In the course of our thoughts we have arrived at a critical point: we must attempt to free ourselves from the traditional condemnation of play as a mere reproduction of “actuality,” thus to free ourselves from the lens of the disenchanted and the Platonic “evil eye” for tragedy. This is by no means an easy matter. For, conceptual penetration into the phenomenon of play has been carried out in a philosophically radical form precisely from the viewpoint of disenchantment and in the closest connection with the foundation of Western metaphysics. Plato’s struggle with Homer and the tragedians is no peripheral motif, no ornamental arabesque; it is a life-and-death struggle, more essential, harsher, and sharper than the strife with the sophists. The sophist is only the caricature [Zerrbild] of the philosopher, able to be exposed in his impotent illusoriness by a more rigorous conversance with the very same logos that he manipulates in an merely eristic, instrumental way. The sophist is exposed by relentlessly being referred to the truth of the logos. The philosopher and the sophist, in their strife, remain within the dimension of the concept. The poet, as the representative player, is the seer, the spectator of the great game in which all things are put at stake, in which they have their emergence and decline, their fortune and downfall, their radiance and extinguishment. The poet is the spectator of the drama [Schauspiel] of the prevailing of the gods, of the deeds of heroes, of the sufferings of human beings; in his song, he allows everyone to see what he has seen. Plato’s critique of the poets claims that the poet only sees images, and images [Bilder] are mere re-productions [Ab-Bilder] and after-images [Nach-Bilder] of customary things and events that for their part are already poor afterimages of the ideas that alone truly exist. Plato’s critique of the poets has its ontological emphasis in the interpretation of the image as such. The imagistic character of all poetry has thereby been subjected to an aggressive, indeed a demolishing critique, which was able to summon its power from the immense conceptual energy that was released in thinking through mere seeing [Schauens]. However, one cannot postulate as a universal formula that the concept prevails over intuition. For in Plato thought itself, in its highest apex, after it has passed through the dialectic and in view of the highest idea, the idea of the good, has the character of seeing. Admittedly, this is a seeing of thought. He also calls it a “touching,” in order to indicate this ultimate and highest immediacy of the enactment of thought. Such “immediacy” does not exist before mediation but rather after it, and can only be attained over a long and arduous course of thought. The poets, however, purport to immediately see what is genuinely real in their visions and to be able to place it before the eyes of their fellow human beings in the poetic word; they lie, insofar as they pass off mere reproductions as what is essential. From the perspective of the metaphysical critique of play, as we conceive Plato’s critique of the poets more generally, the “non-actuality” constitutively belonging to play as a “mere reproduction,” that is, as something that has a lesser ontological status than the things that belong to the typical reality of our lives, is less than the house, the table, the bed. But how can we free ourselves from this perspective? How do we remove the metaphysical lens in relation to play? Can we, so to speak, leap out of the situation of disenchantment with a single bound, transpose ourselves into the position of the enchanted, and from there recognize new conceptual determinations concerning play? If this were so, such a leap would have already been carried out often and even resulted in new conceptual categories for play. The Western metaphysical understanding of Being, to which the interpretation of play as reproduction belongs, too, cannot be arbitrarily abandoned, so to speak. We cannot simply “step off the trolley.” The historically transmitted understanding of Being is the dimly lit house of the human being in the gloom of the world-night, as it were, which shelters and protects him and affords him a dwelling—a house, admittedly, that he must time and again repair, that remains exposed to continual ruin, that perpetually falls into disrepair. A restructuring of this understanding of Being, of even a minor sort, can only be carried out as a confrontation with the tradition. And the more primordial such a restructuring would be, the more severe the historical displacement must be, too. The philosophical question concerning play cannot be explicated without explicit reference to the Platonic critique of the poets. For that reason, we have tarried for so long in our discussions about the image, the mirror, and the like. That may appear to be a superfluous addition; however, thought strictly from the matter itself, it was necessary. For what we have said about play in a different way, for instance, must be able to stand up to the critical spirit of Plato’s train of thought. The moment at which Plato’s critique began is with the peculiar “non-actuality” that, as a playworld, belongs to play. Is this non-actuality grasped decisively when it is taken as a reproduction? That is the question that concerns us. “Non-actuality” here does not mean “non-being,” as probably everyone will acknowledge, does not mean a sheer nothing, but rather an enigmatic something, which does not exist like customary existing things but is also not nugatory like a hallucination or a merely subjective delusion. The “non-actuality” of the playworld is an appearance of its own kind. Plato has an answer, an answer to the question as to what sort of odd appearance it is: this appearance is only an image. And an image is determined, above all to the extent that it is a reproduction, from its own derivative resemblance to the original. The appearance of the playworld is thus explained as a reproductive relation of resemblance between two beings. We can express the fundamental sense of this Platonic interpretation with the formula: the playworldly appearance is interpreted from the relational space of an intraworldly relation—play mirrors, as it were, real processes of serious life, copying them in the medium of a unique appearance. As long as play is thus interpreted from the relation to innerworldly beings, the conception of it as a reproduction inevitably presses on and imposes itself.
But here we are attempting to insert a question mark. For is play primordially a reproduction of innerworldly processes and events, a repetition and imitation? Or is it a particularly emphatic form of the human relation to the world? The world-relation of human existence, although it defines and thoroughly attunes us in an essential manner, has remained furthermost from a conceptual clarification. Hence, we do not have at our disposal an adequately cultivated conceptuality to express with the necessary clarity the world-relation of human play and the relation of understanding to the play of the world itself that is concealed therein. For the moment, we will sketch out the direction of our question. We have already begun to do so by briefly discussing and formally indicating the concept of the symbol. We do not understand by this any sort of sign that indicates, depicts, represents, stands in for something, and so forth. A symbolon is a fragment that has been determined for completion. But the philosophical concept of the symbol does not pertain to inner-worldly completions of fragmentary forms of life. Rather, it is precisely each innerworldly being that is conceived as a fragment of Being, as finite individuality split off from the one, all-encompassing Being. Each finite thing as such is a fragment, is exposed in its individuation, is torn away from all others, is enclosed within its limits, is only this—and not everything else. It is it itself, and through its selfhood and its self-standing is removed from the one primal ground of life, from which it emerges and into which it will again someday be submerged. And yet it is never alone as this self-standing thing; not only does it stand in proximity to other self-standing things that form its surroundings. It and its neighboring things are gathered all together into a presencing [Anwesen] that encompasses them all—one Being runs through every being, subtending all the limits and divisions of individual things, holding and gathering them, exposing and sheltering them, letting them emerge and pass away, bearing their change and passage. We ordinarily have no eyes for this one and unifying Being of the whole that subtends all limits of things, no ears for the music of the world: we are captivated by beings, distracted by the variety of things, we are turned toward the finite without essentially understanding the finite in its finitude. We do not perceive the power that gives and takes away finite things, binds them together and divides them, gathers and separates them. We gape at individuated beings in their incalculable multiplicity but ordinarily do not thereby catch sight of the fundamental process of individuation. We move about as a thing among other things, comport ourselves with understanding to things in all domains, but do not ordinarily understand the prevailing force that unifies beings in their multiplicity and at the same time tears them apart in their delimitation. In the customary understanding of Being we deal with fragments of Being without experiencing them as fragments. Philosophy as world-wisdom awakens when the finite thing flares up in its intraworldliness and thus refers to the world-whole, when the fragmentary character of beings shines forth in the light of the world. That need not always be an event of theōria. There are manifold ways in which finite beings become truthful symbols and can experience a primordial, worlded “completion”—in which the fragment is returned to the intact whole. In all great upsurges of the human heart and spirit the transformation of things occurs. They are not thereby “altered,” not metamorphosed; they remain finite Being, but this finite Being of things reveals itself in its finitude on the basis1 of the more primordial, more intact Being of the world. And this Being of the world does not lie like a realm of stronger and more powerful things next to or behind or above ordinary things, is not a sphere of the eternal beyond the sphere of the transient. The Being of the world prevails and reigns in finite things, prevails as finitization, individuation, which is simultaneously gathering and dispersal. Wherever this force of the gathering-dispersing prevailing of the whole is experienced as the “war” and “peace” of the world, all things gleam in a new light, become symbola. This glimpse or lightning flash of the world mostly comes as an onslaught. It can come to appear in all human fields of life: in love, in work, in ruling, in the remembrance of the dead—and in play. In the coming together of man and woman both these halves of life become the symbol for the great cosmic harmony of all oppositions, and they then feel themselves blessedly aglow from the flame of the life of the totality and can say with Hölderlin’s “Hyperion”: “The dissonances of the world are like lovers’ strife. In the midst of the quarrel is reconciliation, and all that is separated comes together again. / The arteries part and return in the heart, and all is one eternal, glowing life.”2 Deep as the world, however, are not only the life attunements of cosmic harmony—the harshest ruptures can be world-profound, too, if they are conceived as pointing to the strife intimately raging through the one whole, pointing to the negativity endemic to Being, to the world-structuring power of rupture, to war, which according to the words of Heraclitus is the father of all things. Even where the human being tills the barren earth by the sweat of his brow, the world-light can gleam in the simple activities of sowing or reaping, and the nearness to the bounteous power of the earth can be experienced. Or when we bury the dead, give them back to the elements, this activity, too, becomes a symbol for us: in the case of this one fellow human being whom we return to the earth, the return of all exposed things into the nameless, ineffable, sheltering ground can become clear and significant for us. This, however, does not happen in such a way that the individual case could be recognized as an example of a universal rule. Rather, the very distinction between the individual and the universal, between the example and the rule, disappears in the genuine symbol. Now, one could, however, object that here an elevated and intensified association with human things, the admission to its more mysterious significance, would overshadow the everyday praxis of life; that such a description would not apply in everyday life, but would only hold for the particular life praxis of the cult. An important problem is touched on with this objection.
But the question is whether the human being can apprehend the world-significance of finite things only in the cult—or whether the cult is the collective memory of world-profound things. If ever a golden age existed in the dawning morning of the human race, then this race had no cult, because all things were still world-profound, because the shimmering of the farthest stars lay on each blade of grass and everything was full of gods. Only when in the course of time things were exploited, when human beings cultivated their customs and thought and felt according to custom, when customs disguised and clouded the primordial dwelling of the human race on the solid earth under the open sky—only then did it become the task of a special praxis to break through the trivialization of life through customs, which was perceived to be a danger, and to again hoist the things that were sunk into the all-too-familiar upward into their lost radiance. The cult elevated customary things by consecrating single instances of them and giving them a cultic relevance. The cult is the attempt to restore the primordial world-light to all individuated, finite things.
This attempt has a remarkable structure: it appears to want to contradict itself. For, initially, it is precisely the demarcating exclusion that is striking about the human cult. The counter-move against trivialization through customs, against the banalization of human existence, is begun in the cult as the demarcation of a sacred sphere. A grove, a forested area like any other, a hilltop or a special precinct in the city is demarcated, is separated off by sacred borders from the rest of the soil, is held to be consecrated ground, to be a site for the appearance and self-manifestation of the gods. On such ground a temple is erected. And it is arranged in proper alignment with the cardinal directions of the heavens: the rising and setting of the sun, the starry vault and much of this sort of thing finds its counterpart in the measurements of the most ancient temples. And some individuals are marked off from the mass of ordinary human beings, removed from the ordinary course of life. This seclusion of priests, however,3 is not sufficiently grasped if one sees it only as part of the universal specification of human activities, which goes along with the division of labor. The priest relates to his fellow human beings like the awe-inspiring temple precinct to the surrounding land. The chosen one is also secluded. He is singled out and removed, has been transported by his consecration of universal human ordinariness, is raised beyond the customary human measure. He becomes the administrator of the mysteries and sacraments, promulgator of the holy, executor of sacrifices. This sacrificer is himself the first sacrifice—he belongs, to cite the words of Hegel, among “those solitary individuals, whom their people had sacrificed and exiled from the world and dedicated to the contemplation of the eternal. . . . Theirs was a life devoted exclusively to the service of contemplation, without practical gain but only for the sake of blessedness.”4 The priest, who sacrifices and consecrates, is himself sacrificed and consecrated—is marked off from the mass of everyday human beings stirred by desire and passion. But he is marked off for those things—as the demarcated temple ground has been spared as a site of divine epiphany for the surrounding land. Precisely by there being a space that remains free, indeed even furnished with a significance that raises it beyond all ordinary places, in the midst of fields where human beings toil for sustenance, or among the houses in which they live, procreate, and die, this sacred space can take on the function of hallowing all places of the countryside or city. It stands then for all other spaces, stands in their stead, operates vicariously. And, similarly, the priest acts vicariously for his fellow human beings; he takes the relation to the sacred upon himself in order, from such a relation, to have an influence on the lives of his fellow countrymen. The sacred things of the cult, whether they be the temple precinct, the priest, the altar and the chalice, the sacrificial lamb, or the consecrated bread, operate, on the whole, vicariously for profane things: for the house of the human being, for his dinner table, for the wine that he drinks and the bread that he eats. Cultic consecration divides sacred and profane things in order to ultimately consecrate the profane. The cult must initially draw out and wrest a sphere free from the generally prevailing ordinariness of life, separate and delimit it from the everyday, in order to be able to penetrate the everyday itself from out of the sacred site that is thus elevated. Regarded in this manner, it is an immense stratagem of life to withdraw from instrumentality and superficiality in order to return to the primordial sources. That is initially thought of in a purely human sense, the cult conceived as a phenomenon of human self-relation. Yet it is certainly more. It is indeed not merely a relation to his own originality of life that the human being who is threatened by the danger of stultification in customary routine attempts to produce. In the cult the immortal gods appear to mortal human beings. So, at least, the priests, prophets, and saviors of all peoples and times tell us. The finite human wisdom of philosophy has removed this divine aspect of the cult from consideration; here only silence remains for us. But we can direct our gaze to the human phenomenon of priestly self-consciousness: the priest understands himself as a mediator between humans and gods, as a representative, as a mouthpiece of God, as his herald and promulgator—as a proxy of God on the earth, to whom extraordinary authority is granted, to whom it is promised that everything that he establishes as binding on earth is also binding in heaven and everything that he dissolves on earth is also dissolved in heaven. If the essence of the priest is thus thought of as a vicariousness of God on earth, even if hierarchically graded, then in such a conception the divine must still be represented in a certain sense as distant and absent. The distance and absence are not absolute: perhaps they only exist for the dull senses of human beings or for the indolence of their hearts. What is always there does not arrive at epiphany. Land and sea, the elements and the most familiar things have no epiphany. The sun rises every day anew in the eastern sky, traces its golden track in the firmament and sinks into the west; its appearance and receding are quotidian. The appearance of the sun is no epiphany. The Greek god dwells at a distance from human beings, perhaps on the shimmering heights of Olympus or even in the highest regions of the stars, in the depths of the earth or way out on the uncharted sea. But he can come among human beings, sometimes appear to them in disguised forms in order to protect mortals and to save them from the fate of Semele. He can also manifest himself in the gentle charm of natural impressions and stir the soul: in the moonlight over mountain forests as Artemis, in the gleaming glare of the sun as Phoebus Apollo, in the white-maned, storming steed-waves of the sea as Poseidon. The Christian god, thought of as the creator of the world, remains on the one hand transcendent from the created world; on the other hand he continually and ubiquitously suffuses it with his omnipresence and omnipotence. He is simultaneously present and absent. His presence is only accessible to faith, not to the natural knowledge of the finite human being. The Christian does not see his god with physical eyes during his life on earth, except perhaps5 the first Christians as disciples of Christ. But these physical eyes, too, did not see the glory of their lord; they trusted his word, while their eyes saw a human being who died on the cross. Because the Christian god actually dwells in heaven and invisibly pervades the earthly world with his omnipotence and omnipresence, proxies of God are needed for visibility; prophets and priests are needed. The Greek gods had a place in the world, were at home in the magnificent sphere of the highest radiance of Being, which mortals never reach; the Christian god has no place in the world—rather the world has a place in him. There always also belongs to the cult as a phenomenal structure a proxy of things or human beings in relation to the gods. It can be the “graven image” that one worships, the “exalted serpent,” the marble form of Pallas Athena, the holy book, the altar, or the sacrificial lamb and the sacrificing priest. Because such things “stand in for” the gods, they, hallowed from such a relation, are for their part able “to stand in for” all the profane, earthly things, that is, they keep the relation to the sacred alive for the latter.
The most difficult problem in interpreting the cult is the relation to the world-whole that resonates in all these proxies. The vicariousness of profane things in sacred things and the vicariousness of the gods in priestly human beings, statues, temples, and cult equipment—these are, in each case, relationships between beings. The world-relation, in contrast, is a relation between an intraworldly thing and the world. What can this mean here: a thing stands in for the whole? A finite thing stands in for the infinite? And, to be sure, not an infinite thing that is thought by the highest intensification and denial of finite properties, by the combined via eminentiae et negationis, which amounts to the traditional concept of the “absolute.” The world is near and far in a different way than a being can ever be near and far. All nearness and farness of beings is made possible by the spatiality and temporality of the world. Only in the space-time of the world are innerworldly things near to and far from one another. Thing and world have no gap, no remoteness between them: each thing is in the world, and yet all things together do not fill up the world. Expressed figuratively, the world is farther outside than each conceivable thing, and yet it is also closer to each being than the nearest thing; indeed it prevails in and through them. The world is what is nearest and farthest at the same time, is the force of the universal movement of Being in all beings, the passage as emergence and decline of all finite beings—the throwing that throws them into existence and the predation of all-producing, all-consuming time. Whenever we understand a single thing from out of this passage of Being, it becomes “world-profound” and flashes in an infinite significance. It does not point away from itself and out to another thing—it points into its very ground, into the movement of transience that flows through it. Such insights into the fundamental movement in which all finite things are placed are rare; they have an unsettling force for the human heart and the human spirit. We thereby perceive the immense power of the negative, the inexorability of death, but also the inexhaustibility of the womb, from which all individual things emerge. In the cult we preserve and retain the world-profound, lived experiences of our existence. When all things no longer flash in the light of the world—as perhaps in the fabled golden age—when things become used up and custom replaces the primordial, entrancing, enigmatic character of intraworldly beings and the dust of the everyday deposits itself everywhere, the cult must elevate a few things and interpret them as symbola, in order to retain the memory of world-open existence. That means the cult is already a derivative comportment of the human race, the recollection of a world-relation that was not yet determined by the distinction between the sacred and the profane and by the human being’s conscious distance from the gods. The cult seeks to retrieve, to restore the world-relation, but it is capable of such restoration only in a mediated way: precisely in the elevation of a few things that it wrests into an in-finite significance. When the whole earth is no longer full of productive power and fecund growth, then a place must be set aside as a sacred precinct, where the festival of recurring Persephone can be celebrated as an invocatory summoning to presence of all worldly powers of growth. When all human beings no longer live in concord with the peace and the war of the world, then the priest as the sacrifice for all must seclude himself from the natural and ingenuous community and must ponder the prevailing fate of the whole. When each house, each table and each bed, each finite piece of bread and each finite drink of wine is no longer known to be intact [heil] and to belong to the whole, then a specific single house, a specific table, a specific piece of bread, and a specific portion of wine must take on the reference to what is intact—as a temple, as an altar, as an offering. Where intactness [das Heile] as a fundamental feature of the worldliness of all beings is denied or is obscured by the dust of custom, the “sacred” [das “Heilige”] must appear. The sacred is an echo of worlded intactness [des welthaft Heilen].
