Ka

VII

Driven into the year like a wedge, the three last days of the aśvamedha, the “sacrifice of the horse,” came as the climax of what was the king of all sacrifices, the sacrifice that allows he who celebrates it to become king of all kings, to obtain everything he desires. Three days of ceremonies, but the whole year converged on that short segment of time. All year one sensed a hidden tension, all year something was going on in preparation for those days, as if the ultimate purpose of the year was to home in on those three days. After which another year and other ceremonies would follow, as though to attenuate the consequences.

To be sovereign of the whole earth, one need do no more than think of oneself as sovereign of the whole earth, one need do no more than celebrate the rite of he who is sovereign of the whole earth: the sacrifice of the horse. What is real in effect (actual sovereignty over the whole earth) is secondary and derivative with respect to what is of the mind, and to the rite that is its consequence.

The place of sacrifice was an even, well-trodden stretch of land, flat but sloping gently toward the east. Beyond its eastern edge, there was to be no sign of another, similar space that might itself become a place of sacrifice. Rather, there had to be water to the east, water all year round. Usually a pond. Above all the place was an empty space, a clearing. Something entirely normal and nondescript. The only thing that mattered was that there be no other place, at once equally normal and nondescript, in the immediate vicinity. Because there a rival’s shadow might one day loom. It was also important that one be aware of the presence of water.

Before the sacrifice of the horse, there is an empty clearing. After the sacrifice of the horse, there is an empty clearing, with a few remaining ashes and a melee of foot and hoof prints. Some of the items necessary for the sacrifice, like the mahāvīra pot, were made during the sacrifice itself. Making these things was part of the sacrifice. And they were then destroyed at the end of the sacrifice. Again this destruction was part of the sacrifice. You might say that the main concern of those officiating was to start from zero and return to zero. To make everything themselves, accepting nothing ready-made, nothing already in existence. Then to destroy everything, leaving no trace, as if what was being worked out within the sacrifice was of the same stuff as time, which looms over all but is palpable to no one.

Everything begins, and ends, with the eye, within the eye. In the beginning, Prajāpati saw the sacrifice of the horse. He saw it as one sees an animal passing by. But what was the horse? Prajāpati’s eye.

This happened: Prajāpati was watching and desiring, in the void. His left eye began to swell (aśvayat). His left eye fell to the ground. Prajāpati looked at his swollen, now detached eye, lying in the dust, and saw that it was the horse (aśva). Upon which he thought that more than anything else he would like to be whole again, to recover his eye. Then that very moment he saw the sacrifice, saw the white horse with the black patches galloping by, its mane blowing in the wind. He knew he would kill it, knew he would cut into the horse’s flesh on its left flank so that his left eye might return to its socket as before. But now there would be the almost imperceptible mark of a suture. That scar would be the sign of sacrifice, of life passing by.

Agni, the firstborn, had just fled. The other gods were crowding around Prajāpati: “Follow him! You’ve got to get him back! Agni won’t show himself to anyone but his father!” they said. So Prajāpati turned into a white horse. For a long time he wandered around at random, tried every direction. While drinking from a pond, he saw a lotus leaf with a blaze of light flickering over it. He raised his muzzle to look. His mouth was seared by fire. And his eyes too were affronted by the blaze. Agni realized he had hurt the Father. As he burned beneath the horse’s noble and solemn muzzle, he said: “Father, I shall grant you one boon. Ask…” Prajāpati said: “That whoever goes in search of you in the form of a white horse shall find you.” From that day on white horses have red mouths, as if seared, and delicate eyes. They are the marks left by that wound we call knowledge.

Preparations for the sacrifice of the horse were long. The craftsmen had to make the wherewithal. They cut down twenty-one trees to make as many poles, to which the victims would be tied. Thirty-six long-handled spoons were required. Four four-wheeled chariots. Four silver-buttoned headdresses were prepared for the brides of the sacrificer-king. They baked the bricks for the altar of fire. They forged two hundred and forty-two knives. Three hundred and thirty-three gold needles, the same number of silver, the same number of bronze. Then a pot to cook the horse’s blood in. Three cushions were embroidered with gold. Hundreds of animals were rounded up, from every village. “The tame animals they keep in the villages; the animals of the forest in a forest; the animals of the mountain on a mountain; the animals of the rivers in the rivers; the birds in cages; the reptiles in pots.”

Thus it was at the time of the Veda: scores of shabby, worn-out things; a huge clearing, most of it empty; a tension that galvanized the space from end to end, with invisible threads vibrating from one fire to another, one hut to another.

