{pro-matter orientation of the Vedas} Rig Vedic funeral hymns 10.14.8 and 10.16.

5 mention unison of the deceased with a new body. The latter verse, urging Agni as cremation fire to accomplish this feat, recurs in Atharva Veda 18.2.10 in a funeral hymn in which Agni is repeatedly cautioned, as in the Rig Veda, not to burn the body too harshly or completely (Knipe, Hindu Eschatology, 173). Atharva Veda 18.2.26 and 4.64 imply that a limb of the cremated body may be employed ritually to reclothe the asu in the other world, a belief countering the notion of a dead body as useless when its asu or prana has moved on (ibid., 174; see section below on the Yamaic glorious body). {Intro: Fleshing out the Synedrion, This Wheels On Fire!} Rta, arya etymology and the rotiform polis/synedrion: The root [of rta] is r-, ar-, to put in motion, to move; the Indo-European root ar- means to fit, to arrange (the spokes in the wheel), so that rta would be that which is well arranged, the established norm, truth, order, etc., always with a dynamic connotation (ibid., 350n132). Rta is related to rju, straight, upright, right (ibid., 350n133). Yamas dwelling is in the highest, third heaven, where there is eternal light (cf. RS 9,113,7-9; 10,14,8; 10;15;14; etc.). RS 10,135,1 speaks of a tree with beautiful leaves under which Yama drinks with the gods, while AS 5,4,3, without mentioning Yama, specifies the tree where the gods abide in the third heaven to be a papal-fig. (Cf. Geldner 1951: 132ff. [Ger.]; Macdonell 1897: 138ff., 171-174, 167ff.). This tree is undoubtedly to be identified with Varunas light-issuing heavenly banyan-fig mentioned in RS 1,24,7. The idea of all heavenly bodies being fixed to the pole star with invisible ropes that prevent them from falling / seems to be based on Varunas banyan tree in the centre of the heavens, with the planets and stars fixed to its aerial roots. These aerial roots may also have given rise to the idea of Varunas noose, with which he seizes evil-doers and punishes them by binding them with fetters of sickness and death. I have suggested that these conceptions are of Harappan and Dravidian origin on the basis of the Indus script. The combination of the pictograms fig-tree + fish can be read in Dravidian as vata-mn: in ancient Tamil, this compound means north star, the name of the small star Alcor in Ursa Major near the pole star. (See Parpola 1975: 196ff.) Against this background, it is interesting to compare the symbols painted on the burial pottery of the Late Harappan cemetery H at Harappa. The symbols of fig leaves, fish, stars and trefoilsalternatein the sky around the flying peacocks and the various hoofed animals (cf. fig. 18). All thesesymbolize stars, the abodes of the pious deceased. The horizontal human beings depicted inside the peacocks have been plausibly interpreted as the dead who are carried to heaven by these birds. [The peacock] represents Varuna in his sky garment of the starspangled night. In the Rgveda it is above all Varuna who is watching from

the sky with his eyes (sun, moon and the stars). T 6,3,1 speaks of the golden-winded bird which flies up to the zenith as the messenger of Varuna, as the bird which is active in Yamas abode or womb (ibid., 70-71). {Appropriate eating/joining} What begins at the subatomic level, the assimilation of one thing by another in order to survive, culminates in the drinking of the Soma and the eating of the Eucharist. It is all subsumed in that primordial dynamism we call Sacrifice: our partaking in the universal metabolism that lets Life be(come) alive, and by which the entire reality subsists (Panikkar, Cosmotheandric, 137). Logically, the human inhabitants of Paradise, which was free of mortality and death, should have become mortal at the very moment of Yimas downfall but there must have existed a number of other versions. According to one of them, which resembles the forbidden fruits of Jewish Paradise, men lost immortality by devouring (= eating in an improper way) the meat of Yima. See the gloss to the Pahlavi translation of Yasna 9,1: / The body of (Hm) was made immortal owing to his honesty, / and (it was) not (treated) in the way of those who devoured (= improperly ate) the meat of Yima [footnote 15: the idea of cannibalism is disproved by the use of gt meat, which cannot refer to Yimas dead body.] / so that death was produced in their bodies. At first glance, this version would blame Yima for having made people eat meat, thus giving way to death and destruction, the logical consequence of which would have been the loss of paradise and immortality. Yet one should rather suppose that men stole some meat kept by Yima for sacrificial purposes, a hypothesis which is corroborated by the interpretation of Yasna 32,8 put forward below. Depicting Yima as the first sacrificer, the gloss has ritual implications that have not yet been recognized as such. The same subject can be found in the corrupt Pahlavi Rivayat 31b1-3, where Yima is described as having permitted men to slaughter animals and, at the same time, as having tried to prevent them from doing so: Zarduxsht asked this also of Ohrmazd: / What did Jam do best of the world? / Ohrmazd said: That which was when the dws (demons) said to men: Kill the beneficent animal. / Men replied: Let us act with (*without?) the permission of Jan, / and they did, / and so Jam battled with the dws (demons) for men not to kill the beneficent animal / <so that by> his <> the dws were condemned / and <men> were made by him(?) mortal and punishable (ibid., 72-73; review all footnotes throughout article [!!!]).

The Yima legend was well known to the Iranians of Zarathustras time, and his reference to it belonged to the very few passages of the Gths that were comprehensible to most of his listeners. Nowhere else in the Gths had the prophet regulated human behaviour in such a detailed form. In no way did he attribute vegetarianism to the inhabitants of his paradise, but he admitted that the consumption of meat since ancient times had been an inevitable necessity for the preservation of human life in (most of) the Iranian countries. His solution is a compromise between practicability on the one hand and love for all beings of the good creation on the other. People should eat meat but they should do it moderately, thereby saving their livestock and, at one and the same time, doing justice to the animals entrusted to them by Ahura Mazd (ibid.). {Yama-Yami} [T]he rise of relatively permanent, discrete individual forms and shapes in nature was felt to be an injustice, for which, in accordance with the mysterious saying of Anaximander, they must make reparation to one anotheraccording to the arrangement of Time (ibid., 7; int. cit. of Anaximander from Freeman, Ancilla, 19). [This is perhaps a de-concretized manifestation of the Yamaic death problem. If the material is interconnected and is directly linked to the divine, where is justice and unity with no synedrion? The existential longing for being-communion is expressed here as a form of creation travailing and groaning for salvation in Christ. The fall, the separation, is the origin of tragedy and death, but Yama refuses to go in-through-the-out-door, to exchange sister for mother, himself for Greatfather Hypsistos. This is the sin of Ixion/Dios/Jove, who drank the sweat

