Vol. 6, Issue 2, Part C (2024)

This paper examines the second chapter of Roberto Calasso’s Literature and the Gods (2001), titled “Mental Waters,” in which Calasso explores the persistence of myth, gods, and divine manifestations in literature and consciousness. Delivered originally as part of his Oxford lectures, the work’s oral origins inform its personal and allusive style, which challenges linear critical traditions in favor of a mythopoetic engagement with history and memory. In “Mental Waters,” Calasso charts the movement of myth and its relationship to literature through concepts such as Aby Warburg’s “mnemonic wave,” the divine nymphs as emissaries of inspiration, and the complex interplay between chaos and cosmos. The chapter interrogates the fragility of modern attempts to recreate mythology, insisting that myth cannot be divorced from the religious consciousness that once animated it. Drawing on Nietzsche’s writings, particularly his Dionysian reflections, and Hölderlin’s poetic sensibility, this analysis underscores Calasso’s argument that literature remains an archive of divine traces, a space where gods, though estranged, persist in simulacra. The essay situates Calasso’s thought within a broader intellectual lineage while retaining his emphasis on the aesthetic and spiritual dimensions of myth’s survival.