Sleepless and sweaty in the “great heats” of July 1840, Ralph Waldo Emerson reached for something sublime and sensual: “There was nothing for me but to read the Vedas, the bible of the tropics.” The problem was that the “grand ethics” of Vedic mythology, and the “unfathomable power” of Vedic cosmology, were traduced by a fetish for sacrificial rites. A modern seeker had to sift “primeval inspiration” from “endless ceremonial nonsense.”
This sentiment, like many an Emerson original, was already a Romantic commonplace; often, his breathless intuitions sprang whole from the head of Thomas Carlyle, like Athena from Zeus. The saving of living spirit from dead ritual was a common ideal of Enlightenment rationalists, Romantic irrationalists, and the British administrators of India who (as Warren Hastings explained in his preface to the Bhagavad Gita) translated India’s sacred texts, the better to rule the natives. In the 1890s, Max Müller, doyen of Victorian Indology, summarized this Victorian consensus: Vedic wisdom was “indispensable” to “liberal education” and more “improving” than the “dates and deeds of many of the kings of Judah and Israel.”
But only the hymns of the Rig Veda qualified. The later Vedas were a mess of “sacrificial formulas, charms, and incantations.” The priestly commentaries and sacrificial manuals of the Brahmanas should be studied “as a physician studies the twaddle of idiots and the ravings of madmen.”
Roberto Calasso began Ardor as a commentary on one of those “ravings,” the Satapatha Brahmana, but it grew into a lucid panorama of Vedic civilization. Calasso is a stylish dramatist of lost inner lives, one of those increasingly rare writers both erudite enough to comprehend the alien past and stylish enough to make it interesting. He revived the Hindu gods in Ka, and the equally lurid pantheon of European Romantics in The Ruin of Kasch. Miraculously, his The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, on the dead gods of Greece, became a bestseller. His studies of Kafka, Baudelaire, and Tiepolo are treasure chests of epigrammatic insight into modernity. Only George Steiner has foraged so broadly and fruitfully in the weed-choked fields of art and memory. Mysteriously, Calasso has done this without giving up his day job as publisher of Adelphi Editions in Milan.
Neurotics have obsessions; the religious have rituals; and artists have recurring themes. Ardor is the seventh in a sequence, an unfolding altarpiece that envelops the viewer. Calasso’s themes are sacrifice, the act of violence at the heart of religion; and analogy, the evoking of the invisible by the visible. As Yeats wrote in “The Second Coming,” the “blood-dimmed tide” of sacred murder, the oldest and crudest proof of faith, asserts that “some revelation is at hand.” The ardor of the priest is the “passionate intensity” of the fanatic, slaughtering his enemy to ward off his own death; the destruction of the sacred portion evokes the powers of creation.
The Vedas are thematically perfect for Calasso, a reader of Sanskrit, but never before has he sailed so far back in time, and in such murky waters. Veda means “knowledge,” but we know little about the origins of Vedic civilization and how it developed in northwestern India in the second millennium b.c. The priestly authors of the Vedas portray their forefathers as the Arya, the “noble” or “hospitable” conquerors. The Vedic gods, led by Indra, had an equally violent domestic life and were propitiated by animal sacrifices whose volume and complexity suggest that humans had only recently left the altar. In the Asvamedha, or “Horse Sacrifice,” dozens of animals were dispatched under the king’s gaze, and the queen ritually copulated with a dead horse under priestly supervision. The participants in these ritual exertions contacted the gods directly by ingesting a mind-altering brew called Soma. Later, the priests lost the recipe. It is never advisable to write sacred texts on tree bark.
