“Fugitive Guests of Literature”: Re-reading the First Chapter of Calasso’s Literature and the Gods

This paper offers a detailed and interpretative reading of “The Pagan School,” the first chapter of Roberto Calasso's Literature and the Gods (2001), a book that originated as a series of lectures at Oxford University and was later transcribed into prose. The chapter begins with Calasso's striking assertion that “The gods are the fugitive guests of literature” (3), a statement that encapsulates his lifelong meditation on myth, ritual, and their transformations in modernity. This paper analyses how Calasso's argument reframes literature as a site of displaced ritual, where the divine persists not as a stable theological presence but as an intermittent visitation. By focusing exclusively on this chapter, the paper traces Calasso's exploration of the sacrificial origins of literature, the ancient Greek understanding of theos, the nineteenth-century Oriental revival, Baudelaire's École païenne, and the shift from cultic ritual to the solitary act of reading as the last vestige of divine communion. Drawing upon additional scholarship from Catherine Bell, Walter Benjamin, Jonathan Z. Smith, and David Jasper, the paper situate Calasso's reflections within a broader discourse that links mythopoetic imagination, ritual theory, and literary modernism. This reading suggests that the first chapter is not merely introductory but programmatic, laying out Calasso's argument that literature has become the final sanctuary of gods—now fragmented, ironic, and “fugitive,” yet still irreducibly present in texts.