Roberto Calasso Quotes

The monster does not need the hero. it is the hero who needs him for his very existence. When the hero confronts the monster, he has yet neither power nor knowledge, the monster is his secret father who will invest him with a power and knowledge that can belong to one man only, and that only the monster can give.

The gods are fugitive guests of literature.

Whatever else it might be, the divine is certainly the thing that imposes with maximum intensity the sensation of being alive.

Zeus is never ridiculous. Because his dignity is of no concern to him.

Baudelaire was far more than a great poet. He established the keyboard of a sensibility that still lives within us, if we are not total brutes.

They had to stir the churn of the ocean, until the soma floated up, as butter floats from milk. And this task could not be undertaken in opposition to the Asuras, but only with their help. The pronouncement ran contrary to everything the Devas had previously thought. But in the end, what did they have to lose, given that their lives were so futile? Now they thought: Anything, so long as there be a trial, a risk, a task.

The biggest danger in life is that the food of humans is all made of souls.

Maybe I’m inclined to what Nietzsche called “impure thought,” that is to say, a kind of thought where abstractions are so mixed with the facts of life that you can’t disentangle them. I feel thought in general, and in particular what is unfortunately called “philosophy,” should lead a sort of clandestine life for a while, just to renew itself. By clandestine I mean concealed in stories, in anecdotes, in numerous forms that are not the form of the treatise. Then thought can biologically renew itself, as it were.

ardor which is tapas; the name Indra

As the Greeks see it, elegance arises from excavation, from the cavity.

ogni vero editore compone, senza saperlo o anche sapendolo, un unico libro formato da tutti i libri che pubblica

All of this follows from a time in history when procedures have taken command over rituals. A moment that is elusive, hard to establish, since the two powers also have features in common. First of all, they are both formalized actions. But they aim in opposite directions. Ritual aims toward perfect awareness, which for Catholics is the moment of transubstantiation. Procedures, on the other hand, point toward total automatism. The more procedures multiply, the more the realm of automata expands.

That something merely happens is pointless. But that something happens and a watching eye gathers it into itself is everything.

Le figure del mito vivono molte vite e molte morti, a differenza dei personaggi del romanzo, vincolati ogni volta a un solo gesto.

Mostrare la propria libreria è come far entrare un estraneo nell'intimità. È come raccontare dei propri flirt. Una cosa da evitare.

Yājñavalkya immediately separated out the two essential points in every sacrificial act: substitution and the transposition from the visible to the realm of the mind.

The wild animal loves pure men because those men, at one time, were themselves prey.

Some would sing as they killed the bear, so that the bear, while dying, could say: "I like that song.

Pure is that which stands out against a background, which has a profile, which can thus become a target.

Where there is no initiation, there is the autodidact. Anyone for whom knowledge is not wisdom transmitted through experience is enrolled in a university that is a correspondence course.

Viewed from the standpoint of the Enlightenment, the Veda is as dark as night, dense, with no apparent inclination toward clarity. It is a world that is self-sufficient, highly tensioned, even convulsive, wrapped up in itself, with no curiosity about any other manner of existence. Streaked by all kinds of violent desires, it has no thirst for objects, vassals, pomp. If we are looking for an emblem of something utterly alien to modernity (however it might be defined), something that might look upon it with complete indifference, we find it in the Vedic people.

Sacrifice requires perfect awareness of destruction: if this clear-sighted attention is missing, there is no sacrifice. For technology it's enough to justify with claims about its practical utility.

The sky, the first mnemotechnical order. Its vault became the house of the past, an unsullied museum. Indispensable stories glimmered each night - or remained temporarily concealed behind a veil of cloud.

Detachment and renouncement: often synonyms in Sanskrit, but not in the Gītā: here ‘renouncement’ (saṃnyāsa) is the lower form that consists of becoming a hermit, sitting beneath a tree and moving no further. ‘Detachment’ (tyāga) is making use of this world as if not using it.

Man’s relationship with the gods passed through two regimes: first conviviality, then rape. The third regime, the modern one, is that of indifference, but with the implication that the gods have already withdrawn, and, hence, if they are indifferent in our regard, we can be indifferent as to their existence or otherwise.

Mythical figures live many lives, die many deaths, and in this they differ from the characters we find in novels, who can never go beyond the single gesture. But in each of these lives and deaths all the others are present, and we can hear their echo. Only when we become aware of a sudden consistency between incompatibles can we say we have crossed the threshold of myth.

