The law falls silent when it reaches the lavish margin of society, its superabundance: it is the area where animals are killed, silently, unmentioned by the law. It is the sacrificial band that girds society, its infula.

From the Laws of Manu: “The householder has five instruments of murder: the hearth, the pestle, the broom, the mortar, and the water jug.²⁹⁰ In order to atone for all these offenses, the great sages have established five great sacrifices that the householder must perform every year. The teaching [of the Vedas] is the sacrifice to brahman, the offering of food and water is the sacrifice to the ancestors, the offering [of food] in the air and on the ground is the sacrifice to the ghosts. As for the offering to men, this is hospitality. He who never fails, so far as possible, to perform these five great sacrifices, even if he remains inside his house, is not tainted by the sin of murder.” The delicacy of the Vedic sages: the five murder weapons are household items: the broom, the water jug. This is to show that murder involves the simplest, everyday, unconscious acts. A room is swept, and a victim is strangled: the connexio makes one act resonate with the other.

That we are made of ātman and jīvātman, of a “Self” and an “I” (following Guénon’s translation), which are coexistent and mutually dependent, was a truth once again perceived in the Western hermetic tradition—every alchemical operari implies it—and eventually in German romanticism, in the interplay of Doubles. But the official course of philosophy, that sequence from Locke to Hume to Kant that we find in the textbooks, had always sought to erase any duality from the mind and tended to reduce each individual to a position of central command, whose reliability had yet to be established. The task of patiently inspecting the joints, undertaken by Kant, finally led to those joints being smashed apart by Nietzsche and his hammer. Instead of the individual there was now a yawning cavity. Crossing it, like the backs of dolphins, were dark beings, momentary impulses. Meanwhile, science agreed to transform itself once and for all into a prosthesis, a device to be attached during laboratory hours to a subject who, otherwise, acted as a good citizen of the realm of Public Opinion. And yet, within that same strict epistemological plan, devoted to Ockham and to the eradication of all superfluity, the original duality of the subject would once again emerge: in the last years of the nineteenth century, when discussion began about the paradoxes of set theory, another line started to emerge, which would lead to Gödel, and from there would branch out in every direction: a sign of a final corruption, of a now proven inadequacy of every discourse that did not include discourse about itself. And it was precisely here, in the duality between a discourse that has a referent and one that has itself as a referent, that the two birds of the Upaniṣads reappeared, the ātman and the jīvātman—and at the very center of science, as at the center of Vedic ritual, once again there was the exchange of looks between the two birds, perched on the same branch on the vast tree of life.