstospati, you are Īśāna, you are Aśsani.” “It’s not enough,” said Rudra. “You are Kumāra, Boy,” was Prajāpati’s last rattle. Rudra said nothing, leaning on his bow. “For every name you give me, a scale of evil falls from me,” he said in a whisper. So far Prajāpati had been stunned by the Archer’s ferocity. Like an evil hunter, he had shot him at the moment of utmost pleasure, utmost vulnerability. Now he was watching him die and tormenting him, insisting that the dying Father reward him with solemn names. But when Prajāpati heard him speak of this evil, he was startled: he recognized himself in the Archer. Only Prajāpati had had evil beside him like a brother, including the Evil of Death, from as far back as he could remember. What did the other gods know of that? So then Prajāpati gave up the fight, ready for the end. He could hear a confused buzzing, a chattering that came and went in waves. Half-opening his eyes, clouded with pain, he saw a number of figures busying themselves around him. They were the gods. Stooped and servile, those who had incited Rudra to wound him were examining his wound with fervor and apprehension. Their anger had been swiftly replaced by devotion. They were trying to decide how best to pull out the three-notched arrow buried in his groin. The rattle still in his throat, Prajāpati smiled to himself in contempt. “They’re afraid I’ll die,” he thought. “They’ll always be afraid I’ll die, and they’ll always be trying to kill me.” He strained to look beyond them. Running over the ground and down to a hollow, Prajāpati’s seed had formed a pond. And now that pond was surrounded by a circular wall of fire. “Other gods are about to appear…,” thought Prajāpati. So it was. Then the flames fell. Only here and there a few embers glowed. Prajāpati looked at them, far away, with affection: “You are the band of beautiful singers, you are the Aṅgiras…,” he murmured, as deft fingers slid over his belly, then the chill of a blade. They didn’t pull out the arrow. They sliced into the flesh and cut away a tiny scrap, along with the metallic point.

“Wherever life is felt more acutely, that is Rudra,” said a western dancer. The gods thought so too, and were afraid of Rudra. They would see him arrive, suddenly, from the north, a shadowy figure, cloaked in dark gowns, glowing embers in his eyes. Shrewd and smooth-tongued, they praised him, and kept out of his way. The important thing was never to use his name. When pressed, they used the adjective “rudric” rather than the name. They never invited him to their sacrifices. (And what else was life?) They were afraid something irreparable might happen in his presence, afraid the fire might flare up and engulf them all. The gods knew the risks of intensity, because they were intensity itself. They shrank from anything that might shake the world’s cage too fiercely. Even the seers were startled when Rudra appeared, for his mere presence aroused the gravest of suspicions, a fear that had dogged them from the beginning: that sacrifice might not be enough, that it might not be able to draw the whole of reality into itself. At the same time, they called Rudra “King of the Sacrifice.” Why? Again suspicion was at work. Perhaps, outside their rites, their meters, their calendar of ceremonies, another sacrifice was going on, silently, constantly, in the veins of all that is, in the name of Rudra. But how to distinguish such a thing from profusion and massacre?

They were always speaking of the dawn, as if they had never seen anything else. Though in India dawns are brief. The difference between the shortest and longest days is hardly considerable: just four hours. Were they remembering the dawns of another country, a northern homeland, whence they had once descended? Uṣas is everywhere, in the Ṛg Veda. Her name occurs three hundred times. There are twenty hymns in her praise. Some say they are among the oldest. Some say they are among the finest. Nor did they fulfill the function of forming the accompaniment to an offering, since no material oblations were made to Uṣas. The poetic word wrapped around her as though around itself. And no offering to any god could serve its purpose unless Uṣas was witness to it. Recipient of words alone, Uṣas was the precondition of every offering: that flaring up of consciousness that occurs when Uṣas steps forward, uncovering herself.

“True with the true, great with the great, goddess with goddesses, venerable with the venerable,” she would appear from afar, head high, “bright beacon of the immortal,” dripping moisture, on a chariot drawn by pink horses, laden with ritual offerings. Always powdered with the same makeup, “like women on their way to an assignation,” she bathed standing up, the better to be seen, white, gleaming, born from black, buzzing around men like a fly. Why? To awaken them. Awakening: this was the “fine virtue” of Uṣas, her impalpable gift, as the gifts she received were likewise impalpable: mere words arranged in meters. Never the slaughtered animal, never the libation. Just words.