of Ouranos {soma, the seeds in the waters, THUS THE AMBROSIAL SEED PROBLEM} and killed father Chronos, for the Greek version separates the patricide from the incest, the proto-Barbelognostic semen drink. This Jepen narrative becomes operative in later contexts in Western thought, preeminently in esoteric Judaic spirituality, but also in Western esotericism and in Eastern religious Tantrism, etc.] Yama incest theme: Prajpati had sexually approached his own daughter, who had assumed the form of a red she-deer (the red asterism Rohin). In punishment for his incest he was shot to death with a three-jointed arrow (said to be another constellation: Orions belt?) by the hunter (Sirius..); the myth identifies the hunter with Prajpatis own son Rudra (the rising sun), who was instantly born of Prajpatis seed. This asterism is, therefore, connected with Varuna, whose later name is Prajpati (Parpola, Sky-Garment, 83). Yama incest: AB 7,13: [T]he gods said to men This is your mother again. A sonless one cannot attain heaven, All the beasts know this; Therefore a son his mother And his sister mounteth (trans. Keith 1920: 299ff., w. modifications) (ibid., 112). [T]he 1000th cowentered [Prajapati] in the form of lightning, which saying dadadadadada i.e. I shall give, I shall giveprovides beings with rain and food (dir. cit, ibid. 89). The Apabharan naksatra ruled by Yama [was] the asterism par excellence of king Varuna (Yama) and the asterism primarily represented by the trefoils of the Harappan priest-kings as well as the dhisnyas of the trpya garment . (-) The name apabharanh (later shortened to bharan) means those which carry away. In the verses accompanying the sacrifices to the asterisms TB 3,1,2,11 records the following for the Apabharan: let the Bharans carry away (apa) (our) evil, let the venerable king Yama perceive that; for he is the great king of a / great world, let him make the path easy to go and fearless for us. [Yama blazes the human trail by conquering fear of death and allowing all men to share in this triumph.] The star name apabharanh is synonymous and even etymologically close to avabhrtha, the name of the expiatory bath [Holy Baptism] of the Vedic sacrifice. The comparison is all the more legitimate, because Apabharan is the very last asterism of the oldest attested naksatra cycle: the Apabharan asterism marks the close of the year. Similarly the avabhrtha bath is taken at the end of the sacrifice: according to SB 6,2,2,38, the purificatory bath is the completion (samsth). The final bath by means of which the participants purify themselves and dispose of the leavings of the sacrifice the pressed out Soma plants, the black antelope skin, dksita garments marks not only the end of the Soma day, but also the end of the whole foregoing year: whatever sin he has committed in the year before, verily that he thereby propitiates (Heesterman 1957: 169) (ibid., 91-92). [T]he Dravidian names for bilva are closely homophonous with the ProtoDravidian root vel/I to be(come) white or bright, shine, glitter and its

derivitive velli star, Venus (cf. DEDR 5496a). [This] could explain why bilva is identified with light (jyotis) in Aitareye-Brhmana 2,1: Now as to (his using) Bilva (as wood for the sacrificial stake), they say, Bilva is light; a light he becomes among his own people, he becomes the chief of his own people, who knows thus. The word jyotis light is associated with the stars, with the heavenly world. 7,4 identifies the three cosmic lights with the three lights in man: the sun in the sky = the eye in the head, the lightning in the atmosphere = the heart in the body, / the fire on the earth = the semen in the lap (or organs of generation). [Wow, is this a kind of vernal/purusal trifuntionality? [1] Sun-eye-head; [2] lightning-heart-atmosphere; [3] earth/fire-semen/thighs/genitals-producer class.] In Dravidian the word velli means not only star, planet Venus, but also semen (both being white). These meanings are shared also by the Sanskrit word ukra; and there is a myth of ukra, the planet Venus as the priest of the demons (asuras), being emitted as seed from ivas linga. If the bilva leaves symbolize drops of semen, one can well understand why they are thrown on the linga and yoni in the cult (ibid., 104-105). The earliest reference for stambha is KS 30, 9, which discusses the sacrificial victim and how he is to be made go to the heavenly world alive; the victim is bound with fetter equated with Varunas fetter (varunapa) either to the stambha sacrificial post or to a wooden stick (dru). The Rgveda and Atharvaveda have the dialectial variant skambha instead of stambha. Thus in the long hymns AS 10,7-8, skambha is in mystical speculations praised as the body and soul of the universe, the highest principle. [Is this a divine measuring rod?] AS 10,7,15, for example, asks: Where both immortality (amrta) and death are set together in man (purusa)that Skambha tell (me): which forsooth is he? (ibid., 106). Although later periods like to portray him as a judge, with Citragupta as his scribe, and stress the role of his two dogs as his messengers, [Yama] is not in Vedic times a figure who punishes, but a hero who runs before us and shares with us both the human condition and the divine calling (ibid., 545). Yama means a twin of not only Yami, but also of all men and of the Gods (ibid.). This is the foundation of his dual consubstantiality; it is an indication of Yamas connection to all men. [Yama the bridge. I am the door] He is the Forerunneror, as the Atharva Veda puts it in a paraphrase of [a] Rg-Vedic hymn: Yama was the first to die among the mortals, The first to go forth to that world before us. [AV 18.3.13] Yama stands for the personified link between the two worlds. He does not come from the otherworld to ours but, on the contrary, he goes from our world to the other realm. Yama is the bridge to immortality, constructed from our side. But, unlike other bridges, Yama is a person; the bridge is personified (ibid.).

Yama is a king of the human realm that is the kingdom of the dead. He is really the gatherer of people [RV 10.14.1]. All Men at one moment or another are gathered by him. He gives them a resting place [RV 10.14.9; 10.18.13]. He is more the hero of the dead than the God of death. People pray to him in order to be released from their bondage (ibid.). Yam, the twin sister of Yama, not only loves him but is convinced that the law of nature, which she certainly represents, demands that man and woman procreate and love each other. Moreover, as twins, Yama and Yam have already been lying together in their mothers womb. But their first responsibility is toward future generations: if / they do not overcome the taboo of incest, mankind will perish forever and the race of men will be extinguished. All the arguments are in favor of Yam. Yama, however, does not yield. He retorts that evil times will certainly come later, in which unlawful actions will be done, but that he is not prepared to do such a deed. [A]ll the Gods will disapprove of it. He is unmoved by dialectical arguments and unconcerned with pragmatic reasoning, for he the primordial man is truthful to this vocation. We have, however, already suggested the main reason for Yamas refusal: his loyalty to rta, his rejection of anrta: Shall I utter truth aloud and murmur untruth secretly? Shall I be a hypocrite and only keep up appearances? Shall I act according to somebody elses caprice, or even follow my own likings, disregarding the true cosmic order of things? Shall I, in short, not be truthful? [paraphr. of RV 10.10.4] (ibid., 545-546). Although they are supposed to be alone, Yama with an extremely refined psychological device simply directs the imagination of Yam to embrace another. There is an indication here that the gratifying of the sexual urge does not stand in the foreground. The act of incest is not committed and yet mankind subsists. Men are mortal and yet they became immortal. Here lies the power of this myth. We may indicate some of the leading threads. Yama is a brother to the Gods. His father Vivasvat is certainly a solar deity, perhaps the sun itself. Suranyu, his mother, is none other than the daughter of the God Tvastr. But Yama is also a brother to Men. Though he is offered the soma and is thus accorded a privilege of the Gods, he is never explicitly called a God. He is a real Man and the whole story of his temptation proves that he has had to work out his own salvation. By nature, that is, by birth, Yama is twin to Gods and Man. But by grace, that is, by conquest, merit, deeds, and by his fidelity to his life, he has overcome death, has become immortal, and divinized, he has become the father of all Men once they are on the other side of time and space (ibid., 546). The fact that mankind was not extinguished and that offspring came out of the first pair does not justify speaking of a hidden or later incest as if only a Fall could be at the origin of the human race. It would perhaps be more accurate to speak of a Miracle, of a double one indeed, that of generation and that of immortality. Both things go together. Procreation is immortality. Yamas loyalty has effected both, and thus he became both the first immortal man and the father of Men (ibid., 547).

