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Category: Friedrich Nietzsche

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Der Antichrist (book) Friedrich Nietzsche

Christianity:

The communism of antiquity, 1

by Alain de Benoist

In The Antichrist, Nietzsche does not hesitate to affirm that:

What stood as aere perennius,[1] the imperium Romanum, the most magnificent form of organization ever to be achieved under difficult conditions, compared to which everything before or after has just been patched together, botched and dilettantish, those holy anarchists made a ‘piety’ out of destroying ‘the world’, which is to say the imperium Romanum, until every stone was overturned…

Christianity was the vampire of the imperium Romanum, – overnight, it obliterated the Romans’ tremendous deed of laying the ground for a great culture that had time. – You still don’t understand? The imperium Romanum that we know, that we are coming to know better through the history of the Roman provinces, this most remarkable artwork in the great style was a beginning, its design was calculated to prove itself over the millennia – nothing like it has been built to this day, nobody has even dreamed of building on this scale, sub specie aeterni [2] – This organization was stable enough to hold up under bad emperors: the accident of personalities cannot make any difference with things like this, –first principle of all great architecture. But it was not stable enough to withstand the most corrupt type of corruption, to withstand Christians…

This secretive worm that crept up to every individual under the cover of night, fog, and ambiguity and sucked the seriousness for true things, the instinct for reality in general right out of every individual, this cowardly, feminine, saccharine group gradually alienated the ‘souls’ from that tremendous structure, – those valuable, those masculine-noble natures that saw Rome’s business as their own business, their own seriousness, their own pride.

The priggish creeping around, the conventicle secrecy, dismal ideas like hell, like the sacrifice of the innocent, like the unio mystica[3] in the drinking of blood, above all the slowly fanned flames of revenge, of Chandala revenge – that is what gained control over Rome, the same type of religion that Epicurus had already waged war against in its pre-existent form. You should read Lucretius to see what Epicurus had fought, not paganism but ‘Christianity’, I mean the corruption of the soul through the ideas of guilt, punishment, and immortality. – He fought the subterranean cults, the whole of latent Christianity, – at that time, to deny immortality was nothing less than salvation.

____________

[1] A line from Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities.

[2] From the standpoint of eternity.

[3] Mystical union.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Rosenberg

Editor’s Note: Below I quote excerpts from a speech by Alfred Rosenberg at a commemorative event on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Friedrich Nietzsche on October 15, 1944, in Weimar (the full speech can be read here):

Nietzsche also knew this very well when he wrote: ‘The discipline of suffering, of great suffering, do you not know that only this discipline has created all enhancements of man so far?’ Only such common suffering heightens the tension of the soul, only the sight of a great and general fate strengthens the spirit of invention and bravery in the struggle. Only such suffering can call upon human beings, i.e., an entire community that feels suffering in common, to great achievements. And this prerequisite for the transformation of his prophecy into a people reflecting upon itself had to be denied to Friedrich Nietzsche…

That is in line with what we have recently been saying: that the white man must suffer once again to cleanse himself of all the mental infection he suffers from, even if that means the suffering resulting from a Third World War.

‘But may it [the German spirit] never believe’, Nietzsche added at that time, anticipating almost everything, ‘that it can fight similar battles without its household Gods, without its mythical homeland, without a “return” of all German things!’ ‘Let no one believe that the German spirit has forever lost its mythical homeland, for so clearly it still understands the birdsongs that tell tales of that homeland. One day it will awaken, in all the morning freshness of a monstrous sleep: then it will slay dragons, annihilate treacherous dwarves, and awaken Brünnhilde, and Wotan’s spear itself will not be able to bar its way!’

See what I said in January of last year about The Mastersingers of Nuremberg. With the honourable exception of Carolyn Yeager, who never played degenerate music on her podcasts, this is something that contemporary neo-Nazis will never understand.

Here a hope was expressed that literally went to everything, demanded not only a cleansing from all overgrowing foreign plants and their juices but confidently expected it, a true inner rebirth leading back to the ultimate roots from which it longed for the supply of power for a great future…

‘The time for small politics is past: the next century already brings the struggle for domination of the earth, the compulsion to great politics’.

