Why do I want to humiliate myself?, W. wonders. Why, over and again? – 'Your presentations. Your books …' It's a mystery to him. Is it masochism? Undoubtedly. But this masochism itself has a source. It's Hindu, W. says. It must be.
Didn't I tell him one fevered night about the centrality of sacrifice in Hinduism? Of the 400 kinds of sacrifice detailed in the Vedas? Of the correspondences between the microcosm and the macrocosm, of cosmogony and anthropogony?
Of the horse sacrifice – the most splendid of all -when a stallion was sent out to wander through the world for a year, before being ritually suffocated? Of the dismemberment of the horse, and the offering of its parts to different deities? Of the divine power of the horse, harnessed by the queen's symbolic copulation with the dead stallion? And of the king who receives this divine power in turn, and for whom the sacrifice only magnifies his glory?
Didn't I insist that to sacrifice and to be sacrificed were essentially the same? That it is the self that is immolated in the sacrificial fire, even as it is the same self that is purified and becomes one with God? I told him the only authentic sacrifice was suicide. That the victim of the sacrifice – whether human or animal - is only a substitute and a proxy.
Light the sacrificial fire in the Hindu religion, and it is you yourself you set aflame, I've told W. You sacrifice yourself, but this reveals the continual sacrifice that is your ultimate or highest self, Atman.
The Atman itself is sacrifice: didn't I tell W. that? Then sacrifice is not only a matter of destruction. Didn't Prajapati, the Lord of Creatures, create the world by dismembering himself in sacrifice? Wasn't it then that the all – the universal whole and totality -divided itself into the three worlds and four quarters of the manifest universe? Wasn't it thus that the Cosmic One, the principle of unity and uniformity, gave way to the sundered world of gods and men, the sacred and the profane?
Dismembered, scattered, Prajapati begged Agni, the god of the sacrificial fire, to put him back together. He begged him to reunify heaven, middle space and the earth; he begged for his fragments to be rejoined to the whole. And it was thus that the five parts of his body – hair, skin, flesh, bone and marrow – became the five layers of the sacrificial altar. It was thus that Agni lent his own body – the eternal flame – to the sacrificial fire. Henceforward, it was through oblation, through the offering to the fire that the universal whole and totality would revealed itself anew. It was through the ritual of burning that the moral and the immortal were rejoined anew.
Now he understands, W. says, or he thinks he understands: my life, the disaster of my life, is an attempt to belong to the sacrifice.
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