From The Gods in Exile

Abstract

From The Gods in Exile HEINRICH HEINE (Translated by Diskin Clay) I will content myself with saying in a few words that, after the decisive victory of Christianity, the pagan gods of the ancient world came to grips with their difficult situation and the hard necessity they had already experienced in an early age. This was the age of the Revolt of the Titans, who burst the gates of Tartarus, heaped Pelion on Ossa, and scaled Olympus. These poor gods and goddesses were compelled to flee ignominiously with their entire court and they came to conceal themselves among us upon the earth and assume every manner of disguise. Most of the gods took refuge in Egypt, where for self-protection they transformed themselves into animal shapes, as Herodotus tells us. It is exactly in this same manner that the pagan divinities were obliged to flee and seek safety in all manner of disguise and in the most remote hiding places, when the true God appeared with his cross and when the zealous iconoclasts, a black band of monks, shattered their temples and cast anathemas upon the banned gods. A good number of these Olympian refugees had neither ambrosia nor a place of asylum and they had to resort to an honest occupation on earth to gain their daily bread. Some of these gods whose property and sacred woods had been confiscated were even compelled to work as day laborers in our native Germany and drink beer instead of nectar. In this extremity, Apollo seems to have resigned himself to enter the service of cattle farmers. Just as once he herded the cattle of King Admetus, he lived as a herdsman in Lower Austria. But there his melodious singing awakened the susarion 21.1 spring/summer 2013 picions of a learned monk who recognized that he was one of the ancient pagan gods and delivered him up to an ecclesiastical tribunal. Under torture he admitted that he was the god Apollo. He asked for permission to play his lyre and sing a last song before he was led to execution. Now he sang so tenderly and sweetly and there was something so powerful in his singing—and in addition he was so handsome and tall—that the women broke into tears. There were even some who had fallen ill from the intensity of their emotion. After some time had passed, the authorities wanted to remove his body from his tomb and drive a stake of holly through his stomach. They believed that be must be a vampire and that the women who had fallen ill would be cured if they administered this home remedy, which was generally recognized as successful. But, when the tomb was opened, they found it empty. As for Mars, the ancient god of war, I would be inclined to believe that during the age of feudalism he followed his former occupation as a robber knight. The tall Schimmelpenning , the nephew of the Munster executioner, encountered him in Bologna, where he served as Maître des Hautes Œuvres . Some time latter, Mars served as a lansquenet under the command of General Frondsberg and took part in the sack of Rome. No doubt, he must have felt cruel pangs of distress when he witnessed his beloved city, the temples where he himself had been worshipped and the temples of the gods who were cousins to him destroyed so ignominiously. After the Great Defeat, the fate of Bacchus, the handsome Dionysus, was happier than that of Mars and Apollo. On this subject, there is a medieval legend bearing on his fate. In the Tyrol there are great expanses of lakes, surrounded by forests whose trees touch the sky and are reflected in the lakes’ rippling blue waters. From these waters and woods emanate mysterious sounds; they provoke an eerie feeling in the solitary walker in these parts. On the shore of one of these lakes there was the hut of a young man who lived on the fish he caught; in addition to fishing he worked as a ferthe gods in exile 194 ryman whenever a traveler wanted to cross the lake. He had a large boat that he moored...