Altizer’s death of God theology (which was Nietzschean to the core) was a part of the history of religions school that Long helped to found, and which had its own experiential beginnings. Hence Altizer relates a dreamlike ecstatic “initiation” involving ghosts, “spirits of those dead who never leave us,” in Hyde Park, Chicago, and goes as far as to argue that such presences were the “instruments” of Mircea Eliade, who lived down the street. The “deep sense of mission” Altizer came to know around the altered states of this spectral initiation led him to call Eliade “father” and resulted in his
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