In ancient Indian mythology, fire was a god. The word for fire is agni, and Agni the god who ate oblations. Agni served as mouth and gullet for the entire pantheon – when sacrifices were offered to any god, Agni would eat them, ferrying goods from our world to the spirit realm.
When the gods were cursed such that they could not sire children with their wives, Agni, who’d once consumed Shiva’s semen, was asked to stray. From Robert Goldman’s translation of Valmiki’s Ramayana:
(note, in terms of safety for reading at work, that the following passage is decidedly less circumspect than you might expect based on a familiarity with other sacred texts, e.g. the King James rendering of Genesis 38:9)
[A]ll the gods proceeded to Mount Kailasa, adorned with metallic ores, and charged Agni, the god of fire, with the task of begetting a son. ‘You are a god, eater of oblations, and should carry out this task of the gods. Great is your splendor. You must release the semen into the Ganges, the daughter of the mountain.’
Agni, the purifier, promised the gods he would do this and so, approaching the Ganges, he said, ‘Bear this embryo, goddess, as a favor to the gods.’
Hearing these words, she assumed her divine form, and he, seeing her extraordinary beauty, scattered the semen all over. Agni, the purifier, showered it all over the goddess, so that all the channels of the Ganges were filled with it.
In ancient Indian mythology, the semen of powerful males will sprout children wherever it lands, no female gamete required. Numerous heroes were engendered when males chanced across beautiful women bathing and shortly thereafter just happened to ejaculate – their children might be born from baskets, butter jars, or someone’s mouth.
A fetus soon formed from the material sprinkled over Ganges’s body, but although she’d consented willingly to bear the child, she soon declared it to be too powerful, that the embryo was burning her body. She tucked it into the base of the Himalayas to finish gestation.
Later in the Ramayana, Sita attempts to sacrifice herself – but Agni will not take her. Sita was kidnapped and so her husband Rama comes to rescue her. With the help of a monkey army, Rama destroys a South Indian kingdom and slays his wife’s captor. But he assumes that Sita has been tarnished by rape. He tells her (in the Robert Goldman and Sally Sutherland Goldman translation):
“I have recovered my reputation, and that is the purpose for which I won you back. I do not love you anymore. Go hence wherever you like.”
Heartbroken, Sita decides to jump into a fire – she’d rather die than lose her husband. But the fire doesn’t burn her. Instead, her presence is said to burn the fire itself. Agni lifts her from the bonfire and tells her husband that she is beyond reproach. The man agrees, briefly, to take her back.
More often, Agni simply burns things. Objects from our world disappear, leaving nothing but ash.
And we are also like fire. In David Shulman’s essay for the New York Review of Books, he writes:
For Vedic thinkers, all that lives survives by consuming other living beings. Humans, too, have a hungry fire burning in their bellies; they have to sacrifice other creatures to that fire every day if they are going to stay alive.
We are heterotrophs. Unlike plants, we can’t create ourselves by drinking in water, air, and sunlight. We have to eat – sacrificing something – to survive.
Much of the time, the sacrifices that allow our lives are violent. Humans evolved as meat eaters – scavengers, likely, then hunters. We stalked, killed, and butchered mammoths. On contemporary industrial farms, plants are culled by nightmarish threshers, ripped from the ground and shaken clean by machines.
We are heterotrophs. It’s either us or them.
But sometimes we’re fueled by willing sacrifice.
Fruit-bearing plants co-evolved with animals. Fruit is a gift. When a plant bears fruit, it hopes for reciprocity, but in a generalized way. The plant isn’t trading – it can’t guarantee that any one offering will procure a service. But over time, many hungry animals have willingly spread the plants’ seeds – that’s the gift we offer in return.
(This is true of all fruit. I’d say it’s foolish to trust our Supreme Court justices’ opinions on just about anything – I definitely wouldn’t expect them to correctly identify the parts of a plant. In addition to bananas, grapes, and apples, things like tomatoes, squash, zucchini, and peppers are fruit. It’s thought that each type of fruit co-evolved with a specific animal that was originally responsible for spreading its seeds.)
Even if a plant gives fruit to us willingly, though, you could wonder whether the fruit agrees with the sacrifice. No matter what the tree might want, perhaps an apple would rather not be eaten.
Any one cell might prefer not to die.
Cancer is a rough equivalent to libertarian philosophy. Cancer is the ultimate freedom. In a multicellular organism, most individual cells will voluntarily cease to grow when their industry infringes upon their neighbors. They experience “contact inhibition.” As soon as a cell touches another, it respects the established boundaries as inviolable.
If a cell’s usefulness has waned, it undergoes apoptosis – voluntary suicide.
In a multicellular organism that practices sexual reproduction – even unilateral reproduction like Agni showering sperm over Ganges’s prostrate body – every cell that isn’t part of the germ line is doomed to die. From the perspective of evolution, your body is like a disposable rocket ship, built only to ferry the lineage of cells in your genitalia forward through time. Those cells matter – their descendants might survive forever.
The cells in your hand? They might have children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren – but their line will come to an abrupt end. Maybe you were bitten by a radioactive super-power-granting DNA-altering spider and the cells in your hand became amazing. Doesn’t matter. Their glorious kind will go extinct.
And if the cells in your hand decide that this isn’t fair, and instead liberate themselves from the shackles of self-restraint and suicide, growing as much as possible – well, that’s cancer. The host organism will die. And those renegade cells, the ones who adopted the mantra look out for number one, will inevitably also die, starving fruitlessly, progeny-less.
It’s the same old tragedy of the commons, the same reason why there are now so few fish in the sea, and why Easter Island has no trees. Sometimes personal persistence dooms you more completely than would sacrifice toward a common cause.
Frank Brown Cloud 