Thus it was long afterward, on the threshold of the kaliyuga, when Yudhiṣṭhira, near the end of the bloody war against his cousins, the story of which is told in the Mahābhārata, chose to celebrate the sacrifice of the horse to expiate his guilt: the elements were the same, in accordance with the ancient canons. But the twenty-one poles to which the victims were tied were all golden now. Around the place of sacrifice a huge city had hurriedly been built, to host the kings who would attend, each with his retinue; to house the animals, some of every species; to offer shelter to the ascetics who had come down from the mountains to be present at the ceremony. “The whole island of the Jambū, with all its many and diverse peoples, assembled together for the king’s sacrifice.” It was the biggest bazaar anyone had ever seen. Never had so much jewelry and so much crockery been gathered together in such a space. “No one there was sad, no one was poor, no one was hungry, no one was unhappy, no one was rude.”

It was easy to miss the moment the sacrifice began. You would see four priests crouching down. One, the adhvaryu, prepared a cake of boiled rice and shared it with the others. A commonplace, everyday thing to do. Yet it was the beginning proper. That white cake was the seed. That seed was desire. For something to begin, desire must take shape like a substance that expands, that radiates outward. That white rice cake — or again the four glittering gold pieces that the sacrificing king handed out to the priests while they ate from their bowl. “Because rice cake is seed and gold is seed.”

The adhvaryu, priest of countless ritual gestures, he who enjoyed such close contact with the sacrifice that he came out scorched at the end, would look the sacrificer-king in the eye and say: “Hold thy voice.” Why? “Because the sacrifice is voice (vāc).” That is what was meant. And that was the signal that one was entering into the sacrifice.

In the evening, in the hut of fires, they celebrated the agnihotra; they poured fresh milk, mixed with water, onto the fire. They heated the milk on the fire named gārhapatya, they poured it out on the fire named āhavanīya. Those two fires were the poles of every ritual tension. Everything that happened was a passage from one to the other.

The procession of women arrived from the south. Silent and absorbed, they advanced in four lines. Leading them were the four wives of the sacrificer-king, their thick hair and complicated headdresses studded with silver buttons. The mahiṣī, the first bride, the consecrated; the vāvātā, the favorite; the parivrktā, the neglected; the pālāgalī, of inferior caste. Each was attended by one hundred maidens: a hundred princesses for the mahiṣī; a hundred of noble birth for the vāvātā; a hundred courtiers’ daughters for the parivrktā; a hundred stewards’ daughters for the pālāgalī,

In the shadow of the hut, a zigzag barrier of women. After pouring out the milk, the sacrificer-king lay down, naked, between the thighs of the favorite, likewise naked. There he would stay, all night, without moving. With the constant contact he would desire her, but without possessing her. He would let tapas grow within him; he knew he would be needing that austere ardor for a long time, a whole year, the duration of the sacrifice. Behind them, in order, the other women were stretched out on the ground.

Why that night, at once erotic and motionless? It was “a form of the state of wakefulness.” Wakefulness was essential. That for the whole first night of the rite the sacrificer-king should stay awake. Friends were with him to keep him from sleeping. But above all: wakefulness meant that constant contact with the body of the favorite.

When the sun rose, and the sun was the horse, they were ready to greet it with twenty-one formulas: the first six had to do with sight (“Homage to he who contemplates attentively”), two with hearing, six with being and nonbeing, then one with sight, one with hearing, and finally five with the mind (“Homage to the brahman! Homage to tapas! Homage to the stillness!” were the last). Each homage was a phrase, a musical articulation. Behind every composition lies the sequence of those formulas.

Before the sacrifice of the horse begins, the sacrificer-king entrusts his power to a priest, the adhvaryu. “The adhvaryu is king for the duration of the sacrifice.” But the sacrifice lasts a year. And the year is everything. Thus the king stands aside from his kingly offices for the whole period during which he celebrates the sacrifice that makes him a king. Which, again, is all the time there is. Thanks to the aśvamedha one can acquire sovereignty; but, if one doesn’t possess sovereignty, one is “swept away” by the sacrifice of the horse. Such is sovereignty’s vicious circle. There is no sovereignty that is not founded on that vicious circle.

At this point the adhvaryu would pass a rope around the horse’s neck. This was the beginning of the sacrificial act. What had come before was training, purification, making oneself fit, preparing oneself, baking the mind. Now came the moment for action pure and simple. It is action that binds. The first act was a rope passed around the horse’s neck, while the adhvaryu said to the animal: “You are he who encircles, you are the world; you are a guide, a protector.” But how could that mere rope go around that which goes around everything, encircles the world? Yet that is what it did.

