Rancé remarked in his letters, with his usual bluntness, that we must all think of ourselves as sheep to the slaughter, tanquam oves occisionis. Victor Hugo: “The gospel makes God a shepherd.⁴⁴¹ The Trappist makes him a butcher.” But shepherds, who protect their flock, gradually slaughter them. The secular practice of euphemism, exemplified here by Hugo, offers only an idyllic image of the shepherd. To someone (like Hugo) who is placed outside sacrifice, no criticism of sacrifice can undermine the obligation to kill, which remains, unspoken, with its power intact. Only certain Altaic peoples, shepherds and farmers who practice sacrifice, have been able to transform the most radical criticism of sacrifice into ceremony. “It was the custom of the Tatars of the Minusinsk region to sacrifice a live horse to the god of thunder.⁴⁴² After stopping to pray at the place of sacrifice, they remove the horse’s reins and let it run away. From then on, the horse is free and cannot be touched. The Buryats also place a bowl of milk on the back of these animals consecrated to the thunder. The priest officiating at the sacrifice sprinkles milk over the animal’s back, and at the same time in the four celestial directions. He has the horse censed with burning grass and the bark of a resinous tree, then ties ribbons to its mane, and finally the horse is sent off into freedom. At the place where the bowl of milk falls from the horse’s back, prayers are given for health and success. From that moment, an animal consecrated in this way is no longer used for the service of man. When the animal dies, its mane and its tail are cut off and tied to another horse, which must then substitute the previous one.” The untying of the knot of life, which takes place with the killing of the dressed sacrificial victim, can only be opposed with equivalent force by another untying: that of the reins of the captive horse, which frees life into life. But this, which is the only adequate opposition to the sacrifice, occurs within the sacrifice itself, it treads the same ground, wears the same ribbons, repeats the same gestures to the very end: the hands that were about to carry out the strangling now carry out the gesture of untying the reins. The horse vanishes into the taiga, or continues to follow the herd, but as if it were invisible, since no one can touch it and least of all use it. No one can sell it, no one can buy it. That white horse is the Double of all horses, which grace permits to be seen beside the others: but the Double cannot be used, the Double can only be unleashed. On the site where the reins have been removed, everything remains as if the lifeless body of the victim were present: the smoke of spruce lingers in the air, since this is a place governed by the principle “there is no smoke without god,” the milk bowl has fallen to the ground, showing divine favor or disfavor according to how it lies.⁴⁴³ Even the ribbons on its mane camouflage the freed horse as the sacrificial victim. But there is a final vertiginous step, with which the ceremony of the consecrated horse responds to the metaphysics of the sacrifice: when the freed horse dies, its mane and tail are cut off and attached to the one that substitutes it. This is the heart of the sacrifice: substitution—and this mortal machine is reversed in a pledge of eternal life: by substituting one for the other, the white horses, over the course of the generations, are like a single one, which never dies. This is the extreme point at which sacrifice has been reversed: achieved in a remote time, in an area of Asia dotted with shamanic relics, where white horses are consecrated to the thunder. The next step has never been taken. No man has ever felt the hands of other men untying the invisible reins that are strapped around his neck. No one has ever been totally freed from the use of other men. And the fact of “being used for the service of man” is steeped in the poison of exchange, which slowly, or sometimes abruptly, kills.