They used to say that the universe is made essentially of hexagonal rock crystals, also — and especially — where it is darker and more shapeless, in the spaces that open up beyond the Milky Way. Those same hexagonal crystals are alveoli in the brain, where images emerged. And the central commissure of the encephalon, two entwined serpents, is to be found in the Milky Way.

Every construction is temporary, including the fire altar. It is not a fixed object, but a vehicle. Once the voyage is complete, the vehicle can be destroyed. Thus the Vedic ritualists did not develop the idea of the temple. If such care was given to constructing a bird, it was to make it fly. What remained on earth was an inert shell of dust, dry mud, and bricks. It could be left behind, like a carcass.

The mythographer lives in a permanent state of chronological vertigo, which he pretends to want to resolve. But while on the one table he puts generations and dynasties in order, like some old butler who knows the family history better than his masters, you can be sure that on another table the muddle is getting worse and the threads ever more entangled. No mythographer has ever managed to put his material together in a consistent sequence, yet all set out to impose order. In this, they have been faithful to the myth.

Reading the Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa is like making a journey to the radiant heart of India. But the idea—later abandoned—of a commentary certainly did not aim to do that. On the contrary, it was an attempt to move away from any specific coordinates of time and place to return to observing certain simple gestures, of which we may be aware or unaware, but are always with us and without which we could not exist: the actions of breathing, swallowing, copulating, cutting, killing, evacuating, speaking, burning, pouring, thinking, dreaming, watching—and more.

As the Vedic ritualists say, man is the only one of the sacrificial victims who also celebrates sacrifices. It is essential to anticipate this question: why invent the highly complex ceremony of sacrifice, if in the end everything is to be reduced to dividing up pieces of meat? Here is the answer given by the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa: the sacrificial victim shall be divided into thirty-six parts, because the bṛhatī meter consists of thirty-six syllables: “By dividing it in this way, the victim is made into a celestial being, whereas those who proceed in another way tear it apart like rogues or criminals.” And here we see the great role that meter plays in the Veda, as the primary articulation of form, as the first effective device for breaking away from the meaningless and arbitrary succession of existence. Here it is said, among other things, that “the bṛhatī is the mind.” And so, if the mind coils within itself the thirty-six fragments of the sacrificial victim, this alone is enough to transform those pieces of flesh into fragments of a whole that has a life of its own—and is perhaps also “a celestial being.

No sacred places were fixed, umbilical, created once and for all, like temples. The sacred place was the scene for the sacrifice. It had to be chosen each time following set criteria: “As well as being on high ground, that place shall be flat; and as well as being flat, it shall be firm; and as well as being firm, it shall slope eastward, since east is the direction of the gods; or otherwise it should face northward, as north is the direction of men. It shall be raised slightly to the south, because that is the direction of the ancestors. If it had been lower to the south, the sacrificer would have soon passed into the underworld; in this way the sacrificer will live long: that is why it is slightly raised to the south.

The gods do not speak with everyone,” and so a way has to be devised to approach them: men must segregate themselves in the same way as the gods are segregated from men. Then perhaps the gods will pay attention. An initial separation from other men is achieved through the preliminary actions of the rite. When setting up the gārhapatya fire, he first sweeps the chosen space with a palāśa branch and says: ‘Away from here! Away! Crawl away from here,’ then: ‘Go away, go and slip away from here,’ he says to those who slither on their bellies. ‘You who are here from ancient and recent times!’ and therefore both those who are here from a remote time as well as those who have settled here today.” The ritual action is an imitation. Of other men, who lived in the beginning? Or of gods? During the building of the fire altar when certain bricks, known as dviyajus, “which require a double formula,” have to be arranged. At that moment the sacrificer thinks the following words: “I wish to go to the celestial world following the same form, celebrating the same rite that Indra and Agni used to enter the celestial world!” What the sacrificer is imitating is the act of the god himself making himself a god Ritual serves above all to resolve through action what thought alone cannot resolve. For example: what do we do with the ash produced by the sacrificial fire? The ashes are thrown into water. And these words are spoken: “O divine waters, receive these ashes and place them in a soft and fragrant place!” And then: “May the consorts, married to a good lord, bow down to him.” The “consorts” here are the waters, who have found a “good lord” in Agni. The waters are chosen as a place for ashes, because Agni was born from the womb of the waters.So Agni will not be lost.

