FROM CULT TO CULTURE
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any idea of the genuine actuality of
J
ahve, the Elohim of Israel. In
the magic rites, which at the time of cultic potency forced the Elohim
of the people into physical presence, prophets and psalmists could
only see "riddles of primeval times."
He is particularly cutting about King Solomon "the wise," whom
he denounces as "an aesthete unnerved by erotic excesses and
in
a
religious sense a progressivist blockhead" typical of the regression of
the cult from an effectively present national god into the preaching
of an abstract and generally human deity
in
heaven. He refers to
Solomon's prayer in the temple, where the king asks: "But will God
indeed dwell on the earth?" as a "scandalous speech." As though
Israel's unique task had not consisted in building for its god a dwell–
ing, a tent, and in providing
all
means for his constant presence.
King Solomon's "sermon" was just twaddle and ushered in the poets
of the Psalms who exiled the Elohim entirely into the blue sky, sing–
ing constantly of a deity in heaven whereas the Pentateuch does not
even know the heavens as a seat of god. The Elohim of the Penta–
teuch (which Chaim Breisacher strangely enough takes to be a
homogeneous archaic document) leads his people in a pillar of fire;
the god of Israel dwells among the people. While later psalmists
piously ask in the name of God: "Do I then eat the flesh of bulls
and drink the blood of goats?" the Pentateuch expressly describes the
sacrifices as the actual nourishment of
J
ahve. These pious litanies of
the psalmists were actually a slap
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impertinent enlightenment in
the face of the reality of the cultic communion.
Breisacher's archaistic interpretation of the Pentateuch, which
Thomas Mann describes at length and not without amusement, does
not stop at details of the exegesis. He cannot say enough to show
the genuine cultic communion with the Elohim of Isr.ael as a magic
technique, a manipulation of dynamic forces in which mishaps might
easily occur, catastrophic short circuits due to mistakes and failures .
Religion as ethics he considers a pale substitute for the sacral acts
of the cult. Ethical codes of morality are a typical intellectual misun–
derstanding of laws rooted
in
archaic rituals. Prayer is for him only
"the vulgarized and rationalistically watered-down late form" of very
active and real magic invocation, the coercion of the gods.
