The magnificent edifice of the Vedic sacrifice, this temple of temples, where every brick is a Borobudur of hidden galleries, decorated with bas reliefs invisible from outside, is insufficient to conceal, behind all its relentless affirmations, the place of doubt, a tiny wound in the intact skin of the horse that is to be killed on the altar: the existence of a victim that substitutes the sacrificer (yajamāna) himself. The only answer to the divine sacrifice of Prajāpati would be the suicide of the sacrificer. The response, instead, is the killing of a victim. “The victorious Horse went to its immolation, meditating thoughts addressed to the divinity,” and someone reassures it: “the axe will do no lasting harm to your body.”^{262, 263} This concern about the victim’s consent is revealing: for it presupposes that such consent might not be given. But it is not a question here of discovering an ancient deceit, which would bring satisfaction to all the agents of Enlightenment, always ready to spot the smallest wrong (and the smallest good). If there are at least two beings present before the sacrificial post—the victim and the one who strangles it with a noose—this is because the substitution has already taken place in the mind. The very act of naming, in the arbitrary decision that allows the cancellation of a thing and its substitution with a sound, contains that primordial murder that the sacrifice exposes and, at the same time, attempts to heal. The fabric continually repaired by correspondences, the meanings attributed each time to the individual syllable, to the individual meter: all is a vast attempt to re-stitch the fabric around that minuscule tear produced by the word, by the mental image that cancels a presence to evoke an absence, by the sign: by all that which substitutes something else, and on which another magnificent edifice will be built, contrary to that of the Vedic sacrifice, which in its constant expansion seems to foresee it, and at the same time tries to conceal it, until the cycle stirs it in its present form, in us, around us.