Prajāpati (who?)

an excerpt from Ardor (2014) by Robert Calasso

The god at the origin of everything didn’t have a name but a title: Prajāpati, Lord of the Creatures. He discovered this when one of his sons, Indra, told him: “I want to be what you are.” Prajāpati asked him: “But who (ka) am I?” And Indra answered: “Exactly what you just said.” So Prajāpati became Ka.

Indra wanted his father’s “greatness” or, according to others, his “splendor.” And Prajāpati had no problem with divesting himself of it. So Indra became king of the gods, even though Prajāpati had been “the sole lord of creation.” But it was neither “greatness” nor “splendor” that made Prajāpati the “god alone above the gods,” a formula that smacks of incompatibility only for latter-day readers in the West. What Prajāpati could not renounce was something else: the unknown, the irreducible unknown. At the moment in which he knew he was Ka, Prajāpati became guarantor of the uncertainty involved in questioning. He guaranteed that it would always remain. If Ka didn’t exist, the world would be a sequence of questions and answers, at the end of which everything would be fixed once and for all. But since Prajāpati “is everything”—and Prajāpati is Ka—there is a question in every part of everything that finds an answer in everything.

No wonder the gods, sons of Prajāpati, increasingly ignored their father, to the point of forgetting him. For a power to be exercised, it has to be based on certainty. And Prajāpati, though he was the one “whose commandments all the gods acknowledge,” had delegated the exercise of his sovereignty without raising any resistance. He had kept for himself only the unknown, that which was encapsulated in his name. An unknown that surrounded every certainty like an undrainable ocean lapping an island.

Prajāpati: the creator god who is not entirely sure he exists.