» Wed Dec 05, 2012 9:00 pm Like the Revelation (sruti) itself, we must begin with the Myth (itihasa), the penultimate truth, of which all experience is the temporal reflection. The mythical narrative is of timeless and placeless validity, true nowever and everywhere: just as in Christianity, “In the beginning God created” and “Through him all things were made,” regardless of the millennia that come between the datable words, amount to saying that the creation took place at Christ’s “eternal birth.” “In the beginning” (agre), or rather “at the summit,” means “in the first cause”: just as in our still told myths, “once upon a time” does not mean “once” alone, but “once for all.” “The Myth is not a “poetic invention” in the sense these words now bear: on the other hand, and just because of its universality, it can be told, and with equal authority, from many different points of view. In this everlasting beginning there is only the Supreme Identity of “That One” (tad ekam), without differentiation of being from non-being, light from darkness, or separation of sky from earth. The All is for the present impounded in the first principle, which may be spoken of as the Person, Progenitor, Mountain, Tree, Dragon or endless Serpent. Related to this principle by filiation or younger brotherhood, and alter ego rather than another principle, is the Dragon-slayer, born to supplant the Father and take possession of the kingdom, distributing its treasures to his followers For if there is to be a world, the prison must be shattered and its potentialities liberated. This can be done either in accordance with the Father’s will or against his will; he may “choose death for his children’s sake,” or it may be that the Gods impose the passion upon him, making him their sacrificial victim. These are not contradictory doctrines, but different ways of telling one and the same story; in reality, Slayer and Dragon, sacrificer and victim are of one mind behind the scenes, where there is no incompatibility of contraries, but mortal enemies on the stage, where the everlasting war of the Gods and the Titans is displayed. In any case, the Dragon-Father remains a Pleroma, no more diminished by what he exhales than he is increased by what he inhales. He is the Death, on whom our life depends; and to the question “Is Death one, or many?” the answer is made that “He is one as he is there, but many as he is in his children here.” The Dragon-slayer is already our Friend; the Dragon must be pacified and made a friend of.
The passion is both an exhaustion and a dismemberment. The endless Serpent (speirama ai?nos, coil of eternity), who for so long as he was one Abundance remained invincible, is disjointed and dismembered as a tree is felled and cut up into logs.For the Dragon, as we shall presently find, is also the World-Tree, and there is an allusion to the “wood” of which the world is made by the Carpenter. The Fire of Life and Water of Life (Agni and Soma, the Dry and the Moist, all Gods, all beings, sciences and goods are constricted by the Python, who as “Holdfast” (Namuci) will not let them go until he is smitten and made to gape and pant; and from this Great Being, as if from a damp fire smoking, are exhaled the Scriptures, the Sacrifice, these worlds and all beings; leaving him exhausted of his contents and like an empty skin.16 In the same way the Progenitor, when he has emanated his children, is emptied out of all his possibilities of finite manifestation, and falls down unstrung, overcome by Death though he survives this woe. Now the positions are reversed, for the Fiery Dragon will not and cannot be destroyed, but would enter into the Hero, to whose question “What, wouldst thou consume me?” it replies “Rather to kindle (waken, quicken) thee, that thou mayst eat.” The Progenitor, whose emanated children are as it were sleeping and inanimate stones, reflects “Let me enter into them, to awaken them”; but so long as he is one, he cannot, and therefore divides himself into the powers of perception and consumption, extending these powers from his hidden lair in the “cave” of the heart through the doors of the senses to their objects, thinking “Let me eat of these objects”; in this way “our” bodies are set up in possession of consciousness, he being their mover. And since the Several Gods or Measures of Fire into which he is thus divided are “our” energies and powers, it is the same to say that “the Gods entered into man, they made the mortal their house.” His passible nature has now become “ours”: and from this predicament he cannot easily recollect or rebuild himself, whole and complete.”
We are now the stone from which the spark can be struck, the mountain beneath which God lies buried, the scaly reptilian skin that conceals him, and the fuel for his kindling. That his lair is now a cave or house presupposes the mountain or walls by which he is enclosed, verborgen and verbaut. “You” and “I” are the psychophysical prison and Constrictor in whom the First has been swallowed up that “we” might be at all. For as we are repeatedly told, the Dragon-slayer devours his victim, swallows him up and drinks him dry, and by this Eucharistic meal he takes possession of the firstborn Dragon’s treasure and powers and becomes what he was. We can cite, in fact, a remarkable text in which our composite is called the “mountain of God” and we are told that the Comprehensor of this doctrine shall in like manner swallow up his own evil, hateful adversary. This “adversary” is, of course, none but our self. The meaning of the text will only be fully grasped if we explain that the word for “mountain,” giri, derives from the root gir, to “swallow.” Thus He in whom we were imprisoned is now our prisoner; as our Inner Man he is submerged in and hidden by our Outer Man. It is now his turn to become the Dragon-slayer; and in this war of the God with the Titan, now fought within you, where we are “at war with ourselves,” his victory and resurrection will be also ours, if we have known who we are. It is now for him to drink us dry, for us to be his wine. We have realized that the deity is implicitly or explicitly a willing victim; and this is reflected in the human ritual, where the agreement of the victim, who must have been originally human, is always formally secured. In either case the death of the victim is also its birth, in accordance with the infallible rule that every birth must have been preceded by a death: in the first case, the deity is multiply born in living beings, in the second they are reborn in him. But even so it is recognized that the sacrifice and dismemberment of the victim are acts of cruelty and even treachery; and this is the original sin (kilbisa) of the Gods, in which all men participate by the very fact of their separate existence and their manner of knowing in terms of subject and object, good and evil, because of which the Outer Man is excluded from a direct participation in “what the Brahmanas understand by Soma.” The form of our “knowledge,” or rather “ignorance” (avidya), dismembers him daily; and for this ignorantia divisiva an expiation is provided for in the Sacrifice, where by the sacrificer’s surrender of himself and the building up again of the dismembered deity, whole and complete, the multiple selves are reduced to their single principle (consciously if they are “saved,” unconsciously if they are “lost”). There is thus an incessant multiplication of the inexhaustible One and unification of the indefinitely Many. Such are the beginnings and endings of worlds and of individual beings: expanded from a point without position or dimensions and a now without date or duration, accomplishing their destiny, and when their time is up returning “home” to the Sea in which their life originated.
Coomaraswamy, Rama; Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. (2010-08-01). The Essential Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (Perennial Philosophy Series) (Kindle Locations 8124-8152). NBN_Mobi_Kindle. Kindle Edition.
