“Death sank up to his thighs in the substance of the Sun. His torso emerged from the red-hot mass and looked downward. If you raised your eyes from the earth, behind the barrier of light you could sometimes glimpse a dark outline, as though of someone greeting you from afar. No one was eager to answer that greeting. They said they didn’t want to look at the Sun so as not to be blinded. The truth is they didn’t want to acknowledge the greeting of that silent, unknown being, to whom, in whispers, they would sometimes allude, in the name ‘black sun.’
“Death is sunk up to his thighs in the Sun and in the heart, as in a soft and burning pastry. From afar people would see his shadow fording the Sun as if it were a ditch. All of a sudden the shadow seemed to reach a shallow spot, because more and more of it appeared. You could see the thighs, the knees. When you could see Death’s feet someone would say: ‘He’s been cut off — and at that moment someone else would die.
“Death is that person half buried in the Sun, who slowly devours it. Just as the ‘person,’ purusa, who can be seen at the center of the pupil — and it is the one, barely perceptible sign the mind allows us of its existence — slowly devours the body in which it has been set. Death is to be found wherever some substance is consuming itself. Death is the act of eating. Thus we are a debt owed to Death. We pay that debt every passing moment, cunningly stretching it out and breaking it up with the strength Death itself gives us, stingily conceding, moment by moment, to the Person in the Eye a particle of ourselves to devour.
“The Person in the Eye is not born alone, cannot exist alone. The first couple were the two Persons in the Eye. In the right eye was Death. In the left eye his companion. Or again: in the right eye was Indra. In the left eye his partner Indrāṇī. It was for these two that the gods made that division between the eyes: the nose. Behind the barrier of the nose two lovers hide, as though separated by a mountain. To meet, to touch, they must go down together into the cavity that opens up in the heart. That is their bedroom. There they twine in coitus. Seen from outside, the eyes of the sleepers are hidden by the eyelids as though by a curtain around a bed. Meanwhile, in the heart’s cavity, Indra and Indrāṇī are one inside the other. This is the supreme beautitude. That’s why you mustn’t wake a sleeper suddenly, so as not to disturb Indra and Indrāṇī’s lovemaking. That’s why whoever is woken finds his mouth sticky, because those two divinities are emptying their seed, while in the sleeper’s mouth the liquids of Indra and Indrāṇī mingle.
“Death and duplication go together. Never the one without the other. The science of reflection and scission, the unleashing of doubles, systematic substitution, simultaneous glances, both inward and outward: all these are the works of duplication. Only he who encourages them can gain access to knowledge. But duplication comes together with Death. And only knowledge can defeat Death. This is the circle.”
They were sitting on three stools. Dadhyañc had a view of the Aśvins’ almost identical profiles as they focused their attention elsewhere. One of them said: “When we were still children, we were given certain words that were attributed to Prajāpati and that none of the Devas or Asuras claimed to have understood, though they had committed them to memory. These were the words: ‘The ātman, the Self, released from every evil, subject neither to age, nor death, nor suffering, nor hunger, nor thirst, whose desires and whose thoughts are reality, this one must seek, this one must strive to know. He who achieves that ātman, that Self, and knows it, shall possess all worlds and all desires.’” Then the other Aśvin said, as though taking over from where his twin had left off: “Could it be that the sovereign of all words is this ātman, a reflexive pronoun that declines like a masculine noun, a word we’ve used every day without thinking, without sensing that this was the secret, that it was to this we must come?” The more baffled they felt, the more they wanted to learn — they told Dadhyañc. He looked them in the eye and said: “The ātman comes before the aham. The Self comes before the I: the reflexive pronoun comes before the personal pronoun: why? The most basic thing is not that a being says ‘I’: all animals say ‘I’ from the first moment they emit a sound. Between Self and I there is but one difference: the Self watches the I, the I does not watch the Self. The I eats the world. The Self watches the I eating the world. They are two birds, they sit on opposite branches of the same tree, at the same height, at the same distance from the trunk. To anyone watching them, they are almost the same. Like yourselves. No one can separate them. The first words the Self said were: ‘I am.’ Nothing existed as yet when the Self said: ‘I am.’ The I owes its existence solely to the fact that it was pronounced by the Self. From the start the two had the shape of a person, puruṣa. Even though the whole world would later appear from the Self and the Self would sink into it right to the tips of his fingernails, still the Self and the I too preserved the form of a person. Which is why we speak to them and they to us.”
Dadhyañc went on explaining the doctrine of the honey to the Aśvins. His speech spread through them from pores to marrow. The world was the same as before. Nothing was the same as before. One day Dadhyañc said: “Śaryāti wants to celebrate a soma sacrifice with both gods and men. Do you know who he is? He is the father of Sukanyā, the girl who rejected you. And he is the son of Manu. Thus Sukanyā is your niece, through the simulacrum, Samjñā. But at this point you would hardly be surprised by any relationship… You must come to the sacrifice too. This is the last time you shall see me with my horse’s head. Now, go…”
The Aśvins wept. Although they hadn’t yet savored the soma, they knew that the best part of their lives was coming to an end.
Given that the Aśvins were born of a mare, given that they always traveled by land and sea — and even in the sky — on a chariot drawn by white horses, given that they learned the doctrine of the honey from a being who had a horse’s head, it would seem obvious that their name should derive from aśva, “horse.” But the etymologists of ancient times did not restrict themselves to such obvious reflections. The name also derived, they said, from aś- “to gain.” Why? Because they were the first to gain the Daughter of the Sun, Sūryā, when they won her in a contest; because they “gained everything.” How so? “One with wetness, the other with light,” says the etymologist.
Sons, lovers, husbands, brothers, friends, paranymphs, conquerors, chosen ones: such, simultaneously, were the Aśvin for the woman they traveled with, or who traveled with them. It might be Uṣas — or Sūryā. And they would have liked it to be Sukanyā. They were the “Lords of Ornament,” Śubháspátis — and there was no other god who could boast that name. Which is why women were drawn to their chariot, as if to a jar full of honey. The two of them were never alone, even though they were to fill the world with duplication. There was always a third, as their chariot had three wheels, a girl between them, often invisible. In her they communed.
The “honey whip,” káśā mádhumatī, darted from the Aśvins’ hands and cracked down on the earth. Who can be sure what it was made of? What is sure is that people wanted nothing better than to feel its edge. A goatskin bursting with honey poked out from the Aśvins’ three-wheeled chariot. They would dip their whip in it before cracking its dripping sweetness all around them. Where did the whip come from? From the mother of all mothers, from Aditi, the Unlimited One, from she who has no need of a husband to bring forth fruit. The supreme moments of the Aśvins’ lives always had to do with a female figure: when they awoke — and all they saw was Uṣas’s tawny hair bowed over them; when Aditi silently placed that whip in their hands; when, at the end of a wild chariot race — the time their fourth wheel was lost forever — Sūryā stood waiting for them on a rostrum beside the finish line and climbed onto their chariot, “for such was her wish,” she said. Only a mortal, Sukanyā, whom they had seen rise from the waters like a goddess, rejected them. And that rejection — they thought — had been their salvation, because it had led them to Dadhyañc. Thus they had gained what had always been lacking, the one element that is ever the thing we lack: knowledge. From the honey to the doctrine of the honey. Isn’t this the only step we can ever make? All others depend on it — or are illusory. They smailed into emptainess and set off on their way again.