The Golden Stag

Rāvaṇa flew to the dwelling of Mārīcha, the demon sorcerer, and laid his design before him, and commanded his help. And Mārīcha, hearing what was asked of him, was seized with a terror that the whole rest of the chapter turns upon, for Mārīcha, alone among Rāvaṇa’s servants, knew Rāma from bitter experience, and knew that the path his master proposed led straight to destruction.

For Mārīcha had felt Rāma’s power before, long ago. He it was, the reader may remember, whom the young Rāma had struck at the sacrifice of Vishvāmitra, when Rāma, sparing his life, had loosed a weapon that hurled him bodily across the miles and flung him into the distant sea. Mārīcha had never forgotten it.

The memory of that blow, of the effortless overwhelming power of the boy who had tossed him across the world like a pebble, had branded itself into his soul, and had turned him, in the years since, from a marauding demon into something almost like a hermit, a demon who had withdrawn from his old violence and lived quietly in the forest, precisely because he had learned what Rāma was and wanted never again to come within reach of that terrible bow.

And now his master was commanding him to go and provoke that very power, to place himself once more in Rāma’s path, and Mārīcha was filled with a dread that made him bold, bold enough to argue with the lord of the demons, to warn him, to plead with him, at the risk of his own life, to turn from the path of ruin.

He warned Rāvaṇa with all the desperate eloquence of terror. Do not do this, he begged. You do not know what Rāma is. I know. I have felt his power. He is no ordinary man; he is death itself in human form; to cross him is to embrace destruction. I tell you, I who have been thrown across the world by his arrow and have lived every day since in the shadow of that memory: leave him alone. Leave his wife alone.

Take your golden kingdom and your great power and your queens and be content, and do not, for the sake of a single woman, bring down upon yourself and all of Lankā the doom that this Rāma will surely deal you. You imagine you are planning a clever theft. You are planning the destruction of your race. I have seen his strength; you have not; believe me, and turn back, before you loose upon us all a ruin that nothing will be able to stop.

He spoke, the tellers say, as one who saw the future clearly, and in a sense he did, for every word of his warning would come true. But Rāvaṇa would not hear it. His pride could not brook being counselled by a servant, and his lust and his fury were beyond the reach of reason, and Mārīcha’s very terror only angered him, for it implied that there was a power in the world greater than Rāvaṇa’s own, and that his proud soul could not accept.

And so Rāvaṇa gave Mārīcha a choice, and it was the choice of a tyrant, no choice at all. Serve me in this, he said, or die by my hand, here, now, for your refusal. If you will not go and play your part in my design, I will kill you myself, this instant, for your cowardice and your insolence. Choose: obey me, or die.

Here is the cruel hinge of Mārīcha’s fate, and the story dwells on it because it is a genuine moral situation, terrible and clarifying. Mārīcha was offered death either way. If he refused Rāvaṇa, he would die at once, murdered by his own master for his disobedience, an ignoble death, a coward’s execution. If he obeyed Rāvaṇa, he would go and provoke Rāma, and he was certain, being wiser than his master, that this too would mean his death, for Rāma would surely kill him.

Death behind him, death before him; the only question was which death to choose.

And Mārīcha, facing it, chose with a strange and bitter dignity. If I must die, he reasoned, let me die at the hands of Rāma rather than at the hands of this tyrant. Death from that divine bow is a nobler end than death from a demon’s spite; to be slain by Rāma is almost a liberation, a release from this wretched existence at the hands of the very power I have feared and, in fearing, half- worshipped, all these years. Better to die by the arrow of the divine than by the blow of the wicked.

If I must perish, let it be Rāma who kills me, and let my death at least be at worthy hands.

There is a real pathos in this, and the story feels it. Mārīcha is not a good being; he is a demon, a servant of evil, a creature who has done wickedness in his time. And yet in this moment he is granted a kind of grim nobility, for he sees the truth that his master is blind to, he speaks it at the risk of his life, and when he is overborne he chooses the nobler of two deaths with a clear and bitter courage.

He goes to his doom knowingly, understanding exactly what he does, choosing to be the instrument of a design he knows is ruinous only because the alternative is a meaner death, and finding, in the certainty of dying by Rāma’s hand, something almost like grace. He is a damned creature who sees his damnation clearly, and there is a tragic dignity in the clear- sightedness, a dignity denied to his master, who rushes toward the same doom blind and proud.

So Mārīcha yielded. Compelled by the certainty of death either way, and choosing the death that came from the divine over the death that came from the tyrant, he agreed to play his part in Rāvaṇa’s design. And the part was this: he would use his sorcery to take the form of a deer, but no ordinary deer, a deer of impossible, dazzling, unnatural beauty, a golden stag with a hide that shone like gold and silver, spotted with jewels, its eyes like gems, a creature so lovely and so strange that no one who saw it could fail to desire it.

He would appear at Panchavaṭī in this enchanting shape, and dance and graze near the cottage, and by his unnatural beauty he would draw Sītā’s longing, and through Sītā’s longing he would draw Rāma away in pursuit, and so the guard on Sītā would be broken, and Rāvaṇa’s moment would come.

It was a cunning and a wicked plan, and it turned upon the one weakness that even the wise and the good can share: the pull of beauty, the longing for the lovely thing glimpsed and desired. And Mārīcha, going to his death with open eyes, took upon himself the golden shape, and turned his steps toward Panchavaṭī, toward the cottage by the Godāvarī where Sītā sat unknowing, to lure her, and her husband, and the whole world, toward the abyss.