Ka : Stories of the Mind and Gods of India

"A giddy invasion of stories--brilliant, enigmatic, troubling, outrageous, erotic, beautiful." --__The New York Times Book Review__"So brilliant that you can't look at it anymore--and you can't look at anything else. . . . No one will read it without reward." --__The Boston Globe__With the same narrative fecundity and imaginative sympathy he brought to his acclaimed retelling of the Greek myths, Roberto Calasso plunges Western readers into the mind of ancient India. He begins with a mystery: Why is the most important god in the Rg Veda, the oldest of India's sacred texts, known by a secret name--"Ka," or Who? What ensues is not an explanation, but an unveiling. Here are the stories of the creation of mind and matter; of the origin of Death, of the first sexual union and the first parricide. We learn why Siva must carry his father's skull, why snakes have forked tongues, and why, as part of a certain sacrifice, the king's wife must copulate with a dead horse. A tour de force of scholarship and seduction, **Ka** is irresistible. "Passage[s] of such ecstatic insight and cross-cultural synthesis--simply, of such beauty." --__The New York Review of Books__"All is spectacle and delight, and tiny mirrors reflecting human foibles are set into the weave,turning this retelling into the stuff of literature." --__The New Yorker__ Roberto Calasso narrates the birth of one of the world's great cultures: the formation of the mind of India. He doesn't explain or describe this mental world - he regenerates it through its epic cyclical stories and customs, until we no longer need to define it for ourselves because we have come to know what it is. So: Who is Ka? And who is the immense eagle asking the question, filling the sky, elephant and giant turtle dwarfed in his claws? How can he be the child of a woman? Who are the tiny folk he eats? The first impact of Ka is one of tremendous strangeness, bewilderment, disorientation. How can a Western tradition which demands to identify a beginning and an end understand one that sees no beginning and no end, but only an eternal tangle? Slowly, though, the strange becomes familiar, as new and ever more fantastic stories are spun out, gods emerge, bizarre sacrifices are performed. Rejecting our cravings to have the culture systematized and predigested for us, Calasso invites us to understand India on Indian terms, through Indian images, through India itself. As Ka unfolds, the worlds of the Devas, of Siva, Brahma and Visnu, of the wars of the Mahabharata, are splendidly revealed, until finally, with the advent of the Buddha, we are amazed at our own sense of recognition, for these stories seem to confirm, or to articulate for the first time, our own deepest perceptions about our human condition. "A giddy invasion of stories--brilliant, enigmatic, troubling, outrageous, erotic, beautiful." -- The New York Times Book Review "So brilliant that you can't look at it anymore--and you can't look at anything else. . . . No one will read it without reward." -- The Boston Globe With the same narrative fecundity and imaginative sympathy he brought to his acclaimed retelling of the Greek myths, Roberto Calasso plunges Western readers into the mind of ancient India. He begins with a mystery: Why is the most important god in the Rg Veda, the oldest of India's sacred texts, known by a secret name--"Ka," or Who? What ensues is not an explanation, but an unveiling. Here are the stories of the creation of mind and matter; of the origin of Death, of the first sexual union and the first parricide. We learn why Siva must carry his father's skull, why snakes have forked tongues, and why, as part of a certain sacrifice, the king's wife must copulate with a dead horse. A tour de force of scholarship and seduction, Ka is irresistible. "Passage[s] of such ecstatic insight and cross-cultural synthesis--simply, of such beauty." -- The New York Review of Books "All is spectacle and delight, and tiny mirrors reflecting human foibles are set into the weave,turning this retelling into the stuff of literature." -- The New Yorker In'the very best book about Hindu mythology that anyone has ever written'(The New Republic) Calasso plunges Western readers into the mind of ancient India. He begins with a mystery: Why is the most important god in the Rg Veda, the oldest of India's sacred texts, known by a secret name—'Ka,'or Who?What ensues is not an explanation, but an unveiling. Here are the stories of the creation of mind and matter; of the origin of Death, of the first sexual union and the first parricide. We learn why Siva must carry his father's skull, why snakes have forked tongues, and why, as part of a certain sacrifice, the king's wife must copulate with a dead horse. A tour de force of scholarship and seduction, Ka is irresistible. In a collection of epic cyclical stories woven together, the author explores the myths and legends of India, chonicling the exotic worlds of the Devas, Siva, Brahma, Vishnu, the Mahabharata, and the Buddha