This is the fundamental conception that guides our recourse to the phenomenon of the cult. This conception, with its briefly outlined theses, has of course still by no means been given its due. But once more it should be emphasized that we are dealing only with the purely human side of the cult, not with its super-human partners, who fall under the jurisdiction of the theologians. In our opinion, to put it cautiously, the cult preserves the recollection of the human world-relation, but it disguises it, too, in preserving it: the cult reinterprets its meaning in terms of a relation to a higher being, yet at bottom and in general the human world-relation is not at all a relation to any intraworldly things, not even of the highest kind. And that holds already for the early forms of cult, for the archaic practices of enchantment and magical rites. Even the early cult is an indirect recollection of the world-relation. That does not make it any easier for us to understand; for the conspicuous thing in archaic existence is indeed precisely the belief in daemons, the paralyzing horror in the face of uncanny, spectral beings, the panic-stricken anxiety before numinous powers. No warrior’s bravery helps against this primal anxiety, no diligence and exertion at work helps. Precisely the two serious activities in which the human otherwise asserts himself, belligerent struggle and the toil of work, remain inconsequential here. One cannot battle with daemons and one cannot break their resistance by working. But the activity that one for the most part regards as the least serious and that one commonly believes to have no power, namely, play, becomes the sole possibility for the human being to counteract the magic power of the daemons or to turn their malevolence around. The mask of the player itself becomes a magical force. What that means philosophically is a most difficult problem.
If meditation on human play is carried out through the lens of the disenchanted,6 then play takes on the aspect of reproduction, which in any case is acknowledged as having a mediating function, as Plato’s critique of the poets had shown. To be sure, it still remains a phenomenon of life with status, but it must recede behind more essential ways of carrying out existence. In what its light of understanding makes manifest, it is taken to be inferior to work and struggle and love, for instance. It becomes a way to “recover” from the ways in which life is difficult and grave, it becomes lighthearted idleness, a cheerful and pretty variation on bitter seriousness. It mirrors in an impotent way the powerful pursuits of life, makes present merely as a reproduction every dark sorrow and every harsh pain of our heart, and thus has the capacity to safely discharge the dangerously pent-up affects, passions and desires, tribulations and anxieties, to purify the soul of dark forces. We are always in danger of losing the proper composure and calmness that belong to the character of life, of reacting intemperately to the threatening character of our environment, of exceeding the degree of fear appropriate for us or, on the other hand, of giving ourselves over too much to being with our fellow human beings and of losing ourselves in the process. We preserve the soul from an excess of fear and compassion by giving an outlet in play to these self-destructive affects, letting them peter out, so to speak, in the playworld-appearance. In the economy of life, play’s task becomes to minimize the excess of imagination that serious life cannot utilize for its own creative tasks and to find a use for the harmless discharge of aggressive and destructive impulses of the soul and at the same time to thereby hold a mirror before the human being, to help provide him with a view of himself “in the image” and to thus promote his self-understanding. It is evident that play has a significance in the life-economy of the human being that is similar to the dream—seen from the vantage point of depth psychology. Playing is a kind of waking dream, distinct from the ordinary dream in sleep by its being carried out collectively. When we dream in sleep, we can, to be sure, very well stand in diverse communal relations in the dream-world; the dream-world-I is together with other dream-world-fellows. But the dreaming-I is alone. In contrast, in play we have not merely a community of persons according to the playworldly roles, but always also an actually existent community of real players, who are open to one another in the communal activity of playing. One ascribes to the dream—similarly to play—a cathartic function: it purifies the soul of drives that well up from the most submerged and darkest depths of life, from the wish for incest to the desire for murder; it diverts the excessive imagination and at the same time, however, keeps the imaginative power of the soul alive and in full swing. It is precisely the imposition that the dream experiences from the perspective of waking sobriety that has become decisive for the conception of play. Just as the one who is awake judges in the clear sobriety of the morning the wild, colorful dream of the night, so too has metaphysical philosophy all the way back to its beginning judged play—and it has passed judgment on it as a “mere reproduction.”
A completely different perspective on play opens up for us when we understand the “non-actuality” of its playworld not as a “reproduction,” not as an imagistic rendering and portrayal of an original being, but rather as a “symbol”—and thus think the essence of the symbol from the world-relation. A being, a finite thing, becomes a symbol when it experiences “completion” by the world-whole, when the totality shines forth and gleams in it, when it becomes representative of the universe—when the finite is translucent in its intraworldliness, sets the gaze free, as it were, into the prevailing force that flows through the finite, brings it about, and annihilates it. Each thing in the vicinity of the human being can become a symbol, can wrench us from the fixed limitation of our gaze that sees for the most part only beings: finished, fixed things and finished, fixed events in and with things, but not Being itself, which structures and destroys, which only “sojourns” in the thing, so to speak, and which ultimately conditions all things [das letztlich Bedingende für alle Dinge]. This direction of the symbol, its world-sense, the completion of all finite fragments of Being by the world-whole, is for the most part concealed from us by an understanding of the symbol and symbolism that we have from the cult. The connection between cult and play is extremely significant. We have initially touched on it in a preliminary fashion with our brief discussion concerning the symbol and the cult.
The cult—considered only according to its human side—belongs already to a stance of existence that is determined by a kind of curious world-oblivion. To be sure, the human being, as a human being, is never without a knowledge of the world. He is, simply, the world-open being; the thought of the totality occupies him—and makes possible his understanding of Being, his reason, his language, his bearing toward the actual and the possible, to Being and non-being, makes possible his art of producing artificial things, makes work possible—the thought of the totality glimmers in the human wish for the immortality of mortals in children and grandchildren and fuels the struggle for rule within the state. Because the human being is the world-open living being, he is also the rational, the speaking, the erotic, the skilled and political living being who understands Being. These are quite simply features that fundamentally separate him from the rest of the natural creatures. But even though he owes these fundamental features of his existence to his world-relation, he is nevertheless, for the most part, just not open in an explicit and eager way to the world as such. On the contrary, as a rule he lives turned away from the world, lives immersed, “blind to the world,” as it were. Yet even the human being’s world-blindness is a mode of his world-relation, the mode in which he predominantly comports himself in his everyday form of life to the all-prevailing whole; he does not live attentive to the universe; he moves about, all too self-evidently, within space and time and within the general appearing of beings and pays no attention to space-time as such nor to appearing as such. In each instance he is turned by myriad interests to specific things that he desires, strives for, chases after; in his everyday form of life, the human being lives immersed within the world, but without regard to the world. On account of myriad things that interest us, we do not pay attention to the whole that thoroughly attunes and resonates around everything. But we ourselves and everything with which we are concerned in such an interested manner in the manifold dimensions of life are finite things that we understand in a twilit vagueness as finite. However, in the understanding of beings in regard to their finitude there always lies an obscure, albeit undeveloped, knowledge of the world, the world-intimation that is the pricking thorn of our spiritual unrest, as it were. We mostly leave it at that in this world-intimation, go about our business, concern ourselves with the particular affairs that matter to us, with our property, our money and well-being, with our nearest and dearest, our family members, our nation—perhaps in a noble and almost noncommittal feeling also with “humanity.” The world for us is still much further removed from the interests of our life than humanity is. We usually do not concern ourselves with it at all; it is the most self-evident of all self-evident things, is the scene of our sojourn, but goes endlessly on beyond into unthinkable distances of space and depths of time. We are at home on a small wandering star. Our most audacious technical projects dream of a rocket flight to neighboring celestial bodies. But even then we would still have only colonized a small island in the immensity of the universe. If we but ponder it, this immensity makes an impression on us with mixed feelings of shudder and sublimity, terrifies and enraptures our understanding with the chilling emptiness in which the thought of the world remains for us. And after such an occasional intermezzo with the “starry heavens above me”7 and the elevation in the feeling of the sublime that is morally tied to it, one turns all too gladly once more to nearby and tangible things, to what is interesting, useful, and dear. The world recedes into the uninteresting; it is no theme for our action, no object for the praxis of our lives—it is at most the theme of a theoretical contemplation.
World-wisdom arises when the everyday certainty of interest-bound association with innerworldly beings breaks down, when distance is gained, when astonishment releases us from our captivated enthrallment to things and we attempt in a questioning manner to think the being-in of beings in the world-whole. Philosophy as the thoughtful relation of the human being to the world has been decisively determined in its historical trajectory by the fact that an initial openness to the prevailing world-whole was closed off; by the fact that a theoretical regard for intraworldly beings, things, and substances gained supremacy; and by the fact that the unity of things was conceived as a thinglike unity, as a system and as an architecture of lesser and greater ontologically powerful things, as a hierarchy that culminates in a highest being and descends in stages. In connection with this, the finitude of beings was then conceived as distance from the highest being, to which alone “infinity” was ascribed. The “highest being” of metaphysical philosophy was called by the name of God. “Infinity” became a theological attribute and lost its primordial8 cosmic sense. The history of the transformation of world-wisdom into a theologically stamped ontology does not come to an end, however, with the Platonic-Aristotelian foundation of metaphysics, but rather runs through the course of philosophy up to the present day as a latent tension and strife between the world-closure and world-openness of Western thought.
The cult, however, is older than philosophy. Before human beings were able to think in a rigorous way, before they could avail themselves of concepts, they beheld in images that which is, that which is genuinely and is essentially, what their task on earth was, their fate and their purpose. These images [Bilder] of myth, however, were no “re-productions [Ab-bilder]” of something previously existing and previously known in the manner of afterimages or depictions, as if what came to expression in them could also have been known independently of these images. Mythical images are primordial experiences themselves, so to speak, not belated renditions of experiences. Nor do they serve as means of communication, as aids for a collective agreement concerning the questions about the sense of human life. In ordinary circumstances one can communicate something to someone very well with an image; an image can function as a means of communication. For instance, in a criminal affair a witness produces a sketch of the crime scene and a drawing of the culprit and thereby communicates important particulars to the police. He makes objective in the optical visibility of the image a knowledge that he already previously had. Insofar as it is a reproduction of an original that is thereby disclosed, the image communicates. However, the mythical image is precisely not a reproduction. We can rather say that it is a sense-image. The sense that lies in it does not become apparent to the mythical human being “imagelessly” in order afterward to be preserved and expressed for the first time in an image. Rather, the beholding [Schau] of the image is the creative visionary act of understanding the sense of life. And this productive act of beholding has been already originally enacted in a collective communication. Mythical existence lives in collective enactments much more intensely than we can generally imagine; it lives from out of archetypical grounds of the soul. But once again, not in such a way that any individual differentiation would be absolutely impossible. The archaic human being is neither a beast that lives simply like the ant, immersed in an objectively purposive organic union of life without a relation to this purposiveness, nor is he a “modern individual.” The archaic human being, too, comports himself to his life in the world, strives for an insight into the obscure sense of life, but he is bound much more strongly and sympathetically to the fellows of his tribe, his horde, his people, than the historical human being of late culture. The rhythm and feeling of life pulsates through all members of a clan and perhaps even flickers through them at times with the same visionary energy, makes them into epopts of the same sense-image. The sense that is communally understood is condensed as an image. The image as sense-image in the atmosphere of the mythical cult need not be an image in the strict sense of the word; it is not at all a matter of it looking identical or even similar to something that is portrayed. In general, it is a question of whether the mythical image refers to “things [Sachen],” points to other beings. Anything can become a sense-image: a human gesture, a plant, an animal, a word, a piece of writing, natural things without any artificiality. Yet artificial things, too, can become sense-images: pillars, a statue, two crossed pieces of timber—and ultimately, too, images and figures in the ordinary sense. Such things are then altogether “significant”; they represent a suffusion of sense to which the mythical human being cannot comport himself independently of the representation—a suffusion of sense that opens up to him in the representation. To be sure, with some justification, one can say that things that originally have an ordinary significance would thereby be overloaded with new and much more profound characteristics, that they would be reinterpreted as “metaphors,” as sense-bearers of a sense that a sober and impartial attitude could not find in them. However, that is spoken from the perspective of the spectator, who understands myth as an anthropological reality, but not as a still valid, true expression of the sense of life. For us—the late skeptics—the mythical world appears to be an enchanted landscape of fairy tales that the dream-sense of the human being has created. For the mythical human being himself, in contrast, things “are” their “meaning”; for him there is no distinction between a mere bearer of meaning and a meaningful sense persisting alongside it. The thing and the sense of the sense-image secretly coincide. The mythically significant thing is a metaphor. But that precisely does not mean that it is something other than that which is signified by it. That which signifies and that which is signified coincide—or better, continually cross over into each other. If in a lyrical mood we compare small clouds in the sky with a flock of sheep, then that is an entirely superficial metaphor in which no relation exists between the things compared; it is a conceiving together of different things by the human being who compares them. We can compare many such things in this way—and the hackneyed schemata of popular metaphors are universally known. The genuine, primordial metaphor [Gleichnis] can only be beheld and expressed by the human being where actual “equivalences [Gleichungen]” come to pass, where transitions take place in the things themselves—where, perhaps still more primordially, transitions are carried out between the world and things. The human being of myth beholds equivalences prevailing through the world when innerworldly things become a metaphor for him. We alluded to this aspect with the notion of being a proxy, of representation. The symbol is the finite thing [Ding] in its inner transparency with regard to the prevailing force of the world that conditions [bedingende] it.
It may be that all historical time was preceded by a prehistory in which all things were still aglow in the light of the world, when beings themselves had not yet been so released from Being as to occlude it, and the human being still oscillated in the knowledge of the all-encompassing unity of everything divided and individuated. No knowledge is able to reach back into that fabled prehistory—not even the cult’s knowledge. When we said that the cult was to a certain degree the memory of that golden age, we did not mean that in the cult the human being returned to prehistory, as we return to yesterday with our memory today. The cult “remembers,” insofar as it invokes in a fragmentary way, as it were, a submerged world-openness. It is the memory of “paradise lost” from the vantage point of loss. In the cult the partial and incomplete memory of the worldliness of beings is enacted—indeed, paradigmatically, in a few things. The cult is structured by the exclusiveness of sacred things—of the temple precinct, the priest, the sacrificial altar—thus by the strict separation of the sacred from the profane. But the narrow realm of the sacred stands, vicariously, for all non-sacred, for all profane and ordinary things. And, secondly, the priest stands vicariously for the gods. That can still be spoken from the self-understanding of homo religiosus. And if, from the perspective of the human being, from the human side of religion, it is also thought that the elevation of a few things to the status of symbols amounts to a human proxy for what is super-human, then in this conception one still remains within the horizon of the religious interpretation of the world. Religion appears to be divided into two sides, the incommensurability of which presents the genuine miracle of religious existence. The human being comports himself to the divine, and the divine comports itself to human beings. Now, if one makes the cut in such a way as to only take into account philosophically what religion for its part recognizes as the human side of its essence, if one leaves out of consideration everything that concerns the divine and the gods and keeps silent about them out of reverence, then not much remains for philosophy in religion than an odd psychology. But vis-à-vis religion, philosophy, as one may declare as a freethinking opinion,9 does not itself need to take the standpoint of religion and to recognize without question its demarcations between the human and the superhuman. On the contrary, it must attempt to extend its own competence even to that which is denied it by religion: it must attempt to understand religion itself as a symbol, as a metaphor, which is traced back to the world-relation of human existence. Therefore, it must venture the attempt to reduce the gods to sense-images of the world-totality—to see traces of the universe in the dimension of the divine. Such an approach exceeds the basis of phenomena that are given in psychological findings regarding religious consciousness, for instance. However, a depiction of given facts does not concern us here, but rather an explication of human play as an ecstatic relation to the play of the world. The human being and the world can be reached by philosophical thinking; gods cannot. It follows from this10 that philosophy should not treat the existence or nonexistence of the gods, that it should make declarations neither of a dogmatic theism nor of a dogmatic atheism.
We are acquainted with beings; they reveal themselves to us in manifold ways: each person is familiar with the elements—earthy solidity, fluid water, air, and fiery light—and is familiar with the things that are mixed together from these elements in myriad ways: the lifeless stone, the blooming tree, the swift deer, and aside from these pure natural things the human being and the works of his hands and intellect. We call all of that collectively “things.” Of these things, however, we know that they are gathered within an all-encompassing total unity—that they exist within a common, ordered, and structured presencing, exist in space and in time, appear therein and vanish from there again. To be sure, we never discover, as a being, the world in which each being is; we cannot even discover it because it is itself the space-time of all discoverability. And yet we do not suspect that it could be a mere figment of our imagination; indeed, it is in all things and beyond all things. For us, the gods are neither simply present in the manner of things in our environment nor uniquely non-objective, but a mode of conditioning that enables all objects. The world gives space and grants time for beings; it is the space-giving and time-granting for all that exists in the mode of individuation. The rule of the gods, however, is “believed in.” This faith may perhaps move mountains—but it remains faith.
