What Is The Sacred?
We know it as holy, divine, eternal, and a host of other words- but what is it really and why is it important?
Somewhere in Rishikesh, India. Photo by Garima Garg.
In his numinous book, Ardor (Penguin, 2015), the Italian writer Roberto Calasso begins by explaining the meaning of Agnihotris, or those that preserve the ritual fire, as a conversation between eight brahmins and a woman, Gargi, from the text Satapatha Brahmana. The brahmins include Yajnavalkya and Asvala.
The latter is the priest of the king Janaka and he wants to test the knowledge of the former who is believed to be the most knowledgeable one as a brahmin. Partly due to the rhythmic nature of the Vedas and partly due to Calasso’s otherworldly writing, the exchange feels somewhat liminal too. So, Asvala asks Yajnavalkya, how can he escape death as a hotr even though his own work requires a lot of animals to be sacrificed to rituals. To which, the knowledgeable one responds, “By way of the hotr, of fire, of speech. For the hotr of the sacrifice is speech. What this speech is, is fire. It is the hotr, it is liberation, it is total liberation”. In stating this, he refers to the repetitive recitation of a priest which formalises the sacrifice being undertaken and the offering being made through the act. The exchange goes on. Asvala is trying to confuse Yajnavalkya and asks the same question from a different vantage point. “The atmosphere offers no point of support. What path will the sacrificer take to get to the celestial world,” Asvala asks. “By way of the brahmin officiant, by way of the mind, of the moon.”
Then come the revelations of Bhrgu, who is young when we meet him, and is stating them— “Every act that consumes a part of the world, every act that destroys. There is no neutral state, no state in which this doesn’t happen. The act of eating is a violence that causes what is living, in its many forms, to disappear. Whether grass, plants, trees, animals, or human beings, the process is the same. There is always a fire that devours and a substance that is devoured. This violence, bringing misery and torment, will one day be carried out by those who suffer it on those who inflict it. Such a chain of events cannot change. But the serious damage, the paralysis that this causes in those who become aware of it can be treated, remedied. And what was the remedy? The very act of perceiving that which is, not just with words, but with gestures: in this case, with a series of gestures to be carried out in the agnihotra, the most basic of all rites. Pouring milk into the fire- every morning, every evening- meant accepting that what appears disappears and that what has disappeared serves to give sustenance to something else, in the invisible.”
In other words, the most basic of all acts, i.e., eating food, was woven in a ritual and an understanding that encouraged attention, respect, and humility towards the act of consumption which was seen as intrinsically destructive. In order to balance that act of destruction, something was sacrificed as a reminder of it but also as a way of self-regulation. That self-regulation of one’s needs and desires was also one’s self-sacrifice, not as a moral grandstanding act but as an act of humility and self-awareness of one’s greed, lust, and ego. While today such ideas will seem comically antiquated, it is worth asking if there was something to this quality of sacrifice and sacred intertwined with each other in all respects of life in ancient times.
The modern age is one of material abundance, prosperity, and choice. In this age, it is the act of consumption that is sacrosanct, not the object of consumption, whether we talk about food, education, legal and healthcare aid, or what have you. Our commerce and technological advancements have freed us from shackles that weighed down much of the world for much of the human history. At the very heart of it is the smartphone, which doubles up as a personal supercomputer, giving us abilities that would have been considered god-like even a few decades ago. What, then, is the need for primitive obeisance towards nature, god, and one’s surroundings? What is the need for the sacred and sacrifice in a world such as ours? Hasn’t the desacralisation of nature and life given us everything we ever wanted?
It is worth considering that within a century of industrial production and consumption, mass secularisation, and privatisation of natural resources, that we live on a planet overrun with all sorts of problems— the environmental, the societal, the communal, and the personal. This age of abundance and technology has not freed us from the problems of climate change, wars and crime, and the fragility of a family or a communal unit. While the human civilisations have always grappled with such issues, never have we dealt with such problems in a such a desacralised world. That is, problems can no more be solved by appeal to the holy, divine, and the eternal in the real sense of the word.
So, what was this sacred and why was (and is) it important? Most of us tend to associate this quality with a place of worship— a temple, church, mosque, and the like. It calls to us ideas of authority, blind faith, and superstition. After all, most wars that have been waged in the world have been done so in the garb of religion, even if the wars were actually about land, power, or personal delusions.
But despite it all, the average person until a few centuries ago understood something of the intended sanctity of nature and life. It was understood that nature’s gifts were not to be taken for granted and that there was a higher reality like god or fate that governed our lives. It was accepted that one must take only what one needed and a bit more but also give back in equal measure to nature as well as one’s community. In other words, everything and everyone that gave us sustenance was sacred because sustenance meant survival. Survival is still our most vital instinct as humans but the dynamics of sustenance have changed radically. For today, sustenance is but guaranteed for most, if not all.
Whatever is guaranteed eventually loses its meaning and creates more serious existential issues for us. On one hand, being disconnected with what sustains us is to be lost in a maze in a zero-gravity ambience. With nothing to anchor one’s perspective and understanding, one drifts along with the chaos of future without a grounded sense of past and present. On the other hand, it pushes us higher on the hierarchy of needs and desires. From basic survival of the body, we move towards the sociological and psychological survival. But how can the higher needs and desires take on meaning when the lesser ones have been so throughly desacralised by way of easy availability of material resources?
True to the nature of times, even our attempts at rediscovering the sacred are mostly hollow for they take the form of celebrity “fandoms”, politics as a mass media theatre, and worst religious impulses whipped up for social media “content”. This is to a great extent because this form of sacred exists without the sacrifice, that is, the act of giving back and self-regulation. Without the latter, we are unable to discover the corresponding attention, respect, and humility in our lives at the most basic. This means that our struggle becomes collectively more sociological and psychological without there being any sacred belief that could actually induce the collective towards any kind of sacrifice. In this paradox, lies the crisis and journey of our age.
Great write up!
It’s a very interesting link you make between loss of a sacrificial consciousness and (over) consumption without consciousness. There’s something there in this connection. Looking forward to reading more on this.
Good article Garima. 'There can be no sacred without a sacrifice' is an insightful observation.