The most brutal part came soon enough. With a rope around its neck, the horse and a black dog (“with four eyes,” they said: but it was just a black dog with two white patches above its eyes), were pushed toward the pond near the sacrificial clearing. Preceded and followed by relatives of the sacrificer-king, by the son of a prostitute, by a priest. The dog stepped into the water. The horse stepped into the water. When the dog was out of its depth and began to flounder, the adhvaryu said: “Kill”—and the son of the prostitute attacked the animal with a wooden club. Usually it was sidhraka wood, but the important thing was that it be a wood whose name included the syllable ka. Briefly, the dog would try to lift its head above the water again. Again it was clubbed. Then the priest would push its already inert body between the horse’s hooves, saying: “Away with the mortal! Away with the dog!” But why did the banishment of what is mortal have to be so cruel, one wondered, as already the dead dog slid away southward on the surface of the water? A whole year, a cycle of noble deeds and lofty formulas was set in motion by that cowardly act.

The most cowardly act was now followed by the most noble. For a while the rope had been tied around the horse’s neck. Now it was untied. And they let the horse free to wander around at will. But before letting it free, the adhvaryu and the sacrificer-king stood beside the horse and murmured a number of formulas. They told the horse who he was and what they were asking him to do. “Follow the path of the Ādityas”—the path of the sky — was what they chiefly urged. Meanwhile the four hundred armed guardians who would escort the horse wherever it chose to go had already gathered around. They would defend it, even if it meant killing whoever might get in its way; they would watch over it to see that it did not mount a mare or plunge into water. Thus they pressed on for almost a year. The horse must never turn back. As with the sun, had it turned back, “everything would have been destroyed.” The animal’s wanderings, ever free and ever further away from the place of sacrifice, must never stop. Thus “continuity” (samtati) was not broken. And, as the horse trod ever new lands and the path it took became an ever longer and more tangled thread, so each day at the place of sacrifice the adhvaryu would repeat the formulas that state the “forms” (rūpas) of the horse, while his thoughts, and those of the other priests, remained fixed on the invisible and wandering animal — and what the adhvaryu did then, this incessant repetition of formulas, protected the continuity of that thread that bound them together.

Any lands the horse trod in its wanderings became the property of the sacrificer-king. Anyone who saw the horse knew that from that day on he had a new king. It is not through war that one conquers, since conquest is the unbridled running of the horse. War occurs only if a prince attempts to stop the horse. Then the sacrificer-king must break off the sacrifice and declare war on that prince. War is an incident that interrupts a rite.

Freedom is the wandering of the horse. Everything else is obligation and precept. Freedom is manifest only within the frame of the bond. At the beginning the horse has two ropes around its neck. Then it is untied. Not the opposite.

As long as it continues to wander, the sacrificial horse is like the young Siddhārtha in the park of his father’s palace. He too is escorted, he too is secretly led in order that he not see anything: the horse in order that he not encounter mares or water; the Buddha in order that he not encounter old age, illness, or death. But both will encounter what they should not: the horse on his return to the place of sacrifice; Siddhārtha, by chance, in a corner of the park. The Buddha is Tathāgata, “He-who-came-thus.” The horse is “he who has been led” (meaning: to the sacrificial pole). In those two verbs (“came,” “led”) lies the difference between the two. One emerges from thick forest, like a common pilgrim: thus does the Buddha reappear to his companions — and risks not being recognized. The horse too reappears from thick forest, to find himself once again in the place of sacrifice from whence he set out, as if he had come back by chance, but behind him, imperceptibly, his escort has been guiding his wanderings. Blessed are the footsteps of both the one and the other, the Buddha and the horse.

Every time they met a brahman, as they wandered through forest, villages, and meadows, they would ask him: “Brahman, what do you know about the sacrifice of the horse?” If the brahman couldn’t answer at once, they robbed him. Indeed, “he who, being a brahman, knows nothing of the sacrifice of the horse, knows nothing about anything, and so is not a brahman and as such is liable to be robbed.” Of all those they met they would ask: “What happens during the sacrifice of the horse?” If they couldn’t answer, all their belongings were plundered and seized. The victim of robbery is he who does not know. Thus they set out to base conquest on knowledge. For all the peoples who lived around them, all who came after them, the opposite was true: they set out to base knowledge on conquest.

While the horse was wandering through lands unknown, the sacrificer-king and the priests sat around the altar on gold-embroidered cushions. Then the hotṛ began to tell stories. They were stories of ancient kings, exemplary stories, which the new sacrificer-king would revive. They were cyclical stories, starting over and over, the whole year long. Thirty-six times, in cycles of ten days. Hence their name: pāriplava, the story that keeps beginning again (pāriplavate).

