The eternal return shifts the cycle beyond the Zodiac; a vision tinged with anguish, in the perception of the colossal numbers that now invade the empty spaces between the stars. Auguste Blanqui imprisoned at Clairvaux: “At night, clinging to the bars of his cell, he conversed with the stars.”²⁹¹ Impossible experience of full pure unrelated fragmentation. Now the ring, which was decorated with the beasts of the Zodiac, expands immeasurably and is encrusted with cosmic dust.

“A lowering of the head”—the final gesture in the face of life’s adversities, according to the oracle, was the gesture that the sheep had to make before being sacrificed: “You are forbidden to slay the sturdy race of sheep, O Theopropides.²⁹² But if the animal agrees by lowering its head to the purifying water, I say, O Episcopus, that it is right to sacrifice it.”

Ahnungslos, “unperceiving”: this wonderful German word indicates the condition into which history has tortuously led the West. To be born “unperceiving,” with no traces of guilt or grace, is the original modern status, that forlorn claim to free oneself from the world that lurks hidden behind the bench of a workshop or laboratory, behind a school desk or a bank counter. At its origin, as always, lies a detail of sacrificial practice. “If one consecrates, it is to desecrate better,” the Ancestors said. The world weighed horribly upon everything, everything had too much meaning, every tiny object contained too much power. An undeclared dream began to take shape: that the finest thing was to become lighter, to rid oneself of the world. To do so, one had to concentrate the sacred in a victim—and kill it. After, all that was left was to return to heady banality, profane at last. The possibility of letting one’s thinking become empty, arbitrary, and wandering was the only Siren the pure Westerner has obeyed. All the others he has deceived—and not even with too much effort.

In the tangled web of sacrifice, the Westerner chose one single thread—that of expelling the sacred through the killing of the sacrificial victim—and he sought to separate it from all the others. He felt no great regret about no longer eating the sacred, in absorbing a tolerable part of the source of all power, of the inexhaustible soma. Home cooking was enough for him—or, at most, a banquet among friends, spiced with the gossip of some courtesans. But there remained something dark and disturbing about those sacrificial practices: the impurity, prior to concentrating itself entirely on the victim, was in the subject himself, in the sacrificer—and it was weighing down his life, which tried now to be simply transparent and cruel. At the end of a long, dark process, sacrifice was transformed into judicial trial. With the advent of law, guilt, which belongs to the sacrifice, and primarily to the sacrificer, is shifted at the outset onto the victim alone: he will no longer be called the victim, but the culprit. The law severs the connection between guilt and the process of life (“la vie étant coupable,” life being guilty, as Joseph de Maistre would one day say): in the judicial process, guilt is extraneous to the law—it waits only to be stabbed by the law.²⁹³ Between Oedipus Rex and the Gospels, sacrifice has completed its transformation into a trial. It is now for the law to establish the choice of victim. But the only trial that is wholly effective, insofar as it frees itself from the sacred, is the trial in which the innocent is convicted. Here it is shown how the law has always been, and will always be, overwhelmed by something previous and more powerful. Pilate washes his hands, since he realizes that the law is powerless to absolve. Christ is not condemned by the law, but by the impotence of the law. Those who condemn him are the crowd, together with its priests.