The pre-Christian past is all a long process of euphemization, edulcoration of sacrifice. With Christ, sacrifice all of a sudden rediscovers its crudeness, it once again becomes a lynching—and at the same time the cycle of sacrifice is closed, since no sacrifice can follow that of Christ, except as a continual commemoration of that sacrifice—the Mass, which insists on avoiding the shedding of blood (“incruente immolatur”). More than the act of equating a piece of bread and a few sips of wine with the body and blood of the god/victim, what marks an insurmountable break with the past is the fact that animals will no longer be killed on altars, there will be no further attempt to drive out evil “sanguine taurorum et hircorum” (“with the blood of bulls and goats”).³²⁰ With the Christian era, the ritual of bloodshed disappears: a prelude to the disappearance of ritual itself. The following step demands a secular version of sacrifice: regicide, twice over, with Charles I, then Louis XVI. Here, too, a single irreversible fact, the killing of that victim, is enough to herald an age in which neither have goats to be slaughtered on altars nor have beheaded kings to be commemorated. Then the word sacrifice returns in triumph in August 1914. It is no longer a single wretched individual—an entire generation of nameless young men is raised to the nobility of victim and buried in ditches, which are now trenches.

The Forest Doctrine

The Vedic seers regarded birth first of all as murder. The primordial world was suffocating, too dense, slimy. It was the bed of a cosmic swamp. It was an immense curled-up animal that nursed life in its bowels. Until the animal’s jaws are shored open with a prop: then Dawn bursts out from the darkness and things are put into articulated order, spaced apart and breathing—they receive the “gift” of ṛta. That prop that forces the jaws to remain wide open is the axis of the world, it is the separation between sky and earth, it is the king with his arms raised as he is anointed in the rājasūya ceremony. Around this spins every wheel, divided into spokes, whereas in the beginning the wheel was single, immobile, and solid. Thanks to the god Varuṇa “the way of ṛta is opened up, to happily reach the other shore the road of the sky has become visible.”³²¹ Varuṇa is the one who “raised up the prop in the bottomless space”; he who “prepared a vast way for the sun to follow.”^{322, 323} But Varuṇa is also the place of origins itself, “he has measured the first creation” with the power that most belonged to him: māyā, “measuring magic,” according to Lilian Silburn’s illuminating translation. The snare with which he will punish his victims forever unites his two characteristics: Varuṇa is undifferentiated waters and Varuṇa is ṛta, differentiating order.^{324, 325}