Given this overall evaluation as well he still hopes once more for a rigorous German heart, for the German form of scepticism, for a ‘spiritualized Fridericianism’, and he expresses it more than once that today, where in Europe only the herd animal comes to honour and bestows honours, an entirely different human type would have to assume rule to reverse this destiny.

Thus a profound criticism of the entire social structure sets in, a criticism of the Marxist, even then already falsely termed socialist movement, as it cannot be thought out more consistently and annihilatingly even today. For him Marxism is the thoroughly thought-out tyranny of the lowliest and dumbest, that is of the superficial, envious and three-quarters actors; it is indeed the conclusion of ‘modern ideas’ and their latent anarchism. Nietzsche turns above all against the attempt to abolish the concept of property because abolishing this concept of property had to breed a destructive struggle for existence; for man has no providence or self-sacrifice towards anything that he possesses only temporarily; he deals with it exploitatively, as robber or as dissolute squanderer. And amidst this criticism already arises the indication of a way out:

Keep all paths to small fortunes open, but prevent effortless, sudden enrichment; withdraw all branches of transport and trade that favour the accumulation of large fortunes, which is to say, especially money trading, from the hands of private individuals and companies, and regard both those who own too much and those who own nothing as dangerous creatures to the community…

With that, the presentiment of the Marxist dictatorship which we see marching against us as a mortal enemy from Moscow is clearly predicted. It has allied itself with that force which Nietzsche presented as particularly dangerous, without our wanting to assert that he was then able to survey the whole structure and psychology of the East in every detail.

But Nietzsche knows that probably, despite all cognition, the development once initiated cannot be reversed in a short time, and therefore he predicts that from this mixture of liberalism, plutocracy and anarchy the great crisis of Germany and the whole European continent would have to emerge. He is profoundly convinced that from this hodgepodge initiated by the entire liberal movement, meanwhile expressing an untiring hatred against Rousseau as the intellectual originator of these currents, Europe would someday have to arrive at the most terrible all-encompassing confrontations, but then perhaps also at severe tyrannical phenomena. He writes: ‘The democratization of Europe is at the same time an involuntary event for breeding tyrants, understanding the word in every sense, including the most spiritual’…

He was looking for this voice of wanting to understand and friendship. He also made some friends, but gradually, with an ever-sharper realization of an impending spiritual and political fate, his former companions also stepped back. The companions of his scholarly years sink into the bourgeois world. Richard Wagner also does not seem to want to go the way forward, and in this painful yet to the end still distant reverence, the greatest inner crisis in Nietzsche’s life comes to light, when he declares that Wagner, as an artist, to whom he now believes he must spiritually oppose, also alienates those people in Germany who are worth working on…

While this or that of those prophets of our time may be particularly close to us in some areas, Friedrich Nietzsche was probably the greatest figure in the German and European intellectual world of his day as an overall personality and as an unswerving recognizer of an entire epoch that was about to perish! One thing must be considered with all his later confessions and criticisms: if in his remarks he only suffered wounds and therefore took a fighting stance against the immediate causes of these wounds, the same would have happened if he had lived in France or England or another state for a long time. Because everywhere the same phenomena of decline were at work to decompose old grown traditions without thereby creating new ties and setting up new ideals. The whole world paid homage to base values.

This evokes what I recently said about internal jihad: that one must repudiate one’s nation project to save the Aryan, referring to a ‘nation’ that has been founded on the worship of Mammon (and this even refers to post-WWII Germany).

The revaluation of the values of passing liberal humanity into an ideal of the noble, hard personality, making greatness possible, is essentially Nietzsche’s doctrine that runs through all his works. If in recent times his ‘will to power’ has been particularly emphasized, this core has been rightly highlighted as that character resistance centre from which both the well-founded treatises and the ecstatic proclamations of ‘Zarathustra’ and the harsh attacks of his last writings can be explained…

In truth, there have been no power institutions that have had as hyenas of life an effect like the heartless capitalists of the international stock exchanges, never such a chloroformization of entire peoples as has happened through the all-Jewish press, and never has a power attack on the great culture of a continent been prepared more insidiously than after these influences through the Marxist dictatorship movement. What Nietzsche prophesied, European anarchism, was on the way…

