Ardor (52 page)

Meanwhile the brahmins drank
soma
—and kept silent. Indra celebrated
soma
—and could no longer drink it. Suddenly, in a flash, a secret, obstinate, unending conflict broke out between the two sovereign powers, between priest and king, who were required to work together. The Veda, unlike the rest of the world that would follow, was always biased in favor of the priests, without it being too apparent.

Who is noble? Anyone who can boast “ten consecutive ancestors who drank
soma.
” But, to drink
soma
, you had to be invited. Indra’s offense—greater than any other—was that of having tried to drink
soma
by force. Tva
ṣṭṛ
had refused to invite him. This was understandable, since Indra had just killed his son. But Indra should nevertheless have been invited by another brahmin, if not by Tva
ṣṭṛ
. This is the fundamental weakness of the
k
ṣ
atriyas
: their king has to be invited to drink
soma.
And only a brahmin can invite him. It is a question of intoxication, even of pure power. It is said that brahmins who drink
soma
can kill with their eyes.

*   *   *

The life of Soma—“the least understood god of the Vedic religion,” Lommel once wrote—has been left in obscurity because many have thought it enough to identify him with the
soma
plant or (later on) with the moon. But being an intoxicating juice, a celestial body, a king, and a god, all at the same time, is not in itself a problem for Vedic thought. In his royal manifestation, Soma was the head of a dynasty—the
lunar dynasty
—that cuts through the whole of Indian mythical history up to the
Mah
ā
bh
ā
rata.

Soma’s father was one of the Saptar
ṣ
is: Atri, the Devourer. For three thousand years he had practiced
tapas
with his arms raised. He seemed like “a piece of wood, a wall, or a rock.” So heightened was his consciousness that he never blinked. And one day a juice began to trickle from his eyes and illuminated every corner: it was Soma. The goddesses that kept control over all directions gathered together to receive that glow in their wombs. But the light spilled over. Soma’s fetus fell to the ground and Brahm
ā
placed it on a chariot drawn by white horses, which began to roam the skies, spreading a pearl-like glow. They said: “It is the moon.” At that time Dak
ṣ
a, the chief brahmin, had to marry off his sixty daughters. He looked up at the lunar radiance and decided to entrust twenty-seven of them to Soma. Soma would receive them, night after night, on his journey through the sky. And each daughter was to enjoy him in equal measure. They became the houses of the moon, the first silver-sequined corps de ballet. Then Soma was consecrated king with the celebration of a grand rite, where the future sovereign offered the three worlds as recompense to the
ṛṣ
is
who had officiated over the sacrifice.

At the end, Soma cleansed himself in the
avabh
ṛ
tha
bath that marked the conclusion of the rite. He immediately felt relieved, buoyant, free of responsibility at last. All the gods, all the
ṛṣ
is
had worshipped him. He was sovereign over all. What did he lack? Liberty. That strange intoxication that flows from liberty. He felt that new waves were crashing in his mind: arrogance and lust. What would the worst outrage be? To abduct the wife of a brahmin. Soma knew very well that “even if a woman has had ten non-brahmin husbands, if a brahmin once takes her hand then he alone is her husband to the exclusion of all others.” But no one could resist Soma, the fluid that penetrates everywhere and makes all desirable. And so he set his eye on T
ā
r
ā
, wife of B
ṛ
haspati, chaplain to the gods. It wasn’t difficult to snatch her, and it was thrilling to have intercourse with her, with her exquisite round, moon face.

The result of her abduction could only be war, in the heavens. It was the fifth war between the Devas and the Asuras. Amid repeated massacres, with the final outcome still uncertain, many forgot the original reason for the conflict. But not B
ṛ
haspati, known as “the vulture” for the keenness of his gaze. He realized straightaway that T
ā
r
ā
’s womb was swelling (in the meantime she had been returned to him). He looked at her in disdain, and said: “Never will you be able to hold a fetus in your womb that belongs to me.” Then he ordered her to abort. But T
ā
r
ā
was stubborn and hated nothing more in the world than brahminic arrogance, of which B
ṛ
haspati was the epitome. She refused.

Questioned by the Devas, she admitted that she was about to give birth to Soma’s child. When Budha was born, he condensed in himself the luminescent beauty of both his mother and his father. Meanwhile Soma was wasting away. The sovereign of the heavens, the perfect lover, the repository of rapture, was suffering from consumption. He felt weaker, his light grew dim. He then returned to his father. Inert, all skin and bones, Atri did not deign to look upon him. But later, little by little, as he humbly served that motionless and silent being, Soma felt he was recovering. The sap slowly began to flow once more through the veins of the cosmos.

*   *   *

T
ā
r
ā
’s betrayal was all the more blasphemous and outrageous since King Soma was the
only
king for the brahmins, and therefore for B
ṛ
haspati. For the
k
ṣ
atriyas
everything can become food, except the brahmin, because “his king is Soma.” And so the brahmins cannot be touched by the
k
ṣ
atriyas
, but it is their fate to be deceived and mocked by their own sovereign: Soma. The most treacherous enemy is within one’s own power, even if it were
brahman.
“Spiritualia nequitiae in coelestibus,”
as Paul would one day say. The greatest impiety comes from the sovereign god.

