The foundation of sacrifice is this: that each of us is not one, but two. We are not a solid brick, but each of us is the two birds of the Upaniṣads, on the same branch of the cosmic tree: one eats while the other watches the one eating. The sacrificial deceit—that sacrificer and victim are two people and not one—is the dazzling, insurmountable revelation about ourselves, about our double eye.

History can be summed up as follows: for a long time men killed other beings, dedicating them to an invisible object; and then, from a certain point, they killed without dedicating this act to anyone. Did they forget? Did they regard this act of homage as pointless? Did they condemn it as repugnant? All of these possibilities had some relevance. Then the simple act of killing remained.

Creation is the body of the first victim. In the act of creation the divinity amputates a part of itself, abandoning it. From then on, all it can do is observe its amputated limb in the hands of necessity.

Quechcotona, in the Nahuatl language, means “to cut off someone’s head” and at the same time “to pick an ear of grain with the hand.” The perception of the origin of sacrifice is precisely that every picking is also a murder, that every killing is the separation of a thing from what is connected to it (and, moving step by step, this includes Everything). But life, if it wishes to be perpetuated, demands that something is picked. Sacrifice involves the first uprooting, the first detachment, the original decisio (from caedo, meaning to kill the sacrificial victim with spilling of blood) in a delicate, highly subtle, immense network that reconnects the hollow of the wound to Everything at the moment the wound is opened. It is possible to pick just an ear of grain, but the supreme increase of power is reached when the picking is also a killing. Instead of a blade of corn, to rip out the beating heart with the “obsidian butterfly” from the torso of a victim lying on his back: by tearing out that web that joins the heart to the rest of the body, around six to seven liters of blood spurt out. It is the surfeit of life, which in this blood alone promises to be everlasting.

The Vedic seers (ṛṣi), no less than the Aztec priests, had a supreme sense of precariousness. Every moment of time had to be torn away by force—with the violence, perseverance, precision of the sacrifice—before the sun stopped, before everything was once again lost in Ahi Budhnya, “the serpent that inhabits the depth of the sky,” the immense, amorphous darkness on darkness.²⁵⁹

The Aztecs were constantly at war, but not out of any wish to conquer. For them, war served above all for obtaining prisoners, who then became sacrificial victims. Twenty thousand a year, on the calculations of some scholars. War was a by-product of sacrifice. When sacrifice was no longer an institution, it withdrew into its subordinate power: war. In August 1914 the entire liturgical apparatus of sacrifice was once again unpacked from the trunks. Bloody images were dusted down and given central place in homes and newspapers. In World War II, it would instead have sufficed to concentrate on one word: holocaust.