It is this that the immortals wish from you: an offspring from the unique mortal. If Yama does not yield, death will reign over the whole earth and he / himself will die without offspring, most miserable destiny. He could hardly suffer a stronger temptation, and we can understand here incidentally that if the ethical sphere were autonomous and unrelated to the cosmic one, there is no reason on earthwhy the merely moral taboo should in this instance not be broken and overcome. Yet Yama does not yield because he does not understand the problem in terms of individual casuistry or of the merely ethical grounds of autonomous morals. It is the victory over death which brings him immortality and we can understand why. He has really passed beyond death, has despised it, has not yielded, has not been frightened of dying, of remaining without offspring, and thus of leaving the whole world unpeopled. The temptation is not in Yam, the dear sister, but in what she says, in his reasons. The myth tells us that Yama has conquered immortality. It does not need to tell us that he has conquered life also, for human life goes on here in this world, without the perpetration of the incest. At the origin of the human race there is a miracle, a miracle both of life and of immortality. The true incest that perpetuates the human race is not merely a human act of procreation between brother and sister, but the theandric action of the divine father of creatures uniting himself with his daughter; this stresses the fact that man is not only an animal but also a divine offspring. If Yama had wanted to, he could have usurped the place of God, but he could not commit such a cosmic crime. Yama is not simply a Vedic deity; he is neither a God nor just a mortal man. He is man, the Man, but he is not the cosmic purusa or the metaphysical tman. He is the concrete historical and trans-historical Man; he is mortal and yet he has an immortal life before him which he has ot win by conquest, by overcoming the temptation to break the order of the universe for the sake of complying with others or of / following the arguments of his own mind. Yama overcomes all attempts to make him the supreme criterion of truth and righteousness. Let the world remain empty of mortals yet he will not yield. Yama is the symbol of Man, of an achieved and fulfilled Man, who has thus already transcended his earthly condition yet preserves his full identity as Man. He is the master of the house, yet he fails to keep the rules of hospitality, so that he has to apologize by dispensing his favors (ibid., 547549). Yima fled, and evilentered the world. Yima was cut / superimposed by the conception of Yima forming a primary twin couple with his sister (Phl. Jamag, Vedic Sanskrit Yam). In theRigveda, this twin couple is faced with the duty to procreate progeny, as prescribed by divine law, but the inevitable way to fulfill this duty is to commit incest. This is the deadly sin by which Yama lost immortality and became the king of the underworld, the Indian Hades. [T]he Iranian theoryhardly the general practice of the Iranians cultivated the idea of the next-of-kin marriage not as a sin but as a religious merit. (-) According to [Bundahishn] 14B,1, Jam (Yima), after having lost

immortality, married a she-dw (female demon) and gave his sister Jamag in marriage to a he-dw (male demon), a marriage from which unwholesome animals such as the ape and the bear arose. Contrary to this improper solution, Bdh, 35,4 attributes to Jam and his sister Jamag the first next-of-kin marriage in Iranian history, saying that from Jam and his sister Jamag a pair (juxtag) of man and woman was born, and they became wife and husband together, a tradition which is paralleled by similar passages of other Pahlavi texts. Concerning Yimas twinness, Zarathustra himself does not seem to have adopted the concept of a twin couple of brother and sister, but he rather emphasized the ambivalence of his character. Yima was a twin in himself insofar as he was the prototype of mankind in which both good and evil are inseparable. In Yima, the twin, the two antagonistic primeval spirits started their fight against each other, the fight which will not be decided until the Renovation of the World. On these two, seeYasna 30,3: These are the two spirits (existing) in the beginning, the twins who have been heard of as the two (kinds of) dreams, as the two (kinds of) thoughts and words, and the two (kinds of) actions, the better and the evil one (ibid., 69-70). [Amazing, the two ways presaged in Yamaic context] Dir. cit. B 10.4.4.1-2: When Prajapati was creating living beings, Death, that evil, overpowered him. He practiced austerities for a thousand years, striving to leave evil behind him. 2. Whilst he was practicing austerities, lights went upwards from those hair-pits of his; and those lights are those stars: as many stars as there are, so many hair-pits there are; and as many hair-pits as there are, so many [moments] there are in a (sacrificial performance) of a thousand years (ibid.). [Parallel between ascesis, ritual time, and body. Also, the stars in the sky and their spacing may correspond to the tetraktys. Is the tetrakys connected to the Indian trefoil pattern?] The trpya garment corresponds to the garment worn during his period of consecration by the ordinary soma sacrificer; interestingly, this is identified with the cows skin, and its openings are said to represent stars. We read in B 3,1,2,13-18: He then puts on a (linen) garment, for completeness sake: it is / indeed his own skin he thereby puts on himself. Now that same skin which belongs to the cow was originally on man. 14. the gods spake, Verily, the cow supports everything here (on earth): come, let us put on the cow that skin which is now on man: therewith she will be able to endure rain and cold and heat. 15. Accordingly, having flayed man, they put that skin on the cow, and therewith she now endures rain and cold and heat. 16. For man was indeed flayed; and hence wherever a stalk of grass or some other object cuts him, the blood trickles out. They then put that skin, the garment, on him; and for this reason none but man wears a garment, it having been put on him as his skin 17. Let him, then, not be naked in the presence of a cow. For the cow knows that she wears his skin, and runs away for fear lest he should take the skin from her (ibid., 74-75). Competition of gods and men: It is through the sacrificial stake that the offerings go to the heavenly world, says MS 4,8,8. In AB 2,1 we read of the post: By means of the sacrifice the gods went upwards to the world of

heaven; they were afraid, Seeing this of us men and seers will track us. Having fixed it point down, they went upwards. Then men and seers came to the place of sacrifice of the gods, Let us seek something to track the sacrifice. They found the post only, with point downwards. They perceived, By this the gods have blocked the sacrifice. Having dug it out they fixed it upwards; then they did discern the world of heaven., (ibid., 113, citing Keigh 1920: 136). [Okay, seriously, this has to be the cross, and Ill be damned if purusa wasnt crucified] {Yama texts} AV 18.2.10-11: Away, O Agni, to the Fathers, send him who, offered in thee, goes with our oblations. Wearing new life let him approach his offspring, and splendid, be invested with a body, / Run and outspeed the two dogs, Saramas offspring, brindled, four-eyed, upon thy happy pathway. Draw nigh thou to the graciousminded Fathers who take their pleasure in the feast with Yama (Hymns of the Atharva-Veda, 228-9). [So, the new life of heaven is the wearing of a body, presumably partly or wholly new. But the path begins here in this world and ends in heaven. It is one with the path of the oblations savor, which wafts up to the top of the sky, the heavens.] AV 18.2.21-28: 21 Hither I call thy spirit with my spirit. Come thou; delighted, to these dwelling-places. Unite thee with the Fathers and with Yama: strong and delicious be the winds that fan thee. 22 Floating in water, bringing streams, let Maruts carry thee aloft, And causing coolness by their rush sprinkle thee with their falling rain. 23 I have recalled thy life to life, to being, power, and energy. Let thy soul go unto its own: so to the Fathers hasten thou. 24 Let not thy soul be left behind: here let not aught of thee remain, Of spirit, body, members, sap. / 25 Let not a tree oppress thee, nor Earth the great Goddess weigh thee down. Among the Fathers find thy home, and thrive mid those whom Yama rules. 26 Each parted member, severed from thy body, thy vital breaths that in the wind have vanished, With all of these, piece after piece, shall Fathers who dwell together meet and reunite thee. 27 Him have the living banished from their houses: remove him to a distance from the hamlet. Yama's observant messenger was Mrityu he hath despatched men's lives unto the Fathers. 28 Those Dasyus who, not eating our oblations, come wilh friends' faces mingled with the Fathers, Those who wear gross those who wear subtile bodies,from this. our sacrifice let Agni blast them (ibid., 230-231).