So the forces that are now struggling with each other have not newly emerged; they are prefigured by the liberal movements of the 19th century, by the over-technicization of a new era, by the unbridled rule of money and gold, by the monopolization of the entire news system in Europe by racially alien hands. The European cultural citizens, tired of the sedation of their resistance forces, are now overwhelmed by a long-dammed destructive passion from the East, which, in a strange alliance with Jewish-West-leaning Marxism, has shaken not only Germany but the whole European continent to its foundations. When we proudly declare that National Socialist Germany alone still defends this old Europe today, when we can perhaps say in a slightly different sense than Nietzsche in the 19th century, but still from an even greater depth, that we are the ‘good Europeans’ today, that is a historically honestly won right…

But despite this realization, we still feel in our experience the great train of a new era and know that what has carried us and gives the German nation the inner will to inflexible resistance today is also based on that deep shock of the lonely Nietzsche, which carried him through a painful life, which often led to despair and accusations in solitude, but was always at the same time driven forward by the unconditional necessity of such an avowal to the future…

This is how we, National Socialists, see the workings of those powers today which, coming from the past, began to become a dangerous force of disintegration in the 19th century and today lead to the most terrible disease of the European essence in a large, suppurating process, and at the same time we see some prophets demandingly raise their voices amidst this fateful currents to break these creation-hostile values to help realize a new order of life.

Among them, we honour the lonely Friedrich Nietzsche today. After stripping away all that is tied to the times and all too human, this figure stands spiritually beside us today, and we greet him across the times as a close relative, as a spiritual brother in the struggle for the rebirth of great German spirituality, for the shaping of generous and spacious thinking and as a proclaimer of European unity as a necessity for the creative life of our old continent, rejuvenating itself today in a great revolution.

If a new visitor is not familiar with our recent psychobiography on Nietzsche, he could do so now.

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Friedrich Nietzsche Racial right

Crusade

against the Cross, 21

Sometime before he sent his mad letters, when Nietzsche was charring in Turin, he wrote Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is, which no longer contains any new ideas. Ecce homo was only the presentation of his books under the delirium that he was soon to split history in twain. A few months later, when the martyr of the spirit was interned in the psychiatric hospital in Jena, Adolf Hitler was born. Nietzsche would later be taken by his mother to Naumburg. When her mother died, Elisabeth took her brother to Weimar, where he lived until 1900. The interior of that house, the Nietzsche Archive, can be seen in the video linked in my post this morning.

Adolf Hitler grew up, matured and, when he was already at the height of power, visited the house of the Nietzsche Archive. As a reward for the visit, Elisabeth gave him a relic: her brother’s walking stick!

Unfortunately Hitler didn’t win the war, so the West is now ruled by an anti-Hitlerian, anti-Nazi, anti-national, anti-White, anti-Gentile, anti-male and anti-heterosexual ideology. Because the Anglo-Americans ‘won’ the war, and told—and tell—the story that rules the West, I have to reiterate what I have so often said about the other side of the Wall.

Many among the racialist folk are actively deluding themselves by not recognising the Christian problem. The old saying ‘You can’t solve a problem if you can’t first define it precisely’ applies to those who believe that there is only the Jewish problem and not a Christian problem. Most racialists ignore the history of Constantine and his successors not only explained in some PDFs of our featured post, but even available in books still in print, such as The Darkening Age.

But the problem are all Westerners. From the mighty Woke liberals to the comparatively small racialist reaction, via traditionalist Christians, liberal Christians, agnostics and atheists, all find themselves bending the knee before the cross. Just look at the news these days: kids on the campuses fanatically worshipping the cross, imagining there the recently crucified Palestinian! At the opposite pole, those who belong to the anti-Semitic racial right also worship it, as can be seen in the number of articles in The Unz Review: both authors and commenters pity the same crucified Palestinian! Not to mention the traditional Christians who, literally every day, kneel in their churches in front of an image of the crucified rabbi.

While it is a breakthrough that one aspect of the Jewish Problem is finally beginning to be discussed—the state of Israel—what these people, Christians, atheists, liberals and white nationalists are unable to see is that it is impossible to win the battle by having the cross as the sign in the sky through which they will win. It is impossible to win with Christian ethics because it is a suicidal path that practises the most aggressive dysgenesis.