Uṣas has a prefix peculiar to herself: prati-, which is a “coming to meet” someone, a stepping forward, face-to-face, from the furthest distances. The hymn singers never wearied of praising Uṣas’s breasts. “Young and brazen, forward she comes”: thus Uṣas appears. And what is her first gesture? “She bares her breasts. like a loose woman.” Or, with an observation that was also an invitation, they remarked: “Girl full of smiles, bare your breasts when you shine in the east”; “You bare your breasts to make yourself beautiful.” If Uṣas was slow to make the gesture, the singers were quick as chroniclers to remind: “Going to meet men, like a beautiful young woman, she pops out her breasts.”

Awakening is a vision that comes forward. It is the first image that adheres to the mind, flood tide of fullness, of a taste hitherto unknown. It is Uṣas who welcomes the pūrváhūti, the “first ritual call,” which is also the “first thought,” pūrvácitti. There’s a race to be the first one to think of her. And to receive grace is to be the first one she thinks of. Here the goddess is subject and object, coupling without end. Since she is the first. Uṣas is the unique, she from whom all others issue, to whom they return, but she is also — immediately — multiple, surrounded by emulators and look-alikes. She appears “from day to day bearing her many names.” There is no Uṣas without uṣásah, countless “Dawns bearing happy names,” which echo her, disperse her, until you ask: Which one is Uṣas?

Thirteen times the Ṛg Veda speaks of a goddess who is svásṛ, “sister.” Eleven of those times it means Uṣas. Intimate with everyone, no other divinity could boast such an abundance of kinfolk. She was reputed to have many lovers, and often enough they were her brothers — Agni? Pūṣan? Sūrya? the Aśvin twins? She was the only goddess of whom such stories were told. One day the young Śunaḥśepa found himself tied to a sacrificial stake. His father had sold him for a hundred cows so that he could be sacrificed instead of someone else. The appointed time drew near. Then the Aśvin twins suggested he invoke Uṣas. Śunaḥśepa remembered a hymn that had been dear to him, that he had sung many times, thinking of Uṣas, of the lover he had always desired, never believing she would be his. Śunaḥśepa said: “What mortal can presume to possess you, immortal Uṣas, you who love as you will? Who will you choose from among us, o radiant one?” He went on invoking her. Verse after verse, the cords that bound him came undone.

Uṣas and Sandhyā, the two fatal maidens, were Dawn and Dusk. Why was their beauty thought to be superior to any other that would ever be? Those two moments, the unfettering and the fading of the light, this entry into the manifest and retreat from it, were articulation itself, were “connection,” bandhu. But not the usual connection, between two similar and manifest beings, or between two equally visible shapes. Here what emerged was the connection between the manifest and the unmanifest, between two worlds that might have remained forever separate — but which now came together, surfaced together in the bodies of those two girls who look back and flee. This connection tended to become something else too: a coupling. Everybody wanted to couple with Uṣas, with Sandhyā, because coupling is the image of connection: not the other way around. Uṣas and Sandhyā were the image of supreme connection. The first particle of the invisible that penetrated them was time.

Every morning, at first light, they evoked Uṣas, strung together her sixteen epithets, sang in many meters of her gifts, of the endless extravagance they expected from her, a punctual prodigality. These words were to waken her, so that Uṣas might waken them. Each act could find a meaning only if preceded by that other act, awakening, which anchors the mind to what is, existence. But beneath the surface they harbored a dark and growing rancor toward that girl with the copper hair, who brushed against them only to desert them. At every blinking of an eyelid they remembered that Uṣas mocked them as she played, that she always won, then ran off with the prize, with life. Or they thought of her as Varuṇa’s spy, doing his job for him, since everybody knows that for Varuṇa “the blinkings of a man’s eyelids are numbered.” To awaken means to blink one’s eyelids. But the gods do not blink. That was all it took to seal the fate of men who do not want to die. One day someone would avenge them of the wrong done by the fatal maiden with the copper hair. It happened once — and never ceased to happen, right up to Gilda and beyond.

Indra knew the hiding place where the Cows, the Dawns, the Waters, lay concealed. He crouched down in deep dark, waiting to pounce. The dazzling lights of Uṣas’s chariot had barely taken shape when he attacked. He waved a lethal weapon, quite out of proportion with his adversary, that nimble, ivoried chariot, counterpoint to its rider’s ornaments. And Uṣas was already fleeing, hitting high notes of terror. Was it a comedy? Was it a play? Grimly, Indra unleashed his rage on the empty chariot. He split through yoke and shaft. He was like a crazed warrior, tormented by some pain no one understood. And awkward too, in the fury of blows he rained down on that sumptuous and delicate object.

