ius iurandum erat, quasi diceretur: ita me Castor, ita me Hercules, ut subaudiatur
iuvet [Mecastor and mehercules are oath formulas, as if one were to say: “So
may Castor, So may Hercules . . . ,” implying “come to my aid”] [112.10]).
Blasphemy presents us, then, with a phenomenon that is perfectly symmetri-
cal to the oath, to understand which there is no need to drag in the biblical inter-
diction or the ambiguity of the sacred. Blasphemy is an oath, in which the name of
a god is extracted from the assertorial or promissory context and is uttered in itself, in vain, independently of a semantic content. The name, which in the oath expresses
and guarantees the connection between words and things and which defines the
truthfulness and force of the logos, in blasphemy expresses the breakdown of this
connection and the vanity of human language. The name of God, isolated and
pronounced “in vain,” corresponds symmetrically to perjury, which separates
words from things; oath and blasphemy, as bene-diction and male-diction, are
co-originarily implied in the very event of language.
א In Judaism and Christianity, blasphemy is linked to the commandment “not to use
the name of God in vain” (which, in Exodus 20, significantly follows the one that forbids
the making of idols). The translation of the Septuagint ( ou lēmpsēi to onoma kyriou tou theou sou epi mataiōi, “do not take the name of the Lord your God in vain”) underlines the idea of vacuity and vanity (cf. the beginning of Ecclesiastes: mataiotēs mataiotētōn,
“vanity of vanities”). The originary form of blasphemy is not, then, injury done to God
but pronouncing his name in vain (cf. mataioomai, “to rave, to speak haphazardly”). This
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is evident in the euphemisms that intervened to rectify the blasphemous utterance of the
name by changing one of its letters or substituting a similar nonsense term for it (as in
French par Dieu became pardi or parbleu; cf. the English gosh and similar). Contrary to the common opinion, in paganism as well there existed, even if for different reasons, the
interdiction of uttering the name of the gods, which took its extreme form in the custom
of carefully keeping the true name of a city’s patron god unknown in order to avoid its
evocatio (see below, §18). Plato thus informs us that the Greeks preferred to call Hades by the name of Pluto “because they feared the name [ phoboumenoi to onoma]” ( Cra. 403a).
As the awareness of the efficacy of the pronunciation of the divine name was lost,
the originary form of blasphemy represented by uttering it in vain took second place to
the pronouncing of injury or falsity on God. From male dicere de deo [speaking badly of God], blasphemy thus became mala dicere de deo [saying bad things about God]. In Augustine, who, significantly, treats blasphemy in his treatise on lying, the evolution is already complete. If the originary proximity to the oath and to perjury is still present,
blasphemy is now defined as saying false things of God: peius est blasphemare quam
perierare, quoniam perierando falsae res adhibetur testis Deus, blasphemando autem de ipso Deo falsa dicuntur [blasphemy is worse than perjury, because in the latter God is called to witness a falsehood, whereas in the former falsehood is spoken about God Himself ]
(Augustine [1], 19.39); and even more clearly: Itaque iam vulgo blasphemia non accipitur, nisi mala verba de Deo dicere [So usually the word blasphemy is applied only to speaking evil of God] (Augustine [2], 11.20).
Hence the embarrassment of modern theological dictionaries when they find them-
selves confronted with the originary form of blasphemy, which now appears as an entirely
venial sin: “The most suspect of these swearwords, the French expression ‘s . . . n . . .
de D . . . ,’ is considered by many moralists to be a true blasphemy, and consequently
to be gravely culpable, either because of the injurious meaning that it seems to have or
because of the horror that it inspires in all consciences with any delicacy at all. . . . Others, observing that the meaning of the words in question is equivocal, say that only intention can transform this manner of speaking into blasphemy” ( Dictionnaire de théologie
catholique, s.v. Blasphème).
The evangelical prohibition of the oath in Matthew 5:33–37 (see also James 5:12) must
be situated in this context. Essentially, what Jesus opposes to the oath is a logos that has the form nai nai, ou ou, which is usually translated yes yes, no no ( estō de ho logos ymōn nai nai, ou ou). The expression gains its full meaning if we remember that the Greek formula for the oath was nai dia (or negatively ou ma dia). By extracting the particle nai from the formula and removing the sacred name that followed, Jesus opposed one part
of the oath to the whole. What is at stake, then, is a gesture symmetrically opposed to
that of blasphemy, which instead extracts the name of God from the context of the oath.
18. It becomes easier to understand, on this basis, both the function of
the curse in the oath and the close relation that links it to blasphemy. What
the curse sanctions is the loosening of the correspondence between words and
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things that is in question in the oath. If the connection that unites language
and the world is broken, the name of God, which expressed and guaranteed
this connection based in blessing [ bene-dicente], becomes the name of the curse
[ male-dizione], that is, of a word that has broken its truthful relation to things.
