Experimentation is a sacrifice in which guilt has been expunged. The sacrificial pyramid, where blood has drenched the warm stones of the altar, becomes a vast slaughterhouse that extends horizontally in some nondescript corner of the city.

The slaughterhouses of Chicago, university laboratories, their corridors reeking of dismembered frogs, power plants camouflaged in the desert, are centers for one and the same cult. They distribute power thanks to a violent operation, a decision, where everything is focused on procedures, so that their control capability becomes ever more perfect. Hadn’t the Vedic seers already said that “exactness, reality is the sacrifice”?²⁶⁰ The more perfect the control, the richer the material that can be developed, the greater the power unleashed, the more uncontrollable its outcome.

In technology, the accursed share, the part of the fire, has become the immense experimental waste, dedicated to the unknown god, who is god of the unknown. And, just as in the sacrifice, it is precisely the part that is irredeemably destroyed that guarantees future life. Only research that goes on in the dark can give adequate nourishment to the process. Nothing is more laughable than disputes over the limits of experimental research. As if that which is based on breaking down the limit could map out an enclosure less vast than Everything without thereby negating itself. These are disputes stirred up by foolish and incredulous priests against the stern masters of the cult: as if a Brahmin had dared to question whether the gods demand sacrifice.

A sacrificial act is any act where the person acting contemplates himself as he acts. The victim, the offering, is the one who acts. The sacrificer is the eye that contemplates him. For this reason, any act can be a sacrifice. For this reason, ancient society can be regarded, in the way it operates, as a “perpetual sacrifice,” according to the definition of René Guénon, who suggests it as something patently obvious: “Since sacrifice is ritual action par excellence, everything else shares in its nature and is to some extent an integral part of it, so that it necessarily determines the whole overall structure of a traditional society, where everything for that same reason can be regarded as being an actual perpetual sacrifice.”²⁶¹