We can try to imagine what the pāriplavas were like, those stories of the deeds of gods and kings, endlessly recited throughout the long twelve-month wait for the horse’s return. We may even plausibly suppose that they were the earliest models for what would one day become the Mahābhārata. None of them has survived. We know of them through other channels: through the hymns of the Ṛg Veda, which offer allusions, enigmas, dazzling glimpses; through the speculations of ritualists, who refer only to fragments of the stories, particular details useful for expounding some line of thought they are developing — and otherwise consider them as common property. Yet those stories don’t give the impression of being lost to us, rather of occupying a space within a frame, a space at once empty and clearly delineated. And in this case it is the frame that is the real center of the picture. The frame is the story of the stories: the Romance of the Horse that no one told, but that every deed showed forth, that every deed helped to bring about throughout the arc of a year. That forever untold romance not only contains all the other stories, which can spring forth only within its intervals, but also is their secret articulation, as if all the doings of the gods and the first kings were above all a consequence of that story-frame, that no one ever tells, but that all, from the sacrificer-king to the priests to the most humble of bystanders, help to evoke, to have happen within the sacrificial clearing.

Narrative emerged during the wait, the long wait for the horse’s return. And it was a way of preventing the relationship with the wandering horse from being broken. The narrative wandered around like the horse. The secret thought of the narrative is the horse. The secret thought of the horse is the narrative. And what did the pāriplava recount, every ten days of the horse’s absence? “This cyclical legend recounts all realms, all regions, all the Vedas, all the gods, every being.”

There were two lives running parallel. There was that of the wandering horse, followed by his escort of four hundred warriors, an unpredictable, uproarious horde, who crossed villages like a whirlwind, leaving travelers bewildered. They would see a cloud of dust and say: “It’s the sacrificial horse.”

And there was the life of the priests and the sacrificer-king. Their thoughts were always on the horse. Their greatest fear: that the horse would get lost. Whatever they did, their ritual gestures — which were innumerable — was done in order to tense the thread that linked them to the horse. Sometimes you would see them pouring oblations into the hoof marks the horse had left in the dust.

And one day the horse would reappear. With great familiarity, as if it had never been away, the priests welcomed it into the hut they had built for it out of aśrattha would on the sacrificial clearing. It would be shut up there for seven days while the priests and the sacrificer-king busied themselves with oblations all around. As the soma was being filtered, the sacrificer-king would murmur: “From nonbeing lead me to being; from darkness lead me to light; from death lead me to immortality.”

It was time for the bloody part of the sacrifice. The priests opened the door of the horse’s hut and got it to come out. The horse led the way. The adhvaryu held it by the tail. The priests followed in single file, each holding a flap of the robe of the one in front. Why did the priests follow the horse? Because the horse knows “the path of the sky.” It also knows some chants better than the priests. Thus the udgātr, the chanter, let the horse take his place. The horse approached the enclosure where the mares were hidden. The enclosure was opened. At the sight of the mares, the horse neighed, high-pitched, in the silence. “The horse goes hiṇ, and that shriek is the udgitha.” The udgītha is the chant that the udgātṛ must make. It is the chant the udgātṛ would now imitate from the horse.

There is a privilege bestowed on whatever takes place in the intervals, the chinks, the gaps. It is a memory of the continuous. Thus in addition to the twenty-one equidistant poles to which sacrificial victims were tied, there were also victims tied in the intervals between the poles: all wild animals. Thirteen for every interval. Including three sparrows (for the Summer); three frogs (for Parjanya); three crocodiles (for Varuṇa); three peacocks (for the Aśvins); three eagles (for the Year); three moles (for Bhūmi); three deer (for the Rudras); three buffalo (for Varuṇa); three elephants (for Prajāpati); three midges (for Sight); a tawny gazelle (for the Apsaras); a porcupine (for Hrī, Modesty); a black snake (for Mṛtyu); an owl (for Nirṛti, Dissolution); a boar (for Indra); and a pied gazelle (for the Viśve Devas, the All-gods).

The wild animals were a noisy, colorful lot. Hard to keep them quiet. Inevitably they would get mixed up with the other three hundred and forty-nine victims, all tame animals, tied to the twenty-one poles. It was a circus and a slaughterhouse. Anyone would have thought they all awaited the same fate. But that wasn’t so. Or at least, not from a certain point on. All the victims, wild animals or tame, were anointed, using different sticks and knives depending on their kind. For the horse, the knife was encrusted with gold; for the victims tied to the horse, it was decorated with copper (the horse was tied to the central pole, but twelve lesser victims were tied to his body and hampered his movements); for the other victims it was decorated with iron. It seemed, then, that all the animals were being prepared for the sacrificial slaughter. And you could feel sure of this when the agnīdh began his circumambulation around the victims, waving a firebrand. A circle of fire was traced out around each victim. But just when you expected that the two hundred and sixty wild animals were about to be strangled (and already perhaps people were wondering how the priests would manage with the midges), to your amazement you would see that one by one the wild animals were being untied and set free. Why? To answer that question is to have the answer to everything — and since “the aśvamedha is everything,” it also includes the answer to this question.