In the mythical sphere this means that the curse [ male-dizione] directs against
perjury the same evil-doing force that its abuse of language has liberated. The
name of God, released from the signifying connection, becomes blasphemy,
vain and meaningless speech, which precisely through this divorce from mean-
ing becomes available for improper and evil uses. This explains why the magical
papyri are often nothing other than lists of divine names that have become in-
comprehensible: in magic the names of the gods taken in vain, especially if they
are barbarian and unintelligible, become the agents of the magical work. Magic
is the name of God—that is, the signifying power of the logos—emptied of its
sense and reduced, as in the magical formulas known as Ephesia Grammata, to
an abracadabra. For this reason, “Magicians used Sanskrit in the India of the
Prakrits, Egyptian and Hebrew in the Greek world, Greek in Latin-speaking
countries and Latin with us. All over the world people value archaisms and
strange and incomprehensible terms” (Mauss, 51/71).
It is from the oath—or, better, from perjury—that magic and spells are
born: the formula of truth, when broken, is transformed into an efficacious
curse, and the name of God, separated from the oath and from its connection to
things, passes into a satanic murmur. The common opinion that would have the
oath derive from the magico-religious sphere must here be precisely reversed.
The oath presents us, rather, in a still undivided unity, what we are accustomed
to call magic, religion, and law, which result from the oath as its fragments.
If one who had risked himself in the act of speech knew that he was thereby
co-originarily exposed to both truth and lying, to both bene-diction and
male-diction, gravis religio (Lucretius, 1.63) and law are born as the attempt to
secure trust, by separating and technicizing in specific institutions blessing and
added to the oath to guarantee what at the beginning was entrusted entirely to
fides in speech, and the oath can thus be presented, in the verses of Hesiod that I have cited above, as that which was invented to punish perjury. The oath is not
a conditional curse: on the contrary, the curse and its symmetrical pendant, the
blessing, are born as specific institutions from the division of the experience of
speech that was in question in the oath. Servius’s gloss on Aen. 2.154 ( exsecratio autem est adversorum deprecatio, ius iurandum vero optare prospera, a curse is an
attempt to stave off adversities, an oath to choose good fortune) clearly shows
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both the distinction between curse and oath and their constitution as two sym-
metrical epiphenomena of one sole experience of language. And only if we man-
age to understand what we could call the anthropogenic nature and valence of
this experience (which Thales, according to the testimony of Aristotle, consid-
ered the “oldest” and “most venerable thing”), can we perhaps also shed a new
light on the relationship among its historical remnants, which magic, religion,
and law present to us as divided.
א It is possible to take up again in this perspective the question of the etymological
meaning of the term epiorkos, which has created so much work for scholars. Luther (and Benveniste at first) interpret the term as the fact of being subjected to a horkos (in which case the oath becomes synonymous with a curse [see also Loraux, 126/127]). Leumann
(and Benveniste in a second moment) instead interprets the term as the fact of adding
( epi) an oath ( horkos) to a word or a promise that is known to be false. Developing this last hypothesis, one could see in the epiorkos an oath added to the oath, that is the curse that strikes the one who transgresses fides. In this sense every word that is added to the initial declaration is a male-diction, implying that the speaker is a perjurer. This is the meaning of the evangelical prescription of keeping to nai and ou: the yes and no are the only things that can be added to one’s own commitment to the given word.
19. It is in this perspective that we must interrogate the originary meaning
and function of the name of the god in the oath and, more generally, the very
centrality of divine names in the apparatuses that we are accustomed to call re-
ligious. The great philologist—and, in his way, theologian—Hermann Usener
dedicated his monograph Götternamen to the problem of the genesis of divine
names, and it is significant that since the date of this publication (1896), there
have been no comparably relevant contributions to the question. One should
reflect on the by now famous reconstruction of the formation of the names of
those germinal centers of divinity that Usener calls “special gods” ( Sondergötter).
These are divinities of which neither the literary nor the artistic sources tell us
anything and that are known to us only by citations of the indigitamenta, the
liturgical books of the pontifexes that contained the list of divine names to be
pronounced in appropriate cultic circumstances. That is to say, the Sondergötter
are known to us only through their names, and, to judge from the silence of the
sources, they live only in their name, whenever the priest ritually invokes them
( indigitabat). Even an elementary etymological competence permits one to re-
construct the meaning of these names and the function of the “special gods” that
they named: Vervactor refers to the first tilling of May ( vervactum); Reparator
to the second plowing; Inporcitor to the last plowing that traces the porcae, that is the elevations of earth between furrows; Occator to the working of the earth
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with the harrow ( occa); Subruncinator to the pulling out of weeds with the hoe
( runco); Messor to the carrying out of the harvest ( messis); Sterculinius to fertiliza-tion with dung. “For every act and situation that could be important to the men
of that time,” writes Usener, “special gods were created and named with distinct
verbal coinages [ Wortprägung]: in this way, not only are the acts and situations
as a whole divinized, but even their parts, singular actions, and moments” (75).
