i: to wit: an annunciation. I am to grow osmotic vegetation |  | he: tis much of a muchness! Ice flowers or such as are made of starch, sugar, and cellulose--both are nature, and the only question is for which one ought to praise nature the more. Your inclination, my friend, to inquire after what is objective, the so-called truth, while suspecting nothing of value in the subjective, in pure experience, is truly philistine and worth your overcoming. You behold me: Therfore am I here for you. Does it pay to ask whether I really am? Is 'really' not what works, and truth not experience and feeling? What raises you up, what augments your sense of energy and power and mastery is the truth, damn it--and were it ten times a lie viewed from a virtuous angle. And I will assert that an untruth of the sort that enhances energy is a match for every unprofitably virtuous truth. Will assert as well that creative disease, genius-bestowing disease, which takes all hurdles on horseback, springing in drunken boldness from rock to rock, is a thousand times dearer to life than plodding health. Never have I heard naything more stupind than that only sick can come from sick. Life is not squeamish, and cares not a fig for morality. It grasps the bold product of disease, devours, digests it, and no sooner takes it to itrelf than it is health. Before the fact of life's efficacy, my good man, all distinction of disease and health is undone. A whole horde and generation of receptive lads, all healthy to the core, throw themselves upon the work of the diseased genius whom disease has made a genius, admire, praise, and exalt the work, carry it away with them, refashion it among themselves, bequeath it to the culture, which does not live by homebaked bread alone, but equally by donations and poisions from the apothecary of the Blessed Messengers. Thus saith the untransmogrifiied Sammael. He guarantees to you not only that toward the end of your hour-glass years the sense of power and mastery will more and more outweigh the pains of the little mermaid and finally mount to a most triumphant well-being, to an enthusiastic surge of health, to the life and manner of a god--that is but the subjective side of the matter, I know; it would not suffice for you, would seem unsolid to you. Then know this: We pledge to you the vital efficacy needed for what you will accomplish with our help. You will lead, you will set the march for the future, lads will swear by your name, who thanks to your madness will no longer need to be mad. In their health they will gnaw at your madness, and you will become healthy in them. Do you understand? It is not merely that you will break through the laming difficulties of the age--you will braek through the age itself, the cultural epoch, which is to say, the epoch of this culture and its cult, and dare a barbarism, a double barbarism, because it comes after humanitarianism, after every conceivable root-canal work and bourgeois refinement. Believe me, barbarism has a better understanding even of theology than does a culture that has fallen off from the cult, which even in things religious saw only culture, only humanitarianism, but not excess, not the paradox, the mystical passion, the ordeal so utterly outside bourgeois experience. I truly hope you are not mazed that Old Clootie speaks of things religious? 'Sblood! Who else, I would like to know, should speak to you today of religion? Surely not the liberal theologian? I am by now the only one who still preserves it! Whom would you credit with theological existence if not me? And who can lead a theological existence without me? Religion is as assuredly my field, as it is not that of bourgeois culture. SInce culture has fallen off from the cult and has made a cult of itself, it is no longer anything but offal, and after a mere five hundred years all the world is so weary and surfeited, as if, salva venia, it were force-fed with iron cauldrons.