Sacrifice creates the strongest link between society and what lies outside it. But the sacred margin of contact with the outside world—the geometric locus where the sacrifice takes place—also permits the existence of an internal, profane area in pectore, which can now grow without being threatened at any moment by the sacred. In the destruction—even only of herbs—the guilt on which culture is established is affirmed: its detachment, its isolation from everything else, insofar as it isolates a thing-victim and expels it. By dedicating the victim to something other than itself, society recognizes its own dependence upon that from which it has detached itself. And at the same time it holds the outside world at a distance, offering it the victim rather than itself. This is the act of reverence. This is the cunning trick of enlightenment. At first, they are inseparable. The ploy is wrapped in reverence, and it works as a slow corrosive, like the poison (German: Gift) in the gift. As a Gift-gift.

In Guénon’s formulation, the sacrifice reflects (and therefore inverts) the solve et coagula of origin: that which was divided in the creation is now joined back together. “The essential purpose of sacrifice is to ‘unite that which has been separated,’ therefore—so far as man is concerned—to reunite ‘I’ to the ‘Self.’ ”²⁸⁹ Hence the coniunctio, the hierogamy, which is interwoven with the acts of the sacrifice: the ritual foundation of interweaving Eros and Thanatos. Hence the smell of slaughter that is the aura of sex. But how can an act of violent expulsion and destruction be an act of reunion, of restitution? In killing the victim, culture violently detaches itself from the thing, it severs a tie that binds it to the whole. But, by dedicating the victim to the divinity, culture rejoins the thing destroyed—as a representative of culture itself—to the whole. Here, in this pendular movement, lies the double aspect of sacrifice. And the difference is determined by the point at which the movement is halted: whether at the center within society or the center outside it. In the Vedic texts, the answer is clear: the center into which the sacrifice flows lies outside society. The sacrificial vessel sets out from the formless and profane existence of the yajamāna (the “sacrificer”), who is the patron and beneficiary of the ceremony; during the ritual actions it sails through the treacherous waters and currents of the sacred, which is made there; finally it delivers the victim to the divine ocean, which reabsorbs him, in the same way that ātman absorbs jīvātman, in the same way that the Self absorbs the I. Then the sacrificer returns to his life. A murderous eros, an amorous killing, the archetype of every journey.

Porphyry, in De abstinentia, discusses whether or not nómos (law) extends to animals. Nómos does not, in fact, extend to the whole of nature, but is founded on a separation between one sphere where it rules (society) and one sphere abandoned to whim (animals, along with nature). Law cannot therefore support universal interdependence: its application involves the severing of links that the law itself does not set down. Where the law has not spoken, chance rules. Chance means anything whatsoever. Where the law has not spoken, anything whatsoever can rule.