Obliquity of the Ecliptic (in the chi—χ—formed by the Demiurge in Plato’s Timaeus, the Ecliptic is the axis of the Other, in respect of the Equator, which is the axis of the Same; the obliquity of the Ecliptic brings the drama of the seasons, now removed from the eternal, symmetrical balance of the equinoxes, which we would have if the angles were correct, right angles: that drama will be the basis for every rise and fall, for every adventure, for every journey; it is the original disorder of the world);

Precession of the Equinoxes (it reveals evil even more clearly, insofar as it is that retrograde movement, left to itself, that takes advantage of divine weariness, as Plato brutally explained in his Statesman: “Listen then.⁴²⁹ At certain moments the god guides all of this in its rotating course; but at other moments, when the allotted periods of time have reached their measure, he lets it go, and then everything starts rotating on its own in the reverse direction, since it is a living creature and has received intelligence from he who fashioned it in the beginning. Now this disposition to retrograde movement is an inherent part of its nature”—and this is because “the being we call heaven and earth,” however hard it tries, cannot be entirely free from change and so it has been given that “retrograde circular movement that deviates as little as possible from its own movement.”^{430, 431} A consequence of these two contrary cosmic movements is the division of time into different eras through the continuous, slow shift of the celestial points of reference, hence the succession of worlds that burst into flames or are submerged by water);

Incommensurability of (Simone Weil described it as “the drama of incommensurables”: but she added that the outrageousness of this discovery, “far from being a defeat for the Pythagoreans, as is so innocently imagined, is their most marvelous triumph”: she uses the image of a pair of scales with, on one dish, two cubes of side 1 and, on the other, one cube whose side is equal to the diagonal of the other two: equilibrium is impossible and no weight, whether added or removed, will ever make it possible).^{432, 433}

Sacrifice recognizes the noncorrespondence between discrete and continuous; but at the same time it recognizes the necessary bond between the discrete and the continuous: the bond is the victim. The victim fills the gap between the discrete and the continuous. But, precisely because it fills it, it has to be destroyed. And the world then returns to marking itself out in parallel series of the discrete and the continuous—the wheel divided into 360 segments, gods, days, degrees, goes on rotating above the solid wheel of Vṛtra.

Guilt, and eventually Christian sin, descend from ritual inexactitude like the cadet branch of a noble family. Ritual is the kairòs that extends over every portion of time. This heightened precision, this keen perception of order, outside which every delay and every hesitation is guilt—the evil to which all evil can be traced—arises from a long, desolate exploration of experience: in no part of it had anything identical or perfectly regular ever appeared. Only certain minuscule points in the heavens moved along unchanging paths. That was order. All the more disturbing was the discovery that, there too, something was not quite right—or rather, it was right but had slightly moved, by reason of the Precession. Or else it was the calendar calculations that left something over, an unexplained lump of time: an excess that, here too, had to be dealt with in some way. The accursed share was nesting among the celestial spheres.