Unlike all of them, the National Socialists at the top of the Third Reich repudiated not only anti-racism but the very essence of what it means to kneel before the Cross: that a crucified victim is, by definition, morally more worthy than the crucifying Romans. That is why Himmler gave texts about Genghis Khan to the SS: to prepare them psychologically about what, once values are transvalued, we have to do.

Nietzsche was dazzled when he saw how Christians inverted Greco-Roman values through precisely the symbol of the cross:

This reminds me again of the invaluable words of Paul. ‘The weak things of the world, the foolish things of the world, the base things of the world, and the things that are despised, hath God chosen’: this was the formula; decadence was victorious in hoc signo – God on the cross –. Have people still not grasped the gruesome ulterior motive behind this symbol? – Everything that suffers, everything nailed to the cross is divine… Christianity won, and with this, a nobler sensibility was destroyed, – Christianity has been the worst thing to happen to humanity so far. – – [The Antichrist, §51]

The Christianity of Nick Fuentes and the rest of the white nationalists who fantasise about a new religious awakening in their country won’t save the Aryan man from extinction. We already saw what happened when the Iberian Christians conquered the Americas: they immediately became mongrelised despite their Jew-wise Inquisition. Fuentes and company will never save us because the one nailed to the cross was the rebel who raised his hand against Rome; more recently the slave that the English liberated, last century the holocausted Jew, the black American; this century the deranged transexual, etc., and the bad Aryan is supposed to have crucified him.

I would like to end this series with the plea that Nietzsche’s self-immolation after running towards the sun was not in vain.

Let us begin a movement parallel to American white nationalism: a movement in which, though minuscule for the moment—The West’s Darkest Hour—we have already taken up the crusade against the cross!

It’s time to show the nationalists that there is a higher idea than the dumb and stubborn monocausalism they preach. What does it matter if so few people visit this blog, or that hardly anyone comments on the discussion threads of my posts? What matters is to plant the insignificant—microscopic I dare say!—mustard seed in the hope that it will eventually grow and compete with the plant planted two millennia ago by Saul of Tarsus—the worst thing to happen to humanity so far!

I teach you the Overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?… The time has come for man to set himself a goal. The time has come to plant the seed of his highest hope. —Thus Spake Zarathustra

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Friedrich Nietzsche Videos

Final years

Nietzsche’s final years were spent in the Weimar home under the care of his sister Elizabeth (watch a 1-minute BBC clip here).

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Der Antichrist (book) Friedrich Nietzsche

Crusade

against the Cross, 20

Nietzsche’s guesthouse in Via Carlo Alberto, Turin.

In the first entry of this series, I said that the article by Robert Sheaffer that I first read in 1993 had motivated me to reopen the Nietzsche case, insofar as I consider it central to the point of view of The West’s Darkest Hour. And as I said at the end of the previous entry, once one discovers the primary cause of Aryan decline, everyone else seems idiotic to us, just as the boy who saw the naked king found the adults around him incredibly idiotic.

Becoming like the child of the story represents a huge problem for the adult visionary. ‘Running towards the sun’—Nietzsche’s poetic words to describe himself—in search of ultimate truth results in the visionary being charred, moth-like, as he approaches the primary source of light. No one has described Nietzsche’s dazzling charring better than Stefan Zweig, excerpts from whose book The Struggle with the Daimon I posted more than a decade ago, here.

While I was harsh on Nietzsche in criticising what I call in my autobiography ‘idiotic defence mechanisms’, albeit in his case referring to the eternal return of the identical, I am happy to point out that with The Antichrist this mechanism disappears. Nietzsche himself, in a letter to Franz Overbeck, had acknowledged in April 1884 that his Zarathustra was an ‘anteroom’ and that he was going to spend the next years of his life on ‘the development of my philosophy’.

In The Antichrist, both Zarathustra and the eternal return disappear. Zarathustra would only reappear in his poem Dionysian Dithyrambs, but it is very significant that by this time in December 1888, Nietzsche had already lost his self, and the very title of the first poem of that collection of nine poems to Dionysus is entitled ‘Only Mad! Only Poet!’

