This article revisits the intersection of myth and political theology through readings of relevant texts by Carl Schmitt, Ernst Cassirer, and Hans Blumenberg. At stake is the question of whether myth can inform a concept of political polytheism that avoids the absolutist threat to democracy of Schmitt’s monotheistic brand of political theology. To answer this question, the present essay proceeds in three steps. It reconstructs the Schmittian model in contrast to polytheistic concepts of the political, then traces the notion of the myth of the state in Cassirer’s and Blumenberg’s work. Finally, it shows how Blumenberg arrives at a preliminary yet operative model of political polytheism that goes beyond conceptions of the liberal democratic consensus and reveals a political form of resistance to power.

This article begins with Werner Herzog's programmatic statements on new images and deep truth and connects it to ideas of Nietzschean aesthetics, mainly the Apollonian image and the Dionysian horror. My main argument is that Herzog contributes to the literary and aesthetic tradition of new mythology within the medium of film by developing a distinct visual language that tries to express non-rational truth claims. In a first step I explore how Nietzschean aesthetics influenced the debates about the mythic image and total cinema in classic film theory and visual studies. More importantly I show how the desire to create new mythic images not only influenced Herzog's discourse on film, but his actual aesthetic practice. In my analysis of his 1971 documentary Land of Silence and Darkness (Land des Schweigens und der Dunkelheit) I show how the dynamic between Apollonian veil and Dionysian Urbild (original image) is effective in the construction of what Herzog calls “deep truth”. This article attempts to shift the focus away from the fact-fiction debate surrounding most of Herzog's documentaries and to concentrate instead on framing Herzog's claims of non-rational truth theoretically and locating his work in the aesthetic tradition of new mythology.

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