AV 18.4.64, 66-67: 64 If Agni Jtavedas, as he bore you hence to the Fathers world, hath left one single Limb of your bodies, here do I restore it. Fathers, rejoice in heaven with all your members! (-) 66 Here hast thou left thy heart; O man, as sisters leave their little pet. Do thou, O Earth, envelop him. 67 Bright be to thee those worlds where dwell the Fathers! I seat thee in that sphere which they inhabit (ibid., 256). RV 10.14: HYMN XIV. Yama. 1. HONOUR the King with thine oblations, Yama, Vivasvn's Son, who gathers men together, Who travelled to the lofty heights above us, who searches out and shows the path to many. 2 Yama first found for us a place to dwell in: this pasture never can be taken from Us. Men born on earth tread their own paths that lead them whither our ancient Fathers have departed. 3 Mitali prospers there with Kavyas, Yama with Angiras' sons, Brhaspati with Rkvans: Exalters of the Gods, by Gods exalted, some joy in praise and some in our oblation. 4 Come, seat thee on this bed of grass, O Yama, in company with Angirases and Fathers. Let texts recited by the sages bring thee O King, let this oblation make thee joyful. 5 Come, Yama, with the Angirases the Holy, rejoice thee here with children of Virpa. To sit on sacred grass at this our worship, I call Vivasvn, too, thy Father hither. 6 Our Fathers are Angirases, Navagvas, Atharvans, Bhrgus who deserve the Soma. May these, the Holy, look on us with favour, may we enjoy their gracious loving-kindness. 7 Go forth, go forth upon the ancient pathways whereon our sires of old have gone before us. 'Mere shalt thou look on both the Kings enjoying their sacred food, God Varuna and Yama. 8 Meet Yama, meet the Fathers, meet the merit of free or ordered acts, in highest heaven. Leave sin and evil, seek anew thy dwelling, and bright with glory wear another body. 9 Go hence, depart ye, fly in all directions: this place for him the Fathers have provided. Yama bestows on him a place to rest in adorned with days and beams of light and waters. 10 Run and outspeed the two dogs, Saram's offspring, brindled, four-eyed, upon thy happy pathway. Draw nigh then to the gracious-minded Fathers where they rejoice in company with Yama.

11 And those two dogs of thine, Yama, the watchers, four-eyed, who look on men and guard the pathway, Entrust this man, O King, to their protection, and with prosperity and health endow him. 12 Dark-hued, insatiate, with distended nostrils, Yama's two envoys roam among the People; May they restore to us a fair existence here and to-day, that we may see the sunlight. 13 To Yama pour the Soma, bring to Yama consecrated gifts: To Yama sacrifice prepared and heralded by Agni goes. 14 Offer to Yama holy gifts enriched with butter, and draw near: So may he grant that we may live long days of life among the Gods. 15 Offer to Yama, to the King, oblation very rich in meath: Bow down before the Rsis of the ancient times, who made this path in days of old. 16 Into the six Expanses flies the Great One in Trkadrukas. The Gyatr, the Trstup, all metres in Yama are contained [avail: http://www.sacred-texts.com/hin/rigveda/rv10014.htm]. RV 10.10: HYMN X.Yama Yami. 1. FAIN would I win my friend to kindly friendship. So may the Sage, come through the air's wide ocean, Remembering the earth and days to follow, obtain a son, the issue of his father. 2 Thy friend loves not the friendship which considers her who is near in kindred as stranger. Sons of the mighty Asura, the Heroes, supporters of the heavens, see far around them. 3 Yea, this the Immortals seek of thee with longing, progeny of the sole existing mortal. Then let thy soul and mine be knit together, and as a loving husband take thy consort. 4 Shall we do now what we neer did aforetime? we who spake righteously now talk impurely? Gandharva in the floods, the Dame of Waters-such is our bond, such our most lofty kinship. 5 Even in the womb God Tvaar, Vivifier, shaping all forms, Creator, made us consorts. None violates his holy ordinances: that we are his the heavens and earth acknowledge. 6 Who knows that earliest day whereof thou speakest? Who hath beheld it? Who can here declare it? Great is the Law of Varua and Mitra. What, wanton! wilt thou say to men to tempt them? 7 I, Yami, am possessed by love of Yama, that I may rest on the same couch beside him. I as a wife would yield me to my husband. Like car-wheels let us speed to meet each other. 8 They stand not still, they never close their eyelids, those sentinels of Gods

who wander round us. Not me-go quickly, wanton, with another, and hasten like a chariot wheel to meet him. 9 May Srya's eye with days and nights endow him, and ever may his light spread out before him. In heaven and earth the kindred Pair commingle. On Yam! be the unbrotherly act of Yama. 10 Sure there will come succeeding times when brothers and sisters will do acts unmeet for kinsfolk. Not me, O fair one,seek another husband, and make thine arm a pillow for thy consort. 11 Is he a brother when no lord is left her? Is she a sister when Destruction cometh? Forced by my love these many words I utter. Come near, and hold me in thy close embraces. 12 I will not fold mine arms about thy body: they call it sin when one comes near his sister. Not me,prepare thy pleasures with another: thy brother seeks not this from thee, O fair one. 13 Alas! thou art indeed a weakling, Yama we find in thee no trace of heart or spirit. As round the tree the woodbine clings, another will cling albout thee girt as with a girdle. 14 Embrace another, Yami; let another, even as the woodbine rings the tree, enfold thee. Win thou his heart and let him win thy fancy, and he shall form with thee a blest alliance (avail. at: http://www.sacredtexts.com/hin/rigveda/rv10010.htm). EIGHTH ADHYYA. FIRST BRHMANA THE ID. 1. ... When Manu was washing himself, a fish came into his hands. 2. It spoke to him the word, 'Raise me, I will save you!' [Manu answered:] 'What will you save me from?' 'A flood will carry away all these creatures: from that I will save you!' [Manu answered:] 'How am I to raise you?' 3. It said, 'As long as we are small, there is great destruction for us: fish devours fish. First keep me in a jar. When I outgrow that, dig a pit and keep me in it. When I outgrow that, take me down to the sea, for then I shall be beyond destruction.' 4. It soon became a large fish. Thereupon it said, 'In such and such a year that flood will come. You will listen to my advice by preparing a ship; and when the flood has risen you shall enter into the ship, and I will save you from it.'

5. After he had reared it in this way, he took it down to the sea. And in the same year which the fish had indicated to him, he attended to (the advice of the fish) by preparing a ship; and when the flood had risen, he entered into the ship. The fish then swam up to him, and to its horn he tied the rope of the ship, and by that means he passed swiftly up to yonder northern mountain. 6. It then said, 'I have saved you. Fasten the ship to a tree; ... As the water subsides, you may gradually descend!' Accordingly he gradually descended, and hence that (slope) of the northern mountain is called 'Alarm's descent.' The flood then swept away all these creatures, and Manu alone remained here. 7. Being desirous of offspring, Manu engaged in worshipping and austerities [withholding pleasure]. During this time he also performed a pka-sacrifice: he offered up in the waters clarified butter, sour milk, whey, and curds. Thence a woman was produced in a year: becoming quite solid she rose; clarified butter gathered in her footprint. Mitra and Varuna met her. 8. They said to her, 'Who are you?' 'Manu's daughter,' she replied. ... 9. Manu said to her, 'Who are you?' 'Thy daughter,' she replied. 'How, illustrious one, (are you) my daughter?' he asked. She replied, 'Those offerings (of) clarified butter, sour milk, whey, and curds, which you madein the waters, with them you generated me. I am the blessing (benediction): make use of me at the sacrifice! If you will make use of me at the sacrifice, you will become rich in offspring and cattle. Whatever blessing you shall invoke through me, all that shall be granted to you!' He accordingly made use of her (as the benediction) in the middle of the sacrifice; for what is intermediate between the fore-offerings and the after-offerings, is the middle of the sacrifice. 10. With her he went on worshipping and performing austerities, wishing for offspring. Through her he generated this race, which is this race of Manu; and whatever blessing he invoked through her, all that was granted to him. 11. Now this (daughter of Manu) is essentially the same as the Id; and whosoever, knowing this, performs with (the) Id, he propagates this race which Manu generated; and whatever blessing he invokes through it (or her), all that is granted to him. 12. It (the id) consists of a fivefold cutting; for the id, doubtless, means cattle, and cattle consist of five parts: for this reason it (the id) consists of a fivefold cutting. . 28. '--They who are to prosper this sacrifice, they who are to prosper the lord of sacrifice.' Those Brhmanas, who have studied and teach the Veda [the

