Preludes to science – So you believe the sciences would have emerged and matured, if they had not been preceded by magicians, alchemists, astrologers, and witches who with their promises and false claims created a thirst, hunger, and taste for hidden and forbidden powers? Indeed, infinitely more has had to be promised than can ever be fulfilled in order that anything at all be fulfilled in the realm of knowledge. Those things which now appear to us to be preludes and exercises preparatory to science were in the past certainly not practised and felt to be any such thing. Similarly perhaps to a distant age the whole of religion will appear as an exercise and prelude. Perhaps religion could have been the strange means of making it possible one day for a few individuals to enjoy the whole self-sufficiency of a god and all his power of self-redemption. Indeed – one may ask – would man ever have learned to feel hunger for himself and to find satisfaction and fullness in himself without this religious training and prehistory? Did Prometheus9 first have to imagine having stolen light and pay for it before he could finally discover that he had created light by desiring light, and that not only man but also god was the work of his own hands and clay in his hands? All mere images of the sculptor – no less than delusion, theft, the Caucasus, the vulture, and the whole tragic Prometheia of all those who know?