people sacrificed humans to their gods; in times of moral belief people sacrificed their strongest drives and instincts to their gods; in a time yet to come people will sacrifice god himself (representative of any belief in consolation and salvation) as a final act of cruelty against themselves. . This three step model of the evolution of religion is important as it ties in with another key point in Nietzsche’s philosophy – the doctrine of eternal reoccurrence or the eternal return. Both the idea of the eternal return and the ladder of cruelty are derived directly from an earlier intellectual influence on Nietzsche, namely the philosopher Schopenhauer. To Schopenhauer dealing with death is the first, and most essential, function of any authentic religion. It is in this sense, by failing to provide a solution to the problem of death, that Schopenhauer regarded Judaism and Graeco-Roman ‘paganism’ as failed religions since they lack a properly developed doctrine of immortality. To Nietzsche’s mind of course, Graeco-Roman ‘paganism’ did provide such a doctrine, for Dionysus, like Christ, is a ‘dying god’ – he dies to be reborn through sacrifice, and in the Greek myths of Dionysus comparisons are draw between the concepts of earthly life (Bios) and eternal life (Zoë) found in the Dionysian Mystery Traditions of Ancient Greece. The Dionysian aesthetic presented in this work is therefore also to be interoperated as an answer to the problem of redemption ( a response to the Schopenhauerian philosophy of redemption), and to the problem of how man can justify his own individual existence in the face of the ‘terrifying’ and ‘absurd’ abyss of life.
The more one examines not the philosophy of Nietzsche, but his