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Didn’t Nietzsche remark, still in the tonality of monotheistic religious satire, that “[t]he world has more idols than realities”?6 After the One had pushed the others to the margins, the gods faded into the twilight of exile. The appointed theologians nevertheless continue to believe that they have done the world the greatest service by making a large portion of humanity dependent on an intrinsically riven god, whose uniqueness was paid for by the cleverly masked incompatibility of his highest attributes.

      In their supremacist zeal, the religious theologians had insisted on garbing God with the most radiant attributes: omnipotence and omniscience.7 They did not consider that their simultaneous proclamation of these attributes implanted a real and highly explosive contradiction into the Highest. Either God is omnipotent, in which case his creative will is always free to introduce novelty and can be mirrored by his knowledge only after the fact; or he is omniscient, in which case he must have used up all his creative power. Only in the latter case can he take an eternal holiday and look back on the universe of what has been.

      The unresolved question of creativity stands at the center of the theological crisis of Islam. It is at once a question about technology and a question about the right to make images. The problem cannot be solved by means of the Qur’an. The Islamic nations, in total, do in fact take part in the creativity of modernity, especially in its advanced technological accomplishments, but so far only from the standpoint of the user. They have not proceeded to the level of “technological existence.”10 They do not produce what they use; they do not generate what they take by the hand. They have neither accepted the principle of translatio creativitatis [transfer of creativity]11 nor grasped it as the task of our times.

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      Nevertheless, in some of the dramas about the titan Prometheus attributed to the poet Aeschylus, we can glimpse the anticipation of a post-Olympian state of affairs. By virtue of his farsighted intelligence, Prometheus is thought to have looked beyond the regime of Zeus. Legend has it that he offered to share his menacing visions with Zeus if the latter would free him from his eternal torment on the rock in the Caucasus. Zeus – obviously quite far from being omniscient when it came to his own affairs – is supposed to have entered into the deal and “unbound” Prometheus. He did this in order to find out whether a virtual son of his could threaten him with the same fate that he had prepared for his own father Cronus when he, Zeus, emasculated him while Cronus was having sex with Gaia. Zeus subsequently refrained from producing a son capable of imitating his father. He relinquished the spicy nymph who was standing by as the possible mother of his murderer.

      Up to this point, the premonitions of unrest in the houses of the gods remain confined to dynastic phase changes. Without further ado, the Greeks of the classical centuries could imagine a palace coup in the Olympian realm; a twilight of the gods in the Indo-Germanic or Nordic style is foreign to their temperament. The Stoic doctrine of ekpurōsis (world conflagration) is a later exoticism imported from the Middle East.

      Germanic mythology gives us more fecund material for approaching the question of the sort of event that the “twilight of the gods” is. Admittedly, up to the present day scholars have had various reasons to debate whether the poets of the gods in Old Norse had already thought up the idea of a consuming fire at the end of times independently, or whether it was exposure to Christian apocalypticism that gave them an understanding of what it means to take an interest in downfall.

      There is no reason here to delve into analogies between Ragnarök and the Mahabharata or the Apocalypse of John. Nor are we worried whether the word Götterdämmerung [twilight of the gods] is a correct translation of Ragnarök. According to the scholarly literature, Ragnarök covers a wide range of meanings, which extend from “death of the gods” to “renewal of divine forces.” Even Richard Wagner appears not to have been entirely convinced of the adequacy of the expression. According to a report by Cosima,12 while he was working on the fourth part of The Ring of the Nibelung, he played with the idea of calling the piece Göttergericht [Court of the gods], “for Brünnhilde holds court over them” (i.e. the gods). Thus at issue for the composer who inaugurated the renaissance of the “twilight of the gods” motif13 was not so much a myth of downfall in Nordic garb as the corrective to an ethical mistake that had long ago woven itself into the fabric of the world. His Götterdämmerung is a moral drama of purification; it is not intended as a phenomenology of spirit for the stage. It recognizes no original sin – just an original mistake. There is ingenious symbolism in the fact that the logs from the fallen world tree make Wagner’s location for the gods, Valhalla, go up in flames. The finale of the stage performance exceeds all proportions. It is as though the profane fragmentation of the world’s organism into pieces of wood were the spiritual and material cause for the dying down of the gods.

      The

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