That the cause of Nietzsche’s madness was unknown to the doctors who treated him is clear from a letter to Peter Gast of 29 September 1904 written by Otto Binswanger, the director of the Psychiatric Clinic in Jena, where Nietzsche was interned for some months: ‘No one will be able to write an exact medical history of Friedrich Nietzsche’, Binswanger asserted, ‘since the beginnings of the illness have not been fully established’.

Why, then, the mania of the last decades to see the aetiology of Nietzsche’s disorder as a somatic disease? Tip: it is part of Big Pharma’s propaganda to sell us their damned drugs from the 1950s onwards. And the same can be said of those who have written about Vincent van Gogh, who would also be temporarily committed to a psychiatric ward. A better approach to the tragedy of both simultaneous cases can be found in the last words of the third volume of Curt Paul Janz’s extensive biographical study of Nietzsche:

The indulgent veil of mental derangement meant that he no longer had to be aware of it. It gave him something else: the tremendum of the genius chord. Without this ending, the fascination that his entire philosophy exerts on the history of philosophy, which places him close to the heroic-tragic end of Socrates—that Socrates whose rival (at least as much) he wanted to be—would certainly be lacking. But, in Nietzsche, it is not only about the end. His whole existence was a martyrdom. And this opens up for him the connection… with a great community. It means the way from the loneliness so badly endured to belonging to the community of the martyrs of the spirit that is far greater than one is usually willing to admit.

This last sentence has been with me for a long time since a Spanish girlfriend gave me Janz’s book as a present in March 1992, when I was living in Barcelona.

Already in January 1889, Nietzsche sent his incredible missives to several characters, including Franz Overbeck. When Overbeck arrived at the Via Carlo Alberto guesthouse in Turin on 8 January 1889 to rescue his friend, he found him completely mad and ‘surrounded by papers’. After returning Nietzsche to his native Germany, Overbeck took the papers back to Basel and among them, he found the manuscript of The Antichrist, carefully wrapped in a folio. By saving this book, Overbeck saved the key to Nietzsche’s thought. Overbeck wrote to Peter Gast, asking him which works Nietzsche had left unfinished; Gast wrote back and, by return of post, Overbeck replied as follows in February 1889:

Of the Transvaluation of All Values, in particular, there is only the first book, also wrapped in a white folio, with the title:

The Antichrist
Transvaluation of All Values

The second line is crossed out and replaced by the words ‘Curse on Christianity’.

Five weeks later, after reading the work, Overbeck sent Gast another letter, in which he says: ‘In particular, Nietzsche’s conception of Christianity seems to me to be too political, so to speak’. Overbeck wrote that line in criticism, but that is exactly what, 130 years later, David Skrbina would conclude in The Jesus Hoax: that Christianity was originally a political manoeuvre of the Jews against Rome!

It is clear from the correspondence between Overbeck, the first reader of The Antichrist and Gast that, as Nietzsche neared his end, his ideas about his work changed completely. The Transvaluation of All Values had been intended as a four-volume work, of which The Antichrist would have been the first. But Nietzsche himself wrote to George Brandes at the beginning of December 1888: ‘In three weeks I shall give orders for the printing of The Antichrist: Transvaluation of All Values’. In other words, once he had finished The Antichrist Nietzsche decided to burn the midnight oil, and what had been the first part of the work was transformed in its entirety.

A month after his letter to the Jew Brandes, Nietzsche had already carbonised himself internally, writing letters such as ‘to shoot the German emperor and all anti-Semites’. Andrés Sánchez Pascual says that despite the psychotic breakdown, ‘at that moment Nietzsche makes a totally lucid and consistent decision: he crossed out the subtitle “Transvaluation of all values” and under it, he writes the following: “Curse on Christianity”.’

Alas, because Nietzsche lost his mind he didn’t send the manuscript to his publisher, as planned. When, not long afterwards, the manuscript of The Antichrist fell into Elisabeth’s hands, she mutilated not only the subtitle but the climax of the book—the final page—when she published it in 1895! Had her brother not become disturbed, the original version that Overbeck found ready for the press would have been published as early as 1889, after Twilight of the Idols. It was not until Elisabeth died well into the 20th century that all the manuscripts of the Nietzsche Archive were made freely available to researchers.