What would have happened if the wild animals had been sacrificed? “If they were sacrificed, they would soon drag the sacrificer dead into the forest, because wild animals partake of the forest.” So the sacrificer-king spared the wild animals in self-defense. At the same time, the sacrificer-king remembered that when Prajāpati wished to reach the world of the gods, he did so by taking possession of the wild animals: “With the tame animals he took possession of this world, with the wild animals he took possession of that world [the world of the gods].” So what was to be done? To sacrifice wild animals meant to kill oneself. Not to sacrifice them meant not to reach the world of the gods. Of course, one would still possess “this world,” something one could do by sacrificing the tame animals. But how important was this world in the end? Man is born into untruth, “this world” is precisely that, the world of untruth. The sacrifice is precisely that which allows us to go beyond this world, to gain access to the truth. Thus, if one forgoes the sacrifice of wild animals, one commits a “violation of the sacrifice.” Yet if they are sacrificed, you know that you, as sacrificer, will be swallowed up in the forest, dead together with the beasts sacrificed. Here loomed the invisible crag of contradiction. Here one was banging one’s head against the hardest of walls. What was to be done? The ritualists, those who thought out the aśvamedha exactly the way Prajāpati had evoked it, were experts in logic and metaphysics. They knew that contradiction is close, as close as can be, to the untrembling heart of thought. They also knew that thought would not overcome contradiction. Yet there was something that might at least get around contradiction, that might allow something prodigious to come into being: a and b, its opposite, simultaneously. And what was that? Gesture. If the wild animals are arranged in the intervals between the twenty-one poles to which the tame animals are tied, if they are anointed, if they feel the coldness of the blade, if, finally, the agnīdh circles around them with a burning brand in his hand: well then, at that point in a certain sense those victims have indeed been sacrificed. But at the same time, these are the very victims who are not sacrificed, because shortly afterward another priest will untie their bonds and set them free. Thus the sacrificer does not lose himself, is not swallowed up in the forest, and yet no “violation of the sacrifice,” something that could have even more serious consequences, has been committed. When one gets to the bottom of the bottom, one encounters that strange particle much loved of the ritualists: iva, “in a certain sense.” One encounters those strange figures that “are neither something offered in sacrifice nor something not offered in sacrifice.” Is it any surprise, then, if ultimate knowledge can only become manifest through enigma? And if enigmas are more than anything else the pretext for generating further enigmas? Enigmas are what issues from brahman. They are what the priests of the brahmodya exchanged between themselves, the dialogue they conducted while seated on opposite sides of the central pole, from which fanned out, symmetrical and equidistant, the other twenty poles, to which the other three hundred and thirty-six tame victims of the sacrifice were tied. That dialogue was de rigueur as one approached the irreducible, insuppressible nucleus of the ceremony, of the story of the horse: the killing.

The brahmodya, the dialogue by enigmas between the two priests seated one to the south the other to the north of the sacrificial pole, began shortly before the horse was slaughtered. “What was the first thought?” was the first question that the hotṛ asked the brahman. Then: “Who is the great bird? Who was the tawny one? Who was the fat one?” Unhesitating, the brahman replied: “The sky was the first thought. The horse was the great bird. The night was the tawny one. The sheep was the fat one.” But the hotṛ pressed on with other questions. Insistently, he challenged the brahman: “I ask you what is the extreme point of the earth. I ask you what is the navel of the world. I ask you what is the seed of the stallion. I ask you what is the supreme home of the word.” Again unhesitating, the brahman replied: “It is the altar (vedi) that is called the extreme point of the earth. It is the sacrifice that is called the navel of the world. It is the soma that is called the seed of the stallion. It is the brahman that is the supreme home of the word.” What had happened? The hotṛ had put forward enigmas. The brahman had solved them. But what were his solutions? Enigmas of a higher order. This alone was enough to suggest that they were the right answers.

They were constantly thinking of residues, of completeness, the possibility that something would be lost. They saw the sacrificial horse, in all his splendor, anointed, decked out for the ceremony, grass in his mouth, a bridle around his neck, going toward the gods, toward his death. And they wondered: the things we gave him — the bridle, the drape, the grass — will they too go with him to the gods? But what will become of the meat that the flies get? Of the shreds that stick to the ax? Of the meat caught beneath the fingernails that tear it apart? This too, all of this, should go to the gods, this too will need an invocation to help it on its way to the gods. So they dedicated an invocation to the flies.

The most distressing moment for the horse was not when, glossily decked out, he led the procession toward the sacrificial pole. Nor when the adhvaryu and the sacrificer-king murmured in his ear that he would be done no violence, that he would not suffer, while the horse knew very well that he was about to be done violence and that he would suffer. Rather it was when, having tied him to the sacrificial pole, they then tied a further twelve victims, goats for the most part, black and white, to various parts of his body, and the goats would writhe around and tug at him, because they sensed that they were about to die. Hence the horse could no longer have his customary freedom of movement. To know that liturgical speculation considered these animals who were tormenting him as his subjects could be of little interest to the horse. He would have preferred to be alone and untrammeled for the brief time that lay between him and his death.

