Ardor (60 page)

And we continue to resort to the names of gods when it comes to weapons regarded as decisive, as if they still had an irresistible attraction. Saturn and Apollo were immediately recruited by NASA. Agni is an Indian long-range missile. Saturn could have been a valid name because of his fatal aura, and Apollo for his epithet of “he who strikes from afar,”
hekat
ē
bólos
, but for Agni the correspondence is even more convincing. Agni is Fire, the very element of which the weapon is built. And he is the first messenger, he who wove the perpetual flow between earth and sky, between the place of men and that of the gods. Agni, indeed, points toward the sky even today. But, once it has disappeared from sight and become an imperceptible dot in the atmosphere, Agni will turn around and seek out its objective on earth. A vertical voyage, up and down, which was the basis of the sacrifice, has become a horizontal movement, where the sky serves only as an obstacle-free terrain. This is the comparison that best represents the current state of affairs: the compulsion to resort to the gods, but wiping them from existence and using their names to evoke deadly power. A trick of infidels who cannot resist using the family crest.

*   *   *

The religion of our time is the religion of society, within which even Christianity or Islam are vast enclaves. Its herald, though he was not entirely aware of it, was Émile Durkheim, who crystallized the notion in
Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse
, first published in 1912. More than with elementary forms of religious life, the book dealt with the transformation of society into a religion of itself. But it is part of its nature that the religion of society does not seek to describe and identify itself as such. Its conduct is similar to that of the religions of the past: pervasive, omnipresent, like the air we breathe.

According to Durkheim, the “moral ascendancy” of society, given the pressure it exercises over every individual, would be sufficient to explain the origin of religion. As for religion itself (
any
religion—and not just that of the Australian Aborigines with which he had been concerned from the very beginning), Durkheim describes it as “the product of a certain delirium.”

And if religion dies out? This would not mean that the delirium would die out. Durkheim is consequential—no one can deny it—and immediately he ventures to suggest: “Maybe there is no collective representation that is not in a sense delirious.” Including therefore also the secular, skeptical collective representation of those at the beginning of the twentieth century who sought to explain the “inexplicable hallucination” they considered religion to be.

Seen from a distance of a century, this view, set out in spare and austere prose, could itself be plausibly described as a calm delirium. Society is more clinging and pressing than ever, but it is difficult to recognize a “moral ascendancy” in it. One cannot see, for example, through what argument such “moral ascendancy” could be denied to Hitler’s Germany. Was it not perhaps a
society
like so many others? Conversely, there seems no doubt that life carries on, more and more, within a “fabric of hallucinations,” which are the irrepressible secretions of society itself (of
any
society, in the same way as Durkheim referred to any religion): thin layers of pixels that wrap the world tighter and tighter, like a new kind of mummy, where the corpse itself tends to crumble away under the layers of bandages.

What Durkheim was describing was not the explanation of every religious phenomenon as an inevitable product of society (“the god is only a figurative expression of the society”). On the contrary: it was the founding charter for the transformation of society itself into a new all-encompassing cult, compared with which every previous form would seem inadequate and childish. But this was the overwhelming historic phenomenon that was being developed at the time of Durkheim—and which now dominates the planet. So omnipresent and so evident that it is not even noticed. Paradox: the totally secular society is one that turns out to be less secular than any other, because secularity, as soon as it extends to everything, assumes within itself those hallucinatory, phantasmal, and delirious characteristics that Durkheim had identified in religion in general. And this is what Durkheim was talking about, without meaning to and without recognizing it, when he wrote: “Thus there is one region of nature where the formula of idealism is applicable almost to the letter: this is the social kingdom.” The “formula of idealism” was an antiquated way of suggesting what, a little earlier, Durkheim had described, more perspicuously, as a “fabric of hallucinations.” But the crucial point was another: it was all in that “almost to the letter.” Life continues from then on, and forever more, within a “social kingdom” where hallucinations have to be understood “almost to the letter.”

What are rituals? Durkheim asks this in the manner of someone spying on certain unintelligible sequences of gestures. And he immediately comes to the point: “Whence could the illusion have come that with a few grains of sand thrown to the wind, or a few drops of blood shed upon a rock or the stone of an altar, it is possible to maintain the life of an animal species or of a god?” Everything points to the view that “the efficacy attributed to the rites” is no more than “the product of a chronic delirium with which humanity has abused itself.”

Up to this point the reasoning is consequential. But Durkheim goes one step further. For him, rites (
all
rites) are senseless delirium, but they have a sense. Indeed, they have
one sense only
, which is found everywhere, among Australian Aborigines as much as in ancient Greece: “The effect of the cult really is to recreate periodically a moral being upon which we depend as it depends upon us. Now this being does exist: it is society.” In one well-prepared move, Durkheim has managed to pull out of his magician’s hat something that might seem even more hallucinatory and delirious than a god or a totemic animal: nothing less than a “moral being,” who must be presumed identical everywhere and capable of embracing any form of existence insofar as it is a supreme and total being: society (“the concept of totality is only the abstract form of the concept of society”—it can be no surprise that people began talking a few years later about
totalitarianism
).