In 1961, seventy-three years after the work was written, Erich Podach published a landmark book on Nietzschean editions. He showed that The Antichrist had undergone mutilations in addition to those already known, and made known for the first time the ‘Law against Christianity’.

By 1964, what appears to be the definitive edition of Nietzsche’s entire works was underway. Directed by the Italians Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, it was published simultaneously in German, Italian and French. The following decade I was to benefit from the Spanish translation of The Antichrist as Nietzsche had left the manuscript carefully wrapped in a white folio, translated by Andrés Sánchez Pascual.

Sánchez Pascual tells us that this work ‘is the most coherent conclusion, the necessary conclusion, of his entire mental path. If Nietzsche’s thought does not lead to The Antichrist, it leads nowhere’. And he adds that to remain in his previous texts and ‘not to advance to The Antichrist is, quite simply, not to dare to look Nietzsche in the eye’.

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Friedrich Nietzsche Twilight of the idols (book)

Crusade

against the Cross, 19

Yesterday I said a few harsh words about the founding cucks in the neighbouring country to the north, but here things were even worse: Hernán Cortés himself married an Indian woman and had a mestizo child with her! At least the northern Protestants would take a little longer to repudiate their anti-miscegenation laws but Catholic Cortés did it from the start!

On the other side of the Atlantic, things were never much better, as the Europeans had already betrayed themselves with Christianity for many centuries. In Twilight of the Idols Nietzsche told some home truths to his compatriots. In §4 of ‘The Improvers of Mankind’ Nietzsche wrote:

These regulations [the Laws of Manu] are instructive enough: we encounter Aryan humanity at its purest and most primordial; we learn that the concept of ‘pure blood’ is very far from being a harmless concept. On the other hand, it becomes obvious in which people the chandala hatred against this Aryan ‘humaneness’ has has become a religion, eternalized itself, and become genius — primarily in the Gospels, even more so in the Book of Enoch.

Christianity, sprung from Jewish roots and comprehensible only as a growth on this soil, represents the counter-movement to any morality of breeding, of race, privilege: it is the anti-Aryan religion par excellence. Christianity — the revaluation of all Aryan values, the victory of chandala values, the gospel preached to the poor and base, the general revolt of all the downtrodden, the wretched, the failures, the less favored, against ‘race’: the undying chandala hatred is disguised as a religion of love.

In §5 he adds a sentence: ‘all the means by which one has so far attempted to make mankind moral were through and through immoral’.

Nietzsche starts the next chapter, ‘What the Germans lack’ with these words: ‘Perhaps I know the Germans, perhaps I may even tell them some truths’. They have ‘more virile virtues than any other country in Europe can show, much cheerfulness and self-respect…’

But this people has deliberately made itself stupid, for nearly a millennium: nowhere have the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, been abused more dissolutely…

How much disgruntled heaviness, lameness, dampness, dressing gown — how much beer there is in the German intelligence! How is it at all possible that young men who dedicate their lives to the most spiritual goals do not feel the first instinct of spirituality, the spirit’s instinct of self-preservation — and drink beer?… the gentle degeneration which beer produces in the spirit!

And in §5 of that chapter Nietzsche adds: ‘In present-day Germany no one is any longer free to give his children a noble education: our “higher schools” are all set up for the most ambiguous mediocrity, with their teachers, curricula, and teaching aims’. In §7 he adds: ‘Learning to think: in our schools one no longer has any idea of this… That the Germans have been able to stand their philosophers at all, especially that most deformed concept-cripple of all time, the great Kant, provides not a bad notion of German grace’.

Countless times I have cited my favourite Nietzsche quote, which I put as an epigraph in the seminal text of this site, ‘The Red Giant’ (German translation here) which we published in 2009 on Blogspot, even before the incarnation of The West’ Darkest Hour on WordPress (I was deplatformed from both!).

