What Nietzsche called the death of God resembles what Mircea Eliade characterized as the recession of a once actively present god into a distant and indifferent one, a deus otiosus. In polytheistic cultures, the typical remedy for this development was to supplement the Great Father with lower and, therefore, more supplicable specialized deities and demiurges. Monotheistic Europeans did not have this option, so those who craved numinous contact, not least artists, responded either by seeking out and reclaiming the residues of earlier forms of Christian piety or by appropriating what they thought were the more magically potent gods of the recently colonized “primitives.” Gauguin did both, first by going to a corner of Brittany still steeped in medieval belief and color and then on to a Tahiti haunted by pre-Christian deities and spirits.

The current overly moralistic, priggish assessment of primitivism cannot erase the fact that it gave access to what was probably the last store of vitality in a moribund European civilization poisoned and degraded by the very modernity it had brought into being. It restored to European art a visionary capability that yielded fresh visions of heaven and hell, which are the two sides of ecstasy. And in so doing, it briefly gave back to art its highest purpose, which has always been and always will be to give symbolic form to what cannot be adequately encompassed by physical form.