Choosing the tree to cut down, from which to make the yūpa, the sacrificial “post,” which in itself epitomizes the totality of the sacrifice, is like choosing any other victim: it is the act in which the mystery of election is revealed. The ritualist therefore considers it with great care, so that the sacrificer must bring all his keenness into play. What tree will he choose? Not the closest one in the forest. That would be too crude and too simple. It would be as if all you had to do was take one step forward to be chosen—and one step back not to be. But nor will the sacrificer choose the tree farthest away. The last would then be the most likely—and all, if they wanted to avoid being chosen, would rush to the most conspicuous positions. Here again the choice would lose its mystery. No, the sacrificer will choose “on the nearer side of the farther” and “on the farther side of the nearer.” And where in the forest does the farther begin? Where does the nearer reach its limit? No one can know this. Not even the sacrificer, until that inscrutable moment when he will say to the tree, in that grim, unctuous tone that all victims recognize: “We favor you, O divine lord of the forest.” This way of dealing with the mystery of election brings us face-to-face with an implacable difference and peculiarity, from the brahminic point of view.

Prajāpati: the creator god who is not entirely sure he exists. Prajāpati is the god who has no identity, who is the origin of all insoluble paradoxes. All identities arise from him, who himself has none. And so he takes a step back, or to one side, allowing the rush of mortal beings, ready to forget him, to carry on. But they will then return to him, to ask him the wherefore. And the wherefore can only be similar to what made them first emerge: a rite, a composition of elements, of forms, a temporary—the only—guarantee of existence. He never resembled a sovereign who elatedly surveys his dominions. He left that feeling to one of his sons, Indra—and he pitied him for it. He knew that, along with euphoria, and bound up with it, Indra would face mockery and retribution. Since Prajāpati was an amalgam of seven ṛṣis, those “seers” who, in turn, had been seven “vital breaths,” though incapable of existing alone. Asat is therefore a place where at the beginning energy is burning. And so from the vital breaths were born “seven persons (puruṣas).” The first beings with bodily features were therefore the ṛṣis: the Saptarṣis, the original Seven Ṛṣis. But the Saptarṣis were immediately aware of their limited power. Generated by the vital breaths, they themselves could not procreate. Their first desire was therefore to act in concert, transforming themselves into a single person. This had to be their task: to compress themselves, condense themselves into one single body, occupying its various parts: “Two above the navel and two below the navel; one on the right side, one on the left side, one at the base.” There was now a body, but it had no head. Still they worked away. From each of them was extracted essence, sap, taste, rasa. And they concentrated it all into the same place, as if into a jar: that was the head. The person made up from the Seven Seers was now complete. And “that same person became Prajāpati.” This was how the Progenitor was created, he who generated everything, including the vital breaths, Indra, and the Saptarṣis who had laboriously created him.

Ade accennò un sorriso con le sopracciglia: non abbiamo notizia di un sorriso più misterioso di quello che increspò allora la fronte del signore dei morti. Era il sorriso di colui che sa, e segnala con quel lieve cenno la sua distanza da tutto ciò che avviene.

«Cuántos acontecimientos, cuántas historias una dentro de la otra, que en cada juntura esconden otras historias.. Y apenas acabo de salir del huevo», pensaba Garuda mientras, exultante, volaba rumbo al norte. Al fin un lugar sin seres vivientes. En aquel lugar se detendría a reflexionar. «Nadie me ha enseñado nada. Todo me ha sido sólo mostrado. Necesitaré toda la vida para empezar a comprender lo que he vivido. Comprender, entre otras cosas, qué significa el estar hecho de sílabas...»

[the true historian's] desired prey is primarily what has eluded memory and what has had every reason to elude it. After lengthy training in this struggle with the opaque, he will be able to test himself against Plutarchan figures, who are, in contrast, obscured by an excess of testimony - that thick carapace history secretes to keep them remote from us. And the end of his arrogant rise, the historian wants to meet Napoleon as if the latter were a stranger. At this point he becomes part visionary, and can muster the insolence to begin a book as Léon Bloy did: 'The history of Napoleon is surely the most unknown of all histories.

To his foreign guests, Vasiṣṭha said: “You have entered a place where amazement is vain. Everything is normal here. There are fathers who are sons of their sons or sons who are fathers of their fathers and their sisters, who are their lovers and wives too. Here the latter-day priest is also among the first of the gods. Here the monster is an ascetic and the ascetics fight the monsters.

One operates on the mind with the mind. What else is there, after all?