Now I will put that quote in context, by citing the preceding pages of ‘Skirmishes of an Untimely Man’ of Twilight of the Idols. It is here that can be seen that it’s very difficult to follow Nietzsche without considerable European culture, which is why I read Andrés Sánchez Pascual’s heavily annotated German-Spanish translation of Twilight of the Idols. Without Sánchez Pascual’s explanatory endnotes I couldn’t have followed the philosopher in his finesses.[1]

The German-English translation by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale of Twilight of the Idols can be read here, but the translators removed a good amount of italics from the original German (italics that I add back below). Reddish colour added on my favourite Nietzsche quote:

§ 1 My impossible ones. — Seneca: or the toreador of virtue. Rousseau: or the return to nature in impuris naturalibus [in natural filth]. Schiller: or the Moral-Trumpeter of Säckingen. Dante: or the hyena who writes poetry in tombs. Kant: or cant as an intelligible character. Victor Hugo: or the pharos at the sea of nonsense. Liszt: or the school of smoothness — with women. George Sand: or lactea ubertas — in translation, the milk cow with ‘a beautiful style.’ Michelet: or the enthusiasm which takes off its coat. Carlyle: or pessimism as a poorly digested dinner. John Stuart Mill: or insulting clarity. Les frères de Goncourt: or the two Ajaxes in battle with Homer — music by Offenbach. Zola: or ‘the delight in stinking.’

§ 2 Renan. — Theology: or the corruption of reason by ‘original sin’ (Christianity). Witness Renan who, whenever he risks a Yes or No of a more general nature scores a miss with painful regularity. He wants for example, to weld together la science and la noblesse: but la science belongs with democracy; what could be plainer? With no little ambition, he wishes to represent an aristocracy of the spirit: yet at the same time he is on his knees before its very counter-doctrine, the evangile des humbles — and not only on his knees. To what avail is all free-spiritedness, modernity, mockery, and wry-neck suppleness, if in one’s guts one is still a Christian, a Catholic — in fact, a priest! Renan is most inventive, just like a Jesuit and father confessor, when it comes to seduction; his spirituality does not even lack the broad fat popish smile — like all priests, he becomes dangerous only when he loves. Nobody can equal him when it comes to adoring in a manner endangering life itself. This spirit of Renan’s, a spirit which is enervated, is one more calamity for poor, sick, will-sick France.

§ 3 Sainte Beuve. — Nothing of virility, full of petty wrath against all virile spirits. Wanders around, cowardly, curious, bored, eavesdropping — a female at bottom, with a female’s lust for revenge and a female’s sensuality. As a psychologist, a genius of médisance [slander], inexhaustibly rich in means to that end; no one knows better how to mix praise with poison. Plebeian in the lowest instincts and related to the ressentiment of Rousseau: consequently, a romantic — for underneath all romantisme lie the grunting and greed of Rousseau’s instinct for revenge. A revolutionary, but still pretty well harnessed by fear. Without freedom when confronted with anything strong (public opinion, the Academy, the court, even Port Royal). Embittered against everything great in men and things, against whatever believes in itself. Poet and half-female enough to sense the great as a power; always writhing like the famous worm because he always feels stepped upon. As a critic, without any standard, steadiness, and backbone, with the cosmopolitan libertine’s tongue for a medley of things, but without the courage even to confess his libertinage. As a historian, without philosophy, without the power of the philosophical eye — hence declining the task of judging in all significant matters, hiding behind the mask of ‘objectivity.’ It is different with his attitude to all things in which a fine, well-worn taste is the highest tribunal: there he really has the courage to stand by himself and delight in himself — there he is a master. In some respects, a preliminary version of Baudelaire.

§ 4 De imitatione Christi is one of those books which I cannot hold in my hand without a physiological reaction: it exudes a perfume of the Eternal-Feminine which is strictly for Frenchmen — or Wagnerians. This saint has a way of talking about love which arouses even Parisian women to curiosity. I am told that that cleverest of Jesuits, Auguste Comte, who wanted to lead his Frenchmen to Rome via the detour of science, found his inspiration in this book. I believe it: ‘the religion of the heart.’

§ 5 G. Eliot. — They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality. That is an English consistency; we do not wish to hold it against little moralistic females à la Eliot. In England one must rehabilitate oneself after every little emancipation from theology by showing in a veritably awe-inspiring manner what a moral fanatic one is. That is the penance they pay there. — We others hold otherwise. When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident: this point has to be exhibited again and again, despite the English flatheads. Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole: nothing necessary remains in one’s hands.

