Throughout most of Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche acts as a magician conjuring images of ideas and leaving them to be interpreted, either as signs of goodwill or portents. His opening in the preface is one example of this practice, and many of the images that he conjures in part 3 of the book are another. There is the image of the great hunt, the protracted worm-like reason, ‘god on the cross’, and the ladder of religious cruelty, are just a few of the images that he conjures that seem worth exploring in more depth. The first of these images is what opens up the entire section.
Nietzsche begins this chapter with a meditation on limits when he describes “The human soul and its limits, the scope of human inner experience to date, the heights, depths, and ranges of these experiences, the entire history of the soul so far… these are the predestined hunting grounds for a born psychologist and lover of the “great hunt”. (43) In this first passage, Nietzsche paints a picture of a soul that has boundaries, with his allusion to predestination furthering this image of imprisonment. This language of despair continues when he asserts that “To no avail: time and again he gets an ample and bitter reminder of how hard it is to find hounds and helpers for the very things that prick his curiosity”. Again, we are given this language of deficiency, it seems that these born elect are deprived of both freedom and of assistance. He then parallels the image that he paints with the figure of Pascal, someone a recurring figure in this section of the book. This allusion to Pascal draws the audience to what is missing from the image that Nietzsche has conjured. Namely, the actual source of the hunt it absent, and the hunt is carried out without assistance or success in sight. It is this somber image of the religious character that Nietzsche opens the book on, a meditation that is closely related to the next image. 
The second of these images, the worm-like reason is both an image and a simile. Nietzsche mentions this image is his critique on Pascal when he claims that Pascal’s faith “has the gruesome appearance of a protracted suicide of reason—a tough, long-lived, worm-like reason that cannot be killed at once and with a single stroke”. The question that remains is, what does it mean for a reason to be both long-lived and worm-like? This image seems to be inherently paradoxical on a multitude of levels. First, how can something that is worm-like be equated to both longevity and suicide? Secondly, the language used here seems to indicate that this is an image of both reasons and of faith, concepts that are on some level diametrically opposed.  There is also the question of what does worm-like even entail? When we imagine a worm, we imagine a creature of simplicity one that is both grotesque and useful, but also one that is undeniably unkillable. If, a worm is chopped in half the head will simply continue to perform its duties and will eventually regrow what it has lost, with no attention given to the attack or major loss on its part. Now, what does it mean to apply these qualities, to the idea of faith? Apparently, Nietzsche seems to be implying that faith is a paradoxical idea. One that is inherently simple and useful, one that is self-destructive but extremely hard to destroy. For example, let us imagine that the faith-based argument is the head of the worm, and the evidence for the argument is the tail, if faith is worm-like, as Nietzsche suggests. Faith will survive even when all evidence is destroyed, as long as the head of the argument survives. Nietzsche delves deeper into his critique of faith with his image of the ‘god on the cross’.
