From always the authors wrote about the gods because their community trusted them with this role. However, they continued to write even when the community began to ignore or fight the same gods they used to worship. But who were these gods and why were their names still of interest to the world? Starting from the ancient Greek gods who, from the Renaissance onwards, traverse European thought in strong and idiosyncratic waves, and moving on to the gods of the East who, with German romanticism, occupied Central Europe, their divine forms helped literature to escape rhetoric and be led to a land that is not described on maps but in which - from Holderlin to Mallarme and from Proust to today - we rediscover literature in all its transformations and manifestations.