FROM CULT TO CULTURE
399
Goldberg rejects in his philosophy of religion the sterile orthodox
division between monotheism and polytheism and puts the emphasis
on a dialectic between the present and absent god.
The absence of god is a general theme of gnostic philosophy
and literature of the last twenty years. For Goldberg the eclipse of
god takes the form of the absence of divine justice in the human
realm. The sacral act of the people is a transcendental political
action. Whereas other gnostics apotheosize and universalize the
experience of absence, Goldberg tries to coerce god into presence
by the magical potency of a sacral act. The sacral act effects as a
political action the eschatological revolution.
At a time when the boundaries between cultic mythology and
poetic phantasies have been so utterly confused that sheer enthusiasm
for mythology can avail itself of the last remnants of prestige vested
in religion without committing itself to any definite or rigorous
standard of belief or action, and when poetic license manipulates
mythic motives frivolously while putting on a mask of seriousness,
Goldberg's radical philosophy of mythology has the advantage of
facing squarely the problem of mythical reality and consciousness. It
teaches us that mythology presupposes the actuality of a mythico–
religious form of life. The premise is obscured in all theological or
literary interpretations of mythology that can see in it only a sym–
bolic mode of expression. Goldberg's theory of myth is a test case for
all myth-enthusiasts who blur the simple but basic distinction between
the real and the poetic.
In such a radical theory the partly grotesque and partly nihi–
listic consequences of a restitution of mythology come into the open
-consequences which less responsible and more oracular (and
therefore also more successful) hierophants like Martin Heidegger
in philosophy or Ezra Pound in poetry fail to come to terms with.
In order to establish the union between gods and men or to recover
the potency of the sacral act man must first abandon or destroy the
entire history of culture. I see Goldberg's originality not so much in
his
interpretation of myth, later confirmed in rough outline by
empirical anthropology and ethnology, as in the terrifying literalness
with which he set out to translate myth into reality and in his un–
compromising
will
to take the records of archaic cults and rituals
