L'ardore QUOTES

1 " ardor which is tapas; the name Indra "

2 " The gods do not speak with everyone,” and so a way has to be devised to approach them: men must segregate themselves in the same way as the gods are segregated from men. Then perhaps the gods will pay attention. An initial separation from other men is achieved through the preliminary actions of the rite.

When setting up the gārhapatya fire, he first sweeps the chosen space with a palāśa branch and says: ‘Away from here! Away! Crawl away from here,’ then: ‘Go away, go and slip away from here,’ he says to those who slither on their bellies. ‘You who are here from ancient and recent times!’ and therefore both those who are here from a remote time as well as those who have settled here today.”

The ritual action is an imitation. Of other men, who lived in the beginning? Or of gods? During the building of the fire altar when certain bricks, known as dviyajus, “which require a double formula,” have to be arranged. At that moment the sacrificer thinks the following words: “I wish to go to the celestial world following the same form, celebrating the same rite that Indra and Agni used to enter the celestial world!” What the sacrificer is imitating is the act of the god himself making himself a god

Ritual serves above all to resolve through action what thought alone cannot resolve. For example: what do we do with the ash produced by the sacrificial fire? The ashes are thrown into water. And these words are spoken: “O divine waters, receive these ashes and place them in a soft and fragrant place!” And then: “May the consorts, married to a good lord, bow down to him.” The “consorts” here are the waters, who have found a “good lord” in Agni. The waters are chosen as a place for ashes, because Agni was born from the womb of the waters.So Agni will not be lost. "

― Roberto Calasso , L'ardore

3 " Choosing the tree to cut down, from which to make the yūpa, the sacrificial “post,” which in itself epitomizes the totality of the sacrifice, is like choosing any other victim: it is the act in which the mystery of election is revealed. The ritualist therefore considers it with great care, so that the sacrificer must bring all his keenness into play. What tree will he choose? Not the closest one in the forest. That would be too crude and too simple. It would be as if all you had to do was take one step forward to be chosen—and one step back not to be. But nor will the sacrificer choose the tree farthest away. The last would then be the most likely—and all, if they wanted to avoid being chosen, would rush to the most conspicuous positions. Here again the choice would lose its mystery. No, the sacrificer will choose “on the nearer side of the farther” and “on the farther side of the nearer.” And where in the forest does the farther begin? Where does the nearer reach its limit? No one can know this. Not even the sacrificer, until that inscrutable moment when he will say to the tree, in that grim, unctuous tone that all victims recognize: “We favor you, O divine lord of the forest.”
This way of dealing with the mystery of election brings us face-to-face with an implacable difference and peculiarity, from the brahminic point of view. "

― Roberto Calasso , L'ardore

4 " Prajāpati: the creator god who is not entirely sure he exists. Prajāpati is the god who has no identity, who is the origin of all insoluble paradoxes. All identities arise from him, who himself has none. And so he takes a step back, or to one side, allowing the rush of mortal beings, ready to forget him, to carry on. But they will then return to him, to ask him the wherefore. And the wherefore can only be similar to what made them first emerge: a rite, a composition of elements, of forms, a temporary—the only—guarantee of existence. He never resembled a sovereign who elatedly surveys his dominions. He left that feeling to one of his sons, Indra—and he pitied him for it. He knew that, along with euphoria, and bound up with it, Indra would face mockery and retribution.

Since Prajāpati was an amalgam of seven ṛṣis, those “seers” who, in turn, had been seven “vital breaths,” though incapable of existing alone. Asat is therefore a place where at the beginning energy is burning. And so from the vital breaths were born “seven persons (puruṣas).” The first beings with bodily features were therefore the ṛṣis: the Saptarṣis, the original Seven Ṛṣis. But the Saptarṣis were immediately aware of their limited power. Generated by the vital breaths, they themselves could not procreate. Their first desire was therefore to act in concert, transforming themselves into a single person. This had to be their task: to compress themselves, condense themselves into one single body, occupying its various parts: “Two above the navel and two below the navel; one on the right side, one on the left side, one at the base.” There was now a body, but it had no head. Still they worked away. From each of them was extracted essence, sap, taste, rasa. And they concentrated it all into the same place, as if into a jar: that was the head. The person made up from the Seven Seers was now complete. And “that same person became Prajāpati.” This was how the Progenitor was created, he who generated everything, including the vital breaths, Indra, and the Saptarṣis who had laboriously created him. "