In no way do I thus mean to say something detrimental about the truth of religion, only that its truth must be thought in an entirely different manner than the truth that belongs to the human understanding of Being and to the human world-relation. Only the truth of the understanding of Being and of world-openness belongs to philosophy. The truth of religion certainly does not relate to the truth of philosophy as the “representation” to the “concept”—as it did in Hegel’s hybrid conception, which thought that philosophy is “absolute knowledge” and for this reason could leave no truth external to it, but rather had to include everything within itself. Philosophy does not think in the intense brilliance of the concept what religion believes in representative images. Each attempt to dissolve religion into philosophy leads to a theologization of philosophy. In fact, here we find that he who “takes the sword, perishes by the sword.”11 There is no wickeder, more deadly poison than that of the dead gods. Like a dreadful symbol, therefore, is Nietzsche’s lament of Ariadne over the god of play. The herald of the “death of God” entered into the night with the formula “Dionysus versus the crucified.”12
If we now attempt to discuss the cult from philosophy’s vantage point, we do so only insofar as it appears as human to us, yet we do not consider “what is human” to be in the subjective acts of religious consciousness alone,13 but above all, too, in cultic symbols. The cult appears to us to be a derivation of a more primordial world-relation. For the one who is situated in the cult, such an interpretation is not acceptable; for him the cult is the primordial association with the sacred, the divine, with the gods, with God. For the humans practicing in a cult, being a proxy, which counts as foremost,14 means the priestly promulgator’s proxy for God. Since God appears in the “burning bush,” lowers himself down into the flames, the ground on which the human being kneels down before him is sacred; the character of the sacred that belongs to certain places and things, to certain human beings and states of affairs, belongs to them only on account of God. For homo religiosus the symbol is not a coincidence between a finite thing and the infinite world, but rather between a thing and divine consecration. For mythically bound human beings the manifestation of the numinous power has the ambivalent character of blessed terror and disturbing exaltation. The sacred becomes the mysterium tremendum. We must first simply bring this self-conception of the cultic human being into view, without wishing to somehow “explain” it.
However, it is important for the train of thought we are pursuing here to explicitly and incisively pay attention to how the association with the numinous and the daemonic happens. The archaic human being does not deploy, against the force of daemons to which he knows himself exposed, the powers by which he otherwise asserts and defends his everyday existence. He does not work and struggle against the superior daemonic power. From the meager earth he can gain an abundant harvest by the toil of work, by irrigation and many such arts, by the improvement of his tools, by making use of the powers of animals, by observation of the proper, appropriate times for sowing, and so forth. With a weapon he can defend his fields, pastures, lands, and herds against plundering neighboring tribes. By his own effort and his own power he sets himself in opposition to the resistance of nature and human beings. But all his exertions can, so he believes, come to ruin through the disfavor of daemons; they send sickness, poor growth, unfruitfulness for land and people. And they have free rein over human beings not in the way that the human being cultivates the wilderness, not in the way that he battles enemies. The daemons do not work and struggle against human beings; they have no trouble with them. They effortlessly do what they like with human beings. We could characterize this effortless, arbitrary, and unpredictable association of daemonic powers with human beings most readily as a game. They play with us. We are like marionettes in their hands; we are their powerless playthings. And they do not show themselves to the archaic human being as they are, as they truly are; they do not show themselves in their true, valid, reliable form. They play an everlasting game of hide-and-seek, a masquerade of an uncanny sort—they can be hidden in things that appear entirely harmless; they do not allow themselves to be gotten hold of and recognized in a form; they do not reveal themselves to us as they genuinely are; they do not reveal what their true form, their non-deceptive appearance is. They are always masked, keep themselves disguised behind many masks; we do not succeed in unmasking them. They have a magical power, not merely over lesser beings like humans and animals, but above all over themselves; they are engaged in perpetual transformation, in transitions, in metamorphoses. Daemons are incomprehensible for us as long as we are simply and plainly what we are: a hunter, a warrior, a worker, a man or a woman—a human being. As long as human beings live immersed in simple obviousness they are completely and powerlessly at the mercy of daemons—in ancient times.
But—one could ask critically—how does a representation of daemons come about at all? If indeed they do not show themselves as they are in truth, if we always receive only concealing masks for a face, the tree in which the dryad is hidden, the green depths of the sea in which the tritons and nereids live, the storm clouds from which Zeus’s avenging bolt of lightning flashes, why do we not simply remain at the level of the tree, the depths of water, the storm clouds? What tempts us to presume something more behind them, a power that conceals itself and has made itself unrecognizable in such concealment? The event of human death has certainly come to have the greatest significance for a daemonic conception of nature. When a fellow human being dies, one with whom we were acquainted for a long time, who was known in his gesture and body language, in his disposition and style of demeanor, he is then transformed in death into something sublimely uncanny. He has vanished into the inconceivable, into a land without place or name. He has slipped into what is without essence. And yet he is not nothing for us: he leaves behind an emptiness that is felt, which, as infinite resonance, seizes hold of the hearts of those who have loved him. The dead one remains unreachable by the love of the living; this love is no longer fulfilled, it can only honor and preserve the memory. Nevertheless, the dead one comes at night in the dream. He manifestly has another form of existence, which is uncanny and at the same time consoling to us. And this peculiar mode of Being of the dead, to be sometimes “present” in an inconceivable manner, to rise up into the land of the living, is—perhaps—the prototypical paradigm for all daemons. The archetype of everything daemonic—is it in the end the dead human being? Here we are not propounding the thesis that everything daemonic stems from the root of the human dead.15 The archaic human being, however, who does not reach daemons with work and struggle, achieves another, more restricted, dangerous, and even exhilarating association with superhuman powers when he disguises and masks himself, relinquishes the obviousness of his existence, slips into the polysemy of the mask—when he participates in the daemonic power as a player, becomes himself the enchanter.
We are asking about the connection between cult and play—not with a religious-philosophical intention, to which we do not at all feel entitled, but rather because in the cult perhaps the most primeval form of human play appears, and because the aspect of “non-actuality” belonging to every kind of play here signifies an elevation and intensification beyond customarily actual things. We are above all concerned with gaining an insight into the human sense of the cultic symbol. The cultic symbol dissembles the cosmic status of the symbolism of play. Nevertheless, this dissemblance and occlusion is by no means a drawback that would have to be corrected, is not a prejudice that one would have to put aside in order to achieve true insight into valid facts. The gods dissemble and occlude the prevailing world from human beings. We recall Fragment 30 of Heraclitus, which we cited earlier. It says of gods and human beings that neither the one nor the other could have produced the world-dispensation of all things, but precisely by means of this demurral it distinguished both the gods and human beings as poietic beings who are near to the world. Gods and human beings are thereby singled out from all other intraworldly things in that they not merely are in the world but comport themselves to their being-in-the-world. Among human beings this takes the acute and tense form of knowing about their own finitude and transience, about our existence’s being doomed to death. In human openness to the world our own individual finiteness is known against the background of the unthinkably endless time of the whole, and we comport ourselves to this unceasing time in the love whose obscure desire for procreation impels us to the immortality of the human race. We are in the midst of things, are moved in diverse ways like they are, have been taken along for our planet’s ride, taken along by the vegetative life processes—and yet do not exist like the plant and animal do. We act from freedom, work, and are political: we produce things that are not given by nature; we fabricate in a finite and fragile manner; we bring about and effect artificial things, in alien matter and in ourselves; we manufacture technical constructs and states. Human labor overruns the globe with its traces, and the struggle for rule rages through cities and empires.16 However, in work and struggle the human being is close to the generative prevailing of the cosmos that structures and configures. Because we are opened up to the prevailing whole, experience our finitude from out of its in-finitude, we know we will perish and we know about the imperishability of the race; we are able to fabricate and to form politically. As the knowing, understanding world-dweller, as politēs tou kosmou, as cosmopolitan, the human being is the mortal, the lover, the worker, and the fighter. These basic phenomena of our existence are grounded in our world-relation. The animal is intraworldly, without understanding its intraworldliness; it therefore is not aware of death and does not know love, work, and ruling.
But how do things stand with the gods? Are they not similar to human beings insofar as they, too, are open to the world, indeed perhaps stand closer to the whole in a higher and more essential sense? What we understand in only a cloudy and twilit sort of way, that is, that remarkable Being that is comprehensively unified and at the same time appears to be broken in itself in myriad ways and divided into finite things, may perhaps stand before their serenely gazing eyes in effortless clarity. But it is not so much in the difference of a clearer view that they have the advantage over us, not in the knowledge that is more aware and in their greater creative power. What abyssally separates them from everything human is this: that they do not know death, that they are immortal. In the case of the human being, everything that he does has the character of transience, is overshadowed by death. That holds for human love, human work, and the human struggle for rule. And if the myths of peoples speak of the death of the gods, this is a death that is followed by a resurrection, not an actual, final death. Everything the gods do is stamped by immortality, whether it be the way they produce artificial things, the way they invent skills and teach them to human beings, or the way they contend with each other and vie for supremacy in ruling the world. They do not produce their life by producing required, necessary means for life, they do not have to work in order to keep themselves alive, they are not threatened with the danger of starving, they do not suffer the hardships of the weather, they do not need home and hearth like human beings—and they foster their love as an amusement rather than as the preservation of the race of gods. They exist—in the sense of a perpetual perdurance. And because they are imperishable, they do not need, strictly speaking, to love, to work, or to struggle. Human seriousness is missing in their love, work, and struggle. Everything becomes easy and effortless for them. Love, work, and struggle—as depicted in the myths of the gods—are rather a kind of pastime; indeed, we can say, a kind of play. The gods play, they live in blessed leisure, they not only play their games, they also play at love, work, and struggle. They play at the human-all-too-human. The strife of the goddesses over the apple of discord was not merely a divinely ironic portrayal of human bickering; it involved human beings, led to the judgment of Paris and thus to the Trojan War. And if in the course of this the heavenly ones themselves took sides, some fighting on the side of the Achaeans, some on the side of the Trojans, they themselves did not fight a battle for life and death against each other. Indeed they could not die at all; they could at best wound one another. Their struggle was a game—with playthings. And these playthings were the human beings who risked their finite lives, who actually fought and suffered and experienced heartbreaking grief. It is a flagrant idea that all human hardship and trouble is a spectacle, a dramatic play, in the eyes of the gods, that it is elevated to an ultimate buoyant lightness. Play is thus what appears to be raised up above all human measure into the super-human. It is a difficult question as to whether we know about play because we understand the divinity of the gods in the manner of an intimation and from the distance of privation—or whether the human being attained the idea of divine, superhuman, immortal beings who are without needs because he is familiar with play and in play experiences a liberation and release from the heavy, oppressive weight of existence—and ascribed this experience to those imagined beings as a lasting condition. Is human play a reflected radiance of divine Being in our life—or are the gods phantasmagoria of the human drive to play? We cannot answer this question. Theology has no place within philosophy, insofar as the latter conceives of itself as the finite world-wisdom of the human being. At any rate, it is incontestable that the problem of God was central to entire history of Western metaphysics—from Aristotle to Hegel. Yet this entire metaphysical tradition was determined by the suppression of the world-problem. Our reference to the mythical representations of the Being and prevailing of the gods in connection with play thus refers to the merely human side of religion and of the cult and deliberately brackets the question concerning the existence of the gods or God. The cultic symbol dissembles and occludes the more primordial world-sense of the symbol as the coincidence of thing and world. The cultic symbol is characterized by the mysterious presence of divine forces and powers in an elect and demarcated thing, which thus attains an elevated significance and function. The table becomes an altar, bread and wine a sacrament. Through the consecration that the priest as the mouthpiece of the divine pronounces, certain things that otherwise stand in everyday relations to the human being are used and required by him; they can be elevated to the status of harboring a superhuman power. The thing then does not cease to appear as it was appearing hitherto. It does not change its form but remains what it was. It is always still itself and yet at the same time not itself. That should not be misconstrued as though a meaningful sense were bound to any kind of finite thing by collective agreement, as though the thing pointed away from itself toward something else. A signpost is a board that has been written on to indicate directions and attached to a post by the wayside: on it the piece of wood and the “meaning” are clearly to be distinguished. However, the bread that two or three who are assembled in the name of God break is not an external sign for a psychological sense that is thereby intended, but is rather, as this bread, the hidden god. The bread does not cease to appear to be bread and to taste like bread, and yet it coincides with God himself in a mysterious identity. God does not break through in his heavenly radiance by means of the inconspicuous loaf of bread; he remains concealed in it. By his superior, indeed, most superior actuality, he does not obliterate the actuality of the bread-thing with which we are ordinarily familiar: he does not himself go into the phenomenon but holds himself at a remove from the unbelieving gaze. He is inaccessible to the everyday gaze, for which he is but a “non-actuality.” But it is precisely this structure that, in our context, interests us: how, so long as ordinary, everyday things are held to be the standard of being actual, something that is held to be “non-actual” can be conceived as a higher, superior mode of Being—how what is stronger in Being can conceal itself in the semblance of what is weaker in Being. The interpretation of play by Platonic metaphysics conceives the “playworld” merely as an imitative reproduction, thus as inferior when compared to the things that the craftsman manufactures. To be sure, Plato does not take everyday sensible things to be the standard of valid Being. The standard for him is the Being of the idea that is only accessible to thinking. Measured by their duration, all ordinary natural and artificial things are not genuinely existent. But for him the playworld is only a reproduction of sensible things and therefore even less existent than these. If the playworld, however, is not conceived as a reproduction but rather as a symbol, then despite its “non-actuality” it has a higher ontological status than the tangible things of everyday actuality. As a symbol the playworld of human play is initially understood in the cult. The cult is the comprehensive concept [Inbegriff] for all comportments carried out by human beings toward the divine, the comprehensive concept for the representations of God, for the rites and ceremonies of a veneration quaking with terror. The cult—as the human relation to the gods—dissembles human existence’s deeper relation to the world. We, as the world-open being, comport ourselves indirectly and in a mediated manner to the world itself, insofar as we “believe” in a superhuman being that is more open to the world, and insofar as we secretly take the properties of the gods to characterize the world, we think the totality of the world through the power and knowledge of the gods and speak of omnipotence and omniscience. And to the extent that the cult (considered only in a purely human sense) is a mediate form of human existence’s ecstatic relation to the world, the cultic symbol, too, is an early form of the most primordial symbol—it is a symbol of the symbol.
We are approaching the problem from within this perspective. This perspective is one-sided and perhaps all-too-human, because it only takes up the cult according to its human form of appearance and ignores its own truth as a revelation of the divine itself. But the truth of religion remains inaccessible to philosophy. It is another matter whether this has as its consequence a subordination of philosophy to religion or the resolute indifference of the thinking human intellect vis-à-vis all religion. In early antiquity the human being is disturbed and is shaken to the core, agitated, excited, made anxious, and uplifted by his belief in daemons. His sojourn in the world is not exclusively, indeed not even primarily, determined by what he sees, feels, smells, or tastes; it is not characterized by the apprehension of perceived things; it is not ruled by the visible. Much more strongly is he concerned with the invisible, the suspected, the intimated, that which is felt as uncanny power. He is not safe and sound at home in a small but firm circumscribed sphere of familiar things. The shadow of inconceivable powers can always unexpectedly and suddenly fall over all that is familiar and well known. The landscape of his life can suddenly become clouded over; horror can arise from the closest things. It is already even the case for the archaic “savages” that the Being of things in which we believe ourselves to be well versed can incomprehensibly “veer” into a mysteriously dark strangeness that shocks and horrifies. Only the savage does not formulate such veering with the categories of the problem of Being. Even for him the Being of existent things and of his very self is profoundly familiar and at the same time profoundly strange and uncanny. But he calls such experiences the workings of daemons. Early historical existence, to a degree scarcely still imaginable for us, is full of association with daemons. They are everywhere and nowhere, are here and yet not visible; they lurk behind each bush and tree, materialize in diverse disguises, appear in the most impossible and unbelievable forms, mask themselves in the figure of the friend and, from out of the most benign disguise, pounce maliciously, or, with the ghastly forms of ghosts, turn out to be helpful, beneficial powers. Daemons are so unpredictable that one can scarcely arm oneself against them. They are incomprehensible and mask themselves in ever new metamorphoses; they are manifold and variable, capricious and shifting like the weather: sometimes good, sometimes wicked, sometimes helpful, sometimes horrible, sometimes generous, sometimes rapacious. Daemons lie like a monstrous nightmare on the archaic collective soul. And, to be sure, the most uncanny thing is that one does not know why they involve themselves with human beings, why they continually play with them sometimes for good and sometimes for evil, why they interfere everywhere in human affairs, why they confuse and bring into order again and confuse once more. Indeed, daemons do not need human beings, in any case not in the way that the human being needs domesticated animals such as the ox, which he has draw the plow, or the horse, with which he rides out on hunting expeditions and military campaigns. Daemons would be fine without continually disturbing human beings. But they do not let the human being out of their clutches, nor out of the sight of their sometimes malicious, sometimes benevolent eyes, which see without being seen by human beings. The early human being, in everything that he does, lives with the basic feeling of being furtively watched by superhuman witnesses of his deeds and omissions. But these witnesses—what do they actually want from him? They do not want his work, nor his spoils of war, nor his pleasures of love; they also do not want to rule over him as human beings rule over human beings. The human being, compared to daemons, is less than the slave compared to his master. They reign over him in a wholly inconceivable manner. They are, indeed, not only outside, concealed in external things; they also conceal themselves within the depths of the human being’s soul, make him possessed, a person running amok in every sense of the word. Daemons are unrelenting, impossible to ward off, but concealed and disguised witnesses of the course of human life. They obviously take pleasure in forcing open every recess of human self-consciousness, in spying into the furthest nook of each soul, in dabbling in every human craft, in thwarting him from attaining any sort of free selfhood. What do daemons do? We said already that they play, as it were, with human beings, but not like a player does with other playmates; rather, they play with them like a player plays with a plaything. But that does not yet say enough. For a lifeless plaything, it is entirely a matter of indifference how it is manipulated. One can handle them carefully or carelessly. Among children of a certain age it is often the greatest playful delight to take a plaything apart into its constituent parts. One can also play with a living plaything, for instance, animals, which presents a particularly complicated problem.
