1.  The people that got close to its god in the art religion cult is the customary ethical nation that knows its state to be its will and the state's actions to be the implementation of its own self.  ²This spirit confronting the self-conscious people is thus not the selfless light god lacking the certainty of the single individuals, but really only their universal essence and the lordly power into which they vanish [VII.A.a. Light god §2.3 ff. M].  ³All the cult of the religion of this simple shapeless essence returns to its followers in the universal is that they are the people of their god.  The cult only secures their persistence and their simple substance as such for them, not, however, their actual self, which is in fact discarded here.  ⁴For they honour their god as the empty depth, not as spirit.  ⁵The cult of the art religion lacks that abstract simplicity of the essence and hence its depth.  ⁶In contrast, the essence immediately united with the self is in itself the spirit and the knowing truth, although not yet the truth known, i.e. knowing itself in its depth.  ⁷Here the essence, the being, has the self within it, so its appearance is friendly to consciousness and in the cult this secures not only the general justification of its persistence, but also its own self-conscious existence in it; just as conversely the essence, the being, has selfless reality not in a discarded people whose substance is only recognized with a selfless reality, but in a people whose self is recognized in its substance.

2.  Self-consciousness thus emerges from the cult satisfied in its essence and the god returns back into it as into its own site.  ²For itself this site is the night of substance, its pure individuality, but no longer the stressful night of the artist not yet reconciled with its essence, itself caught up in the process of becoming objective [VII.B.a. Abstract artwork §5.1,2 M]; now it is the satisfied night, whose pathos is not needy now, because it returns from out of intuition, out of objectivity overcome.

– ³This pathos is for itself the essence of the sunrise [VII.A.a. Light god §3.1 M] which from now on has set again into itself and has its downfall, self-consciousness, and hence existence and actual reality within it.

– ⁴It has here run through the motion of its realization.  ⁵Letting itself down out of its character as pure essence to an objective force of nature and its manifestations, it is an existence for the other, for the self, by which it is consumed.  ⁶The peaceful essence of selfless nature acquires in its fruit the level at which that fruit, cooking itself and digesting itself, offers itself to self-like life, achieving its highest perfection in the utility of being edible and drinkable as the possibility of a higher level, even nibbling at that of spiritual existence.  In its metamorphosis the earth spirit grows into a quietly powerful substance with the feminine principle of nurturing, but also into a spiritual fermentation with the male principle of the automotive force of self-conscious existence.

3.  This enjoyment is the revelation to the rising light god of exactly what it is, i.e. its mystery.  ²The mystical is not something hidden like a secret or ignorance, but consists in the fact that the self knows itself to be one with the essence, the being, so that this is revealed.  ³Only the self is revealed to itself, that is, what is revealed is only something that has the immediate certainty of itself.  ⁴The cult asserts the simple essence in this certainty.  It is a useful thing with the existence of being seen, felt, smelled, and tasted, but it is also an object of desire and as such becomes one with the self through the enjoyment.  This is how it is completely betrayed to the self and revealed to it.

– ⁵That of which it is said that it is revealed to reason or to the heart is in fact still secret, for it lacks the real certainty of immediate existence, both in objective terms and in terms of enjoyment, which in religion is not just the thoughtless immediate sort, but also the pure knowing kind of the self.

4.  What is revealed here to the self-conscious spirit in the cult is the simple essence as the motion partly of moving out of its night-time hiding-place up into consciousness to be its quietly nurturing substance, but partly also to lose itself again in the subterranean night, in the self, lingering above only with a maternal longing.

– ²The moving impulse is in fact the light god of the sunrise with his many names and his turbulent life [VII.A.a. Light god §4 ff. M] which, similarly let down from its abstract being, at first enters into the objective existence of the fruit.  Then it gives itself up to self-consciousness, in which it finally reaches genuine reality; as a horde of babbling women running here and there, it is the undisciplined whirl of nature in self-conscious shape.

5.  Only the absolute spirit, the one that is this simple essence and not the one that has spirit within it, has as yet been revealed to consciousness, i.e. only the immediate spirit, the spirit of nature.  ²Its self-conscious life is thus only the mystery of the bread and the wine, of Ceres and Bacchus [I. Sense certainty §20.6; VII.B.a. Abstract artwork §14.4], not of the others, the upper gods, whose individuality includes self-consciousness as an essential moment.  ³Spirit as self-conscious spirit has not yet sacrificed itself to it and the mystery of the bread and wine is not yet mystery of the flesh and blood.

6.  This unbound whirl of the god must calm itself down into an object and the enthusiasm that did not make it to consciousness must produce a work which, as in the previous case of the statue in the enthusiasm of the artist, certainly does confront him as just as complete a work [VII.B.a. Abstract artwork §§4,5 and I. Sense certainty etc. §20.5 M], and not one inherently lifeless now, but a living self.

– ²Such a cult is the festival man celebrates in his own honour without yet giving it the significance of the absolute being, for the essence, the being, is but newly revealed to hiim, not yet the spirit, not yet something that essentially takes on human form.  ³This cult lays the basis for the revelation, laying out its moments one by one separately.  ⁴Here then we have the abstract moment of vital embodiment of essence as formerly we had the unity of both in mindless chatter.  ⁵Man thus sets up himself in place of the statue, himself as a shape now brought up and worked out to a complete free motion, just as the former is the completely free state of rest.  ⁶When each individual at least knows how to present himself as a torch-bearer, then one raises himself up from the others, the one who is the shaped motion, the smooth development and fluid force of all members – a soulful, living artwork marrying his beauty with strength and taking the decoration adorning the statue [VII.B.a. Abstract artwork §15.2-7 M] as the price of his force.  He receives the honour from his people of replacing the stone god as the highest living representation of the essence of the people.

7.  In both descriptions we just had the unity of self-consciousness and the spiritual essence is present, although they both lack balance.  ²In bacchanalian excitement, the self is outside itself, and the same is true of spiritual essence in the beautiful embodiment.  ³The dullness of consciousness and its wild stuttering must be accepted into the clear existence of the latter, while the latter's spiritless clarity must be taken into the inwardness of the former.  ⁴The complete element in which the inwardness is just as much outward as the outside is inward is once again language.  Now, however, it is neither the language of the oracle that is in its content completely contingent and individual, nor the sensitive hymn praising only the single god, nor the content-free stuttering of bacchanalian ranting [VII.B.a. Abstract artwork §6.6,7, §7.2 ff.; §4.2 above M].  ⁵Now it has acquired its clear and universal content.  Clear content: the artist has worked his way out of the first completely substantial enthusiasm into a shape that is an existence permeated by the self-conscious soul in all his excitements, living in and through them [VII.B.a. Abstract artwork §4.3 ff. M].  Universal content: the one-sidedness of the statues, only containing one national spirit, only one specific character of divinity, vanishes in this festival celebrating man [VII.B.a. Abstract artwork §3.5 ff. M].  ⁶The beautiful swordsman is indeed the honour of his particular people, but he is a bodily singularity in which the extensiveness and seriousness of the significance and the inner character of the spirit, bearing the particular life, aspirations, needs and customs of his people, has all been destroyed.  ⁷In this externalization into complete embodiment, spirit has abandoned the particular impressions and echoes of nature it included within itself as the actual spirit of the people.  ⁸His people is thus no longer aware of its particularity within him, but rather of its rejection and of the universality of its human existence.