“Thou who, kindled, adorn the granary of prayer”: such were the words with which the hotṛ began the “stanzas of approval,” that part of the liturgy that led to the killing of the horse. Never had the priest’s voice been so soft and thick with emotion. He spoke of the “happy gates,” tall, wide, gleaming, as if they were there before his eyes. But there were no gates to be seen, only animals pushing and shoving in their panic, legs tangled in ropes. Patiently, the horse endured it all. In generous flourishes, enumerating the gods, bringing in the sky and the flies, the hotṛ’s words circled closer and closer to the horse, grew more intimate, more familiar. Finally he whispered: “May your dear life spare you from suffering, as you go on your way. May the ax cause no lasting pain to your body. May no clumsy, impatient quarterer fumble with your joints, mutilate your limbs. You do not die thus. You are not hurt. On easy paths you go to the Gods.” They were the last words the horse would hear, before setting off in another procession. But this time he would not lead the way. Before him he would see a priest with a firebrand in his hand. Then he would have to stop: they made him lie on a cloth. Soon his neck would feel the butter-drenched linen drape they would strangle him with, while his eyes could follow the priests, who had moved away now, sitting in silence around the fire āhavanīya.

The last procession moved northward, because the path of the sky is to the north. At its head was the agnīdh, the firebrand in his hand indicating that the sacrifice was moving into its fiery, irremediable phase. The horse followed. Behind, in single file, the other priests. The first brushed the horse’s flanks with two spits. At the rear came the sacrificer-king. Having reached the place where the horse would be killed, the agnīdh placed two blades of grass he had been carrying on the ground. Then he stretched a drape over the blades of grass, then a blanket and a gold plaque. It was a bed. They made the horse crouch down there, then strangled him with the linen drape. The other animals — hundreds of them — were strangled with cords. The word they used was saṃjñāpayanti, “they make it acquiesce.” The texts explain: “When they make a victim acquiesce, they kill it.”

As soon as the horse had breathed his last, as soon as the other victims had breathed their last, the four brides of the sacrificer-king would step forward together with a young girl, led by the priest assigned to them, the neṣṭṛ. In their hands they would be holding jugs. Behind them, at an appropriate distance, came the four hundred ladies of the retinue. The wives took up their positions around the dead horse. They lifted the hair on the right sides of their heads. A slow, conscious movement. Then they let their hair down on the left. Then they clapped their right thighs while circling the horse and calling it “my lord” and fanning it with the flaps of their long robes. Sometimes the mahiṣī would use a golden fan as well. The fanning was intended to make the horse more comfortable in his deep sleep. Or did they want to wake their lover? In any event, the texts remark that, through this gesture, the women “perform an act of contrition” toward the horse. They moved slowly, like dancers, circling the horse nine times.

The wives sprinkled the dead horse with water from their jugs. They said it would purify his life breath. The fresh drops fell on the animal’s every orifice, and the wives recited: “May your mind be magnified! May your voice be magnified! May your breath be magnified! May your sight be magnified! May your hearing be magnified! May all that has suffered in you, all that has been hurt in you be magnified and settle! May it be purified!”

Lying on its drape, dripping with water, the strangled horse awaited the mahiṣī, the first wife. It was a motionless white mass, its hooves side by side. It bore no signs of violence. Only the shudder of its breathing was missing. Finally alone, the regal wife came close. She lay down and pressed her thighs against the thighs of the dead horse. At the same time she spoke to it, urged the horse to tighten its hooves around her thighs. The priests watched. When the horse and the mahiṣī were glued together, distinguishable only by the color of their skins — the mahiṣī’s light brown, the horse’s a bright white — then the adhvaryu would cover them with a blanket and say: “Wrap yourselves together in the sky.” Just before the blanket was laid over the two lovers, the mahiṣī was seen to take the horse’s phallus and introduce it between her thighs. It wasn’t easy. So the sacrificer-king would step forward and encourage the horse to penetrate his wife, thus: “Place, O male, that which anoints, great joy of womankind, within the vulva of she who spreads her thighs, and enter her.” None of the priests uttered so much as a word. Why not? So as not to appear to be in competition with the sacrificer-king.