The human being documents his dominant position compared to all non-human things by “looking at” them. In his vision, other things become his objects. The human being is the universal witness to the Being of non-human things, which surround us as animals, plants, and rocks. But this witness and spectator is himself the spectacle for an uncanny gaze, which he always feels on the back of his neck—which he never sees unconcealed and as it is in itself, no matter how quickly he may turn around. The belief in daemons is always a belief in such superhuman witnesses to humanity’s life. In the course of human history the primeval belief in daemons becomes clarified. Above all the ambivalent character of the daemonic recedes more and more—or better, separates into “good” and “evil” powers. Daemons lose their characteristic feature of exhibiting an inconceivable reversal of opposites into each other; more and more, they become “housed” in determinate forms and are thought of as “settled” into these forms, even if the latter are still viewed as disguises of their true essence. Daemons become local spirits, local deities, and are distinguished according to their functions and effects, which they exercise on human beings. To be sure, even the “good daemons” retain the enigmatic double aspect of the benign and the formidable; in the awe before them the fear that is near to all reverence still resonates. With this progressive restructuring of the representation of daemons also comes a restructuring of the human relation to daemonic forces. They are represented as “able to be influenced”—able to be influenced by a right and upright conduct of human life, by prayers, requests, and sacrificial offerings. And, in alliance with good daemons that he has moved to favor him, the human being can then avoid the evil daemons’ stalking, tricks, and wicked deeds. The belief in daemons becomes a healing practice with manifold applications. In the course of this trajectory—as is often17 said—a purification comes about, that is, the belief in daemons progresses to the genuine belief in gods, indeed finally to monotheism. We can thus distinguish two main motifs: on the one hand, the tendency to personify the divine. The relation between divine power and the human being who is at the mercy of and handed over to it is determined according to categories of human sociality. “God” is experienced as the personal, overpowering “thou” who takes us up into his goodness and whom the human being approaches with complete trust—like a child approaches its father. God, then, forms a “bond,” for example, with human beings, with his chosen tribe; he is the god of his people as this people is the people of its god. The other motif in the purification of the representation of God is operative in metaphysics, indeed already in its founders. Plato’s critique of the poets was not least a critique of daemonology, too; the god of metaphysics is not the dark power that pursues and hunts human beings, plunges them into fortune and misfortune, casts them into patricide and maternal defilement—the metaphysical god is essentially only good and is for human beings only the cause of good things, never the cause of what is bad and evil. The cause of evil deeds, of errors and transgressions, is always the human being alone. The metaphysical god does not veil himself, does not conceal himself in diverse forms, does not change like a Proteus; he remains unaltered in himself, is pure self-persistence, is changeless constancy, self-identity; nor does he reveal himself in such a way that he sends his son into the world and announces himself in the latter’s words. He is always manifest and always announced in the logos, which prevails through all beings. But he is not visible to human beings’ sense of sight; he is only accessible in pure thinking. And this metaphysical god of thought, this philosopher-god of Plato and Aristotle up to Hegel’s “world-spirit,” is not amenable to supplications and requests, to any sacrificial aromas. He is not moved by human pleading, is not moved by promises and good intentions. He is the demiurge and the sovereign of the cosmos, but not the loving father who forgives and draws near to his heart. And even if Plato says that the human being is “the plaything of the god,”18 this divine play that is thought by Plato is already as moralized as is the play of the poets whom he does allow in his state. The two main motifs of a “purification of the representation of God,” that is, Jewish monotheism and the metaphysical concept of God, came to be united in the history of European humanity and combined under diverse inner tensions. But the representation that the human being lives under the eyes of God, exists in front of his invisible observation, always has a superhuman observer, witness and examiner of the heart over him—that he is never alone in the cosmos—has remained preserved up to the most sublime forms. As long as this representation prevails, all human play is reinforced in its cultic derivation, is a kind of play before God, is not yet immediately worldly.
Now what does the cultic derivation of play look like? By “the cultic derivation of human play,” we are in no way implying that all play is originally rooted in the cult. But considering the archaic cult offers a distinct possibility to understand the “non-actuality” that belongs to play as the playworld in terms of a reference to a higher, not a lower, kind of Being, as measured by the Being of things we ordinarily experience. If the early human being initially knows himself to be uncannily exposed to unpredictable, capricious, and fickle daemons that are sometimes well disposed and sometimes malevolently disposed, then he can oppose to them no force of his own that would come from his own undaunted Being. As long as he simply is what he is, he remains a ball for daemons to play with. However, he is “simply” when he loves, works, struggles. But already death brings along a peculiar bifurcation of the human essence. We distinguish the living and the departed. It would be an all too cheap, pseudo-rationalistic explanation if one were to say that such a bifurcation does not truly take place. In this view, there are only living human beings. Dead human beings are, at most, corpses, relics, from which being-human has departed. Dead human beings are not human beings, they were human beings. That is certainly correct, even if in an entirely superficial sense. Were being-dead only simple being-annihilated, it would then be completely senseless to comport oneself at all to the dead; one would comport oneself to an entirely empty nothing. But the cult of the departed is perhaps the most ancient cult on earth; the memory that we retain of those who have returned home binds our day above ground to a mysterious night from which all life comes and into which it sinks again. The living know themselves to be members of an endless chain, with the deceased behind them and the unborn in front of them. In knowing about the difference between life and death a difference of world-dimensions is understood: the dimension of manifestation and the dimension of absence. The reciprocal relation of manifestation and absence prevails through everything that is. It is evident in a conspicuous manner in the human association with daemons. They are present in the mode of a thousandfold veiling. They manifest themselves in the mask. When the human being lives without masks, thus simply, for instance in the harshness of work and of struggle, he cannot confront daemons; he is at their mercy, exposed to their curse or their blessing. However, the human being has the peculiar possibility of being able to mask himself. Of course, he masks himself differently than the daemon does. Anything whatsoever can be a mask of the daemon. He can appear as a bull, as a swan, as rain, and seduce earthly women—as Zeus used to do. However, what he is in himself, no mortal eye sees, for it would perish like Semele. The human being who masks himself indeed remains in the form that nature has given to him; he cannot escape from it. He masks himself by covering himself, dressing up, wrapping himself in animal skins, concealing his true face in carved masks. He uses the mask as a thing that is distinct from himself, as a cloak, as camouflage. The mask is thus a prop that is different from the masked human being. Obviously we cannot in the same sense say of the daemon that he uses the things in which he temporarily appears as the human being uses his artificial masks. These things become masks by virtue of the god or daemon temporarily appearing in individual things—but by means of masks, which the human being makes for himself or which he finds, the human being is for the very first time transposed into the possibility of appearing ambiguously and polysemously.
In any case, one must guard against an interpretation that would understand the mask that the human being procures for himself as only a reproduction or afterimage. The mask can always be reinterpreted in this way, but it is not originally so. The donning of a mask is an elementary form of enchantment. The basic purpose of the human mask is not to deceive one’s fellow human beings in order to lead them to believe something, in order to appear to be something for others that one in fact is not. One wants to appear multifarious for oneself; one wants with the mask to enter into the magic spell of the daemonic, to participate in a minor way in the incomprehensible transformative power of daemons. The mask is not supposed to mislead; it is supposed to enchant. To a certain degree the mask releases us from the inescapable fixity and rigidity of our life’s situation. One can be everything again. With the mask, the human being even attains daemonic force and power, to a certain extent. In the play of masks he can confront daemons, dispose them to be friendly or drive back the malevolent ones. At issue here is not outwitting the daemons, who would be deceived by a mask, as it were. Beings who are experts at such a high degree of dissimulation do not really allow themselves to be misled by some animal skins and face masks. That which they shrink back from is the magical power of the human being, which he achieves in the masking, in the cancellation of simplicity, and in the passage to a multifariousness of existence. As a player the human being becomes more powerfully and essentially commensurate with the superhuman daemons than in other fields of life; he is able to confront them with the same power, even if in a lesser magnitude. The masking of the human being in ancient periods of humanity has by no means been understood as an optional, arbitrary, or harmless play, for instance as an amusement or cheerful masquerade. On the contrary, it is considered to be a dangerous risk, a provocation of daemons. It was not open to everyone; it was the privilege of the skilled enchanter-priest, the medicine man. The mask became a ritual prop of a cultic invocation that put human society into the full circuit of all the beneficial and terrifying forces of terrestrial and chthonic daemons. The peculiar “non-actuality” of the “appearance” achieved with the mask can be understood, in a more primordial way, not as a deceptive effect but rather as enchantment, as magic. Cultic play at its most fundamental level is the enchantment of masks. What it is beyond this remains for us to ask in what follows.
The enchantment of the mask is the most ancient prop of human play—it belongs to the early form of the cult in an entirely essential way. Strictly speaking, the mask is not a plaything, is not something with which one plays but rather something in which one plays, something that constitutes cultic play in the very first place. The mask is the enchanted item whose possession transforms the human being—the spell’s power adheres to it, as it were; it has a magical quality. But it does not have this like the stone has its weight or like the tool has its usefulness; its magical quality is not a property that belongs to a thing in itself or that belongs to a thing in relation to the human being. Heaviness belongs to the stone (to be sure, not in an absolute sense but rather only insofar as it is in the gravitational field of a body with mass) under ordinary terrestrial conditions. The usefulness of a stone axe or a bow as a weapon exists for that human being who is experienced in handling tools and weapons, who is well versed in such practical things, who understands how to wield them. The practical quality of such artifacts produced by human beings, however, is more than merely the character of being taken up that a thing has for the one grasping it. Anything can have a special “sense” for any human being beyond its general, objective properties: as a memento, as a gift, for instance; it has a reverential value and the like. The things in one’s environment are enveloped in countless sense-qualities of diverse kinds that have wholly different ways of belonging to the thing itself. In a hike on untrodden paths, for instance, we take conspicuous and prominent things as path markers in order to find our way back again. In that case these things have the meaning of pathmarking only for us. However, every alpinist in the high mountains understands the path-directing meaning of so-called cairns; these already have an “intersubjective” meaning, even if it pertains to the limited intersubjectivity of those who understand it. It would be a great and vast challenge to go through the objectivity of the sense-characters in the things within our environment and to determine its many forms and stages appropriately. The human being does not stand on one side and objective things on the other—the human being is interwoven with his environment in a way that is both complex and difficult to disentangle; he has deposited and objectified his understanding, his thinking, his feelings, above all, however, his activity, in things. There are human sense-qualities in things that are only accessible to a few, that display private significations, so to speak, that are not able to be recognized at all by other fellow human beings, such as secret signs and the like. However, there are also sense-characters that exist as private significance for the public, as do the hearts carved into the bark of trees, for instance. Furthermore, there are characteristic significations that exist for wider society: national memorial sites, flags, and so forth. From the mere significances in things, we must distinguish significations that are secure and fixed for a secure and fixed circuit of those who understand them and that are connected with specific things, such as the value of goods, exchange value, commercial value, and monetary value. In these “values” the utility of these things is expressed for all. Obviously, the “objectivity” of the monetary value of a house19 is of a different sort than the objectivity of the value of piety; monetary value is, so to speak, more public and universal, more intersubjective, and more “objective” than the value of piety. Monetary value has a socioeconomic reality, while the value of piety exists for the few for whom the house was a home. Of course, the greater or lesser publicity of a value-quality does not yet tell us anything about the status of such significations.
Clearer than the sense-qualities that “invisibly,” so to speak, adhere to things are the characters in things that point back to a shaping, transformative activity of the human being. All artificial constructs in the broadest sense bear the human act of formation in themselves; human formation is documented in their form and has itself been reified. This human action that has been objectified in things is, for the community of practical users themselves, an objective feature that co-constitutes the objectivity of the practical object. The utility, suitability, serviceability of things produced artificially is by no means a “mere conception,” but rather belongs to the ontological constitution of the artificial construct. To be sure, its utility exists for the human being, exists only for that living being that is determined by the incarnation of freedom. The animal is corporeal but not free—and the angel is free but not corporeal. Neither the animal nor the angel can have a self-created artificial environment. Only the human being works and produces artificial things through his work activity. The animal and the angel do not know what it means to work. They both lack the capacity for technē. Neither is dependent in its Being on the products of its own production. The human being alone is the odd terrestrial creature who does not live out in a predetermined way the life granted him, but rather incessantly transforms the conditions of his earthly sojourn, rises up against maternal nature, and wrests from her a place for settlement, stone for the construction of a house, clay for pottery, bronze for tools and equipment, wild plants for refinement, and wild beasts for taming and domestication. But in work the human being not only produces food and equipment for the production of food, he also, by means of work, produces all the artificial things that he uses in the other basic dimensions of his embodied existence: the necessary, requisite things for battle, for love, for remembering the dead, for honoring the gods—he produces weapons and beds, jugs used for libations. Work creates things of which battle, love, the cult of the dead, and the cult of the gods must always make use in order to have, as it were, a “site.” That is also profoundly connected with the embodiment of human existence: we do not battle in a merely intellectual way, not as one pure intellectual being against other intellectual beings, we battle with weapons. We do not love soul to soul, lifted out of all sensuality; we love the whole, other, beloved human being in a bodily way and we use the bed for procreation and childbirth. Even our deaths are carried out not as a purely “intellectual event” but rather in the full concretion of our embodied existence; the one who dies departs and leaves behind his corpse. The coffin as a hollowed-out tree trunk, in which one is borne out of the community of the living, is likewise a product of labor, a fabrication of homo faber. And similarly, all the devices with which we accomplish the remembrance of the dead are human workpieces. The temple for the god, the ornamented columns in which he comes to epiphany, the votive offerings and cultic devices—all this stems from the laboring activity of the human being as a worker. The worker produces all the artificial things in which the fundamental dimensions of our existence manifest themselves. Without the labor of the worker the human being would be without hearth and home—he would be like a lover without a bed, like a warrior without a weapon, like a suppliant without a sacred precinct and temple, like one who has departed without a tomb. The significance of these necessary things, which provide the sites for basic human phenomena, has for the most part not been sufficiently grasped. In most cases, one takes them as more or less contingent constructs of a merely incidental kind. The incalculable wealth of forms allows the aspect of arbitrariness to thus come to the fore. To be sure, the particular form of weapon, bed, cultic device, or tomb is certainly not at all “necessary”; human history has brought to light an immense richness of forms and in the course of its progress will also bring entirely new and unexpected forms to light. But these are always variations on the same fundamental themes. As long as the human being exists bodily as finite freedom on the earth, he will work and use the devices of work; he will love and have need of the bed for congress; he will erect a house for the gods, who for their part have no need of housing; he will put the corpses of the dead into coffins or consign them to the funeral pyre. Precisely in such things as plow and sword, bed and temple, cradle and coffin, an eternally human sense comes to light: we are interwoven with the Being of such things; they belong to the human being’s furnishings for life, belong to us, are not to be thought away by us without destroying the specific humanity of the human being. They certainly do not themselves have the human being’s mode of Being; they are artificial things—but the human being as a producer cannot be understood at all without his products. The human being as worker objectifies himself in his works, in the constructs of his work activity. Yet the human significance of the temple is not exhausted by its being a house erected by human labor. The temple is necessary for the human being’s need to worship superhuman forces. The temple pertains to the suppliant, not primarily to the worker, even if it only comes into being through the worker. Insofar as the human being produces artificial things in accordance with skilled labor, it appears to be in his power whether such constructs come about or not. He is the efficient cause for such things, which are his “effects.” As effects, as results of labor, they depend on him, the worker. But is it up to the human being whether he wants to be a worker? And is it up to him whether he wants to be a warrior, a lover, and one who prays? Are they not fundamental needs of our existence, which first open up the realm of our free creative activity? Certainly, there are only pots because there are potters—but there must be potters because the human being needs vessels. To be sure, there are only temples because there are builders—but there must be builders because the human being needs, besides a house for himself, a house for the gods, needs to have a consecrated site in order to concentrate on the highest being and to bind his terrestrial day to the heavens. The openness of the human being for his basic needs and the purposive understanding that is contained therein first motivates his work activity. The causality of the causa finalis here precedes the causa efficiens. The human being is creative and industrious because he is placed into the elementary basic needs of his finite existence, because he is exposed to the unsettling questionworthiness of beings, because he knows about Being and nothingness, feels his subjugation to death and at the same time the inexhaustibility of the swelling ground of life, because he recognizes the supremacy of the gods. In battle, in love, and in the cult he exists just as primordially as in work. And yet work, insofar as it builds a human environment and stamps a formation on natural things from out of the human spirit, in a certain way becomes more prominent than the other basic phenomena. The economic process then appears to be the genuine history of the human being. However, in truth, the human essence is structured much more complexly; it forms a reciprocal interpenetration of the basic phenomena. Work makes possible the sites of battle, love, and the cult—but battle, too, avails itself of love, cult, and work in total martial mobilization. Love is likewise a comprehensive aspect of existence: because we obtain earthly immortality through love, we need the bed, the cradle, dwellings for the family, labor as the provision of subsistence, and the cult as the ethical preservation of the depth of the intimacy of familial life in the shadowy realm of the Penates and Lares. And, finally, the cult hallows the tools of the worker, blesses the weapons of the warrior, consecrates the matrimony of husband and wife, and bears offerings for the dead.
The imbrication and joining together of the elementary dimensions of existence is a problem of the greatest philosophical significance and also of the greatest methodological difficulty. We do not yet20 have the adequate categories at our disposal to formulate with sufficient conceptual acuity the being-with-one-another and the reciprocal interpenetration of the fields of human life. It does not suffice to simply distinguish concepts of existence from concepts of things. For, in the first place, human existence is not at all to be understood apart from its involvement with things; it does not hover like a pure spirit, is not like the disembodied, disincarnate angel above spatio-temporal things—the human being exists in the midst of things, exists in the space and time of the world and is deposited therein. He “founds” by cultivating the earth, erecting living quarters, and wresting the things necessary for his basic needs into his realm of life. And, in the second place, all human relation to intraworldly things is already directed by a world-relation, even if an obscure one. The human being is a worker, warrior, lover, and worshipper of the omni-potent because he exists open to the world. The being-together of the basic phenomena of existence ultimately cannot be determined at all from the mere contrast to forms of configurations and constellations that are thought naturalistically, but rather presupposes insight into the connection between the human being and the world. Human labor, however, also produces the plaything for play, and also produces the mask, that is, the enchanted item, without itself being the sort of thing that enchants.
