in whose traits Louis Dumont had the farsightedness to recognize the archetypal individual in the Western sense, is a figure who does not appear in the earliest stratum of the Vedic texts. The system, at that time, is compact and leaves no such space. Having once entered the process of cosmic interaction on birth, there is no way out. But on reaching the Upaniṣads, which take ritualist reasoning to an extreme, the saṃnyāsin makes his appearance—the first defector, not because he rejects the complex system of interaction on which ritual is based, but because he seeks to absorb it within himself, in the inaccessible space of the mind. So the agnihotra becomes the prāṇāgnihotra, the first case of the complete internalization of an event, an invisible ceremony that takes place in an individual’s “breath,” prāṇa. There is no longer any fire, there is no longer any milk to pour on it, the words of the texts are no longer to be heard. But all this still exists: in silence, in the activity of the mind.
