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.”
― Roberto Calasso

“The gods are fugitive guests of literature. ”
― Roberto Calasso

“Whatever else it might be, the divine is certainly the thing that imposes with maximum intensity the sensation of being alive.”
― Roberto Calasso, Literature and the Gods

“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.”
― Roberto Calasso, Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India

“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.”
― Roberto Calasso

“Zeus is never ridiculous. Because his dignity is of no concern to him.”
― Roberto Calasso, Οι γάμοι του Κάδμου και της Αρμονίας

“The biggest danger in life is that the food of humans is all made of souls.”
― Roberto Calasso, Il cacciatore celeste

“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.”
― Roberto Calasso

“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.”
― Roberto Calasso, L'ardore

“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.”
― Roberto Calasso, The Unnamable Present

“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.”
― Roberto Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch

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

“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.”
― Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

“Savage words: how one can destroy someone by simply sitting there in an armchair reading a book, not too far from him.”
― Roberto Calasso, Il cacciatore celeste

“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.”
― Roberto Calasso, The Ruin of Kasch

“Some would sing as they killed the bear, so that the bear, while dying, could say: "I like that song.”
― Roberto Calasso, Il cacciatore celeste

“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.”
― Roberto Calasso, L'ardore

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

“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.”
― Roberto Calasso, Las bodas de Cadmo y Harmonía

“The wild animal loves pure men because those men, at one time, were themselves prey.”
― Roberto Calasso, Il cacciatore celeste

“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.”
― Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

“ardor which is tapas; the name Indra”
― Roberto Calasso, Ardor

“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.”
― Roberto Calasso, L'ardore

“As the Greeks see it, elegance arises from excavation, from the cavity.”
― Roberto Calasso, Οι γάμοι του Κάδμου και της Αρμονίας

“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.”
― Roberto Calasso, L'ardore

“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.”
― Roberto Calasso, L'ardore

“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.”
― Roberto Calasso, Il cacciatore celeste

“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.”
― Roberto Calasso, Ardor

“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.”
― Roberto Calasso, L'ardore

“Pure is that which stands out against a background, which has a profile, which can thus become a target.”
― Roberto Calasso, Il cacciatore celeste