First we must elucidate why the mask is not a plaything—and, to be sure, we must do this within the horizon of the primeval, archaic life of the human being. There one does not play with the mask, one plays in the mask. The mask is not a thing suitable for play, to which an imaginary play-sense can be easily attached, so to speak—as, for instance, the hobbyhorse made out of wood has the play-sense of “war-horse” for the boy who is playing. The wooden thing becomes a plaything insofar as it is given a made-up signification within the context of an enclosed playworld. In this, the resemblance of appearance between the plaything and the represented thing itself is not even absolutely necessary, but a resemblance does facilitate the player’s imaginative bestowal of sense when he designates the wooden thing as a spirited horse and himself as the gallant rider. The plaything is positioned within the encompassing sense-context of the whole playworld, in which it has its imaginary signification, its role-function. The mask of the primitive, in contrast, opens up the play-space for his cultic play in the first place. By masking himself therein the play first begins—a kind of play that indeed has a fearful, dangerous and uncanny seriousness. The masked human being becomes ambivalent, polysemous, unrecognizable. Precisely by concealing himself, he appears as a power equal to the daemons. The mask is thus something like an invisibility cloak, an enchanted ring, a magic wand. It is not so much a matter of what or whom the mask is supposed to portray, to which daemon, to which superhuman helper it is assigned. The face of daemons is indeed inaccessible and unrecognizable for human beings, even if they repeatedly attempt “to make a graven image” of it. The daemon-mask can make no concretely grounded pretension to “resemble” the represented daemon itself; it can at most express more or less precisely a collective representation. The reproductive character is not the essential thing here. Rather, the dissolution of human straightforwardness and unambiguousness is essential. When we escape the firm characterization according to which we must be identical with ourselves, when the primitive early human being can at the same time be a human and a leopard, he is able to resist hostile daemons and to bring the well-disposed ones into closer contact with him. The mask is the enchanted item that is not a means of enchantment, not a means to help the enchanter, but rather is the spell itself. But the mask must be worn by the human being; it does not by itself have the power that belongs to it when it is worn. Taken by itself alone, to be sure, it is still something to be shunned, something on which a heavy taboo is laid—the forbidden thing that may not be touched. But not until the medicine man wears the mask and becomes the ritual mask-dancer within the circle of his helpers does the horde that fears the daemon take courage and gain confidence; through their magic priest they are in a certain way able to participate in the superhuman power of daemons, to which they would otherwise be helplessly delivered over. As someone who is elevated in a superhuman manner in the mask, the medicine man is, to be sure, not himself taken to be a daemonic being by his tribesmen; they know who is concealed under the mask, but they also know that the person concealed there is not the genuine truth of the mask. The truth of the mask for them is the daemonic polysemy as such. And this is not a result of work, so to speak,21 as one for instance produces the beauty of a ceramic piece in the process of producing ceramics. The mask is not a means for producing a polysemy in the mask-wearing human being, and it is not a means for bringing about an enchanting power. If we were to understand the situation in this way, then the labor of the human being would have generative functions for the other equally fundamental fields of life. The production of the mask is itself almost a cultic activity, which is performed according to a transmitted secret knowledge; in this case the cultic aspect also overlays the work processes that lead to the cult’s props. The production of the mask that imparts daemonic power occurs for the most part in a ritually stylized process of work and remains separated from the everyday and profane activity of work. In the finished product, an appearance [Schein] refers back [fällt . . . zurück] to the technē that leads to sacred artifacts. The enchantment of masks operates by shining back [rückscheinend] on the production of masks. Technique thus becomes hallowed, but only the technique that leads to cult objects becomes sacred technique.
However, this is only one concept of sacred technique. This concept is also used—precisely in the explication of the primeval cult—in a sense that is meant completely differently: namely, as a title for the activities, practices, and actions of the medicine man who is endowed with the enchanting power of daemons. Perhaps here, too, in the beginning was the deed. The cult, conceived in its archaic root as an association with daemons, was less an observation and a tranquil tarrying before things or great contexts, was less a contemplative overview of the whole structure of the world and its order, than an attempt to save ourselves from terrible distress, from actual dangers and occasionally, too, from imaginary ones. The human being of early times was, to a degree scarcely still perceptible to us, exposed to the ravages of the elements, to the wildfire of the steppes, to floods of the sea, to adverse weather that destroyed his seeds. He was also exposed to the blows of fate falling incomprehensibly, to the whims of those who dwell in the heavens, who send sickness and blight. At every turn he felt himself secretly observed by resentful kobolds. Life’s decisive question for him was whether he could ward off the evil and hostile influence of sinister daemons and how he could secure for himself the help and assistance of the well-disposed spirits. The human being first lifted his gaze to gods and daemons from deep need, which he was no longer able to master from his own powers. Need taught him to pray. Not the astonished admiration for the grandeur of the world, not the rapture before the shimmering starry night, not the uplifting and sublime view of the wide sea when dawn breaks in the distance brought the human being to fall on his knees, but rather bitter need and obscure suffering, anxiety and concern for those near and dear, fear of the uncanny, trembling before superhuman forces. The archaic cult emerges not so much from a freer22 openness to the world than it does from the fear of the Lord. It is essentially practical. For that reason this cult is predominantly activity, a ritual enactment, but precisely not activity in the customary and ordinary sense. It is the activity of enchantment that for the most part is carried out under the spell of mask-enchantment. The medicine man has extraordinary powers and abilities—yet not from himself, insofar as and to the extent that he is a member of the horde, the tribe, the clan; he has them thanks to the mask, by means of which he can touch and move the daemonic sphere. Ritual activity thus has an entirely peculiar structure: it is a “likening [Gleichung].” What is meant by this requires elucidation.
The ritual activity of the medicine man is to bring to presence in the small, finite circuit of the primitive horde that which prevails through everything as a greater, overarching event. To a certain degree, the comprehensive event finds a reflection in the vicarious activity of the enchanter. However, the reflection is not simply a reproduction of the whole, for the whole is indeed not given as an original. The significant connections in the counterplay of benevolent and malevolent daemons are rather divined than clearly seen, and the ritual gesture is the way in which this intimation is brought into a specific and clear form. The activity of enchantment is just as much intimation [vor-ahmend] as it is imitation [nach-ahmend]; it represents, yet not in the way a reproduction represents an original, but rather in the way a part represents the whole. A mysterious harmony in some way prevails between the part and the whole. The whole shines back into the part and expresses itself in the part, even if in a fragmented manner. The light of the whole falls on the part; the fragment is “completed” by the whole. The totum is in parte. That they have in themselves a symbolic representation of the whole without simply and merely reproducing the whole by no means occurs in all things or all activities. The whole exceeds every possibility of reproduction. But it is representable in the symbolic figure. The medicine man endowed with the enchantment of masks knows the strong symbolic gestures that move the daemons, he knows the secret significations that are based on likenesses between whole and part, and he understands how to handle them ritually. He becomes a practitioner of a magical art; he holds in his hand the “key,” as it were, that unlocks the relations between whole and part. The hunt, the youthful squad’s military campaign, wedding celebrations, funerals—he brings all of this together in the correct and valid gesture, in the ritual ceremony, and he joins the humble life of his tribe to the more powerful orders of the daemonic realm, thereby providing an anchor for it in the superhuman. His activity, however, is by no means an impotent “knowing” about the human’s situation of being threatened by daemons, about the human’s precarious and uncanny position, which he would elucidate in interpretative gestures. The gestures of the rite have above all a practical sense; they ward off hostile powers and, on the other hand, “call the arms of the gods to one’s side.”23 The rite invokes, rendering the evil and good spirits spellbound; it is a magical technique, as it were—in the primitive community the most important of all techniques, more important than the construction of houses and cultivation of the land, domestication of animals, and the art of war, more important than the production of devices, tools, clothing, and jewelry. For all the effort of human beings is in vain, and all their skills count for nothing, if the practice of enchantment and the priest’s magical technique do not assure a small garden for human industry. Most ritual gestures have this sense of a return of all human things to the supremacy of divine operation, to the blessing of the good powers and protection from the evil ones.
But there are also distinct activities in the early cult that have a significance that exceeds what we have discussed to this point—and within which the structure of sense belonging to the symbolic likening is emphasized more sharply. We mean by this the actions that are genuinely enchanting. If the medicine man generally portrays the blessing of heavenly rain for human fields in the ritual pouring of holy water and makes clear to all what the heavenly power of blessing is, such a gesture indeed always has a practical sense, which, however, primarily serves to orient the members of the tribe and to help them come to an understanding regarding the powers on which their life is dependent. However, if drought settles over the land and the seeds go to ruin under the scorching sun, then perhaps the medicine man ventures a great reversal. If the whole symbolically recurs in the part, then the part’s influence on the whole must be possible, too. The symbolic likening must be able to be “reversed.” What happens vicariously in the part must recur in the greater whole. It is not only that the whole shines back in partial things, which are capable of a symbolic representation of the whole, but the parts thus distinguished are also able to influence the whole: pars pro toto. The rainmaker pours the precious and rare water uselessly onto the dust—but he thereby compels the all-prevailing daemons to repeat his activity now on a greater scale and to send rainfall. This idea of an initiatory enchantment lies at the basis of the magic practice of many primitive peoples.24
There are, to some extent, stages in the development of the cult that we have distinguished up to now. The oldest stage appears to be the enchantment of masks; then on that is based magical technique, above all in the impressive form of initiatory enchantment, which is a reversal of symbolic likening. Over this then arises the third stage, which we can call cult-play in the genuine sense. By no means do the two first stages disappear when the cult has taken on the character of cultic play. The mask and magic technique remain preserved in cult-play, too, but they are arranged within its context of sense and attain a function within its total meaning. Cult-play likewise retains an eminently practical sense, becomes a mode of association with divine powers, is a solitary appeal, as it were, a solemn prayer, a plea for heavenly help and blessing. However, it is detached from the immediate situation of crisis, from the entirely concrete cause in an acute crisis; it belongs within the course of the sacred calendar, within the rhythmic recurrence of the seasons, within the revolution of the moon, sun, celestial bodies—it already has a cosmic vastness, even though it is not the symbolic representation of the prevailing of the world but rather of the rule of the gods, of the coming and going of Persephone. In cult-play there is also already to a high degree a beholding, a rapt theōria, a wondering at and astonished admiration of the divine governance in the world-totality. Cult-play allows one to see how things stand with the human being, with his putative power and grandeur, with his pride and his knowledge—how small and nugatory he is before the gods, how he must be shattered by guilt and abysmal suffering, how he must sink into disgrace and madness, in order to experience the most bitter dregs of our existence, the limits of the human, as did Oedipus and Ajax, as did Niobe. Cultic play becomes the dramatic play or spectacle of the communal festival of a god, becomes an epiphany of divine power and a paradigm of human suffering. And in the play that human players perform and carry out as a festive service for the gods and proffer as a votive offering, they play, oddly enough, their own “being-played,” their own human roles of being the ball and the plaything of those who dwell in the heavens. In human play there occurs the representation and the symbolic recurrence of a far greater, more encompassing play, whose two-faced character we divine throughout25 the tragedy and comedy of human existence.
The cultic origin of play is of the utmost importance for the philosophical clarification of the phenomenon of play, primarily for three reasons. As cult-play, as priestly activity, play is drawn into the inmost core of the archaic human being’s life; it is not a “marginal phenomenon,” not a peripheral appearance without which life would be able to be carried out in more serious occupations. Cult-play forms the center of the primitive lifeworld, the fundamental act of its self-understanding and self-interpretation. This early life does not yet speak for itself in concepts and logical syntaxes. It speaks in visionary images, in gestures, in elevated and stylized rituals; it must act and behold, “understand” with the eye and bodily movement how things stand with it—how it is admitted into powerful, overarching forces, exposed and abandoned to them, how it “depends” on what is beyond the human. Cult-play informs the cult community about what is essential and about human beings’ position in the midst of cosmic forces, about the “invisible powers” that bestow blessings and send calamity, whose enigmatic and unsettling presence is felt and yet not directly seen, grasped, or conceived, which in their proximity remain inconceivable and mysterious and lurk around small human settlements in the midst of the wilderness as though concealed and lying in ambush. But cult-play not only gives an orientation, it is above all an activity in the sense of a magical technique, as a cooperation or counteraction vis-à-vis daemonic forces. The most important deed in the primitive tribe’s framework of life is the activity of those who understand how to correctly deal with daemons, who best know their secrets, who understand how to distinguish between good and evil spirits, who know the correct incantatory formulas and in the enchantment of the mask dare to oppose overwhelming forces and detain them. The deed of the medicine man, of the enchanter-priest, is a salvational deed on which the weal and woe of the entire social organization depends. For this reason he has an elevated, privileged status, is the administrator of consecration and sacramental sanctifications; he gives his blessing to weddings, births, and deaths, to hunting expeditions and military campaigns; he conducts the festivals in which the whole of life, which has been disintegrated and scattered into the quotidian, gathers itself again in the coming to presence of the gods. The magical technique of the enchanter-priest is the most important technē in the diversely structured system of primeval practices; divination binds together heaven and earth, gods and human beings, places human things collectively and explicitly within the horizon of the whole. And it is highly significant that the human being’s historical trajectory does not merely begin with purely economic activities, through which he produces his means of life and thus preserves his existence in a “mediated” fashion, but that in the earliest dawn of the historical trajectory the phenomenon of the cult already emerges, in which the intellectual [geistige] activity of making sense of life appears, precisely as the praxis of the enchanter-priest with his secret knowledge and secret arts. The primal form of “knowledge” is priestly and is initially beset with the taboo of the sacred and what ought to be shunned. The “ones who know” are the “initiated,” who are aware of the true relations that exist between heaven and earth, who are aware of the fundamental processes: the governance of gods and daemons, the right time for sacrifice and offering, for sowing and reaping, for military campaigns against enemies. And it is a long trajectory accompanied by dramatic transformations of sense, a trajectory in which human knowledge frees itself from its sacred, priestly roots and becomes the knowledge of philosophy and of the sciences. But in any case, the most cursory glance at the phenomenon of the early cult already demonstrates that human history cannot be conceived only as a history of labor. Intellectual activity does not emerge until labor is “divided” and separated off into manual and intellectual work processes, into performing and directing modes of work. In the early form of priestly knowledge within the horizon of the archaic practice of magic, the motivation for knowledge and the intellectual activity of interpreting life as distinct from work-activity have already become apparent. And one can even say that until late in historical times magical ideas have implicitly co-determined even the human esteem for the sciences. The peculiar solemn seriousness of early play, its sacrosanct ceremoniousness, its priestly dignity, is grounded in the close connection that play has with the primeval cult. Such play does not provide a variation on the serious life of human beings; it is itself the most serious seriousness, insofar as it has to do with the safeguarding of the social community in relation to invisible powers.
The second reason for the particular philosophical relevance of cultic play is the positivity of playworldly “appearance [Schein]” that emerges here. Every spectator knows that a human being is behind the mask, but this knowledge does not disillusion; the point is not that a human being has disguised himself but rather that within a human disguise the daemonic itself comes into view. The awareness of semblance [Scheinhaften] in a mask, play, or scene does not lead to the dissolution of the intention to portray or to a “rupture” of ontological belief. The awareness of semblance is rather just the presupposition for the symbol’s ability to come to light. When an event is “only played,” when it only “appears” in the imaginary circuit of the scenario before the spectators, it is not thereby devalued and deemed to be less than the actual actors [Schauspieler] or to be less existent than the spectators’ stone benches. On the contrary, the “non-actuality,” in the sense of the magical representation, becomes the distinctive “breach” for a deeper and truer, genuine actuality, precisely the actuality of powers and forces at work everywhere. For the first time ever, the concept of actuality thus attains a deep dimensionality with many levels. To be sure, the symbol, taken as a thing, does not, in its signification, have the solid actuality of everyday things. But in being distanced from solidly actual things through the “non-actuality” of the play-appearance belonging to it, it can point back to a more primordial power of Being. The “non-actual” becomes the locus of the hyper-actual. In the cult, the hyper-actual or the actual to the highest degree for the most part has the character of the daemonic and the divine. The symbolism of cult-play remains in the relation of the human being to the god. Symbolism here represents the relation between two beings. And this is the third reason for the extraordinary significance of cultic play. Cult-play brings to presence the governance of the gods, their ordering and steering activity, which without effort and without exertion dominates the transformation and passage of all innerworldly things—and it interprets the prevailing of the gods not merely in human play but also in many ways as a kind of play. Cult-play, as it were, lets the play of the world-governing gods “appear” in the visionary symbolism of the scene, that is, lets it emerge before weak human eyes in a metaphorical visibility. The magical invocation of the highest actuality brings something supremely actual to appearance before human eyes.
But that is just the question we have already repeatedly touched on: whether the human-god-relation, which pervades and attunes the cult, sustaining it in all its forms of appearance, is the most primordial symbol-relation (in the philosophical sense) or only a reflection of the relation between the human being and the world. The world is never one actual thing [ein Wirkliches], nor the highest actual thing in a hierarchy of ontological intensity; yet it is ultimately the all-encompassing actuality [Wirklichkeit], the fabric [Gewirk]. In the fabric of the world each finite being has its place and its duration, its emergence and decline—it is made fit and forfeited [erwirkt und verwirkt]. And the all-encompassing working [Wirken] of the world: does it come to a symbolic presence in a human kind of play—and does it thereby also, as a kind of play, attain the clarity of something that has come to presence on the stage? That is the decisive question that we prepared in our reflection on the cult, more precisely on the human side of the cult. We need cult-play in order to pose our problem, because in it play is experienced as the most serious seriousness; its “non-actuality” is experienced as an entry point to a more genuine actuality. These are features of the greatest significance for understanding play. And, furthermore, cult-play in a peculiar way dissembles the play of the prevailing world, insofar as it allows the governance of the gods to “appear,” sometimes even as a kind of play.
We have hitherto characterized cult-play in three stages: first, as the enchantment of masks; then, as magical technique; and finally as the festival-play of a cultic community. Festival-play can assume a variety of forms: it can be the sacred activity of consecration, the solemn service to the god in the great ritual that affords all spectators the sight of a magical-technical interaction of the priest skilled in enchantment with daemons and gods, making those spectators into witnesses of his heavenly contact. With a mixture of dread, anxiety, and hope, primitive human beings watch their medicine man venture to detain the invisible ones, to spellbind, to influence them with mystical formulas and magic spells, to ascertain the ordained future from the flight of birds, from the blood of sacrificial animals, from the convulsions of the torn-out heart of the human sacrificial victim. But festival-play can also be a trustful attempt to invite the gods to partake in fellowship, to produce a community of mortals and immortals in the joy of the feast, amid the sound of musical instruments and songs that sing the glory and praise of the gods. At the end, such festive-celebratory feasts occasionally transition into an orgiastic delirium, a bacchanalian frenzy: human beings become certain of their contact with daemonic supremacy when they lose control of themselves, when they fall into a trance and shed daytime’s sober consciousness. By no means is the orgy of such festivals merely degeneracy, a debauchery of inebriating drink and unbridled eroticism. What may appear to the outside observer as “debauchery” is for the participants of the cult a rapture that lifts them out of the ordinariness of everyday life. And in an entirely different manner, cult-play can have the feature of bringing the divine sphere to presence on the stage; it then becomes ritual dramatic play or spectacle, which narrates the mythos and lets it become visible. Festival play determines the playful from the perspective of the festival, that is, from the presence of the gods that is believed in, intimated, felt. Play then has for the most part an obscure, cumbersome, gloomy character. The overwhelming power of the gods unsettles the human heart with sublime terror. Even the good news of heavenly succor and of the favor of the gods, which is perhaps proclaimed in such festival play, is not entirely able to brighten up the gloomy seriousness. The distance that separates mortals from immortals is too great. Cultic dramatic play or spectacle becomes tragedy. However, with this indication, we do not wish to provide an interpretation of “Attic tragedy,” that unique flowering of the human spirit. We take the term “tragedy” here in a more general sense, according to which it means the somber interpretation of human fate in the face of the happiness of the gods without need. As long as festival-play is primarily characterized from the perspective of the festival as the mysterious presence of the gods and the playfulness of cult-play is thus overshadowed by the magic of the cult, a dark seriousness governs the stage. Yet the aspect of play in festival-play can occasionally come into its own so strongly and powerfully that all at once the festival is stamped from the perspective of play, is governed by mirthful delight and lighthearted grace, by the jocular character of free, pure play, by its imaginative exuberance. The satyr-play follows the tragic formulation of the mythos; liberating laughter, the ironic distance to our very selves—comedy—follows the heavy, serious bringing to presence of human suffering and the demise of heroes. And it very much depends on how a mythos supposes the gods to be, whether as serious, formidable powers, in whose proximity no unseemly sound is permitted, or as themselves ambiguous beings, whose sacredness is not profaned by Homeric laughter. And if the festival-play of the cult offers not merely the prevailing gods’ coming to presence on the stage, but an elucidation of their peculiar prevailing as a kind of play, then the sense of this elucidation ultimately depends on how divine play is characterized. For the ideas we have about such play of the gods can be emphasized in various ways.
To start, let us take, for example, the play-metaphor to describe the unlimited supremacy of the gods vis-à-vis human beings. They interact with us—as with playthings. What does that mean? Is such a characterization sufficiently clear—or does it still allow for different interpretations? How does the playing human being interact with the plaything? What is the characteristic feature of such interaction? And here we must precisely say that human interaction with the plaything can be manifold, not because there are all sorts of playthings, but rather insofar as the interaction may be carried out in different ways. In “playing,” we can manipulate any given thing, and in doing so we can even “switch gears” as we please; we can use things we have come across for the ends of our play. We do not need to be especially “attentive” in doing so. The play-use is an entirely different relation to things than, for instance, the utilization-use—at more of a distance, more unbound, freer. When the human being recognizes things in his environment for their utility and prepares them for usage through his work, he is to a high degree bound to the peculiar character of such things, depends on them. He cannot interact and switch gears with respect to them arbitrarily and in any manner. The peasant must look after the soil, which he cultivates for use; he may not work it to exhaustion without destroying its fecundity. The artisan must comply with the material that he works on and presses into artisanal form; his work activity is “materially conditioned” in many ways. Each work is faced with the resistance of the things that are to be formed by the work. It is precisely the rigor of work, its travail, that should be understood from its relation to the independence and indestructibility of formable material. Because the human being must invest so much energy, time, and effort into the products of work, he interacts with them attentively, economically, and frugally. He makes rational, economic use of them. Both in the manufacture and in the utilization of the manufactured product, the arbitrariness of the human being is strictly limited by concrete exigencies. In contrast, playful interaction with things in one’s environment is characterized by an extraordinary breadth of arbitrariness and caprice. To handle anything as a plaything hardly demands effort and exertion; it is not at all necessary that natural things first be prepared for play. Certainly, “playing” can also be present when one forms, shapes, and creatively transforms pre-given objects, can experience rapturous delight in the alteration of the given—but transforming is here not work, not travail, not an in-forming [Ein-Bildung] of objective forms that are ends and are required by objective needs; rather, forming is the outcome of a plastic drive to play. The child who makes a mud pie plays—but the homeworker who produces dolls and the mechanic who is occupied with the industrial manufacturing of toys for children do not play; they work, and do so no less than those who produce foodstuffs, tools, machines. A plaything can be an artificial thing, formed from human labor, but it can also be any natural thing. For the playing human being can “designate” anything whatsoever as a plaything, thanks to his creative imaginative play. Imaginative play “works magic,” bestows an imaginary sense on entirely ordinary things and thus decks them out with magical significations for the players. Of course, there are also playthings that are prepared quite beautifully and that are expensive and have collector’s value. Yet the most beautiful and most expensive doll that is to be gotten hold of in a toy store has no more playworldly reality than a poor girl’s measly rag doll. The playing human being does not necessarily have to handle his playthings as attentively as his other products of labor, for he can at any time use his imagination to add what has not concretely come to objective form. Play is characterized by this lack of consideration, by this free unboundedness with respect to the material of play. If it is said of the gods that they interact with human beings as with playthings, this unboundedness of their interaction is what is chiefly meant: they can switch gears with respect to mortals according to caprice, whim, and discretion; they need have no consideration for mortals, not even as much as the farmer has for the cow that he wants to milk; they can plunge human beings into pain, need, misery, and misfortune, and can destroy them, break them down, and devastate them however they please. They are not bound by any consideration or constrained by any dependency; they do not need human beings for their continued existence as the human being needs plants and animals for sustenance. Indeed, they are not nourished by fatted offerings but demand these in order to make the human being conscious of his dependency on divine power, in order to make use of the riven self-consciousness of the children of the earth as the dim mirror of their own glory. The gods play—with human beings as their playthings.
Completely separate from the already touched-on problem of a purification of the archaic representations of God in the direction of the essentially good deity, there is an ambiguity in using the play-metaphor for the activity of the gods—and that is the case because the human enactment of play already includes a twofold relation to the plaything. The interaction with the plaything does not always and perpetually have the just-described fundamental feature of free caprice and arbitrariness, but rather chiefly does when we are assured of our own “self-mastery” in the instance of play, when we delightfully gauge the play-space of our imaginary production in this lived experience. The plaything is then revealed to us in its complete lack of resistance. To a certain degree we can make everything out of it; what we are not able to connect to it in an objective way we can at any time ascribe to it as its imagined sense-property. Now, the freedom of the gods in their interaction with human beings is obviously analogous to this unbound freedom of the human being interacting with the plaything. To know ourselves to be the plaything of those who dwell in the heavens, then, is the acute consciousness of being at their mercy. Our fate is not in our power. Whatever we do, however much we try, however hard we work and however valiantly we struggle, the human being is defenseless against the supremacy of the gods. Above all, the play-metaphor characterizes divine Being in its utter supremacy.
But there is also a somewhat differently structured interaction with playthings, in which the feeling of caprice and limitless arbitrariness does not predominate, where the one playing does not experience himself as the free lord of his game. There is also immersion in play, being carried away into the sphere of play, where the player does not reign supreme over his game, but rather to a certain degree is “pulled into it,” loses himself in it, “vanishes” in his magical role, is himself held spellbound by the mask that he wears. In carrying out this kind of play the player does not relate to his plaything with the sovereign distance of the ruler, but rather is captivated by his plaything, fascinated by it and bound by it, as it were. Do the gods play—as the human being overwhelmed by play does? Do they play as the child plays, enthralled and taken in by play’s spell? Are the gods superior players because of their freedom, because they maintain a distanced relation of free arbitrariness toward the plaything—or are they themselves enchanted players who fall under the power of the magical world? Obviously, the meaning of the human being as a “divine plaything” is to be interpreted in completely different ways depending on whether the play of the gods is assessed as “distance” or as “subjugation.” As a rule, the play of the gods is interpreted in mythical representations of God as an unlimited, free disposal over human beings, as a “play of freedom” in relation to them, these marionettes in the hands of God. The play-metaphor, then, does not express much more than the complete exposure of the human being and the complete, unrestricted arbitrariness of divine prevailing. However, here the claim is not being made that the gods are essentially “players,” that they need human beings. As a pastime in their endless lives they occupy themselves with the fates of human beings and with reigning over all innerworldly things in general. Their ruling resembles a kind of play and their play a kind of ruling. In only a few myths is the prevailing of the gods understood as being enchanted by a kind of play that also spellbinds them—and thus, at the same time, referred to a still more primordial kind of play, in which even the gods are playthings. In general, however, we have to say that human play that is enacted as archaic cult-activity is a clear example of an enactment of play that spellbinds and enchants the ones playing. The plaything of cult-play does not have the character of arbitrary caprice; on the contrary, it has the character of a profound necessity. Indeed, it is the symbol-laden things—such as the altar, sacrificial offerings, and signs standing in for the presencing of the gods. By means of this cult-play, we relate ourselves with understanding to a divine kind of play, which has a different structure than cult-play itself. By means of a kind of play experienced as “subjugation,” we relate ourselves to an almost infinitely distant “play of freedom.” Admittedly, this relation takes place in “belief”; it can be described and considered by philosophy as a human belief but is not validly assessed in its claim to truth.
In our context it depends on what implicit relational categories are inherent to the self-understanding of mythological cult-play. Hence we have to distinguish two questions: first, the question of the play-character of cultic play as such, and then the question of the play of the gods who are brought to presence by cult-play. The early human cult has a play-character because it is first and foremost the enchantment of masks. And it is precisely the enchantment of masks because only through the disguise can the human being lose his unambiguity and “participate” in the polysemy characteristic of the daemonic being. Participation in the daemonic in turn makes possible the magical practice of the medicine man and the enchanter-priest. But only in fully developed cult-play with its ritual can the total bringing to presence of the mythos on the stage come to pass, can the history of gods, demigods, heroes, and champions come to appearance in the play-community of the festival. The setting, marked off from ordinary locations and places, becomes the site of manifestation for the total context of all that happens: the whole comes to appear in exemplary fashion in one place within the whole, which thereby obtains an in-finite representative. The separated off, delimited location of the cultic setting becomes a metaphor for the limitless. And as cultic play enfolds the most serious and most sacred events and stories, so too does a play-interpretation of the event enfold all incidents emerging within the total event. By no means does the mythos interpret everything that happens simply as play, not even where it seeks to understand, in the play-metaphor, the prevailing of the gods.
The expression “everything that happens” is easy to misunderstand. It can mean two different things: in the first place, each happening, each single process, but then also the comprehensive total-happening that subtends all single events, sustains them, keeps them in motion, and is not simply pieced together as their sum. Even the archaic human being is familiar with many kinds of motion, is familiar with the thrust, throw, fall, even if he could never enumerate them in this way; he is familiar with the kind of motion of lifeless things, the way in which plants grow, the way in which animals prowl, the way in which human beings go about in the spaces of their life. And he understands in an experienced and unreflective manner how such motions are “effected.” He understands it when he himself produces, in work, artificial things for his benefit and utility, when he slays the enemy with his weapon. He is aware of the different modes of being a cause, although he does not have a concept of cause that has been thought out. His environment operates in a typical manner. It does not change its modus operandi from moment to moment; it persists in a characteristic way, and as a result, it is clear and recognizable in some contexts. Certainly, the human being of early times does not yet have a rigorous concept of causality, which posits an inviolable lawfulness within nature. Nature may still be conceived as entirely full of spirits, in “animistic” terms; one may still suppose a culprit behind every deed, yet this schema of attributing events to culprits is an interpretation, too, which posits a specific style of causation. Every single event is “effected”; each has its “ground.” To be sure, thought does not yet pose the question for itself of what the ground of the ground is in each case and thus regressively backward to infinity. Theoretical thought has not yet been awakened. Yet there is already an obscure intimation that the total-happening in its comprehensive wholeness must be understood differently—than incidents within the whole. And this happens above all where the prevailing whole is interpreted in its form of motion as play. Things are dependent on one another in their coming and going, their growth and diminishment, their transformation and their exchanging places. They are interwoven in myriad ways; each is the “effect” of an effecting “cause,” whether these causes be natural powers, “purposes” endemic to things or even activities of daemons. Here, it is not a matter of the distinction between scientific and mythical understanding but rather of the distinction between a conception of the comprehensive connection of all events, which is “groundless” as such, and the always grounded single events.26 The whole has no ground and no purpose; it also has no “sense,” no task, no goal. The prevailing whole is grasped in the interpretive metaphor of a game. To be sure, one can, of course, also interpret individual processes and incidents as a kind of play; behind anything that happens, one can suspect as culprits kobolds, daemons, or even gods who play their jokes and pranks on us, but then play is only a particular interpretation of the culprit-schema. Instead of gods ruling methodically, one can also suppose that there are “spirits” who delight in games and seek pastimes, who more confuse our human world than order it. However, the play-motif in cultic play first attains its more profound significance when it is referred to the totality and thereby “transcends” innerworldly processes. The truth of the play of the gods is the play of the world.
The connection between play and cult, which we sought to bring into view primarily in archaic, mythical human existence, opened up for us as an essential imbrication of primordial human phenomena. The human being’s drive to worship, at its root, is bound up with the drive to play; the association with superhuman powers is carried out in early historical time in a play-ritual. That is a strange and extraordinary state of affairs that appears more bizarre the more we “self-evidently” proceed from the everyday, current understanding of play and thus emphasize play’s features of unboundedness, of arbitrary fancy, of unserious, relaxed merriment and a vagabond levity, and oppose play to the solemn ways of carrying out our lives. For this reason it surprises us to encounter play in the most serious and most solemn activity of the archaic human being’s life, in his association with gods and daemons. How could play achieve this status, this elevated significance? Perhaps this question is falsely posed. Perhaps it has nothing at all to do with the fact that human play retains a meaning, which it does not at all have itself, from religion’s dimension of sense. Perhaps even that which, in an everyday manner, we call “play” and contrast disparagingly with serious areas of life is already a fallen mode of an erstwhile primordial state. In any case, we need to be clear: cultic play first and foremost must be interrogated in its playfulness and in no way may it be subsumed under the popular concept of play. The cult is not merely “primordial” in its religious aspect but also in its playful aspect. Here, not only is play “consecrated”; “consecration” is also played. Consecration and play permeate one another in the phenomenon of the archaic cult in an almost indissoluble intimacy. Consecration is determined by play and play by consecration. We have sought to make this clear in reference to the enchantment of masks, magical technique, and the dramatic play or spectacle that brings the mythos to presence. Insofar as these are aspects of the cult, the cult as such is a playful praxis. It is carried out as an elevated kind of human play that does not merely move within a “sense,” maintain itself in an understanding, or stand in an openness to the revelation [Offenbarkeit] of prevailing powers; it gives to be understood the sense that is understood, it interprets the revelation, it imparts its knowledge. The cult is always also a making-known, a life-teaching, proclamation. Proclamation is not thereby restricted to the word. It is not confined to the transmission of knowledge by the discourse that imparts. In the realm of the sacred, discourse has a peculiar powerlessness and impotence. We can easily discuss what is readily given to our senses, what lies before our hands and eyes, the things that we work on, the everyday given thing: here everything has its fixed name, its nameability; everything takes an understood, understandable course; everything is already interpreted in language and pre-formed, pre-known, in its typical modes of relation. We have names for inanimate things, for plants and animals, for land and sea and the celestial bodies in the sky—for the devices that we use, for the paths we take, and in general for our whole well-trodden association with beings in our environment. We reside in the midst of things in such a way that in each case we understand, are acquainted with, and designate them not only as solitary individuals. We are placed within a communal public familiarity; we are installed in a language that encompasses us; we reside in a continual social conversation about things that concern us in various ways. Each field of human life has its own modes of understanding and of co-existentiell conversation. The possibilities of making statements about beings and of expressing things with one’s fellow human beings are thus not everywhere the same. What is familiar in an everyday sense has the easiest possibility of appearing in the word and being discussed in the small talk of neighbors. To be sure, a spate of words stands ready in the everyday realm even for the sacred; it is initially flattened out into a common familiarity. However, it does not actually allow itself to be held fast therein. It withdraws from availability, from the exploitative utility of everyday conversation. The words that designate the sacred do not indicate plainly present phenomena that are perceptible by everyone at all times; they rather point to a breach27 of the actuality that is familiar in an everyday manner, to deeper and more primordial grounds of Being. The words that designate the sacred are themselves thoroughly attuned by the terror of the sacred. The human being is not supposed to take the name of the Lord, his God, in vain. The sacred word is beset with taboos. What holds for the cult in general holds once more for the cultic word. It is removed by being excluded from ordinary speech—as the temple precinct is from ordinary land. It is lifted into an elevated, intensified significance, becoming an invocating sign and magical symbol. The magic word also belongs to the cult in its most primordial form—as an invocatory spellbinding of superhuman powers, as a naming of the unnamable. Hierophantic28 discourse hovers on the verge of saying the unsayable, of invoking in a comprehending and defining word that which, in its incomprehensibility, is above and beyond all comprehension and definition, and of experiencing in the rupturing word the supremacy of the sacred. Cultic knowledge is initially safeguarded as a secret knowledge, transmitted as priestly wisdom, handed down in sacred texts and sealed words; it has an esoteric character and must be protected from all profanation. It is structured in a gradual descent and has a manifold of circles in itself. The inmost circle of knowledge is accessible only to the few who are “initiated” to the highest degree; around it are formed gradually descending steps, in which knowing loses its genuineness and its mystery more and more and finally ends by becoming universally superficial [Veräußerlichung]. The consecration that determines the priest for serving the sacred is before all else an initiation, a revelation cloaked in mystery. In its primitive elementary form, for instance, it is the transmission of the medicine man’s magical formulas to his younger successor.
