Hearing the Silent Call of the Last God: On Heidegger’s Mythical and Prophetic Language Javier Pérez-Jara Yale University Beijing Foreign Studies University Abstract In this article, I argue that Heidegger’s notion of “God(s)” can only be properly understood through a new phenomenological interpretation of his esoteric/private writings of the 1930s and 1940s. Through this interpretation, I will hold that Heidegger built a philosophy, heavily based on poetic devices, in which an “ontic atheism” is the condition of possibility of a true understanding of the divine, and therefore of the sacred, as the phenomenological dimension of the world that is beyond any kind of human technical and scientific reductionism. Until 1928, Heidegger maintained that true philosophy has to be methodologically a-theistic, and that his own thinking denied the ontic existence of God. Nevertheless, after being unable to write the projected second part of Sein und Zeit due to the insufficiencies of traditional metaphysical language, Heidegger started to use poetic and prophetic language around the concept of being. In Beiträge, Heidegger talked about a future and mysterious “Last God” linked to a new understanding of being in general, hidden now in the epoch of planetary technique. In his Brief über den Humanismus, Heidegger rejected Sartre’s consideration of his own philosophy as atheistic, and in other texts Heidegger divided the world into earth, sky, mortals, and the god(s). Finally, in his 1966 Der Spiegel interview, Heidegger famously held that only a God can save us. Simultaneously, however, Heidegger presented his thinking as a Destruktion of onto-theo-logy, understood as the worldview that considers God as the Supreme Being that explains all the other entities. Moving away from the most common interpretations, my paper will investigate who this enigmatic God is, and why did Heidegger decide to combine the language of philosophy, poetry, and prophecy in order to lead towards a deeper understanding of existence. Keywords: Heidegger, Last God, theology, ontotheology, Christianity, phenomenology, technology 1