It wasn’t a sight to be proud of, Uṣas’s flight, as trembling and terrified she stumbled over her embroidered robes while Indra’s lightning split her chariot. And the rabble of men whose bigoted blah-blah had egged Indra on looked at once laughable and dire. Thus was established the model of all moral zeal. Later to receive its official seal in Upper Iran, cradle of the Āryas, in the place and in the language, Avestic, where for the first time they sought to split the cosmos in two, dividing it up into Good Creation and Bad Creation. Upon which the beautiful and heedless Uṣas was transformed into an evil demon they called Bušyanstā, she who says to men: “Not yet, not yet.” For centuries afterward poet upon poet would evoke the “rosy-fingered” Dawn. They forgot that the girl had suffered persecution at the hands of gods and men. She was the first to meet that fate henceforth reserved for beautiful women: beatings and banishment.

“Indra’s quarrel with Uṣas. A strange myth. No motive is ever suggested,” remarks a puzzled Geldner in a note on the only Vedic hymn in which Indra’s attack on Uṣas’s chariot is briefly described. “A mythical element which only appears outside of the hymns to Uṣas, and always abruptly, unexpectedly, like an errutic block, such is the image of Indra splitting Uṣas’s chariot,” remarks a puzzled Renou. Why on earth should Indra, the liberator, attack Uṣas, whom he had liberated? What respect did he hope to gain among men with that cowardly, incongruous deed? There was a dark story, behind it all, which no one has told. Dark as Dawn. “Which is the dark face of Dawn?” asked Ānanda K. Coomaraswamy, in the manner of the ṛṣis. And the answer could hardly be other than dark, imperceptible as the blinking of an eyelid.

Bespattered with the blood and seed of the Father, no sooner was she separated from him than Uṣas fled south, “like an outcast.” As she ran she sobbed: “All my seductions have come to naught.” Words no one paid any attention to. The eyes of the gods were fixed on the Archer and the dying Father, who were about to speak to each other. At this point Uṣas was no longer the Dawn of exalted hymns, resounding each morning in the mouths of men who, freshly awakened, called on Uṣas to waken them. She was just an antelope running off into the woods, waiting for the hunter who would shoot her down.

The antelope was the first being to be wounded, when Rudra’s arrow buried itself in Prajāpati’s groin. So it was also the first being to be hunted and sacrificed. There was a knowledge of the gods — and a knowledge of the sacrificers. A knowledge of the Archer and a knowledge of the witnesses. The wheel of time would go on turning to the point where the last, and hitherto mute, knowledge would speak: that of the victim. The target stood erect, alone. The Bodhisattva was the victim who freed himself from the sacrificial stake. Where did he run to? Toward the awakening. That was the target that spills blood no more. That was the goal of Siddhārtha, “He who has reached the goal.”

“Where the black antelope ranges by nature, that should be known as the country fit for sacrifices; and beyond it is the country of the barbarians,” say the Laws of Manu. Antelope: the prey par excellence, of hunter and predator. At a certain point in their history, it occurred to men that they might climb up a level, might increase their powers, if they were to imitate those they had always fled from: the predators. Thus, having long thought of themselves as antelopes, men began to kill antelopes, to hunt them. The antelope was the first being in whose regard they felt guilty: killing the antelope, they were killing themselves, as once they had been. The whole forbidding structure of Vedic sacrifice is founded on the recognition of that guilt and it is dedicated as much to the antelope as to the gods. They thought of the antelope as an animal that could not be sacrificed, yet sacrifice had meaning only in relation to the antelope. Unless the skin of a black antelope was laid out on the ground, there could be no sacrifice. The sacrifice rested on that skin, on the side of the fur: the black hairs were the Vedic meters. And those undergoing initiation, the dīkṣitas, would gird their loins with a black antelope skin, as if at every moment to recall, indeed to absorb through their pores, something of the substance of that being whose wanderings and flight marked out the borders of the territory where sacrifice took place — civilization — beyond which lay an unknown land, merely wild, that hemmed it in on every side.

One day Uṣas became the Buddha. The powers of the world — the desire and the wound — come to a stop there where all that is left of the antelope is a hoofprint. The Buddha remembered as much when he came to Sārnāth, drawn by an episode from one of his earlier lives. The king of Vārāṇasī hunted a great many antelopes in his park. Many died in ditches where the vultures and jackals devoured them. The king of the stags made a pact with the king of Vārāṇasī. Every day he would hand over one antelope, who would be chosen by drawing lots. One day the lot fell on a pregnant antelope. No one was willing to take her place. Then the Bodhisattva, who was an antelope, offered to take her place and went to show himself to the cooks. The knife fell from the cook’s hand. On seeing what had happened, the king of Vārāṇasī granted all the antelopes their freedom. Instead of being called Antelope Park, his park became Grace-Done-to-Antelopes.

