The law is always double: law as a rule of the world, law as a rule between people. The first belongs to Varuṇa; the second to Mitra. Each has its regulation, its crimes, its punishments. Their action can be concordant—and then the two gods complement each other perfectly in their dual unity: Mitra-Varuṇa. The civilizing sweetness of Mitra, “everyone’s friend,” can exist only insofar as it is silhouetted against the dark and distant background of Varuṇa’s sovereignty.³³² “Mitra is this world, Varuṇa is the other world,” as the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa clearly states.³³³ Mitra is the world of men, Varuṇa is the rest that perpetually surrounds it, that can encircle it like a snare. By gradually ridding themselves of the world, and of the terror that comes from it, creatures united by the social contract are led to recognize Mitra alone, who is first and foremost god of the contract. And so that single law—which was Stifter’s “meek law” so long as it coexisted with the order of Varuṇa—became gradually unperceivable, since around it was the ever greater, overwhelming presence of its divine companion.³³⁴ Meanwhile, Varuṇa’s snares continued to clasp their victims, victims now unaware of the fathomless place from which the snares had been thrown, unaware even that these were sentences passed by a law no one could any longer decipher.

In the end, the most ingenuous and the most important question has to be asked: are the Vedic connections (bandhus) real? Studying them, we gradually reconstruct their marvelous web, which extends over everything. And the epoch in which we are born compels us to see them as an immense matchstick cathedral, perfectly superfluous. We know that life reproduces itself anyway, even without their help. Still, we feel an irresistible attraction to that all-enveloping depth of resonance. And, whatever we think, at a certain point we realize we are inadvertently using some part of that submerged mantle. The only form of life that succeeds in totally rejecting Vedic connections is that of Jeremy Bentham, our Pharaoh, now a mummy in London. An unperceptive life. Vedic connections are grandly superfluous, Bentham is grandly inadequate. We waver in the middle.

Nothing is so repugnant—or so pitiful—as the language of sacrifice on the lips of someone who ignores its principles. Nothing is so devastating as the act of sacrifice in the hands of someone who ignores its principles. Nothing is as irrepressible as the return of sacrificial words and actions in someone who ignores its principles.

Varuṇa is the origin that prevents life and without which life cannot be lived. One has to throw off Varuṇa’s snares to begin living; to continue living one must be anointed, moistened by his primordial liquid.

After years of research, two great scholars spoke about the Vedic seers as follows:

Lilian Silburn

“In the eyes of the Vedic ṛṣis the immediate, the primordial, has an amorphous, multiform, precarious aspect. The succession of days is not guaranteed, cosmic stability must be constantly consolidated. The Vedic cosmos is in effect a painful cosmos of anxiety, contraction and narrowness (aṃhas), which takes the form of darkness (tamas) and flux (salila), in the image of the dark sea of the origins, the limitless, measureless, formless arṇava that threatens to engulf everything.