When the mahiṣī lay beside the horse, she immediately pulled up her robe showing her vulva. The adhvaryu covered them with the linen drape that shortly before had been used to strangle the horse. At the same time the mahiṣī would be using her hand to place the horse’s member between her thighs. All eyes were concentrated on her. But the mahiṣī showed no sign of being aware of it. She went on with her gentle constant complaint. She spoke to the horse, and kept on speaking. “Mother, little mother, dear little mother. There is no one to show me the way. Little horsey is asleep.” Now the king’s other wives, who stood in a circle around the two lovers, began to speak too: innuendos, obscenities. But they got no reply, for the mahiṣī went on with her quavering lament: “Mother, little mother…”

Tight together under the blanket, the dead horse and the queen were joined in coitus. Around them, in a semicircle, stood the priests, the sacrificer-king, the girl, the king’s other wives, and their serving maids, four hundred of them. The coitus went on, silent and invisible, while a weave of innuendos shuttled back and forth between priests and women. The priests spoke of a fist disappearing into a crack, of a bird wriggling around, of a couple who climb a tree and play together on top. The women came back sharply with biting disrespect: “Hey, lassie!” “Hey, adhvaryu!” came their voices. “Hey, brahman, your mother and father play around on the treetops. They wriggle around like your mouth when you try to speak. Hey, brahman, don’t mumble!” At any other time it would have been inconceivable to show such insolence to a brahman. That buzz of obscenities hid something solemn and arcane, evoked it through its opposite. Then the chatter stopped. The queen’s first handmaids approached the blanket, from which the horse’s head and the woman’s were poking out. They helped the mahiṣī to climb decently to her feet. Meanwhile they were thinking: “May we prove able, with all kinds of words, to obtain for ourselves our every desire.” The mahiṣī was standing up now. With a tuft of grass she dried herself where she had touched the horse’s member. Then she looked hard at the girl, whose role had so far remained unclear, and, tossing the tuft of grass at her, spoke these words: “I transfix you with the ardor of coitus.” From that moment on the girl was called sāhā and was allowed to enter the sabhā, the room where the men gathered. Her body would be available to whoever used the room. To one side the priests were reciting: “I have sung of Dadhikrāvan, the victorious horse, the fiery horse. May he bring a sweet smell to our mouths! May he prolong our lives!” They were aware of feeling tainted and extremely tired, for “life and gods will depart from those who at the sacrifice use impure speech.” But the ceremony still had other phases to go through. First the mouth must regain its sweet smell. Meanwhile the four hundred and five women walked away, “just as they had come.”

Soon the women reappeared. This time they had needles in their hands. Gold, silver, and bronze. Gold, the mahiṣī’s, silver the vāvātā’s, bronze the parivṛktā’s. Many, many needles, as many as the pearls that the same women had earlier threaded to the horse’s mane and tail. When the wives threaded the pearls to the horse’s hairs, other women from their procession would hang seashells on the hairs too, to keep the pearls from falling. Nothing of what was offered could be lost. Each had a hundred and one needles. They went up to the horse and delicately marked out lines on its body: they were drawing “the paths of the knife.” As they did so they never stopped repeating the appropriate formulas. You would hear: “May the human wives prove able to divide your hide with wisdom”; “The needles weave and weave on the hide of the fiery horse.” Like land surveyors, like surgeons, the women traced out geometric shapes on the lifeless body of the animal who only shortly before had been, at least for one of them — and she represented all the others — a lover. The onlookers saw no more than three women intent on their work around the horse, as though around a loom. They weren’t in a position to follow the lines the needles made. But they knew that the three wives would divide the skin into thirty-six parts, like a chandas, a meter. That great hunk of dead flesh was to be broken up like a line of poetry.

The horse’s hide had now been etched out, if not actually cut open. But inevitably there comes a point when blood must be drawn. The adhvaryu stepped forward with a blade of grass and a knife with a golden hilt. He placed the stalk on the horse’s belly, then severed the animal’s skin immediately beneath the blade of grass. But who was the agent of this action that was irreversibility itself? Who? — the adhvaryu asked himself, as the knife began to probe the entrails. And the answer was: Ka. Which means: Who? The answer to the question was another question. And everybody knew that that indefinite subject, forever undefinable—who? — was the secret name of the one person whose existence was in no doubt: Prajāpati. If Prajāpati was Ka, all the more so was the anonymous priest at the moment he buried his knife in the horse. Action, at its source, has an unknown subject. Looking at the horse, the adhvaryu would murmur: “Who is slicing into you? Who is cutting you to pieces? Who is your wise quarterer? It is Ka who is slicing into you. It is Ka who is cutting you to pieces. It is Ka who is your wise quarterer.” But where is Ka to be found? He was never among the other gods, as he was never among men. He was so discreet, so elusive that many thought they could do without him. But then everything would break down. Neither gods nor men can live without recourse to Ka. To be precise: they may survive, but they cannot understand. But how to understand Ka? He’s as obscure and elusive as his name is commonplace. There was another word that was at once obscure, elusive, and commonplace: ātman, “Self.” Another pronoun, this time a reflexive pronoun. Were they the same perhaps? The knife was raised. All gods, all men, all meters, all powers: everything in that moment, the moment of the irremediable gesture, dissolved before that one syllable, Ka, that evocation of an ever unknown subject, who with great ease gathered every name, every other being who could claim to be a subject, within himself. The rest was butchery.