sacred texts], assuredly prosper the sacrifice, since they spread (perform) and produce it: these [Brahmans] he thereby appeases. ... 30. 'Hither (he is) called for future worship of the gods;' he thereby in a mysterious manner invokes the blessing of life on this (sacrificer); for as he sacrificed heretofore, so, while living, he will sacrifice hereafter. 31. Moreover, he thereby in a mysterious manner invokes the blessing of offspring for him; for whosoever has offspring,--while he, on his part, goes to yonder world, his offspring sacrifice in this world: hence future worship of the gods means offspring. 32. Moreover, he thereby in a mysterious manner invokes the blessing of cattle for him; for whosoever has cattle, will sacrifice hereafter, as he has sacrificed heretofore. 36. This then is the benediction (implied in these formulas), 'May I live, may I have offspring, may I obtain prosperity!' Now in praying for the blessing of cattle, he prays for prosperity; for cattle means prosperity: hence through these two benedictions everything is obtained; and therefore these two benedictions are here pronounced. [found at http://www.lasalle.edu/~mcinneshin/wk01/satbraflood.htm] B. Paul Virilio and Zoophilia {Hephaestus and Heras Magic Chair} A magical chair was sent to Hera in the guise of a present, and held her fast as soon as she sat down in it (Gantz 75). But Dionysos overcomes Hephaestus stratagem by plying him with wine. Hyginus refers to the chair as floating or swinging in the air, once Hera is stuck to it (ibid.). [This is quite odd. Why would a chair that restricts your movement also fly around? The parallel with Ixions wheel is striking. Also, Hephaestus riding around on this Amyklai Throne in Pausanias 3.18.13. Hephaestus is the only Greek God who cant dance (Miller, Measures, 15), so he accomplishes a pseudodance, a prosthetichorale, by creating the flying car, the metal mount, which promises journey to the other side, but which constricts. Hera, the prisoner of Zeus, who cant do anything (complete) without him, gets a pseudoincestuous dance with her sons mount.] {Virilios course as ante-Yamaic bodybridge. The Yamaic bridge leads to the synedrion, the Great Council, etc.} Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin (1980) showed that the horn (sur-) of Yima must originally have played a role in the governing of the society of souls. This seems a foregone conslusion, since the horn finds its proper place between the flute (nd-) of Yama mentioned in the rigvedic hymn X.135.7

and the trumpet (sr) of Isrfil, both the name and motif of which was taken up in the Muslim tradition. On the other hand, Bruce Lincoln (1982) pointed out that the way in which Yima constructed the vara, by mixing / earth and water, corresponds exactly to the idea various peoples of Indo-European origin have of paradise: a universe enclosed by clay walls, which is a mythologcial transposition of the closed space of the tomb (Kellens, Yima and Death, 95-96). In the entire Mazdean traditionthe critical point of access to paradise is a bridge which has no equivalent in the Indian tradition. This image is not a variant of that of the road, because it illustrates the last formality to be observed before entering into the sojourn of the blessed. At the end of the road is situated the tribunal of the gods who, according to the merits of the deceased, grant or deny the passage of the bridge. The bridge is called cinuuat prtu-, where the word for bridge (prtu-) receives the genitive complement cinuuat. (-) The word cinuuant- is an active present participle in the function of an agent nounand seems to denote a mythical being not otherwise identified and who has / left no traces elsewhere (ibid., 96-97). Bailey interpreted cinuuat prtu- as the bridge of the piler. The piler denotes the one who builds the bridge by putting stones upon stones, and it is difficult to see who it could be other than the equivalent of the Indian Yama. In this way it appears that, in the Iranian tradition too, Yima played a role in the inauguration of the sojourn of the dead. When was this part taken away from him and why? (-) Yima played a role in the setting up of the next world acting as a builder. While his Indian homologue, probably by innovation, only investigated the road as a scout, Iranian Yima was the actual builder of the road to paradise, in the same way that he was to build the vara later (ibid., 98). Yat 19.34: but when (Yima) had added the lie, the untrue word, to his account, the Royal Glory flew away from him visibly in the shape of a bird (ibid.). [Is this a kind of anti-proto-Theophany?] {Virilios Vision of Zoophilia} Man is the passenger of woman, not only at the time of his birth, but also during their sexual relations, hence the taboo against incest as a vicious circle, or rather, voyage. [Is it an original, universal gnosis that FatherSonHoly Spirit/essence is an infertile solipsism? Also, the zoophilism is the coupling, which is an ambiguous driver/passenger, peaceful/violent] Paraphrasing Samuel Butler, we could say that the female is the means that the male found to reproduce himself, that is to say, to come to the world. In this sense, woman is the first means of transportation for the species, its very first vehicle, the second would be the horse [monture] with the enigma of the coupling of dissimilar bodies fitted out for the migration, the common voyage. [Coupling of dissimilar bodies the basis of caste/varna system of India and its later morphing into Frankish feudalism and finally industrial capitalism, the Fordist merging of actor, action, and

object acted upon (filioquist).] Pack animals, saddled horses, or draught horses - the metabolic vehicles present themselves as the exemplary products of a scorned zoophilia, forgotten with the rejection of bestiality [The original prime matter, the tetradic family, and totemism all operate on the same zoophilic logic: the Leviathanic merging of wills and bodies, the opposite of the Incarnational synedrion]. At the origin of domestication, woman preceded the raised and bred animal, the first form of economy, even before slavery and husbandry. She begins this movement that will lead to the pastoral societies, patriarchal societies organized for war, beyond the primordial hunt. In fact, it is at the close of these first acts of carnage that what is to come is first sketched out: war. From the animal hunt for the purpose of immediate subsistence, we pass on to the hunt for woman in passing on to the hunt for man. But this hunt is already more than a slaughter, an execution; it is a capture, the capture of female livestock. The waste of energy ceases, as far as the female sex, once the males are again executed and consumed. This is the case practically up to the agricultural stage that will see the institutionalization of slavery, thanks to the taking of men as prisoners (Virilio, Negative Horizon, 39). [D]omestication is the fulfilment [sic] and perfecting of predation (ibid., 40). The domesticated females back will be the model for later means of portage, all auto-mobility will stem from this infrastructure, from this pleasing conquered croup; all the desires of conquest and penetration are found here in this domestic vehicle (ibid.). Each departure is a distancing that deprives us of contact, of direct experience; each instance of vehicular mediation is nothing other than a drawing and quartering, a torture of the locomotive body, a sensory privation of the passenger. Borne along, walled in by the violence of movement, we merely attain acceleration, that is to say, the loss of the immediate. Speed, by its violence, becomes a destiny at the same time as being a destination. We go nowhere, we have contented ourselves solely with leaving and abandoning the vivacious and vivid [vif] to the advantage of the void [vide] of speed. The term mount [monter] shows [montre] this clearly [It is an affair of vision, of symolism/de-concretization, etc.]: we mount horses, we mount automobiles, we climb up [levons] to be carried off [tre enlevs], stolen away by the prosthesis that extends our mobility; this abduction is at the heart of accelerated travel, travellers taken up by the violence of speed are displaced persons, [personnes dplace] (ibid., 42). The invention of the mount would be in some measure a military tactic of the locomotive body: just as we exercise our limbs standing in place in order to alleviate extended sedentary immobility, so also, in the mobility of the saddled animal, we spare ourselves from the discomfort of pedestrian travel by manipulating the speed of movement. Sliding bit by bit, drifting stage by stage, from the slightest shifts to the most far-reaching, we play this game of hide and seek with our body which we call: assistance, comfort, support, well-