Usener shows that even divinities who have entered into mythology, like
Persephone and Pomona, were originally “special gods” who named, respectively,
the breaking through of buds ( prosero) and the maturation of fruits ( poma). All the names of the gods—this is, indeed, the thesis of his book—are initially names
of actions or brief events, Sondergötter who, through a long historico-linguistic process, lost their relationship with the living vocabulary and, becoming more
and more unintelligible, were transformed into proper names. At this point,
when it had already been stably linked to a proper name, “the divine concept
[ Gottesbegriff ] gains the ability and impetus to receive a personal form in myth
and cult, poetry and art” (ibid., 316).
But this means that, as is evident in the Sondergötter, in its originary core the
god who presides over the singular activity and the singular situation is nothing
other than the very name of the activity and the situation. What is divinized in
the Sondergötter is the very event of the name; nomination itself, which isolates and renders recognizable a gesture, an act, a thing, creates a “special god,” is a
“momentary divinity” ( Augenblicksgott). The nomen is immediately numen and the numen immediately nomen. Here we have something like the foundation
or the originary core of that testimonial and guaranteeing function of language
that, according to the traditional interpretation, the god came to assume in the
oath. Like the Sondergott, the god invoked in the oath is not properly the witness of the assertion or the imprecation: he represents, he is the very event of language in which words and things are indissolubly linked. Every naming, every
act of speech is, in this sense, an oath, in which the logos (the speaker in the logos) pledges to fulfill his word, swears on its truthfulness, on the correspondence
between words and things that is realized in it. And the name of the god is only
the seal of this force of logos—or, in the case in which it falls into perjury, of the male-diction that has been brought into being.
א Usener’s thesis implies in some way that “the origin of language is always a mysti-
cal-religious event” (Kraus, 407). This does not mean, however, a primacy of the theologi-
cal element: event of God and event of the name, myth and language coincide because, as
Usener specifies from the beginning, the name is not something already available, which
is subsequently applied to the thing it is to name. “One does not form some complex of
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sounds in order to use it as a sign of a determinate thing as one uses a coin. The spiritual excitation, which a being that is encountered in the outside world calls forth, is at the
same time the occasion and the medium of naming [ der Anstoss und das Mittel des Benen-
nens]” (Usener, 3). This means that, in the event of language, proper name and appellative name are indistinguishable; and, as we have seen by means of the Sondergötter, the proper name of the god and the predicate that describes a certain action (harrowing, fertilizing, etc.) are not yet divided. Naming and denotation (or, as we have seen, the
assertorial and veridictional aspect of language) are originally inseparable.
20. In his study “La blasphémie et l’euphémie” (Blasphemy and Euphemism),
Benveniste, as we have seen, underlines the interjectory character that defines
blasphemy. As he writes, “blasphemy manifests itself as an exclamation and has
the syntax of interjections, of which it constitutes the most typical variety” (Ben-
veniste [4], 256). Like every exclamation, blasphemy also is “a word that one
‘lets slip out’ under the pressure of a sudden and violent emotion” (ibid.), and
like every interjection, even if it always makes use (unlike what often happens in
onomatopoetic interjections like “aha!” and “oh!”) of terms that are meaning-
ful in themselves, it does not have a communicative character; it is essentially
nonsemantic.
It is remarkable that, in discussing expressions that primitive peoples make
use of to signify the divine (like mulungu for the Bantu, vakanda or manitu for the American Indians), Cassirer observes that, to understand them, we must “go
back to the most primitive level of interjections. The manitu of the Algonquins, the mulungu of the Bantus is used in this way—as an exclamation that indicates
not so much a thing as a certain impression, and which is used to greet anything
unusual, wonderful, marvelous, or terrifying” (Cassirer, 58/71). The same can
be said for the names of the gods in polytheism, which constitute, according to
Cassirer, the first form in which the mythico-religious consciousness expresses
its feeling of terror or veneration (ibid.).
Like blasphemy, which is its other face, the divine name seems constitutively
to have the form of an interjection. In the same way, Adam’s naming of the ani-
mals in Genesis 2:19 could not have been a discourse but only a series of interjec-
tions. According to the duality between names and discourse that, according to
linguists, characterizes human language, names, in their originary status, con-
stitute not a semantic element but rather a purely semiotic one. These are the
remains of the originary interjection, which the river of language drags behind
it in its historical becoming.
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