This is the story about the passage from one world to another, from one order to another—and about the ruin of both. It is the story of the precariousness of order: of the old order and the new. The story of their perpetual ruin.

Scheherazade, Far-li-mas: the stories postpone death, but they don’t suspend it. What they suspend is the death sentence.

Joseph de Maistre is one of the priests of Naphta.

When men played the role of the stars, they were strangled with a black noose.

The law can be observed by a single subject. Sacrifice requires a dual subject. In the law we therefore recognize the exotericism of sacrifice. In its esoteric ground, the sacrifice can yield only to the story, which defeats it in the ordeal. The story is the esoteric of the esoteric, the secret of the secret: it teaches how to live outside the cycle, in the hashish-like suspension of the word. It is the way of life revealed after the defeat of the sacrifice—and yet it maintains the gesture of the sacrifice, diluted in every gesture. But that is not enough to save Kasch, indeed it hastens its ruin. For many generations the priests had strangled the king after studying the stars, for a few years the inhabitants of Naphta survived on the memory of Far-li-mas’s words, before Naphta was destroyed. “Nothing is left of Naphta, except Far-li-mas’s stories, which he had brought with him from the land beyond the eastern sea.”

From a distance, Far-li-mas and Sali seem like the heroes of a new order based on the revolt against sacrifice. From close up, Far-li-mas and Sali are elements of the sacrifice that defeat other elements of the sacrifice. They shift the weight and emphasis. They are unraveling the knot of communion and expulsion, of hierogamy and assassination, in an entirely new way. For the story to succeed in supplanting the blood sacrifice it has to contain something in it that is no less powerful than soma, the mysterious substance of Vedic sacrifice. And soma is the word of Far-li-mas. Hierogamy is the coupling of Sali and Far-li-mas “wrapping their arms and legs around each other in the midst of so many sleeping figures.” Sacrificial expulsion is the death of the priests, struck down by Far-li-mas’s ordeal by word. To escape from the constraint of the blood sacrifice, Far-li-mas and Sali vary the ancient sacrificial story of Mo-ye and Kan-tsiang:

“Mo-ye and Kan-tsiang, male and female, are a couple of swords: they are also husband and wife, a couple of metalworkers.

“Kan-tsiang, the husband, having received orders to forge two swords, set to work, but failed to fuse the metal after three months of trying. When his wife, Mo-ye, asked the reason for his failure, he at first avoided answering. She insisted, reminding him of the principle by which the transformation of holy material (which is the metal) demanded (the sacrifice of) a person. Kan-tsiang then told how his master had succeeded in carrying out the fusion only by throwing himself and his wife into the furnace. Mo-ye declared herself ready to give her body, if her husband would have his own body fused.