The seating position is most revealing: “And therefore the brahmin, during the king’s rite of consecration, sits below the
k
ṣ
atriya
 …
Brahman
is the womb of royalty (
k
ṣ
atra
), and so, even if the king reaches the highest position, in the end he can only rest on
brahman
, his womb. If he should damage it, he would damage his womb.” An inextricable blend of subordination (the brahmin places himself
below
the king) and preeminence (the king can be born only from
brahman
).

*   *   *

Soma
is pure quality on the threshold of the realm of quantity. Only thanks to
soma
is the existence of quantity justified: “Since he buys the king, everything here below can be bought”; “Since he measures the king, there is therefore a measure, the measure among men as well as any other measure.” Money, measure: to enter the world they need to have King Soma, the only material that is quality alone, immeasurable, irreplaceable, the origin of every measure, of every substitution. If this knot is cut, order falls apart.

Exchange is a violent act because there is no secure, guaranteed fluidity between sky and earth. The flow is obstructed, continually diverted. Sacrifice, and consequently exchange, serve to reestablish the flow, but through an action that has something forced, disturbing, about it, a restoration that presupposes a wound and adds a new one to it.

*   *   *

Soma
was to be approached with desire, but also with fear: “Do not terrify me, O king, do not pierce my heart with your radiance.” The risk was apparent at every moment.
Soma
, liquid fire, had to make its way toward the head, where the Saptar
ṣ
is waited for it, crouching. But at the same time there was the plea: “Do not go below my navel.” If that happened, one would have been overpowered.

The first to abuse
soma
was also he who seized it: Indra. Eager, impatient, headstrong, he snatched the liquid from Tva
ṣṭṛ
and drank it without ritual, without mixing it, without filtering it. His body “fell apart on all sides.” The intoxicating liquid came out of every orifice. Then Indra vomited. He no longer knew what to do, so “he turned to Praj
ā
pati.” “Indra lay on the ground, devastated. The gods gathered around him and said: ‘In truth, he was the best of us; evil has befallen him: we must heal him!’” This would one day lead men to perform the
sautr
ā
ma
ṇī
rite, to remedy Indra’s illness and his crime against
soma.
From that time on, men prayed for draughts of
soma
adding a modest request: “Like the harness of a chariot, thus keep together my limbs.” And they made sure to add humbly: “Let these juices protect me from breaking a leg and preserve me from paralysis.” Drunken and precise.

*   *   *

Soma and Agni are linked by an affinity more powerful and secret than any other, above all because they are the only gods who allow themselves to be seen: Agni is in every fire that blazes; King Soma in every
soma
plant that someone collects on remote mountain slopes and then sells to be offered in sacrifice. They are also linked by their origins: when both still belonged to the Asuras and—in the words of the
Ṛ
gveda
—breathed in the “long darkness,” which was the belly of V
ṛ
tra. They were born or came out of the monster, whom Indra had then killed with the help of Soma himself (Indra had ordered him: “Let us both strike V
ṛ
tra, come out, Soma!”). But the story would become even more disturbing when it was discovered that Soma had not only left V
ṛ
tra’s belly, but
was
V
ṛ
tra. The
Ś
atapatha Br
ā
hma
ṇ
a
leaves no doubt: “‘Soma was in fact V
ṛ
tra: his body is that of the mountains and of the rocks where the plant called U
śā
n
ā
grows,’ so said
Ś
vetaketu Audd
ā
laki. ‘They go to fetch it and press it; by means of the consecration and of the
upasads
, by means of the
t
ā
n
ū
naptras
[ceremonies that form part of the
soma
sacrifices] and the invigoration they make it into
soma.
’” They are words that summed up the whole life of Soma, from when he had hidden himself inside himself up until when he had become a plant transported among men, and transformed and killed by men.

Agni and Soma, so far as their origins and their history, are highly mysterious elements that have to be flushed out of the dark, and yet at the same time they are the most apparent, the elements that are visible in the sacrifice, in the fires and in the favorite oblation of gods and men. Bergaigne rightly separated Agni and Soma from the Devas as a whole, not only because Soma is
“fire in a liquid state,”
not only because the characters of the two gods are to a large extent interchangeable, but because their entire existence belongs to a secret stratum of that which is, in the same way as rapture invades consciousness carrying with it something more remote, overwhelming and indecipherable.

In comparison with Agni and Soma, the Devas have something of the
parvenus
about them: born on the earth, the Devas reached the sky through sacrifice, and therefore through Agni and Soma. Agni and Soma, on the other hand, were born in the sky, and from there were conveyed to the earth: Soma being
ś
yenabh
ṛ
ta
, “carried by the eagle,” Agni being delivered by M
ā
tari
ś
van, the Vedic Prometheus. The
Ṛ
gveda
narrates it as follows: “M
ā
tari
ś
van carried the one [Agni] from the sky, the eagle snatched the other [Soma] from the [celestial] mountain.” There is therefore a cross-movement, between the gods, which corresponds with two lineages. The gods, no less than men, could be different
by birth.

*   *   *

“Now Soma was in the sky and the gods were here on earth. The gods desired: ‘May Soma come to us: we would sacrifice with him, if he came.’ They created these two apparitions (
m
ā
y
ā
), Supar
ṇī
and Kadr
ū
. In the chapter on the
dhi
ṣṇ
ya
fires we read how the affair of Supar
ṇī
and Kadr
ū
came to pass.