When Prajāpati “saw” all his desires and everything he would like to achieve, he also saw the aśvamedha. “By sacrificing therewith, he obtained all his desires and attained all attainments.” Perhaps this is why the fulfillment of all desires has been looked on with such suspicion ever since. For that fulfillment implies a death. Or rather: a killing. What is most obscure here, what was always obscure and will ever remain so, lies in the answer to the question: what happened exactly when Prajāpati “saw” the aśvamedha and “sacrificed with the aśvamedha”? Prajāpati was, among other things, a white horse. And likewise “the first sacrificer.” But on this occasion was he horse or sacrificer? Was he the horse who was sacrificed or the sacrificer who killed the horse? Never did active and passive come so close to each other, to the point that they were superimposed one over the other, confused one with the other. It was not out of a desire to conceal things that this question remained obscure. Its very nature was obscurity, whatever one might try to make of it. “Being active or passive,” thought Prajāpati, “doesn’t make that much difference. Or, at least, it doesn’t make the enormous difference men will see there. Every active is someone else’s passive. But this is a truth that, in the normal way of things, would confuse men’s minds rather than illuminate them. If they accepted it, everything would become hopelessly tangled. And this is the reason why a part of the teaching must remain secret: to prevent the course of world events from being paralyzed by knowledge; to create a situation where the only people who can gain access to knowledge are those who, even when imbued with it, will allow the world to pursue its course.”

Ahiṃsā, Gandhi’s nonviolence, was already there in the writings of the ritualists, some three thousand years before him. Literally, it means “not to wound,” from the root hiṃs-, “to wound.” “Like the-one-who-does-not-wound, ahiṃsantaḥ, he takes apart the limbs”; these words referred to the person who cut into the flesh of the sacrificed animal, and hence, here, of the horse. Ahiṃsā doesn’t mean to refrain from violence. But to exercise violence — which is there in any event and involves everyone—in a certain way, without wounding. To wound is more serious than to kill. Violence cannot be eliminated, because it is part of life’s pulse. But wounding… A wound can be inflicted in a thousand different ways. There may even be cases where it is not perceived to be a wound. The knife blade separates the joints with such delicacy and precision, it’s as if it were dividing up Prajāpati’s body to be scattered through the world before being reassembled in the altar of fire. That the greatest importance was attributed to this particular doctrine of the ritualists is demonstrated by the fact that the word ahiṃsā appears in the Laws of Manu, as in Baudhāyana’s Dharmasūtra and again in the Chāndogya Upaniṣad, alongside the word satya, “truth”—and in each case immediately before it. The obligation not to wound the living (and everything is living), the obligation toward the truth: the two were pronounced together, and ahiṃsā came before satya, as if getting to the bottom of the one word one discovered the other.

The first man to have his head cut off was a young fellow, a squire’s son, who had been given the job of cutting up the body of the sacrificed horse. Many lost their heads in this way, for generation after generation. Set upon a chariot, they were led to the horse, “dressed up and weeping, like those who go to their deaths.” When they had completed their task, when they had cut into the body of the horse, their heads were cut off. But one day Dirghatamas Māmateya woke with a start and said: “Who’s that crying? What’s all this noise about?” They told him what was happening. Then Dīrghatamas Māmateya went up to the young man who had been chosen to plunge his knife into the horse and said: “Listen, I’m going to tell you how you can cut up the horse without getting yourself beheaded. Follow the paths of the knife across his body, and as you do so say: ‘Who is it slicing into you? Who is it cutting you to pieces?’ Then, seeing you talking to yourself, someone will come up to you and say: ‘Young man, what are you doing? This is how you cut up the horse.’ Then he will take the knife from your hand and cut into the horse. And his head will be cut off.”

In the person of Dīrghatamas Māmateya, a new figure had arrived on the scene: knowledge. Knowledge is the question of the identity of the agent. Between the young man given the task of plunging his knife into the dead horse and Arjuna on his war chariot there is a relationship of direct descent. They are the same person. Just as Dīrghatamas Māmateya is Kṛṣṇa, the charioteer.

Knowledge is not an answer but a defiant question: Ka? Who? Knowledge is the last ruse, which allows us to escape being killed, to obtain a — provisional — stay of execution. Which was another reason why one celebrated the sacrifice of the horse.

There is a horse’s head rolling along the surface of the sky: it is the sun.

There is a horse’s head rolling across the earth: it is the receptacle of sweetness.

There is a man’s head rolling across the earth: it is the person who hasn’t solved the enigma of the horse’s severed head.

Like everything, the aśvamedha, which is everything, began and ended with water. There was a bath at the beginning. There was a bath at the end. After the final bath (asabhṛtha), “those who do good and those who do evil return to their village together, hand in hand.”