# The Literary Gods of Roberto Calasso May 13, 2026 [ Nicholas Low ](/people/nicholas-low) Nicholas Low is a Research Fellow, Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Divinity School and a Fellow, Center for Theory and Research, Esalen Institute *The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions.* I am one of those for whom the return of the gods is good news. I never learned to ration piety for one deity, and if I had, my “Universal Spirit” would be, as it was for Friedrich Schlegel, a “genuine polytheist, bearing within himself all Olympus.”[1](#footnotes) But this polytheist evangel raises questions: Where have the gods been, and what ended their exile? Is their return complete, or still underway? And most urgently, what do the gods want from us, in their returning? Roberto Calasso offers an answer: they want a willing audience. In the 1830s, Heinrich Heine depicted the gods hiding in plain sight. Since the “decisive victory of Christianity,” Apollo has served as a shepherd, Mars a mercenary, the gods reduced to “working as day laborers in our native Germany and drinking beer instead of nectar.”[2](#footnotes) Dionysus himself donned the costume of a Christian cleric, awaiting the day he might once again openly celebrate the Bacchanal. In Heine’s imagining, one might momentarily descry a god beneath a poor disguise or stumble into a mysterious grove and witness a clandestine moonlit rite. More recently, Roberto Calasso whispered that the gods survived in the pages of “books that few will ever open.” This textual residency is no “prelude to extinction” but a paradigm shift in the revelation of divine power. For the Greeks, the gods appeared in statues, temples, and festivals; for moderns, they coalesce in the “vertiginous and unprecedented concentration of power that has gathered and is gathering in the pure act of reading.” For Calasso, even our delirious “love affair with the microchip” is another moment within a broader “transformation that takes place in a totally invisible way, within the mind.”[3](#footnotes) According to Heine and Calasso, the triumph of monotheism didn’t abolish the gods but pushed them into liminal zones where their presence went mostly unnoticed. Migrating into books, the gods accrued an unprecedented power that is released in the experience we call “literature.” Those who prepared the gods’ return, according to Calasso, are thus those who pushed the written word to its limit: Proust, Baudelaire, Hölderlin, and especially Nietzsche. Michel Foucault, preeminent genealogist of power and patron saint of scholarly scolds, also heard Nietzsche announcing the “imminent scintillating return” of the gods. In an encomium to Pierre Klossowski, translator and disciple of Nietzsche, Foucault praises Klossowski’s prose for connecting with a “long lost experience” of the divine and challenging the capture of the “desirable trace” of the gods “in the tabernacle and the ambiguous game of signs.”[4](#footnotes) Like Calasso, Klossowski identified the path by which the gods return in a new language, literary and philosophical, that transforms the mind into a theater of the gods. But books don’t constrain these deities forever. Calasso insinuates that though the gods first return in literature, the public world soon becomes their stage: “the pagan gods had escaped from those niches in literary rhetoric where many presumed they would be forever confined. Now those niches were just empty graves while a group of noble fugitives mingled mockingly with the city crowds.”[5](#footnotes) Through reading, the exiled gods return, get loose, and walk among us. Calasso warns that our modern ways of assessing “reality” leave us woefully unprepared for such theophanies: “Behind the trembling curtains of what passes for “reality,” the voices throng. If no one listens, they steal the costume of the first person they can grab and burst onto the stage in ways that can be devastating. Violence is the expedient of whatever has been refused an audience.”[6](#footnotes) If ignored, the gods seize and wear us like masks, breaking into our world with shocking force. It is easy to diagnose the mad destruction shattering the world today as the result of all-too-human pathologies. But, as Calasso perceives, “contrary to the modern illusion, it is the psychic powers that are fragments of the gods, not the gods that are fragments of the psychic powers. If they are thought of as no more than that, the impact can be violent.”[7](#footnotes) Calasso’s warning is urgent and ominous: Dictators and demagogues might be unwitting masks worn by the fragments of scorned gods discharging their turbid forces into the world. Yet it need not be so. The gods want to be acknowledged as more than illusions, hallucinations, or pale figments; they demand a receptive audience, and if given one, might appear in less violent guise. Attending to the gods, we humans might become more willing costumes, more comfortably fitted garments for those divine fragments returning to the world through literature. If we listen, new gods may still appear with and through us. Gentler gods might still be born through books, if we learn to read beyond the “trembling curtains of what passes for reality.” --- ## Footnotes 1 Athenaeum Fragment 451, in Friedrich von Schlegel and Peter Edgerly Firchow, *Philosophical Fragments* (University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 93 2 Heinrich Heine, Translated By Diskin Clay, “From The Gods in Exile,” *Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics* 21, no. 1 (2013): 193, . 3 Roberto Calasso, *Literature and the Gods*, Vintage International Ser (Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2010), 22-3. 4 Michel Foucault et al., *Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology*, Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Vol. 2 (New Press, 1998), 125, 132. 5 Calasso, *Literature and the Gods,* 18. 6 Ibid, 184. 7 Ibid, 169. ## Works Consulted Calasso, Roberto. *Literature and the Gods*. Vintage International Ser. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2010. Foucault, Michel. Ed. James D. Faubion. *Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology*. Essential Works of Michel Foucault, Vol. 2. New Press, 1998. Klossowski, Pierre. *Diana at her Bath* and *The Women of Rome*. Translated By Sophie Hawkes and Stephen Sartarelli. Marsilio Publishing, 1998. Heine, Heinrich, Ed. and trans. by Diskin Clay. “From The Gods in Exile.” *Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics* 21, no. 1 (2013): 193. . Schlegel, Friedrich von, and Peter Edgerly Firchow. *Philosophical Fragments*. University of Minnesota Press, 1991. See also:- [ Researcher Reflections ](/topic-tags/researcher-reflection)