― Roberto Calasso , L'ardore

5 " As the Vedic ritualists say, man is the only one of the sacrificial victims who also celebrates sacrifices. It is essential to anticipate this question: why invent the highly complex ceremony of sacrifice, if in the end everything is to be reduced to dividing up pieces of meat? Here is the answer given by the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa: the sacrificial victim shall be divided into thirty-six parts, because the bṛhatī meter consists of thirty-six syllables: “By dividing it in this way, the victim is made into a celestial being, whereas those who proceed in another way tear it apart like rogues or criminals.” And here we see the great role that meter plays in the Veda, as the primary articulation of form, as the first effective device for breaking away from the meaningless and arbitrary succession of existence. Here it is said, among other things, that “the bṛhatī is the mind.” And so, if the mind coils within itself the thirty-six fragments of the sacrificial victim, this alone is enough to transform those pieces of flesh into fragments of a whole that has a life of its own—and is perhaps also “a celestial being. "

― Roberto Calasso , L'ardore

6 " Every construction is temporary, including the fire altar. It is not a fixed object, but a vehicle. Once the voyage is complete, the vehicle can be destroyed. Thus the Vedic ritualists did not develop the idea of the temple. If such care was given to constructing a bird, it was to make it fly. What remained on earth was an inert shell of dust, dry mud, and bricks. It could be left behind, like a carcass. "

― Roberto Calasso , L'ardore

7 " No sacred places were fixed, umbilical, created once and for all, like temples. The sacred place was the scene for the sacrifice. It had to be chosen each time following set criteria: “As well as being on high ground, that place shall be flat; and as well as being flat, it shall be firm; and as well as being firm, it shall slope eastward, since east is the direction of the gods; or otherwise it should face northward, as north is the direction of men. It shall be raised slightly to the south, because that is the direction of the ancestors. If it had been lower to the south, the sacrificer would have soon passed into the underworld; in this way the sacrificer will live long: that is why it is slightly raised to the south. "

― Roberto Calasso , L'ardore

8 " Yājñavalkya immediately separated out the two essential points in every sacrificial act: substitution and the transposition from the visible to the realm of the mind. "

― Roberto Calasso , L'ardore

9 " Viewed from the standpoint of the Enlightenment, the Veda is as dark as night, dense, with no apparent inclination toward clarity. It is a world that is self-sufficient, highly tensioned, even convulsive, wrapped up in itself, with no curiosity about any other manner of existence. Streaked by all kinds of violent desires, it has no thirst for objects, vassals, pomp. If we are looking for an emblem of something utterly alien to modernity (however it might be defined), something that might look upon it with complete indifference, we find it in the Vedic people. "

― Roberto Calasso , L'ardore

10 " Reading the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa is like making a journey to the radiant heart of India. But the idea—later abandoned—of a commentary certainly did not aim to do that. On the contrary, it was an attempt to move away from any specific coordinates of time and place to return to observing certain simple gestures, of which we may be aware or unaware, but are always with us and without which we could not exist: the actions of breathing, swallowing, copulating, cutting, killing, evacuating, speaking, burning, pouring, thinking, dreaming, watching—and more. "

― Roberto Calasso , L'ardore

11 " Detachment and renouncement: often synonyms in Sanskrit, but not in the Gītā: here ‘renouncement’ (saṃnyāsa) is the lower form that consists of becoming a hermit, sitting beneath a tree and moving no further. ‘Detachment’ (tyāga) is making use of this world as if not using it. "

― Roberto Calasso , L'ardore