Hammer of the Gods: Apocalyptic Texts for the Criminally Insane (Solar Visionaries) - Softcover

(October 15, 1844 - August 25, 1900) was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist. He wrote critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and aphorism.

1. DEAD GOD. A cold wind blows across empty space. Dark matter obscures the sun. Wreckage of exploded stars drifts in the void, the ruins of a solar system, burned-out at 3,000K, radiating annihilation in all directions. A single beam of light, cutting through the gloom, frames the silhouetted body of a dead God, stretching cruciform across the galaxy; face taut with pain, spikes wounding wrist and ankle - borne continually upwards towards the vault of the Heavens, where divinities go to die, but all the while drawn down into the abyss below. Lead weights lashed to the base and the vertical struts of the scaffold plumb the deep. The crucified hangs on a counterweight, falling far into emptiness. While He thirsts for eternal order, purity, light, redemption, the counterweight pulls all that is holy back down towards the distant memory of something darker: the general economy of base matter, meat, blood, and blind impulse from which it was emitted - a mistake dropping off the end of a human production line. A human product which suddenly reaches the scrap heap of worthless ideas in an unplanned obsolescence. Dead God. Aborted divinity. Enemy of multitude stars. Stone baby of the macrocosm. Evacuated cyclopean eye of the celestial sphere. Shadows black-out the horizon in a single stroke. Morbid expectations of apocalypse. Ledgers kept in minute detail plot the geometries and timescales of the end of the world. Vertigo and nausea proliferate, requiring that the stomach expands to accommodate ever greater magnitudes of sickness. Pulsing chaos tears apart the fabric of the universe. The last days fade out along the line of a fuse.... So what was it that ruined this passional gothic theatre of obliteration? What was it that robbed us of the comic spectacle of all the sinners falling to their knees, hands outstretched in terror, before all being wiped-out in some final holocaust of divine judgement? It was this: something like divine order without God. God's shadow, smeared on the walls of his burial cave. Transcendental authority. Deicide undertaken, and the old Logos of the universe a bloodless corpse, hacked into pieces by a multitude of blades; business confidence is not shaken at all along a street of graves, churches, memorials, tombs. In fact, something of an upturn is taking place. No-one is troubled by the sound of gravediggers echoing across the marketplace at daybreak. No-one detects the faint smell of death which hangs in the mist. ......