Because the cult’s language is primordially hierophantic29 and is determined only for the priesthood in the highest tension between saying and the unsayable, the proclamation of religious teachings on life does not exclusively happen in the word—it initially happens far more in signs and gestures, in ritual activities of an immediate, heart-rending symbolic power. The cultic community is witness to the enchantment of masks, to the magical techniques of priests who perform sacrifices, and, above all, to the dramatic play or spectacle that places the mythos visibly before their eyes. What the sacred and its irruption into the light of day are becomes clear to the cultic community by more than the expressed word when they see symbolic activities. The burying of the grain seed, its sinking into the dark, lightless ground of earth, and the offering of the ripe ear of corn brings the connection of downfall and resurrection, of death and life, into a simple, valid metaphor for the simple soul [Gemüt]. And if at the high point of sacred activity in the cult of Demeter the cult members put their hands into the kistē, into the womb of the great mother, then, run through by a shudder of enraptured anxiety, they surely perceived the inexhaustibility of existence vouched for in the power of giving birth. And the spectators of the sacred play, which brought the mythos into visibility, were situated as spectators, as eyewitnesses before the epiphany of the divine. As spectators they played along. Still, the cult community in festival-play does not resemble the ancient circus. In the historical trajectory of humanity it comes to pass in various ways that the cultic ritual fades more and more, recedes further and further, while what takes the upper hand is the doctrine, the promulgation in the words of the prophet and preacher. Priestly knowledge loses its basic esoteric feature, becoming a universally issued revelation that only needs to be explained in the proper manner from sacred texts. The more religion becomes a religion of the promulgated word, a kind of good news, and the more it maintains its emphasis in what is sayable, the more does the magical substance, the mythical dramatic play or spectacle, that which is playful in the cult in general, vanish. Certainly there remain relics, remnants in the ceremonial gestures of a liturgy, which, however, are an exhausted ceremoniousness rather than a genuine ritual play. The religious community appears in only a few sacramental activities as a witness and co-player. The connection between play and cult in the archaic early forms of religion is much more starkly given and more decisively discernible than in the historically advanced religions. However, if the early cult is carried out as a kind of human play that is rich in meaning, then this play expresses a total interpretation of life, expresses it more in ritual gestures, in metaphorical activities, than in words. Cult-play gives something to be understood. It is addressed to its community. What it gives to be understood in its symbols, metaphors, and mythological activities is the way in which the gods reign, the way in which they conduct their regime over human beings and finite things in general, the way in which they steer and direct the fate of individuals, of heroes and demigods, but also of the most wretched servant, the way in which they bring about the splendor and downfall of peoples and empires, the way in which they send weather and thereby dispense favor or disfavor for the fields, the way in which they give all and take all. Certainly, the cult always clarifies the great connections of sense that prevail throughout everything that lives and that secure borders within the inanimate realm between land and sea, between the open heavens and the sealed earth. Every cult has an overarching sense, a universal signification. But the cult variously interprets the total context of all things and the particular position of the human being in the midst of nature and in the sight of the gods. The cult is a play of sense-interpretation [Sinn-Deutungsspiel].
By far most cults, being in each case such a play of interpretation, are related to the total character of events insofar as they thereby posit and use human phenomena of existence as paradigms for the movement of the whole. To be sure, we always know that the movement of human beings is interwoven in the encompassing movement of the comprehensive context and is determined from there, but we have no ideas, concepts, or words at hand for the motion of the totality. We can only clarify it for ourselves at all by employing, as metaphorical likenesses, manners of movement that are phenomenally pre-given, but we can at the same time be aware of the inadequacy of such metaphors. The reign of the gods is for the most part posited in the cult on analogy with human phenomena of existence, namely, ruling and work. Human beings imagine the gods to be superhuman rulers and superhuman workers. And the gods are not only imagined in such a way that they accomplish to a far greater extent what human beings do; their ruling and work is not only quantitatively superior to that of the human; they rule in another way and work in another way—divine rule and divine work are qualitatively distinct from all human works. Their rule cannot be resisted; their work is more potent and lasting. In their case, ruling means the establishment of the order of all things in general, the taming of chaos, the regulation of the celestial trajectories and the change of the seasons, the steering of human fates. The rule of the gods is not limited to the human realm; it extends to all beings that stand under the highest being, the divine—it extends to the whole gradually descending hierarchy of things, to the human being, beast, plant, and stone. Human ruling is always a precarious and unstable affair; it is always threatened by the revolt of those being ruled, by the rebellion of the oppressed. The human being is not able to rise up against the rule of the gods. They effortlessly crush the transgressor. Their ruling does not contain within it the quaking tension that makes the souls of tyrants and Caesars tremble, with pleasure and at the same time with dread. Gods do not rule over those who are equally free. To be sure, the human being has the freedom to be able to oppose the will of the gods, yet he can only seal this freedom with his own doom. It was not the boast of Niobe that brought the curse on her offspring, nor the blasphemy of Latona, but rather the fact that she had dared to make the highest and fullest happiness of the earthly woman, her fruitful motherhood, distinct from the realm of the gods’ blessings and wished to ground it in the earthly power of her almost inexhaustible womb alone. Every attempt of mortals to elude the rule of the gods leads to their doom. And supposing that death is not the complete end of human existence, then the human being, who would sooner choose death than bear the rule of the gods over him, would fall prey to the heavenly ones by this heroic act only still more hopelessly. He can no longer “bail out” of the otherworldly life; he would have to experience, unceasingly and without end, that it “is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”30 To be sure, with the representation of a “patriarchal” regime, with the idea of a divine “father,” who comports himself to human beings as to his “children,” religions often temper these thoughts—which dissolve all human pride—of the inescapable rule of the gods that is impossible to resist. But if human beings feel like children of God, they do not know themselves as young gods, in the way that human children know themselves to be young humans. The human being’s divine filiation does not annul the abyssal difference between God and the human being; it only tempers it and dampens the severity of the separation. Because rule, as wielded by the heavenly ones, is not threatened by the opposed tension of those who are ruled and by a possible reversal of the relation of rule, the model for the prevailing of the gods, abstracted and borrowed from human existence, is ultimately a faulty metaphor: they rule, but precisely beyond every standard that is understandable to human beings. And it is similar to those paradigmatic representations that describe the activity of the gods as work. They certainly do not work as we do, we who are able to keep ourselves in existence only by the activity of work. They work in a sense that is heightened beyond every human measure, indeed, beyond every human power of representation. They do not work on beings already existent; they bring things about for the first time. And, to be sure, not any old artificial things, which the human being, too, is able to produce on the basis of pre-given material, by imposing and stamping on natural material a form deriving from the human intellect through the activity of his hands or by means of tools and machines. One says of the gods that they produce natural things, that they do not need pre-given material in order to work on it; rather, the whole of nature, which for human beings is otherwise the scene of their acting and doing, the quarry for their raw materials, is already a divine work. This thought transcends the representational power of our finite understanding and withdraws into religious mystery. In a certain sense, the god of Platonic metaphysics also performs such “work,” insofar as he produces the beautiful and well-ordered dispensation of the cosmos from the amorphous stuff of the world, interweaving the measureless, the apeiron, with the measure, the peras. The labor of the Platonic god is an ontogenetic occupation; it is a bringing into shape of nature—but from primordial ontological powers, from matter and intellect, from chōra and nous. God as conceived by Christianity, on the other hand, is able, by the pronouncement of his omnipotence, to wrest nature and all natural things—from nothing. In regard to the Christian god, the metaphor of work becomes sense-less through an extreme intensification. The creator of the world does not “work,” even if the account in Scripture speaks of a “rest” on the seventh day. If the myths tell of works of the gods, these are, nevertheless, far, far removed from the unfortunate exertion of human work; they are effortless and easy. The idea that appears best—from the human side—is the idea that ruling and work among the gods is at bottom a kind of play. And in a few cults this vision of the divinity of the gods becomes determinative for their sense. Cult-play then brings to presence the prevailing of the gods as ruling or as work, as effortless holding sway and effortless working, not only in a kind of play; it interprets divine life, in the way it is carried out, as a kind of playing. The cult-play of the human being sets the play of the gods into the visibility of the scene, lets them become manifest in regard to their essence, in their inconceivable, effortless success. We already said that such divine play is distinct from all human kinds of playing, that it must be a much freer, indeed an infinitely free playing in comparison to even the most buoyant, dancelike human kinds of play. However, if, in playing, the gods rule nature and all things, then their play, nevertheless, has the character of a causality that conditions the course and transformation of things. Nature and everything that is natural, according to such a perspective, attains the determination of a plaything. The course of nature then is not a kind of play, but rather only the life of the blessed gods, who make use of all other things that are below their sphere as playthings and works of play. As a kind of play, this life of the gods that is blessed with play [spielselig] has no ends that lie outside it—it knows only internal ends for play, which the gods posit just as easily as they again annul. Their activity is “without responsibility,” is “beyond good and evil,” is—to speak with Nietzsche’s Zarathustra—“a wheel rolling out of itself.”31 The lack of ends, absence of aims, and senselessness of the life of the gods that is brought forth in play does not exclude the fact that many immanent ends and aims emerge, but they do not thereby give sense and purpose to the whole of life. The course of life of the gods is not determined by a painfully felt lack—as is the case for finite human beings.
We have our daily aims, tasks, and ends, because with our whole life we head toward an aim, toward an end: toward the aim of eudaimonia. Our manifold strivings, despite all the diversity of our interests, are nevertheless gathered and conducted by an ultimate and extreme concern with the success or failure of life. We are not, we incessantly become—and perhaps never arrive at a conclusive form, and until death we are a project for ourselves. We do not live carefree in a peacefully abiding present; we are carried away by the raging stream of time, whose uncanny movement we observe with trepidation: care breathes down our neck and never actually lets us free of its pressing grip. Certainly, from time to time we can numb ourselves, we can abandon ourselves to distractions and forget our needs and tasks—but care overtakes us again, flushes us out of every contrived comfort, pushes us onto the course of our restless strivings, drives, passions, and desires. The human care for life is not only economic, it is also the concern for the “salvation of the soul,” for the one thing that is essential, concern for insight and the clarification of life. The pervasively projective manner in which the human conducts his life secures all particular purposes and individual aims to the final aim that is sought after, but not given with infallible certainty. Here only the child appears to be an exception, who is in the present, abides peacefully, and almost has eternity in the dreamily assured way of simply being there and not asking why and wherefore. There is only a short span of time in which the child exists no longer merely vegetatively and not yet in intellectual freedom, where it lives purely and in an unbroken way in play. These are golden days in the existence of each human being, memory’s most precious treasure, which brightens the whole of life with its radiance—and is unforgettable, even if we are no longer able to imagine the time that has elapsed. This paradise lost of childhood is the paradigm for our belief in blessedly playing gods. From here, in a certain way, we can devise and above all get a feeling for how the play of the gods might be. Their superhuman life would then resemble that of “the child, who moves the pieces back and forth”—it would be a “kingdom of the child.”32
The saying of Heraclitus we just drew from does not speak of the gods’ play, however; it speaks of the play of aiōn, of the play of the course of the world. In the metaphor of the playing child, a kind of play is thought that is still more profoundly distinguished from human play in general than human play is from the play of the gods—a game in which all things are wagered, all affairs and all persons, whether they be gods or human beings, and which thus has no player. Is this not an absurd and impossible thought: a game without players, a game without a person who is playing, without a who? As long as the orientation to cult-play drives our posing of the question we must inevitably think that, for every kind of play, there is a player playing it as well. Cult-play brings to presence the prevailing of the gods and interprets this “prevailing” as a super-human rule or as a super-human work; in both interpretations rule and work come into an astounding33 proximity to play, above all through the features of effortlessness, groundlessness, and the impossibility of resistance. And sometimes the mythologem of cult-play interprets the activity of the gods themselves as a free, unencumbered playing of halcyon cheerfulness. The human being coincides with the god from an astronomical distance—both are players, the god wholly, the human being in part, insofar as he is additionally a worker, fighter, lover, and mortal; the god plays with everything that is outside him—as with his plaything; he need not regard anything at all as higher than himself; all other beings stand under him, are positioned as his footstool, are only an embellishment of his throne. And because he is set above all other beings, because he is not surpassed by anything, his playing does not have—as human play does—the character of imaginary representation; he need not open up a site for the symbolic manifestation of omnipotence by means of a “non-actual play-world.” The play of the gods, for its part, does not have the features of cult-play. Gods do not believe in gods; they do not religiously revere a highest god. Undeniably, the myths of peoples have told of a hierarchy in the realm of the gods, have spoken of a father or king of the gods; nevertheless, these are completely different manners of relation than those of human beings to the heavenly ones. One can rather say that the gods relate to one another in like manner and yet again relate to one another in an immeasurably inflated fashion, just as human beings relate to other human beings. They are inclined to contend with one another or to enter into amorous liaisons, to be joined by ties of kinship; thus they revere one another, yet not in a religious form. God—as the object of religion—himself has no religion.
It is something else in the case of daemonic intermediate beings, which the human belief in gods posits in various ways: in the case of angels and suchlike. They have religion, albeit not as “belief,” but rather as “knowledge,” insofar as they live within view of the divinity, in the visio beatifica. If through cult-play we thus bring the play of the gods to presence, too, the latter itself can no longer be cult-play. That is an important structural insight. Cult-play does not allow itself to be iterated. However, instances of play can otherwise generally be included in each other in manifold ways.34
Let us briefly summarize the results of our reflection on the connection between play and cult. The cult is the distinctive phenomenon of life in which play precisely35 does not occur in the all-too-popular and all-too-familiar character of the “playful” and is not revealed as “a lack of seriousness” or as “idle”; in the cult it has the urgent, uncanny, and spellbinding basic feature of enchantment, the rapture that removes the human being from his everyday straightforwardness and fixed determinacy. The mask here is not so much concealment for the masked one as it is rather human access, the door to the realm of daemons. It not only enchants the spectators; above all it enchants the wearer of the mask—turns him into an enchanter, into a medicine man, a priest, a mediator between the uncanny and invisible realm of “spirits” and his fellow human beings. Precisely in the case of cultic symbols, the enchanter-priest’s praxis is starkly pervaded by elements of play; play is at work in the bringing to presence of the prevailing whole through the proof of the shining back [Rückschein] of the whole into what is partial. The initiatory enchantment that belongs to magical technique is based on the reversal of this relation—the whole can be influenced by the part, if the part is the symbol of the whole. And the mythological dramatic play or spectacle must also be brought into this context; not only does it make evident what the dominant, over-powering forces are to which the human being is abandoned, and not only does it orient—it is also efficacious, in a practical manner. If the human being brings the powers to epiphany in the dramatic play or spectacle, powers to which he knows he is fully exposed and handed over, then he accomplishes at the same time an atonement and a purification, a catharsis of the soul—a purification that should be thought of differently than the way in which the aesthetic theory of early metaphysics formulates it in Aristotle’s Poetics. Cult-play can “purify” an entire city. Cult-play relates to the gods—brings to presence their superhuman rule and work—and their superhuman play, too, in words and in ritual gestures. The play of the gods, however, remains a kind of play that is played by a person. It always has someone playing, whether he is veiled or unveiled, who moves the pieces back and forth. As will become apparent to us, these are important structures that, in such a context, could only come up in cult-play. The entirety of the cult is certainly not playful, and play, too, in its entirety is not primordially only cultic. Already in the earliest human horde there are the games of children; there are aspects of play in the meeting of the sexes, in courtship, in refusal and assent; there are kinds of play with an excessive martial power, such as martial dances and contests; and, finally, the manifold pranks of everyday life. Yet cult-play predominates in archaic times—and the other modes of play remain subordinated to it and occasionally receive an enchanting sheen from it. If we now leave cult-play aside, we must remain conscious of the fact that a great problem is left behind whose surface has hardly been scratched. To be sure, there is an immense ethnological literature about the early cult and the magical meanings of dances and dramatic plays or spectacles. A philosophical understanding of the assembled facts, however, could first be attained or at least prepared, only once the categorial clarification of the structures of play had made progress. The cult is not only a problem of play—it is above all a theological problem. The genuine theological question is not a concern for us; it transcends the framework of a philosophizing self-understanding of the finite human being. Does it do so in the way that pure sunshine transcends the twilit caves in which we dwell, or like the Fata Morgana transcends the desert sand? Who can know this—except God alone or those whom he calls to be the hearers of his word?
With the bracketing out of the theological question, cult-play already came into our view in an abridged form; it had revealed itself to us only as an anthropological phenomenon. In itself, however, cult-play is a kind of play before God, consecration-activity, archaic practice of enchantment, mantic joining of the human realm with the heavenly powers of fate—is an elevated, solemn, and festive association of the human race with the divine. The intimate binding of religion and play belongs to the wonderful and primordial mysteries of early human existence. The human being of late culture has only sparse memories of this prehistory, when all was still full of gods; they are submerged memories in the collective unconscious that light up from time to time, flash like lightning in our mundane day, which is saturated with the droning of motors, with the workshop din of our technological civilization, with the battle cry of ideologies and with the hectic bustle of our businesses. The human being of our age has a long history full of transformations behind him—a history in the course of which he reorganized himself in increasing measure with the products of his productive power, inserted himself into his self-created environment of artificial things manufactured through work activity, weaved himself into the fabric of his diverse creations of freedom, and perhaps36 alienated himself from his very self in the objectification of his deed. This historical trajectory is just as magnificent as it is uncanny: the earth is covered over with the traces of human structures and destruction, accomplishments and laying waste, work and war. The globe has been marked by the human being. It is no longer natural wilderness—it has been, on the whole, forcefully pulled into the history of the human being. It is the theater of this restless species, the material for its labor, the field for its battles.
This historicization of the earth in the historical course of human work and the struggles for power and rule occurs, however, at the same time as the human being increasingly becomes “terrestrial”: at the same time as there is a dismantling of the religious interpretation of human life and a progressive decline of mythical substance. Certainly, the process of the dwindling of religion has not yet reached its dismal end; powerful life energies still exist in the great religions present today—but the decisive controversy, which cuts humanity in two, revolves around the interpretation of the economic process, around the explication and the proper ordering of the productive forces moving the course of history. This controversy is carried out with religious fervor, or better: it has drawn to itself the most intimate interests of the human being, which otherwise were worked out in religion. One can even formulate the global controversy as follows: it is not at all the case that both world-political camps are only distinguished by their conceptions of the economic process, of the regulation of the economy. They are distinguished above all by their conception of the position of human work activity, whether it is a field of life alongside others or whether it is the central field of life; they are distinguished in the radicality with which they conceive the historicization of the earth as the becoming-terrestrial of the human being. In the time of early humans the earth is predominantly wilderness, hardly scratched by the feeble productive powers of archaic technology. As wilderness, this earth is full of gods and populated by daemons; it radiates in a magical, enchanting light; it affects the human soul with sublimity and terror. And it is only in play, in the form of human play that is elevated by the cult, that the human being who is beguiled by its radiance and made anxious by its terror is able to draw near to the forces prevailing throughout the earth—not in work and not in struggle. The historical trajectory of the human being not only brings along an unfolding of the uniquely human power; it initially brings a purification and an elevated development of the archaic belief in daemons and gods, and thus an unfolding of religion into the great, historical religions, but also then their decline in connection with the shifting of humanity to the spirit of science and the industrial technology thereby made possible. In this the unique power of the human being appears to triumph. The human being becomes “terrestrial,” now not in a sense that refers to the earth as wilderness, but rather that understands the earth as the disenchanted dwelling place of humanity producing its own life itself. This earth is empty of gods.