Nothing enchants the mind more than the existence of the outside world, of something that resists it and will not obey.

They’re afraid I’ll die,” Prajapati thought. “They’ll always be afraid I’ll die, and they’ll always be trying to kill me.

I Cristiani quando costruivano chiese nei luoghi dei santuari pagani e accoglievano antichi capitelli e fusti di colonne nelle loro navate, si comportavano come Eracle con il leone di Nemea, come Atena con la Gorgone. Nel rapporto con il mostro, essenziale è innanzi tutto questo: che il mostro possiede o protegge o addirittura è il tesoro. Ucciderlo vuol dire incorporarlo, sostituirlo. L'eroe diventerà egli stesso il nuovo mostro, rivestito della pelle del vecchio e ornato di qualche sua metonimica spoglia. Così la testa di Eracle non accetta più di mostrarsi se non tra le fauci inerti del leone che ha sconfitto. Il mostro è il più prezioso tra i nemici: perciò è il nemico che si cerca. Gli altri nemici posso semplicemente assaltarci: sono i Giganti, i Titani, rappresentanti di un ordine che sta per essere soppiantato o vuole vendicarsi per essere stato soppiantato. Tutt'altra è la natura del mostro. Il mostro aspetta vicino alla sorgente. Il mostro è la sorgente. Non ha bisogna dell'eroe. E' l'eroe che ha bisogno di lui per esistere, perché la sua potenza sarà protetta dal mostro e al mostro va strappata. Quando l'eroe affronta il mostro, non ha ancora potere, né sapienza. Il mostro è il suo padre segreto, che lo investirà di un potere e di una sapienza che sono soltanto di un singolo, e soltanto il mostro gli può trasmettere. Il mostro, in origine, stava al centro, al centro della terra e del cielo, là dove sgorgano le acque. Quando il mostro fu ucciso dall'eroe, il suo corpo smembrato migrò e si ricompose ai quattro angoli del mondo. Poi cinse il mondo in un cerchio, di squame e di acque. Era il margine composito del tutto. Era la cornice. Che la cornice fosse il luogo del mostro lo sapevano anche gli artefici delle cornici barocche: ben più intricate, ben più folte, ben più arcaiche di tutti gli idilli che racchiudevano - e forse, un giorno, avrebbero soffocato. Poi venne il momento in cui non si vollero più le cornici. I musei ospitarono quadri senza cornici, che sembravano spogliati. La cornice non è l'antiquato, ma il remoto. Scomparsa la cornice, il mostro perde la sua ultima dimora. E torna a vagare, ovunque.

Here is the question Nietzsche raises: "To what extent can thought, judgement, all of logic be considered as the outer aspect, or symptom of a much more inner and fundamental occurrence?

First post-historical corollary: The letter is nothing but the spirit. Among the experimental practices that nihilism, an astute rhetorician, has tried to put into operation in its theater, the first and main one is esotericism. A chilling oxymoron has thus been created, one that grips our whole life. Appearance having now been dissolved as referring to another, what one gets is unremitting tautology, the repetition of divine names, a constant exchange of incorruptible mystical commodities, whether they be words, bodies, images, phantasms, or objects. Seen from a distance, this dizzying circulation produces an effect of static hypnosis, a miserable condition of demigods who would like to die but cannot.

Knowledge by simulcra appears here as a a sort of spell to which the mind subjects itself: a dangerous and beautiful enchantment, a risk we must accept because the knowledge that comes to us by this path would not be attainable in any other way.

Second post-historical corollary: Common Exchange is mystical exchange. The unit of measure--that is, the capacity of anything to be translated into anything else, equivalence (only the elect are equal), reciprocity-- these are esoteric notions, and post-history makes them become the only immediate reality, since it is on them that it bases the circulation of commodities and on such circulation that it models every other exchange.

Groups always form around a corpse. When there is no corpse, that empty place evokes the many corpses that have been there and the many yet to appear.

Does the anonymous, secular individual have to be content with the concealment of the invisible, which has now become the precondition of communal life? This is a watershed. If the essential factor is not belief, but knowledge — as every gnosis presupposes — it will be a matter of opening a way into obscurity, using any means, in a sort of continual bricolage of knowledge, without any certainty about where to start, any concern about the ultimate destination. This is the condition, both wretched and exalting, faced today by those who belong to no religious denomination, but who, at the same time, refuse to accept the religion, or, more precisely, the superstition of society. It is a difficult path, which has no name, no points of reference apart from those that are coded and strictly personal, but it is also a path along which one encounters the unexpected assistance of kindred voices, as in a clandestine constellation. I don't believe we can expect any more in the fraction of time in which we live. And yet, if we look closely, that is an enormous amount. And it is a great game, which not so few have practiced over the centuries, without declaring it, and which now should have the audacity to show itself in full light.