Perhaps Durkheim’s view will one day appear no less improbable than that of the Urabunnas who broke off pieces of rock and threw them randomly, in all directions “in order to secure an abundant production of lizards.” And yet for the whole of the twentieth century Durkheim’s voice was the voice of science, of a sober and cautious learning that dispels all delirium, even though it studies its forms with diligent benevolence. And this could not happen except by way of an act of faith that conferred divine status on an invisible entity (society).

*   *   *

In the end, the question of rituals could be expressed in this way: society celebrates them to sustain, reaffirm, or give credence to itself—and in this case nothing marks them better than military parades on national holidays, tributes at war memorials, or speeches by heads of state at New Year (and from these rites, examples of the highest kind, all others should be inferred); or alternatively, society celebrates rituals to establish contact with something outside itself that is largely unknown and certainly powerful—something of which nature itself is a part. In this case, the model rite would also be the least visible, performed by an individual, in silence, not corresponding to fixed moments of time, as with festivals, celebrations, and commemorations. The two paths are divergent and incompatible. Separated by one essential difference: the second path can never include the first, due to the unyielding disparity between those for whom the ritual is performed. But the first can include the second: for this to happen, it is enough that the very notion of society manages to become the entity that is
largely unknown and certainly powerful
to which certain rites are directed. If this is a god—and a god who demands human victims—society has no difficulty in taking its place, as we have seen on so many occasions. Countless human beings have become victims for the benefit of society.

*   *   *

The word
sacrifice
has now assumed a psychological and economic meaning: this is clear to anyone. Someone
makes sacrifices
for the family. A government
asks sacrifices
from its citizens. But if the same government were to ask citizens to
celebrate sacrifices
, whether or not involving killing, the suggestion would sound very odd. It would seem like a fit of madness.

Yet mankind, for most of its history, has
celebrated sacrifices.
In Egypt, in Mesopotamia, in India, in China, in Mexico, in Greece; in Rome and Jerusalem; in various parts of Africa, Australia, Polynesia, the Americas, central Asia and Siberia; sacrifices have been celebrated everywhere. Why then have such acts become unthinkable, at least for an entity that still calls itself the West but now extends across the whole earth?

“The great tasks of government are sacrifices and military action,” we read in the
Zuo zhuan.
But “the most important task of government is sacrifice.” And, in a period not so distant from this Chinese text, Plato wrote in his
Laws
that “the noblest and truest rule” was this: “For the good man, the act of sacrificing [
th
ý
ein
, a specific word for sacrifice] and engaging in continual communion with the gods through prayers, offerings, and devotions of every kind is the thing most noble and good and helpful for a happy life.” Both the
Zuo zhuan
and the
Laws
seek to define the proper way of living, for the community and for the individual. And both texts immediately point to sacrifice. Something so essential might change somewhat over time (like the art of war) but it is very hard to believe that it could disappear, becoming unimaginable. And yet this is exactly what has happened with the
celebration of sacri
fi
ces.
A caesura separates the last few centuries of the secular and Christian West (and secular because previously Christian) from all that had happened previously. And this caesura is what should be studied, contemplated.

*   *   *

Sacri
fi
ce
is a word that creates immediate embarrassment. Many use it casually when they talk about psychological considerations, money, or war. Linked always to some noble sentiment. But, if we are referring to the ritual ways of what in the past was called
sacrifice
, there is a sudden repulsion.
Sacrifice
is, by definition, something that society will
not
accept, belonging to an age that is dead and gone forever.
Sacri
fi
ce
is regarded as something barbarous, primitive, the stuff of peplums. Why, then, is the word continually used? Especially in key issues where there is nothing, it seems, to take its place.

The reasons for the sacrifices described in the
Ś
atapatha Br
ā
hma
ṇ
a
or in Porphyry’s
De abstinentia
or in Leviticus remain just the same if we have a perception of the
numina
, the divine powers to whom the rites were addressed. But that perception has become confused over time. So the ceremonies seem no more that a sequence of foolish gestures, generally culminating in the killing of an animal. And this is the only point on which there is no possible blurring, since it is patently obvious to anyone today that the world depends upon the daily killing of millions of animals. Killings that take place in many different ways, but all, without exception, in obedience to one single rule: they should not take place in public. This rule is enforced in very different cultures as inviolable and inalienable, without any real voice of opposition. The killing of animals during sacrifices ought therefore to stir a universal feeling of repulsion. And so it does—yet at the same time sacrifice is associated with a series of fine and noble images. Indeed, the word itself is still used, metaphorically, in situations where it inevitably denotes something dutiful and commendable. This tangle of very strong and contradictory feelings becomes evident as soon as we begin to look at the world today, which pretends to ignore sacrifice. And perhaps in that tangle, more than anywhere else, we notice how this world of today is detached from and, at the same time, dependent on all that has preceded it. The inevitable embarrassment of anyone who approaches the question of sacrifice is only a symptom of the persistence of that tangle, which seems to become even more tightly knotted whenever we try to unravel it. And above all, for most people, it remains invisible. The simple act of being aware of it would itself bring a radical change.

*   *   *

It wasn’t just the difference between consubstantiation and transubstantiation that worried Luther when it came to the Eucharist. There was another question to be answered. Was the Last Supper to be interpreted as a divine and human gathering, which the Mass had simply commemorated? Or was it a sacrifice, celebrated by a priest who was also the victim? And a sacrifice that heralded another sacrifice—this time a blood sacrifice—the crucifixion?