Such a way of speaking is easily misunderstood. No dogmatic claims about the object of religion are intended to be made here. We are not saying that there were gods in archaic human existence and that there are no longer gods in modern human existence. We are speaking only about the human phenomena of belief and disbelief. “Full of gods” and “empty of gods” are meant as anthropological expressions. The numinous shudder that emanated from nature as wilderness wrenched the human being of early times beyond himself, impelled relations to the super-human, motivated offering and sacrifice. The archaic human being interpreted his position, his exposure, in cultic gestures of play and from such knowledge practiced magic healing practices. He could not remain within himself, could not stay in the closed circuit of human things—he had to hold human things out into the storms of heaven and the originating powers of the earth. He had to seek contact with divine forces, had always to surpass himself. In contrast, the human being of scientific late culture appears to be characterized by a closing off of the human essence, by a resolute turning away from superhuman forces in the attempt to ground humanity on itself. At one time this was carried out as the rational critique of religion, as its reinterpretation as a phenomenon of a utopian self-alienation; at another time, however, it was carried out still more decisively as the self-objectification of the human being in the freedom of his work activity. The human being is conceived of as unable to placidly remain in himself like the animal and plant. He is conceived of as having to “go beyond” himself, having to surpass himself—but the “surpassing” is shifted onto the human being himself: in his creative power he first forms the dimensions within which this surpassing happens—his freedom, one says, is not only an interior capacity of the self-determination of his will; it is above all a capacity of sensuous-objective production, the objectification of a human sense in an object. Freedom occurs as work and as struggle. As work and as struggle, human freedom forms the dimensions within which it expresses [aüßert] itself and at the same time thereby externalizes [entäußert] itself from itself. The field of externalization belongs indissolubly to human freedom; it surpasses itself within itself, so to speak. Admittedly, it thus depends on an environing nature; yet it does not let this stand as it is in itself, but rather imprints on it, from the uniquely human power, the stamp of its free deed, makes it into the material for its work activity, into the site for the externalization [Veräußerung] of spirit.
The survey of the structure of the externalization of freedom, as it is achieved above all in the conceptual penetration into work, is now variously projected back even onto religion from polemical motives. One attempts to “interpret” religion from out of work not by interpreting religion as a kind or a prototype of work, but rather by “applying” the schema of the self-objectification and self-externalization of human freedom achieved in work to religion. One then says: the human being in the religious attitude of life first of all forms the dimension of the sacred, which he then populates with the creatures of his subconscious imagination; in the appearance of what is “alien” he transfers to the beyond what the ground of his own soul is; the superhuman is a Fata Morgana of the human heart and the dream-woven human act of representation. The truth of religion would be the human being. The human being would not be an image, a likeness [Ebenbild] of God, but God a dreamed-up likeness of the human being. It is an old feature of religious critique to explain the gods from out of the wishful fancies of human beings; it is, however, a more recent feature of the modern critique of religion to leave the structure of “transcendence” to the divine and precisely to derive37 it, with all its transcendence, from an illusory self-externalization and self-alienation of the human being. This possibility was first prepared by the absolute idealism of Hegel, propagated by Feuerbach in a strident battle slogan, brought by Marx into close connection with the structure of labor, and unfolded by Nietzsche in the attempt at a world-historical unmasking of Christianity, metaphysics and Western morals. Hegel’s philosophy opened up the possibility of allowing the harshest and deepest oppositions to cross over into one another; it is a philosophy of universal transition, of mediation, that just as much sets apart as encloses together, a philosophy of the total movement structuring and joining all, a movement of the streaming of Being through all beings. “Everything flows”; flowing Being is the life of Spirit, the concept conceiving itself—however, it is not what is without distinction, but what distinguishes itself within itself, the stream of unity in which negativity is perpetually at work as diremption, as the allowing of oppositions to break open and as the destruction of antitheses. Hegel turns against unity without distinction, against “the night in which all cows are black,”38 just as much as he turns against rigidly maintaining fixed distinctions. Everything hinges on thinking the “absolute” as a stream and as a delimited determination, as a movement and as a thing, as the one-and-all [All-Eine] and as the dirempted. For this reason, for Hegel there are no ultimate, indissoluble distinctions: not the distinction between finite and infinite, nor between the human being and God; the finite being is conceived as self-finitization, as the temporary form of the infinite. The human being is interpreted as God still39 concealed within his majesty.40 What essentially “is,” is transition. The life of absolute Spirit is determined by a perpetual self-externalization and a perpetual return home to itself. Especially revealing in this connection is Hegel’s concept of “self-consciousness.” By this is not meant the plain and simple self-knowing of a spiritual being, which can for instance say “I” to itself, thus not ego-consciousness in distinction to object-consciousness, but rather that knowledge which is achieved in the movement of thought, which breaks through the phenomenal alienness of the external object, recognizes itself as Spirit precisely in what is apparently alien to Spirit, finds itself in another, and thereby conceives the other as its own41 self-externalization. By means of this, the phenomenal distinction between self-consciousness and alien-consciousness is sublated—and a speculatively elevated model of self-consciousness determines the idea as “absolute knowing.” And ultimately Hegel can therefore designate his Science of Logic as the “thoughts of God”: the thinker has passed over into God, because earlier God had alienated himself into the human being. God and the human being are in the transition, are not entities that are fixed and divided in fixed ways; they are poles of the extensive oscillating movement of Spirit or of the absolute Idea. The difference between God and the human being is ultimately conceived from the perspective of a unity of life that is encompassing, but also self-dirempting and from this diremption self-restoring. The surpassing of the human being toward God is not grasped as a relation to another being that is higher and exceedingly powerful—it is understood as self-transcendence, or, better, as a return from a self-externalization: the relation of alienation is dissolved into a self-relation. Yet this does not succeed in such a way that the “phenomenon” of alienness can be made to disappear entirely by means of speculative thought; it is only “re-interpreted,” interpretively turned around [um-interpretiert]. Alienness comes into the self-relation as self-alienation. The concept of “self-alienation” in Hegel is related to the absolute, to Spirit,42 to the Idea. The concept of “self-alienation” means a self-alienation of the concept; it alienates itself from itself when it crosses over into “nature,” becomes external, sinks into the apparently spiritless, in order to then go from this being-outside-of-itself in the sphere of externality, of spatio-temporal determination, into itself and to “recollect” itself as a movement of knowing and of thinking, to realize its being-one-with-itself, its self-possession through a long course of steps. Self-alienation and self-attainment are stations on the way in the movement of Spirit, which is the actual and the true as the streaming of Being in the Being of all beings, one that is perpetually rent asunder by the negativity endemic to it.
Among the epigones of Hegel who attempted “to put his philosophy on its feet,” self-alienation becomes the basic feature of the human essence. If, in Hegel, the human was such as he initially and for the most part understands himself—simply a creature of nature, caught precisely in the self-alienation of absolute Spirit—then the situation is “inverted” by Feuerbach and Marx, and likewise by Nietzsche, too. Idealist philosophy is henceforth taken to be a conceptually ponderous and utopian self-alienation of the human being, a losing of the self in dreamy thoughts without true reality. Philosophy becomes a decided and resolute anthropology—but not even anthropology in the sense of an already familiar individual scientific discipline; philosophy becomes the interpretation of the human being, insofar as all questions converge on it as on a focal point. In the doctrine of the idealist-illusory self-alienation, the dimension of the superhuman is retracted into the human being; the human being is interpreted as the actual basis of actual representations of non-actual phantoms—the dimension of environmental things is understood by way of work as material or as a construct of human work activity. Only because this anthropology operates with the basic thought of self-alienation, borrowed from Hegel’s philosophy but reinterpreted, can it relate all beings in general to the human being and become that post-idealist philosophy of reflection that purports to grasp, in the human being, the quintessence of all beings.
Two relations of the human being to other beings thus suggest themselves: the relation of alienness and the relation of self-alienation. When the relation of alienness is taken as a basis, the human being is considered separate in his mode of Being from the Being of other things: he exists in a different way than a stone, flower, or horse—but also differently than daemons and gods. He lives in an understanding of alien modes of Being, without being able to be, himself, the alien being of another kind. He surpasses, with understanding, his own Being. For example, in cult-play he comports himself to superhuman powers. The situation of the human being appears to be entirely different when the relation of self-alienation is predominantly taken as a basis in order to elucidate the manifold relations of the human being to things in his environment. In a certain way, the human being is then everything; even what is apparently non-human is nevertheless bound to the human in a latent concealment. The surpassing remains within the realm of the human field of life; the “transcendence” of beings is interpreted as humanity’s “transcendental” sense-horizon. Both fundamental possibilities of interpreting the human relation to surrounding beings have become very important for philosophy, because they are conceived as almost fixed alternatives. Either we comport ourselves to alien beings that are in themselves not originally related to the human being and not dependent on him, or we comport ourselves to an “in-itself” that is only secretly posited by us; we alienate ourselves into a seemingly self-standing and human-free sense-construct and are only able in the highest effort of philosophical thinking to break through the appearance of “alienness” and to find out that we are the architects of such constructions. The alternative runs: the human being comports himself either to beings that determine him or to such beings as he determines—either to things-in-themselves or to constructs of his own self-alienation. This “alternative” has its existentielly sharpest form in the realm of religion: the human being prays to the god who has made him, or prays to the god whom he has himself made.
However, if here, in the context of the question concerning the essence of play, we bracket out the religious connection that thoroughly determined and sustained play in the early years of the human race, and restrict our gaze to only its anthropological content, this does not occur by way of the thought of self-alienation. The human being who to a certain degree is everything, who refers the gods, the superhuman beings, back to himself as the spawn of his dreams and who interprets nature as material for work and as a field of his own self-objectification, is no longer left for us. The human being that does remain for us is the one who comports himself to the totality of the world before all relations to beings, the totality of the world from which the lowest and highest things first arise at all. Such a relation is neither a relation to what is alien nor a relation to the self. What it is in itself must be ascertained [erfragt] in the first place. We are attempting to ask about [fragen] it by interrogating [befragen] human play. The bracketing out of the religious significations does not leave behind a kind of play that would be lacking in significance; sacred cult-play does not become “worldly” through a methodical dimming of its religious motifs—at most it thereby becomes “profane.” The profanation of cult-play is a process that comes about in a variety of ways in the history of culture, a process that for the most part happens slowly but is also occasionally actualized in rapid and sudden upheavals, for instance, when one cult prevails over another, achieving an acknowledged predominance; then it can still happen that the cult that had been overcome withdraws into the inconspicuousness of a mere kind of play. What was once an invocation of the gods becomes a song in a children’s game [Spielsang eines Kinderspiels]; an activity originally intended for ritual becomes the mere convention of playful conduct in a game of entertainment [Unterhaltungsspiel]. Much of what in everyday life is only a curious product of play [Spielwerk], an ancient tradition of play [Spielsitte], is a relic of archaic practices. The ruins of play, too, and not only that of cities and empires, litter the battlefield of history. Admittedly, for the most part, the profaning of cultic play arises from its dissipation in time. To be sure, it is shielded against such dissipation more than everyday customs; its hieratic feature acts to preserve it. But even the most venerable things trickle away in endless time. Life never remains stationary; it is movement.43 And ultimately religions and mysteries change, too, even if more slowly than the constructs of ruling and of work. Forgetting spreads out over every instance of human knowledge, like a cloud in the sky, initially scarcely visible, but then expanding more and more; every act of knowing is a theft from an original forgottenness, and this theft is avenged, slowly but inevitably. It is a great illusion to believe that the human race in its collective memory retains all cultures that have lived, that it lives in the continuity of an unbroken chain of memory through countless generations. Certainly, possessions are carried forward from one generation to another, and there are amazing cohesive links throughout the centuries.
But much more powerful than every retention and preservation is the power of forgetting, the immense, ruinous power of time. Everything falls victim to its gnawing teeth, the mountains and sea, stellar nebulae—and, in a much more essential sense, the Being of the human being with all his creations, with all his upsurges and deeds, his conquests and his sufferings. What we retain in time and are able to keep for a while is only a fraction of what we lose in it. The trajectory of human history is a trajectory of perpetual losses, and this far more than a course of new conquests and discoveries. Even the hieratically assured cults fall into ruin—not always in such a way that they are simply supplanted by new cults or other life forces. They fall into ruin by starting to become “habit.” They become rigid in a popular currency. The sense of brightness that in the beginning suffused them with the most acute tension between what is unsayable and what can be said disappears; the enchanting moment recedes and an apparent “common sense [Verständigkeit]” gains the upper hand. Cults die, too, by being “demythologized.” The religious festival-play loses its binding character that gathers the community into the presencing of a god; festival-play remains, but the gods withdraw and quietly abandon the land when human hearts no longer blaze with desire for, and feel timidity in the face of, them—when human hearts have “settled down” in a skillful, almost professional interaction with the sacred. “For when it’s over and Day’s light gone out /”—as we find in Hölderlin’s hymn “Germania”—“The priest is the first to be struck, but lovingly / The temple and the image and the cult / Follow him down into darkness, and none of them now may shine. / Only as from a funeral pyre henceforth / A golden smoke, the legend of it, drifts / And glimmers on around our doubting heads. . . .”44 In the history of the human being there are perhaps no events more disturbing than the toppling of the beloved images of the gods. Nothing strikes the substance of our existence harder. If human empires pass away, states collapse, and buildings decay, human life affected by such ephemerality can always still, being anchored, have knowledge in the “non-ephemeral” and be grounded in the sacred; it still knows its place and is positioned by the relation to the divine on solid, reliable hinges. However, when cults collapse and lose their sheltering, retentive power, the human being is cast out into an uncanny confusion, where he knows neither path nor bridge, where he no longer knows what the proper life is, what good and what evil are, what honor and what glory are, what disgrace and what infamy are. The divine is that great star by which for millennia humanity “orients” its dangerous path and peoples commence their historical passage. When cults petrify, peter out into feeble habits, and ancient images of the gods topple, a new star is usually already ascendant from the night in such dark times. The question is only whether it is always so and must always be so. Who can say what is happening in our time? Have the great religions on earth become exhausted—does a new faith somewhere reveal itself, a new manifestation of divine power? Or is there only a profound renewal, a reformation of the old faith and its churches? Are not merely a few images of gods now toppled, but rather all such images? Does human freedom not take its most extreme risk when it renounces all superhuman commitments and, alone, proclaims the formative-creative power of the human will as the unconditioned ground of its terrestrial existence?
What is happening today and what the time has truly come for cannot be expressed validly by individuals, perhaps because individuals can no longer have a superhuman legitimation, are no longer prophets and mouthpieces of the deity, but rather small waves in the immense human surge. With an extreme skepticism we doubt every purported herald’s office, whether one may believe45 it to be speaking in the name of God or as the mouth46 of Being itself. In the end, a residue of “theology” remains lodged in all philosophemes that are conceived as “mandates.” Yet if one is mistrustful of such claims, then on the other hand the human being is not thus absolutized, not understood as an utterly self-ruling power on its own, to which nothing superhuman would be opposed. Our age probably stands at the furthest remove from the primordial state of early times, when everything was still full of gods—it is probably the time of the greatest emptiness of gods so far, of the greatest dwindling of religious substance, which one ordinarily characterizes as “nihilism.” As long as one characterizes nihilism only from the perspective of the phenomenon of religion, thus describing and deploring it as the growing wasteland of modern godlessness, the opportunity concealed in it is not caught sight of. This consists not merely in the fact that for the first time in his history the human being can attempt to ground himself solely and exclusively in his productive power and to achieve the European Enlightenment in a free self-production not bound by any metaphysical models. The opportunity lies more47 in a possible openness to the world that would no longer be “mediated” by a highest being and would also no longer be disguised by this mediation. The thinking through of human play leads to such an openness to the world when human play is entirely detached from its cultic origins and—this is especially important—when this detachment is not carried out as a profanation of cult-play. The worldliness of playing does not emerge gradually in the dismantling of its primeval-religious character. We do not at all attain the worldedness48 of existence by mere “processes of secularization” that only sap a religious substance and a “spiritual” interpretation of life. For that reason we have emphatically turned against the idea that the concept of human play pertaining to the world could be assessed to a certain degree as an echo-phenomenon of the cult. Profanation is itself a historical possibility that belongs to the sacred as such and is the mode of its decomposition in the weathering of time. The “profane” is initially the forecourt of the temple where ordinary everyday life surges up to the walls of the sacred but is still strictly separated from it; the name of the forecourt becomes the term for the whole sphere of life from which the sacred precinct was demarcated, against which it is set apart and which it elevates in such a separation. The sacred and the profane realms together constitute for the first time the whole of the religious world; however, the dividing borders between the two zones belonging together are not irrevocably fixed. For the most part, they have a stable cohesiveness in early historical times; the actual passage of history pulls even the sacred orders into the unrest within it and the borders are breached in various ways. There is also already a breach of sacred order when the money-lenders and the exchangers of currency spread themselves out in the temple and defile its sacredness—and a human being of pure heart erupts in anger and drives out the defilers of the temple with a scourge made from cord in his hand. Much worse, however, is the profanation that occurs when the ones consecrated to the service of God “make a profession” out of it. Cult-play falls to ruin in manifold profanations—it falls to ruin in the rut of habit, falls to ruin in empty ceremony, falls to ruin, too, when the play of the festival is no longer sustained by the vividly felt presencing of the god in sacred awe or itself led by the intimation of the sameness of Dionysus and Hades in orgiastic debaucheries. Countless are the ways in which the play of the human being who is opened up to the deity become profane in the consuming passage of time. However, insofar as profanation belongs to the sacred like shadow to light, profane play cannot be the paradigm for the question concerning the worldliness of human play—rather, only a paradigm that is neither sacred nor profane, neither consecrated nor unconsecrated, can do so. The world itself is neither sacred like God nor profane like the sacrilegious human being; it is “beyond” such distinctions.