There are gaps in the fabric of the articulate. It eludes uterine anguish (root anĝh), it allows the membranes of the embryo to be abandoned, leading to birth, since birth is a violent separation from everything else, the severing of Varuṇa’s last snare: the umbilical cord. This metaphysical process becomes a story and it begins human history when Indra wanted to repeat Varuṇa’s exploit and thus take control, when he wanted “to distance the sky and the earth even farther.”³²⁶ Then Indra “struck a great blow at the serpent Vṛtra, who kept the waters hidden inside him, cloaked in darkness,” and he seized the soma.³²⁷ This is the archetype of every dragon-killing. T’ao T’ieh, Tiamat, the Minotaur, Marduk, Theseus, St. George—and so many others we come across. Indra’s violent exploit introduces a new sovereignty. Indra steals sovereignty from Varuṇa, but Varuṇa remains the source of all sovereignty, which has nothing to conquer but nurtures every conquest. The anointed king will sit on a throne that is addressed as “the navel and the womb of kingship, practically equivalent to Varuṇa’s watery residence.”³²⁸ But Indra who kills Vṛtra is also the king who is born—and abandons the remains of his placenta on an anthill, which here represents the matrix. For him these remains are now the evil (pāpman), since they would suffocate him in the life between heaven and earth. The hero murderer, who wants to be born, moves through the bowels of the monster, in the composite spirals of t’ao t’ieh before reaching its mouth, which will spit him out into the light. He is Theseus, who has to pass through the whole labyrinth before meeting the Minotaur face to face. The irreducible peculiarity of the labyrinth lies in the fact of being a continuous thread, a long snare coiled around itself. Like Varuṇa, who is articulation itself, but connected by an indissoluble nexus to an unarticulated origin; like the sūtra, the “thread” that “from the macrocosmic as well as the microcosmic point of view connects all states of existence with themselves and with their Principle,” the thread about which it is said: “he who knows this thread, this inner agent, knows brahman, knows the worlds, knows the gods, knows ātman, knows everything.”^{329, 330} But to see the labyrinth from outside, and to kill it in the figure of the Minotaur, one must have penetrated as far as its center, which is the mouth from which one goes out into the space of isolated, separate things, arranged in a precarious manner: the space where the sacrifice must constantly weave an airy connection, between emptiness and emptiness. The hero who kills and at the same time is born is in danger of losing contact with his cosmic victim, with his enemy who is also the source of all power: with water. Goethe’s Mothers are a figure of Varuṇa. That is why birth is followed by baptism; that is why the heir to the throne is anointed in the ceremony in which he is consecrated king; that is why the young calf is licked by its mother immediately after birth, so as not to become dry, so as to recall the original water, Varuṇa’s “hidden ocean.”³³¹