Famous for announcing in 1882 “God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!”[1] in 1888 Friedrich Nietzsche also famously lamented, “Almost two thousand years and not one new god!”[2] In order for a new god to emerge, the old god had to be dead and buried. Nietzsche spoke not to his own time but to “philosophers of the future.”[3] In the aftermath of the death of God — no, the murder of God — Nietzsche asks, “What festivals of atonement, what holy games will we have to invent for ourselves?”[4]
In the “Preface” to Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, Harry Haller directs the attention of the young fictional author of the Preface to a work of Novalis. He reads: