The Upaniṣads require the destruction to be carried out at the moment of maximum consciousness. In the Bhagavad Gītā, Arjuna receives the revelation from Kṛṣṇa at the moment when he is about to kill his kinsmen on the battlefield. The secular world turns its eyes away from destruction. And it keeps destruction out of sight, like the bombed city kept away from the eyes of the pilot who drops the bomb—and is already flying far away.

Porphyry is the perfect Western saṃnyāsin. He is familiar with sacrifice, its secrets, its unspeakableness. But he is gripped by a sort of nausea in front of “the impurity that comes from flesh and blood,” in front of the vapors of immolated souls.²⁷⁷ The world, for him, is “sorcery” (goḗteuma), a potion that dulls the mind.²⁷⁸ He has only one desire: to wake up, and to remain in wakefulness, to break the bonds of the sorceress, to become an apostate from the world, therefore to detach himself from it, since “detachment” is apóstasis.

“Detachment can be achieved with violence … But, for example with sentient things, an object snatched away with violence carries with it some part or trace of that from which it has been detached.”²⁷⁹ Clean detachment, without residue, is achieved however by constantly averting the mind from the impure objects, which is reminiscent of uninterrupted prayer. Porphyry is speaking here as an observer of the psyche, using words that have an affinity with those of the great Buddhist masters and with the hermits of the Thebaid—similar to the exchanges of correspondence between seventeenth-century scientists. But he chooses a wonderfully urbane path of detachment, a pool of silence in the metropolis, an existence recognizable from the outside by no indication other than sobriety and clarity. He performs only a “sacrifice of thought” (noerà thysía), presenting himself to the god “in a white garment and with a pure impassive soul and a light body, not burdened by essences or passions of the soul taken from other beings.”^{280, 281} In the pagan twilight, Porphyry is a man who is tired of ritual, fumigations, spells, not because he questions their power, but precisely because he is familiar with such power—and he knows that it would bind him even more to the demons of the world. Like the saṃnyāsin in the forest, Porphyry hides away in the imperial city. “We who each day train ourselves to die to others,” he writes, using the verb apothnḗskein with the dative, in a construction unknown to his teachers, but which we find in Paul (“dead to the law,” “dead to sin”), who was the most philosophical of the Jews, in whom Porphyry recognized a “lineage of philosophers.”^{282, 283, 284, 285}

The gods whom Porphyry worships look more to the “conduct of the sacrificers than the abundance of the things sacrificed.”²⁸⁶ As for the object of the sacrifice, for them “the most excellent offering is a pure intellect and an impassive soul.”²⁸⁷ Here, as already in India, the sacrifice tends to withdraw into the invisible. No external signs make it possible to know what is happening in the sacrificer, apart from a small gesture that Porphyry compares with those required by good manners: “The honors that we reserve for the gods should be likened to those that are rendered to good men when we stand to allow them to sit in the best places, and should not be likened to the payment of taxes.”²⁸⁸ This reference to good manners toward the gods is the last, sublime pagan message.