being ... in order to feel our animal body less we are constantly on the move (motility), so as to forget the expanse of the territorial body, we travel rapidly, violently. [Freedom from the macro-body, obliquely, from the synedrion. Note the cave of Plato as cinema.] This constant search for an ideal weightlessness is at the heart of the problems of domination. The epiphany of the horse, celebrated in the Middle Ages, illustrates this particularly well: in equestrian heroism, the horse is the bearer of death at the same time as being the protector of life, but wasn't it only the protector because it was the bearer? as Fernand Benoit asks. This theme recurs again in the bearer of Christ, St Christopher, patron saint of motorists. The celerity of the warhorse protects the rider from his pursuers but also from his own weakness, the mount protects its passenger from the weakness of his own constitution, but only by disqualifying it, explaining why the horse and the bird would be portents of death at the same time as being portents of power and domination: it is necessary first for the passenger to join corporally with the divine celerity of the warhorse, to lose his soul in an immediate metempsychosis in order to accede to domination. He who is 'mounted' dominates those on the ground, he dominates them by the height of his mount, but also by the mobile force of his horse with its tack on(ibid., 43). [Connection of zoophilia with Romaic thesis.] The dromocratic hierarchy of speed [vitesse] renews nobility: vitesse oblige! The society of the course, society of the hunt, the dromocracy is merely a clandestine organization of a social and political hunt where speed extends the advantage of violence, a society / where the affluent class conceals the class of speed. The last economy of violence, where the transmigration of species goes beyond portage, in the transportation revolution where riding, a metempsychosis of origins, is illustrated by the myth of the centaur but also by the myth of the motorist. The progress of speed is nothing other than the unleashing of violence; we saw that breeding and training were economic forms of violence, or, if you like, the means to sustain violence, indeed render it unlimited. The conservation of metabolic energy was not therefore an end but an orientation of violence: the means to prolonging it in time, the technological motor resulted in the long-standing pursuit of the perpetuum mobile, and with it the release of this violence. Two questions present themselves: How did we ever guess at the vehicle within the animal? The motor in their limbs? How did the primate come to have this desire to couple with the mount? What sort of seduction is at work here? This desire for a foreign body following as it does the desire for the different body of heterosexuality seems to me a major event on a number of points, comparable to the invention of fire, but an innovation that has been lost in the obscurity that surrounds animality. From the zoophobia that signals the earliest hunts and that ended in the slaughter for immediate alimentary needs, we come to this zoophilia of the training of the animal for transport. How is it that we get beyond the necessities of mere subsistence? How did we guess at the motor beyond the reserve of meat on the hoof? [Zoophiliathe use of the animal as a motor, the original technophilia that

follows the woman of burden.] The means of locomotion on this side of alimentation? What sort of economy, what sort of subsistence is at issue in the costly upkeep of a large animal for the course? Domestication seems to be a quasi functional end of predation: bloodshed was a waste of violence, the enclosing of semi-wild animals, and above all the breeding which followed, brought forth an initial type of economy. Domestication is a form of conservation of energy necessary for subsistence. With the training of the mount, this underwent a transformation: the economy of violence is no longer that of the hunter in the breeder but that of the hunted animal (ibid., 44-45). Whereas the hunter aimed at stopping the movement of the wild animal by a systematic slaughter, with domestication, the breeder is satisfied with conserving it, finally, thanks to training; the rider is linked up with the movement, in orienting it and in prompting its acceleration. From the desire for death to the desire for incorporation [link to Yamaic matters], it seems we witness a phenomenon of the metempsychosis of the living, the couple at odds from their origins henceforth form only one body, as in a marriage. It is the erotic desire for this prosthesis that sets it off in the beginning. But in this instant, the race becomes a higher form than the hunt, the eruption of the beyond, of a beyond of physical bodies, territorial and animal, an image of delirium and possession that will, in medieval belief, become the 'diabolical hunt' where the horse takes on an apocalyptic dimension, where the four riders symbolize the end of time and the extermination of history. After having signalled the suppression of distances by the speed of the course, the eruption of the beyond signals the annihilation of time. The speed of the warhorse symbolizes the terror of the end, but it must also be carefully noted that fear and speed are in fact linked: in the animal world, speed is the fruit of terror, the consequence of danger. In fact, the reduction of distances by the acceleration of movement is the effect of the instinct for self preservation [Eudaimonism/Romaic thesis]. Speed being simply the production of fear, it is flight and not the attack that prompts the violent distancing, the sudden burst of speed. The constant acquisition of greater and greater speed is only therefore the curb to increasing anxiety; in this sense the transportation revolution, in producing in the nineteenth century the factory of speed, industrializes terror: the motor manufactures fear. The speed of movement is only the sophistication of flight and not the attack, as the fascist philosophy of the thirties claimed (All grandeur is in the attack in other words, in the eruption of the beyond of bodies and in particular the territorial body) (ibid., 46). [Body-the sudden] If distance is place, it is also the body. To sweep down upon [fondre], to strike precipitously, is at once: to be swept up into [fondre], to dissolve into ... we find here the vehicular function of the warhorse to disperse (skedasis), to drive the enemy astray [carter], but also, to be carried astray oneself [scarter], taken beyond the familiar horizon (ibid., 47).

Zoophilia/phobia: Let us return to the invention of the vector. Very early, the hunter must have been struck by the swiftness of animal movement and fascinated by the instant reflexes of game [Zoophilia/phobia]. Conversely, pursued by wild animals or enemies, the hunter must have perceived a real change in the acceleration of his performance. In the terror, the power, and in his forces multiplied by fear, he must have perceived a formidable weapon [The animals instant reflexes finds its analogue in the mans fear/survival acceleration/speed]. The aptitude for accelerated movement appeared to him as the aptitude for survival, before the invention of tools designed for killing, movement was for the fighting body what range would later be for the power of projectile weapons: a question of critical distance, a problem of retreat and not solely of penetration [retreat/penetration] (ibid., 47). The knight-banker administers the movable and transportable assets (ibid., 49). [Think of the Knights Templar and their body issues that led to the uberequestrian Frank Philip the Fairs (the perfect, because statuesque, horseman, plus the prima inter Franci) destruction of them.] Desire for a metallic bodythe passenger enclosed in the cabin of the automobile repeats the primary coupling. As if the materialist West, with the revolution of transports, installed its metempsychosis in the present moment of bodies; without awaiting the transmigrations of birth or death, the industry of movement accelerates, transfers, from here to there, from one to the other, we cast off [appareillons], enclosed in the differential of speeds, walled in by the energy of the traveling, we are less human than we are station (ibid., 49). With the invention of the vehicle as animal, man arrives at one of the very first forms of relativity, his territory will no longer be what it was, he is increasingly detached from it through the celerity of the warhorse. Places will become points of departure and arrival, shores which are left behind and arrived at, the earths surface will henceforth be nothing more than the promontory of an equestrian cabotage. In the saddle, or on foot, the cavalry changes the territorial body into nothing more than points of embarkation and debarkation, thresholds for a break of load such as was already hinted at with the transportation revolution of woman. In providing for an elevated traversing of the greatest expanses, the animals body becomes a body-bridge, [Yama] a mobile bridge, whereas the body of woman was only a precarious body-footbridge, the horses body becomes the symbol of the hipparch and beyond him of the monarchy, the leader who harnesses and directs these animal energies. Well before the invention of the arch among sedentary cultures, the body of the mount sketches out the construction of the bridge that spans the distance of the moat, the gap of the river; the symbolic function of the horse that disperses (skedasis) the enemy doubles with the function of exchange, the mount becomes an elevated crossroads, literally, an interchange [changeur], as the cabalistic tradition would call it later onTo finish, these points [points], these bridges [ponts], produce the port [port], this site where the animal lays down its load will mineralize into the architectonic of the portal [porte], veritable port of earth of caravan transience (ibid., 50).