If the Buddha is he who leads toward awakening, his Vedic precursor was the young woman who comes forward, “like a girl without a brother who walks toward the men,” visible from afar: Uṣas, sovereign of awakening. Before it became a noun, bodhi, the “awakening,” which was Buddha’s revelation — and which the fainthearted translate as “illumination”—was actually an imperative—“Awaken!”—issued from the lips of Uṣas. But there was a duplicity about Uṣas that enchanted men and distressed them. The Buddha wanted to put an end to it. And this, not the awakening, was the novelty of his doctrine. “Awakening,” the word that describes the act that is peculiar to Uṣas, can be said in two ways, which alternate constantly in the hymns addressed to her: bodháyantī, jaráyantī. But a second meaning lurks in jaráyantī: “making one grow old.” With awakening, with that which brings things into existence, comes time, which makes them disappear. What brings to existence and what causes to disappear, the two impalpable powers, which precede all others, to which all others return, appeared together, every morning, in the form of she who is “the most beautiful of all,” and behind whom one might glimpse a never-ending procession of copies, all equally beautiful. And, alongside, countless faces watching them: the dead, the unborn. “The mortals who saw the first Dawn shine forth have departed. Now she lets us gaze upon her. And behold the approach of those who shall see her in times to come.”

Horror-struck, Uṣas fled south — and no one paid any attention. She was an antelope hurrying back to hide in the forest. But she knew that the forest was still part of the scene. As she ran, a gesture of defiance began to take shape within. To exit from the scene. To find a place where Prajāpati’s embrace and Rudra’s arrow could never reach her. But how was such a thing conceivable? No one saw Uṣas when, on reaching the horizon, she pressed on into the sky. For a long time she kept on running across dark plains. Occasionally she recognized rivers and animals to each side. She passed the Kṛttikās, the wet and glistening Pleiades. But already she knew where she was going to stop: further on, in the light of Aldebaran, of Rohinī, she too an antelope, she too a dawn. Copper-Hair returned to Copper-Hair.

There are only so many gestures one can make, but meanings are innumerable. So the same stories are repeated, with variations, so that each time we may discover, in one slow rotation, a new earth and a new sky of meanings. And it was precisely there, in the sky, that that rotation was first observed. There was a time when Orion had risen in the dawning of the spring equinox, beginning of every beginning, first moment of time. It shone brightly and soon disappeared, swamped by the sunlight. But the seers saw how through the centuries Orion was slowly moving — and how Aldebaran was approaching the place where it had been. They recognized the precession of the equinoxes long before Hipparchus gave it its name and consigned it to science. And they found all the actors in the drama up there. They saw the precession of crimes in the sky. In the beginning the guilt lay with Prajāpati, who was Orion, whom they called the Antelope, MṚga. In the end, as the equinoctial point shifted, it was in the hunter himself, the Archer, Rudra, who was Sirius. But now the arrow was loosed not by a god, in perfect wakefulness, but by a man, Pāndu, a hunter king who mistakenly, carelessly, shot two antelopes, one a brahman, the other his spouse, as they coupled.

There is a strip of sky that is the Place of the Hunter. It lies between Sirius and the Pleiades, Betelgeuse and Aldebaran. In the middle shines Orion. It is that area of the heavens between Gemini and Taurus, on the edge of the Milky Way. From places as far away as Greece and Guyana, people have looked up and seen it as the scene of a hunt, the trail of a desperate chase. Here and there, to the sides of the trail, you could see bright bones and shreds of flesh. And an antelope or a girl in flight. Or a huge man, shot through by a young huntress: Artemis. The arrow was always loosed from the point where Sirius shines, always buried itself in Orion: another great hunter, shot by mistake, or inscrutable calculation.

Aldebaran, Betelgeuse: between these enchanting names lies the Place of the Hunter. A bloody, feverish story has embedded itself in the sky. It reminds us that it will go on happening forever. But at its edges we find these names, which dissolve in the mind and dissolve the mind. They are the fragrance of sound. If every word conceals the killer of the thing, still without redress since time immemorial, these names emanate a substance that is soft and bright, a substance we would seek in vain among the things that are. Perhaps it is here that a hint of redress may be found.

When Uṣas took her place in the sky, when her moist body was stretched over Rohinī’s, the primordial scene once again found its home, there where it had all happened, motionless on the backdrop of the night. Beyond, blazed the awesome light of Orion. Uṣas immediately recognized it as Prajāpati’s head. Below flashed the three-notched arrow, buried in the three stars of Orion’s girdle. And still further away was a light that wounded, the light of Sirius, the Archer. Once again they formed the triangle of desire and punishment.