The sacred is concentrated in the victim, it is canceled out in the victim, and it emanates from the victim. The sacred must however be killed, since it terrifies: its everlasting contagion makes life impossible. The only other possibility—the modern invention—is where the sacred is not perceived. The sacred is either terrifying or it goes unnoticed. But the situation in which it goes unnoticed produces once again, in reverse, the situation of primal terror. Something common, ubiquitous, that drives people to kill with little or no reason, to inflict ruthless tortures, on themselves, on anyone.

The peculiarly modern form of sacrifice is a vast industrial undertaking that shuns the name and memory of sacrifice. There is talk of whole classes to be eliminated, or otherwise of those inevitable dropouts who each day are cast out of the social mechanism. But they are always events strictly belonging to society. Likewise people still anoint divine beings, arrange them on furs, gird them with flowers and white bands, before an invisible knife crashes down upon them. Astral archons appearing as young women arrested while stealing from department stores or choked by barbiturates.

For Vedic India, I and Self, jīvātman and ātman, were like the sacrificial post (yūpa) and the victim that was tied to it. “Closer to you than your jugular vein,” says the god to the mystic, since he is the knife that has severed that vein.

Nature is a haunted house—but

Art—a House that tries to be haunted.

Emily

“Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.”²⁹⁴ Art, which is elusive by its very nature, can only be given a genetic definition—and this one by Theodor Adorno is perhaps the most beautiful. To ignore the magical compulsions that sacrifice demands is not just a stratagem of reason, which rids itself of the powers. It is also a gesture that opens up an entirely new dimension—it provides the opportunity to play with sacrificial objects, with the flotsam and jetsam that the world of magic has abandoned on the shores of the psyche. All the characteristics of art, from its pervasive ambiguity to its cathartic purpose as revealed by the naturalist Aristotle, to its “disinterestedness” as formulated by Kant, are remnants of sacrifice. Beckett’s “dire cela, sans savoir quoi,” “say it, not knowing what,” resounds with the original operari that was the sacrifice itself. Whereas the “sans savoir quoi” evokes the powers that have been canceled out, which operate anonymously, in obscurity. This is the peculiarity of the West: not that it has discovered Beauty, but that it has let it slip into a state of suspension, it has slackened the noose around the victim’s neck. Escaping from the “lie of being truth” also means escaping from truth itself, from its suffocation. This leads to the implacable hostility of art to every social order, which incorporates each time a claim to truth. In art, the voice that speaks is that of the victim who has escaped in extremis, and forever, from being killed, when ritual had already let everything sacred flow back into that killing. Art has a light step because it roams in the forest. Now the altar is empty.