The step from sacrifice to experiment. Sacrifice: all is based on the presumption of an Other, of many invisible Others, who respond to the right action. That which is offered, irrevocably, is equivalent to declaring a willingness to listen, the expectation of an answer, that ought to be constantly repeated. Experiment: based on the presumption that the right action occurs through accumulation. A thousand actions are tried out, in uncertainty and in the dark, only one of which will be the right action. All the others, with the wastage of energy they entail, are lost, in homage to an unknown entity. The application of the right action to the world, the possibility of perpetually repeating it, will then lead to a growth of power that corresponds to life heightened by sacrifice.

People criticized Guénon for writing like a bookkeeper of metaphysics, with no enthusiasm, with no heart. They thought he lacked inspiration. But Guénon was simply obeying “the esoteric, and more particularly the Rosicrucian precept according to which it was better to talk to every person in their own language.”⁴³⁷

Let us erase the names of gods, founding myths, ritual precepts: what is left of the sacrifice? The difference between the discrete and the continuous, between rational numbers and real numbers—and the recognition that continuous and discrete have to remain linked.

The perception on which every mythology is based: the cycle. And the cycle is written in the heavens, in the return of the constellations. The terror of killing is, above all, a terror that there is no cycle, that the animal will not return, that the star will not reappear. The slight disorder we observe in the heavens (obliquity of the Ecliptic, Precession of the Equinoxes) corresponds to the immense disorder on earth (death).

Technology takes the place not of magic but of sacrifice. Like sacrifice, it is first and foremost a way of controlling danger, which means not just violent conflict within society, but the destructive and self-destructive power within life itself. Plague stands for the conflict between men in the same way that conflict between men stands for plague. Sacrifice requires perfect awareness of destruction: if this clear-sighted attention is missing, there is no sacrifice. For technology it’s enough to justify with claims about its practical utility.

Bureaucratic procedures are used in Kafka not to throw light on some degenerating state of the law, but on its first emergence, its first emergence from the marshy waters, when the abstract and the arbitrary shone in all their extraneousness in the face of Nature, which in those same times became the Village and agreed to serve at the inn the tired lords who, now and then, came down from the Castle.

The “force field between the Torah and the Tao,” which was how Walter Benjamin described Kafka’s place, was also Benjamin’s own place.⁴³⁸ But it certainly wasn’t a psychological or speculative place: it was the saturnine residence, the celestial area, in which ṛta and the “hidden ocean” coexist, where the Law is submerged in the fluidity of the Waters. On the bottom lies xvarnah, the radiance of Glory, exiled in the world, which Benjamin recognized in the aura.