The Dance: In sum, the passenger's desire for coupling [appareillage] with his mount is comparable to the rite of passage of marriage, for in this the interconnection and the departure are linked, as is still suggested in the dance terms cavalier and cavalire. Nevertheless, if yesterday, with the equestrian heroes, the horse would suggest the presence of the absent cavalier, today the dancing couple suggests the absence of the / mount. We should be concerned about this forgetting of the animal vector in the choreographic rhythms, sexual coupling has too much obscured the act of tact, the preliminary organic touching of the joining of bodies, from the handshake, arms on the shoulders or around the waist, to the various conjoinings of collective work and play, to the galop and quadrille, these zoo-choreographic couplings from the nineteenth century. Each of these couplings frames a matching up [appareillage], the mise-en-scene of a break of load [rupture de charge] at once effective and affective where corporeal proximity is performed, and is constantly drawn into question. In this sense, the invention of an animal partner directly interconnected with the human body seems to me to be an event comparable to, indeed inseparable from, exogamy. The coupling of the passenger and the mount pertains to an economy of mutation, it is a graft propitious to the performance of the driving couple where the rider acts as a rein on the pace. In anticipation of what will follow, the driver of the movement becomes also its accelerator thanks to the western innovation of the spur, the key symbol of medieval chivalry. The apparatus composed of the linked combination [fondu-enchan] of man mounted on his mount completes the exogenous unity of the heterosexual couple. The exogamic coupling of the equestrian body and the pedestrian body pertains to the same external regulation: woman comes from elsewhere, she is carried off and the animal vector is in certain cases the means of this transfer. In ancient China, for example, the transport of the betrothed in the ritual cart constituted, from the legal point of view, the essential act of marriage as if to signify the degree to which the passage and the wedding are associated, as if the exogamous marriage was merely the symbol of the shared passage from one group to the other. There are three obvious couplings, of which the last is rarely mentioned: the homosexual couple of the dual; the heterosexual couple of the marriage; the transsexual couple of the passage. [See Birken on the last frontier of Jepen] The institutionalization of the nuptial abduction [rapt] pertains to the / logic by which being carried away [enlvement] conceals the accelerated movement of the race, as a substitute for the hunt. The detachment of the geographic and terrestrial body, thanks to the domestication of the animal body as a vector of transport, is also the inauguration of a desocialization. If yesterday, in the unity of the neighbourhood, the other was both known and recognized through the daily repetition of encounters, with the transportation

revolution, this neighbour will become a spectre that one will only see again accidentally, the foreigner will remain hidden among us The opening to outside influences will not only favour a better communication between groups, the perfecting of exchanges, it will also bring about this fleeting presence of the other: the very notion of a neighbour will at some point disappear for ever, this kinetic addiction to the sudden disappearance of the congener will have the tragic character of a social divorce. The corporeal presence of the other will seem to lose its reality; in passing, as a passenger, fleeting, the other will be identified with its cinematic image millennia before the invention of cinema, the fugacity of the horseman pertains to an identical phenomenon of retinal persistence where the irreality of the course will now hunt the physical reality of bodies advancing the formidable persistence of signs. We live today in a dramatic addiction to the urban metastability and no one seems at all disturbed by associating with phantoms at every turn: we will probably never encounter this woman we see in the street again, and the same applies to virtually all those around us, a meeting with an acquaintance from the neighbourhood being no longer anything more than a brief encounter.... On the other hand, are we to imagine a universe of stability where foreignness was the exception and the relation of bodies the rule? It is, however, this reversal that the revolution of animal transport brings about, the innovation of the mount at once the factory of speed and disappearing machine ... leading to the steam engine that will one day enter the station of La Ciotat, and to the camera that Fromiaut, the inventor of camera dollying, will perch on top of a train, and on the escalator of the Eiffel Tower (ibid., 5153). [I]f, on the one hand, in the exhilaration of the accelerated movement, the passenger casts his gaze upon things that appear to be moving although they are actually at rest while it is he who passes by; on the other hand, in contemporary urban life, those around us give the impression of being stationary, of being our neighbours, even though they will soon disappear forever (ibid., 54). Whether it is a question of furniture [meubl] or shelter [immeuble], comfort fools us, it leads us into error in our experience of our own bodies. Comfort is nothing more than a subtle trap into which we fall with all our weight, the addiction to the comfort of artificial assistance is comparable to that of a narcotic, it deprives us of the physical realities of an actual body like those of the places traversed. With the high speeds that are only one of the outcomes of comfort, we are fooled by the duration of the trip. Doped by the cushion, by the depth of the seats, duped by the celerity of the course, the addiction to comfort leads us to lose our sense of touch, the muscular contact with materials and volumes giving way instead to a series of caresses, light strokes, and fleeting slidings (ibid., 55). In sum, comfort is nothing other than a collection of ruses that aim to erase these infinitesimal inconveniences which are, however, themselves the proof of the existence of weight, scale, and a natural motility (ibid.).

[T]he subterfuges of assistance cleverly conceal the fact that the comfort of the assisted body is nothing other than a sophisticated domestication, the progressive immobilization of physical / bodies set flush in their furniture [encastrement du meubl], in the framing of their domicile [encadrement de l'immeuble], illustrating the democratic illusion of the social and spatial integration, the illusion of a concentration-camp system that is finally nothing more than the vehicular system of the transhumance of an effectively dromocratic society (ibid., 55-56). [Antesynedrion] Zoophilism: The vehicular attraction of the coupling, before being renewed by the technical object, had engendered zoophilism as another form of heterosexuality. The horse in particular was treated like a god by the polemarch, even solemnly married. Reserve of power, source of speed in combat, but beyond that the zoophilous cult likes proposing the image of the hybrid animal. The bulls are winged or sphinxes have lions bodies and human heads [sic]; later they are represented as winged and feminized. At Thebes the Sphinx is the keeper of a hidden wisdom, she interpolates and proposes annoying riddles to those on the road, passers-by and travelers; wrong answers cause the brutal annihilation, the decimation of the unfortunate. The enigma proposed by the Sphinx to Oedipus is a question on the strange being that moves through time, and it is really the diversity of techniques used by the being that is / the basis for the interrogation; it is this very diversity that in turn designates man among other animals. The (metabolic) vehicle is here rendered as the enigma of movement and wrong answers to this enigma come under the sanctions of the predatory animal, the blend of zoophilism from the powerful body recoups murderous energies under a peaceful exterior, supple and often caressing, like that of the great felines (cat family) whose hair trigger responses are unpredictable. [bold added] Zoophilism and its hybrids prefigures [sic] technophilism and its amalgamations. Fords social project for the American economy announced already the synergy being formed between techniques of production, the manufactured product and corporeity itselfthe figure of the consumerworker united in and through indivisible speed. [It is a unity of modes/roles through energy/speed, changing of mode/transcendence/instant karma.] But in Liszts formula, the movement of romantic passions, through the oversupply of energy and acceleration of amorous transport, what is meant is rather a rivalry than an oppositionor an alliance between the metabolic and the technical, an absolute valorization of rites-of-passage and their number, to the detriment of bodies themselves and their presence in the world (Virilio, Aesthetics of Disappearance, 85-86). [Movement/speed/violence at the expense of body] The absence lasts a few seconds; its beginning and its end are sudden. The senses function, but are nevertheless closed to external impressions. The return being just as sudden as the departure, the arrested word and action are picked up again where they have been interrupted. Conscious time

comes together again automatically, forming a continuous time without apparent breaks. For these absenceswell be using the word / picnolepsy (from the Greek, picnos: frequent) (Virilio, Aesthetics of Disappearance, 910).