“We must seek the highest Romanticism in the Orient,” Friedrich Schlegel wrote in 1800, expressing a wish as an order. For more than a century, European Indologists took the “Aryan” past at its priests’ estimation. In the age of industrial cities, spiritual confusion, and democratic mobs, the chimerical Aryans seemed both Romantic and sublime: a race of aristocratic warriors untroubled by law, morality, and other restraints upon the Will, not bourgeois merchants, hobbled by the cash nexus and Christian ethics. “Blond beasts,” as Nietzsche wrote, more wistfully than critically. Although Vedic civilization was younger than the Egyptian, Sumerian, and Hittite civilizations, and although many Vedic texts were little older than Greek or Hebrew ones, the 19th-century West adopted the Aryans as the original human civilization, and the original human race.
The disastrous influence of the Aryan romance on German foreign policy led to a shamed reassessment. In recent scholarship, the Aryans originate in the Asian steppes, the Bactria of the camels and ancient Greeks. Vedic religion arises from the interplay between the “Indo-Iranian” immigrants, some of them positively peaceable, and the Indian locals. The Rig Veda was written around 1500 b.c., while the Myceneans were eyeing Minoan Crete and the Hebrews sojourning in Egypt. The Satapatha Brahmana is at least 700 years younger. It dates from the 8th century b.c. and describes the rites of a settled, stratified urban people. Its priests were contemporaries of the prophet Elisha, who denounced Jehoash, king of Israel, for worshipping a golden calf; and Homer, who imagined the Achaean warriors sacrificing bulls on the shore at Ilium and Odysseus escaping death by refusing to eat the oxen of the sun.
By the 1960s, Vedic researchers were less likely to be sniffing for Aryan blood than to be searching for Soma. As Aldous Huxley had written in Brave New World, “Half a gram for a half holiday, a gram for a weekend, two grams for a trip to the gorgeous East.” R. Gordon Wasson identified Soma with the Amanita muscaria mushroom, still popular with Siberian shamans. Robert Graves believed that “mushroom orgies” had inspired the Greek legend of Dionysus’ invasion of Bactria. Terence McKenna, face down on the road of excess and far from the palace of wisdom, identified Soma with a mushroom that grows on cowpats and linked this to Hindu cow worship. Finally, the Russian archaeologist Viktor Sarianidi, discoverer of the Bactrian civilization, tested some temple vessels: Soma was the juice of the Ephedra plant, a primitive amphetamine, with traces of cannabis and poppy seeds.
Calasso steps over the scholarly cowpats and speculative orgiasts. Ardor presents the world through the eyes of the knife-wielding priest, and of the goat tied to the pole. The sacrificial scene and its mentality float in a “living forest” of symbols, as in Baudelaire’s Correspondances. Myth and ritual are a double act: The “metaphysical nitpicking” of procedure enacts the drama of salvation—or at least preservation. God is in these details, and there are an awful lot of them. At times, Calasso’s ardor for his subject is overwhelming. The reader may feel less like a knowledgeable priest and more like a stupefied goat.
Nature, Emerson said, is the “first legislator.” All its punishments are capital. There is defiance in Calasso’s intense elaboration of Vedic sacrifice, his anatomy of sacred violence as “the microphysics of the mind,” and his insistence that sacred beliefs and rites are a synecdoche for their entire society. In his final chapter, he jumps from ancient to modern times: The cool procedures of “secular” science mask our innate tendency towards “metaphysical nitpicking.” Like “infidels who cannot resist using the family crest,” Saturn and Apollo were “recruited” by NASA. Agni, the sacred fire of the Vedas, still bears death and mastery, as an Indian long-range missile. The “only form of sacrifice universally visible on television screens” is that of the Islamist suicide killer. And his rite of sacred death (Calasso reminds us) resembles the Roman rite of devotio, in which a designated soldier made his “vow to the gods of the underworld,” then rushed into the enemy’s ranks to spread the invisible “contagion” of fear.
“The great innovators,” Proust wrote, “are the only true classics, and form a continuous series.” Erudite and elaborate, baffling and brilliant, Ardor confirms Roberto Calasso as the foremost interpreter of the thought of Roberto Calasso. He has yet to be apotheosized as an adjective, but Ardor is another “Calassic.”
Dominic Green’s next book, The Religious Revolution, is a history of modern spirituality.
