Unique among the ancients, they made themselves known exclusively through their language and their cult. Words and gods. They left nothing else. Nor wished to perhaps. They built no stone temples, no palaces. They left no chronicles of their achievements, made no lists of their possessions, created no images that survived the course of time. Perhaps they felt such things would be a mistake — or in any event unworthy of mention. But the invocation of a divine name, variations of an enigmatic formula, hints at matters celestial, these they never tired of repeating. Right from the word—veda—which would one day be used to describe them, they were devotees, perhaps fanatics of “knowledge.” There had been men who saw knowledge and passed on in “what may be heard” (śruti), hence through words, that consciousness whose origin was “not from man” (apauruṣeya). These men were the ṛṣis, the “seers.” Their dealings with the gods were complex. Sometimes they were superior to the gods (definitely so when it came to knowledge), sometimes they even generated the gods, sometimes it was the intensity of their tapas, the heat that blazed in their minds and could well have damaged even the mansions of heaven, that led them to flee the gods. The ultimate game in the cosmic match, the most subtle and occult of them all, was that played out between gods and ṛṣis, while the manifest game was fought between the Devas and the Asuras, between those gods and antigods who never ceased to confront each other. As for men, they might host “portions,” splinters, fragments of this or that contender, offering a further battleground where their deeds could unfold in new and more complex variations. But did men exist, on their own? Men who did not host within themselves parts of that other world which we are unable to see? Of course they did, but as accidents of nature that blossom and fade without further significance.
Cows were important, indeed vital, to the Āryas, just as they were to the Dinkas along the Nile and to many other tribes of nomadic herdsmen. But it was only among the Āryas that cows became, like the unknown quantity in algebra, an abstract agent that could be applied to everything, transform everything. When they said “the cows,” the Āryas hinted at a secret that was an operation of the mind. The cows were water, coinage, word, woman, dawn. They were the unit of exchange, the lingua franca of existence. The Āryas had the revelation that it is not only the element on which one operates that may be secret but likewise the operation itself. Anyone who does not know this is excluded. He does not know “the secret name of the cows.” Actually, the cows have twenty-one secret names. The uninitiated would hear the Āryas pronouncing them and imagine they were raving in some obsession. In fact they were experimenting with speech raised to a higher power, an abstraction hitherto unknown that now entirely reshuffled the pack of appearances. Before each word, they were seized by panic in the face of overwhelming allusiveness, a devastating expansion of meanings. But at the same time they were enchanted when the scattered elements of the world came together like a herd within the receptacle of consciousness, which vibrated as it named, evoked, invoked. Thus did the Vedie hymns make themselves manifest.
No artifacts have come down to us from the Vedic era. Nothing that those who intoned the hymns of the Ṛg Veda touched with their hands has survived. Not merely because wood rots faster in a tropical climate. Not merely because they chose not to build in stone. Not merely because they decided not to have temples. The hymns speak of palaces with a hundred gates. They speak of well-crafted jewels. Of bronze palisades. They list the paraphernalia of ritual. They speak of arms and chariots. It is as if everything had been pure mental reality that allows the object to appear, then reabsorbs it. What remained were the forests, scarred here and there where the fire had burned. And the hymns, the meters, the names. They preserved words and fire. What else did one need?
For hundreds and hundreds of years, before the Āryas came, there were cities on the hills above the Indus valley. They had cobbled roads, huge baths, canals, engraved seals, defensive walls, granaries. None of this is mentioned in the Vedas. Yet the hymns do speak of Indra demolishing a hundred púr in his warrior charge. Some have understood púr to mean “walls”—and think the passage alludes to the walls around Mohenjo-daro and Harappa being demolished by the invading Āryas. But the more plausible meaning of púr is “livestock corral.” Thus the Vedic lines might refer merely to cattle rustling or sheep stealing. No remains give conclusive support to the notion that the towns of the Indus valley were destroyed by the Āryas. Though there is nothing to say they were not. It may well be that there was a gap of around two hundred years between the destruction of these towns and the arrival of the Āryas. But aside from chronological inconsistencies, clearly a great blank separates the Āryas, who left nothing tangible at all, from the inhabitants of the Indus valley, whose seals traveled as far away as Mesopotamia.
The further they pushed on into the vast Sindhu plain, the more the Āryas turned their backs on the soma, the inebriating plant that grew only in the mountains. It was soma that had given them their strength and vision, and with the impetus generated by that strength and vision they were now conquering something that would deny them access to soma, except through memory. A different landscape lived on in their minds. A northern homeland of long, long nights, prodigious dawns. That was the territory where truth was manifest. Each new conquest was but a temporary camp set up further and further from the place of meaning, useful only insofar as it refreshed the memory. Already living in places where the length of the days hardly varied, they cherished and nourished that memory most stubbornly in word and gesture. To their eyes, every image of beauty, of seduction, of splendor, emanated from a dawn long faded beyond the mountains, to the north.
Ever more difficult to reach and to grasp on its high mountaintops, from the moment the Āryas settled down in the torrid plain, soma began to take on the nature of a simulacrum. Or was it perhaps the origin of all simulacra? Already, the simplest of the liturgies that referred to it was “fearfully complicated.” The substance at the center of everything was quickly becoming the void at the center of everything. And the web of liturgical prescriptions grew thicker and tighter, as if those devotional gestures were partly intended to conceal an absence, where the twofold power of a divine body and its cast still lingered.
The life of the Āryas revolved around but a few elements, a few objects. Always the same, ever repeated. Nor was there any attempt to add others. But the variations on those elements, those objects, were such as to make the head spin. Every morning they confronted the same simple liturgical articles, and every morning, once the mind was yoked up, a stream of thoughts would begin. Grasses, wooden cups, a wooden sword, sour milk, butter, wooden spoons, two carts, water, a gold ring, two wooden boards, five stones, an antelope hide, an antelope horn, a red ox hide. That was what they carried around with them: the wherewithal for the simplest of sacrifices. A temple was unacceptable, because that would have meant using something ready-made, once and for all, whereas what you had to do was start from scratch, every day, transforming whatever clearing you found, scattered bushes and all, into a place of sacrifice, choosing one by one the positions for the fires and the altar, measuring out the distances, evoking the whole from an amorphous, mute, inert scene, until the moment when the gods would come down and sit themselves on the thin grass mats that had been carefully unrolled for them.