So-defined as a mass phenomenon, picnolepsy / comes to complement in the waking order the notion of paradoxical sleep (rapid-eye-movement sleep), which corresponds to the phase of deepest dreaming. So our conscious lifewhich we already believe would be inconceivable without dreamsis just as difficult to imagine without a state of paradoxical waking (rapid waking) (ibid., 14-15). Today is the age of bad habits (drugs, masturbation, alcohol), which are merely efforts at reconcilia- / tion with yourself, attenuated adaptations of the vanished epileptic process. (-) The settled man [has entered] another kind of absence to the world. The luxuriance and illusion of instant paradises, based on roads, cities, the sword, to which the Judeo-Christian tradition opposes a new departure toward a desert of uncertainties (Abraham), lost times, green paradises where only adults who have become children again may enter. In Ecclesiastes what is the essential is lacking; with the New Testament the lack is the essential; the Beatitudes speak of a poverty of spirit that somehow could be opposed to the wealth of moments, to this hypothetical conscious hoarding proposed by Bachelard, to this fear of mini-max equilibrium by exhaustion of the stakes based on a knowledge (information, if you will), whose treasure (which is languages treasure of possible enunciations) becomes inexhaustible (J.F. Lyotard). Images of the vigilant society, striking equal hours for everyone (ibid., 19-20). The basic recreation of childhood, lowered to the level of trivial excitement, remains nonetheless a derivative of picnoleptic auto-induction, the dissimulation of one or several elements of a totality in relation to an adversary who is one only because of differences in perception dependent of time and appearances that escape under our very eyes, artificially creating this inexplicable exaltation where each believes he is finding his real nature in a truth which he would be the only one to know (ibid., 21). With Bergsonian chrono-tropisms you could already imagine different rhythms of duration that, slower or faster, would measure the degree of tension or of relaxation of consciousness and would establish their respective places in the series of beings. But here the very notion of rhythm implies a certain automatism, a symmetrical return of weak or strong terms superimposed on the experienced time of the subject. With the irregularity of the epileptic space, defined by surprise and an unpredictable variation of frequencies, its no longer a matter of tension or attention, but of suspension pure and simple (by acceleration), disappearance and effective reappearance of the real, departure from duration. To Descartes sentence: the mind is a thing that thinks (that is, in stable and commonly visible forms), Bergson retorted: The mind is a thing

that lasts The paradoxical state of waking would finally make them both agree: its our duration that thinks, the first product of consciousness would be its own speed in its distance of time, speed would be the causal idea, the idea before the idea (ibid., 22). [Ante-asceticism/ante-martyrdom] In his absolute impatience to see arrive what is left, Hugheswho his fellow countrymen will end / up calling a mysticbecame a kind of technological monk, and there is very little difference between the dark room at the top of the Desert Inn in Las Vegas and the retreat to the desert of the ancient hermits in search of the Eternal. The Hebraic tradition manifest two kinds of lack, expressed by two deserts, emerging one from the other, heart of everything, in its heart everything. One is named Shemama, despair and destruction, and the other is Midbar, which is a desert not of dereliction but instead a field of uncertainty and effort. The shemama is, rather, polarity of the City-State (City of UrOur, light), its desert is the tragical one of laws, ideology, order, as opposed to what could have resulted from wandering (ibid., 27). Christthe inverse of Hughesbegins by a hidden life to end in public existence, confronting temptation at the juncture of these two modes, Satan offering him domination over nations (the shemama), as if assuming human power could only be evoked by the overview of a solitary expanse where other people are on the verge of invisibility. The preacher in John Hustons film, The Great Sinner, expresses this pretty clearly: The Church of Christ without Christ is nothing but your own shadow, nothing but our reflection in a mirror (ibid., 28). Paul of Tarsus said that reason resembles death (ibid., 31). The rational study of the real is just like the movies; the tabula rasa is only a trick whose purpose is to deny particular absences any active value (ibid.). The crisis, sudden thunder in a calm heaven, is announced by the very beauty of the sky. The epileptic isnt necessarily looking for the crisis as a factor of pleasure, but he has been warned of its coming by a very special state of happiness, a juvenile exhilara- / tion. Sublime, says Dostoevski, for that moment youd give your whole life! (-) The inexplicable enthusiasm precedes the accident, the shipwreck of the senses that of the body. But facilitating factors can also be of the order of distraction, the sleepiness provoked by the repetition of certain themes, or, on the contrary, by intense intellectual efforts, connected, for example, with the moment of invention, of basic discovery, as with Champillon, or with creative activity. In photosensitive subjects the processes of auto-induction of absence are called autoerotic acts, with a sexual origin. As we have seen, at puberty picnolepsy interferes with the awakening of sexual activity. Here also absence is no stranger to invention, to the crystallization of the amorous image (ibid., 32-33). Before the war of 1914 Doctor Gustav Lebon and many of his contemporaries were interested in mass psychology, this new kind of

possession. He said about Germanys entry into war: Never was mental unification pushed farther, the individual soul was progressively destroyed to make of it a collective soul (ibid., 44). And so the idea imposes itself progressively that this synergy of eye and motor, realized in the camera, was not, after all, restricted to this apparatus; the visual prosthesis could from now on melt into the production systems, together with those designed to transport bodies (ibid., 57). From now on when she shouts motor to his assistants, the drivermoviemaker is not so much after making the background-decor parade before him as to cross it, even to pierce through it to the light beyond. Like the war weapon launched at full speed at the visual target its supposed to wipe out, the aim of cinema will be to provoke an effect of vertigo in the voyeur-traveller, the end being sought now is to give him the impression of being projected into the image (ibid., 58). We are currently rediscovering the mystery of the technical motor, we apprehend it less now as an object of consumption susceptible of being desired or rejected than as a strange processional accompaniment, outside of history, scarcely even geographic, a play of representations of the Self close to a dreamlike false day this delirious joy of speed that transcends the infinity of dreams (Marinetti) (ibid., 94). And theres Daniel (16 years old, second in his class, electromechanics), who declared to a journalist of Le Monde, concerning a car he was coveting: I wanted motorcycle, a big one, a very big one, to go far, where I want, no matter where. I wanted to go forever without ever stopping. I wanted it to be the one who drives when Im tired. I wanted it to be like a boat, ocean blue, with distant sails, gulls flying around; or glistening with lights and chrome, illuminating everything suddenly; I wanted it to consume nothing, just a little bit of air, once in a while, and Id want it very fast so as to see only what I like Id put in plenty of dials so that it could see me as well as I see it Ive got to tell you now what shes called: I love you The machine completely replaces the loved one, the mother land inhabited by the spirit of metamorphosis, but technical fatality seems even more blinding and redoubtable than its anthropomorphic blueprints because of the very speed only it can lend to our aspirations. What is bought with the speed machine is no longer even the chance of the voyage but the surprise of the accident, which thou- / sands of motorcyclists look for on the pirate course at Rungis every Saturday night (ibid., 95-96). Endosmosis of the living being produced by technical acceleration; Craig Breedlove, holder of the world land speed record in 1965, entitles the preface to a book of memories: Doing something other than merely living, and he notes: why does man aspire to these terrifying speeds, entering a wheeled vehicle powerful enough not only to carry him off to glory but / also to tear him to pieces? If all is movement all is at the same time accident and our existence as

metabolic vehicle can be summed up as a series of collisions, of traumatisms, some taking on the quality of slow but perceptible caresses; but all this, according to the impulsions lent them, becomes mortal shocks and apotheoses of fire, but above all a different mode of being. Speed is the cause of death for which were not only responsible but of which we are also the creators and inventorsso its been said. As a young man I wondered about the aesthetics of war machines, what I called in my inner sanctum their enigma. I found myself often contemplating a bunker or the silhouette of some submarine seen at a distance, wondering why their polished forms were so inscrutable and where did their kind of plastic invisibility come from? At first I related this to zoomorphism, to metamorphism, but all of that was comparison, imitation and could not satisfy me. Then I believed these forms were inscrutable because they all related to speeds that were different, excessive, and thus fatally reflecting another image of the universe meant to fill up other times; they belonged to other worlds which are invisible to the naked eye, yet something of which remained with them. But the overproduction of movement implied by war changed the way things looked; the motor, since it relates directly to the state of paradoxical wakefulness, replaced the causal ideathat was its revolution; the motor proceeds from the soul (ibid., 102-103). The development of high technical speeds would thus result in the disappearance of consciousness as the direct perception of phenomena that inform us of our own existence (ibid., 104).