Then the gods realized they must create substitutes for themselves: men. But how? For them to be truly alive, a god must die.

In Roberto Calasso’s Ardor, which is the retelling of the wisdom of the Vedic age, there is this utterly enlightening conversation between Yajnavalkya—the pupil of Surya (the sun god) and the master of all yajnas or sacrifices—and the sublimely wise King Janak. Janak asks Yajnavalkya, ‘What happens after death?

I've been silent for so long I don't know where to start. Anywhere would do. But ancient custom has it that everything begins with the gods.

Yahweh was, among many other things, an allegorist.

People criticized Guénon for writing like a bookkeeper of metaphysics, with no enthusiasm, with no heart. They thought he lacked inspiration. But Guénon was simply obeying "the esoteric, and particularly the Rosicrucian precept according to which it was better to talk to every person in their own language.

For society to be well ordered, it will have to regard great pleasures as hostile and troublesome in relation to the whole. But not because they conceal the power of the unlimited. On the contrary: because they would compel us to recognize that the power of the unlimited is concealed in money itself.

E***: Our fate is governed by two mummies: that of Lenin in his mausoleum and that of Bentham at University College, London.

Above all, we have to remember, Marx is greedy. He wants more of everything. He is suspicious of quality unless it is simply the mark of greater quantity: even if quality could exist alone, it would always be less admirable than a quantity in continual prospect of increase.

Savage words: how one can destroy someone by simply sitting there in an armchair reading a book, not too far from him.

El lector verdadero está siempre leyendo un libro -o dos, o tres o diez- y la novedad llega como una molestia -a veces irritante, a veces agradable, a veces incluso deseada- en el seno de esa actividad ininterrumpida. Donde, no sin esfuerzo, deberá conquistar un espacio, si no cae antes de las manos del lector. Este, entonces, volverá felizmente a ese otro libro que estaba leyendo porque eso es precisamente lo que tenía ganas de hacer.

Hay títulos que uno ha evitado durante años y años, viéndolos reaparecer cada tanto. Llega un día en que, sin una razón aparente, nos aventuramos a comprar el libro. Finalmente uno lo abre y descubre que es del todo distinto de lo que habíamos pensado. O bien se constata que es como si ya lo hubiéramos leído -y entonces las razones para evitarlo eran incuestionablemente sólidas.

Es esencial comprar libros que no vayan a ser leídos enseguida. Al cabo de uno o dos años, o acaso de cinco, diez, veinte, treinta, cuarenta años, llegará el momento en que se sentirá la necesidad de leer precisamente ese libro -y tal vez lo encontraremos en un estante poco frecuentado de la propia biblioteca-. Mientras tanto, puede suceder que ese libro se haya vuelto irrepetible, y difícil de encontrar incluso en un anticuario, porque es de escaso valor comercial (ciertos libros de bolsillo parecen disolverse rápidamente en el aire) o incluso porque se ha vuelto una rareza y entonces vale mucho más. Lo importante es que ahora se pueda leer enseguida. Sin más búsquedas, sin la necesidad de buscarlo en una biblioteca. Operaciones laboriosas que cancelan la inspiración del momento. Qué extraña sensación cuando se abre ese libro. Por un lado, la sospecha de haber anticipado, sin saberlo, la propia vida, como si un demonio sabio y malicioso hubiese pensado: "Un día te ocuparás de los Bogomilos, aunque por ahora no sepas casi nada de ellos." Por otra parte, un sentimiento de frustración, como si solo fuéramos capaces de reconocer aquello que tiene que ver con nosotros con gran retraso. Después nos damos cuenta de que esa doble sensación se aplica también a muchos otros momentos de nuestra vida. Valéry escribió una vez que "estamos hechos de dos momentos, y del retraso de una 'cosa' sobre sí misma".

Contact with the skin of a dead animal made it possible to communicate with all other animal species. It was the lingua franca of metamorphosis.

Pero algo tengo que hacer,: entonces me encierro y leo, con un frenesí que me hace estremecer con frecuencia, de noche, cuando me sorprendo insultando en voz alta a seres extinguidos y sin embargo horrendamente activos.