That nature is measured out by returns, by the breath of time, is evidence of it being a sacrificial object. The world is a part that divinity has detached from itself, leaving it to live according to its own rules, and no longer according to divine arbitrariness. But the invisible cord between the divinity and creation isn’t entirely severed: the divinity can always take back its world and act brutally toward it: order can be stamped out, the stars might not return. Hence the sacrifice performed by men: the human offering (that part of life that is not left to live unless reabsorbed in the sky from which it descended) rises up along this same cord, which is then the column of smoke from the sacred pipe. By yielding part of the world to the divinity, the sacrificer wants the divinity to give him the rest of the world, and no longer to intervene there with its uncontrollable whim. The sacrifice is also trying to gain the divinity’s permission to use the world. The first consequence of forgetting sacrifice is that the world will then be used without restraint, without limit, without any part being dedicated to any other. But here, too, the end is superimposed upon the beginning, like a reflection, and therefore seen in reverse. Once the sacrifice has disappeared, the whole world, without realizing it, goes back to being an immense sacrificial laboratory. In a climate of uncertainty over everything, the only proposition that no one would dare put in doubt (since it is seen as obvious) is that the world lives inasmuch as it produces. It is the same obviousness that the Ṛg Veda recognized when it stated that the world lives inasmuch as it sacrifices. Just as, in the beginning, the divinity could only sacrifice itself since nothing else existed, so now the world sacrifices itself to itself (under other names), because the divinity has vanished. The unwitting sacrificers now resemble the Sādhyas, those mysterious “gods before the gods,” who then fell “since they regarded themselves as being above the sacrifice.”^{264, 265} But it is also possible to fall by pretending that the sacrifice has been closed away in a room of the Musée de l’Homme.

If industry is a sacrificial laboratory, the prestige value of the New means that any given object is a fragrant residue of the sacrifice. An unknown quantity of material has been burned in order to produce it. The New is that part of the victim that the gods haven’t touched at their banquet. The gods devour the precious prototype and leave men with the limitless copies. This is why industry is based on reproducibility. But the film star is a catasterism, raised into the heavens after being devoured by the gods.