If there is something I really love about Nietzsche it is that, once you realise that Christianity and its bastard son neochristianity are the cause of all Western evil, everyone in today’s West seems incredibly idiotic to you: something similar to the child with zero superego—the vindication of the Id!—who sees the king naked.

_______________

[1] Friedrich Nietzsche: Crepúsculo de los ídolos. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, fourteenth edition: 1996 (I originally read the 1973 or 1976 edition, a copy now lost).

Categories
Friedrich Nietzsche Vincent van Gogh

Crusade

against the Cross, 18

Nietzsche had very little time left with a lucid mind, something he was well aware of, as we saw from Paul Deussen’s testimony about his visit to Sils-Maria. Therefore, working frantically in Turin in 1888, Nietzsche left no less than six works ready for printing: The Case of Wagner, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Ecce homo, Dithyrambs to Dionysus and Nietzsche contra Wagner! The frenzy of his writing, which as I said reminds me of Van Gogh’s frenzy those very same months under the splendid sun of Arles—which brought out the colours like few other places in the French countryside!—brings to mind Stefan Zweig’s metaphor: the daimon wanted to get out of those bodies using maximum artistic works before they were both burnt by their inner fires (one committed suicide, the other ended up mad).

When the frenzy of writing about everything he had in mind began, Nietzsche was forty-three years old, and in his letters, he admits that his new invective against Wagner was only ‘a distraction’, and that the main work was The Will to Power. But before his magnum opus, now that the muse was visiting him every day without mercy or respite, he wanted to publish a ‘compendium’ of his philosophy: so he rips up the material accumulated for his projected capital work, tears out pages here and there, and shortly sends the compendium to the publisher.

It is essential to know the letters Nietzsche wrote at that time to find out exactly what was going on in his frenetic mind. On 12 September 1888, he told Peter Gast about the compendium: ‘The writing can serve as a kind of initiation, as an appetizer for my Transvaluation of Values’. By this time Nietzsche had already changed the title of his main work, The Will to Power, to Transvaluation of Values. To George Brandes, his discoverer in Copenhagen, he wrote the next day; and to Deussen, the day after that:

Dear friend…

There is already in the hands of my publisher another manuscript, containing a very rigorous and subtle expression of all my philosophical heterodoxy—hidden under much grace and malignity. It is called: A Psychologist’s Idleness. —Ultimately, these two writings [i.e., The Case of Wagner and A Psychologist’s Idleness] are but mere recreations amid an inordinately grave and decisive task, which, if understood, will split the history of mankind into two halves. The meaning of it is stated in five words: Transvaluation of all values.

Around this time he also writes to his old and very understanding friend, the theologian Overbeck:

Dear friend…

To my surprise, the first book of The Transvaluation of All Values is now ready, in its final form, up to the middle. Its energy and transparency are such that perhaps no philosopher has ever achieved them before. It seems to me as if I had suddenly learned to write.

As far as the content or the passion of the problem is concerned, this work splits the millennia—the first book is called, let it be clear between us, The Antichrist, and I would swear that all that has hitherto been thought and said to criticise Christianity is futile childishness in comparison with it. —Such an enterprise makes necessary, even from a hygienic point of view, deep pauses and distractions. One of them will reach you in about ten days: it is called The Case of Wagner: A Musician’s Problem. It’s an all-out declaration of war…

Also, a second manuscript, completely ready for printing, is already in the hands of Mr G.G. Naumann. However, we shall wait a little longer. It is entitled A Psychologist’s Idleness and is very dear to me because it expresses my essential philosophical heterodoxy in a very brief (perhaps also witty) way. Otherwise, it is very ‘tempting’: I say my ‘finesses’ about countless thinkers and artists of today.

Next post I will give some amusing examples of the latter.

Peter Gast’s letter to Nietzsche contained a sentence that led to the title being changed from A Psychologist’s Idleness to Twilight of the Idols. Gast wrote: ‘Ah, I beg you if it is unlawful for an unfit man to beg: a more brilliant, more splendid title!’ Nietzsche replied on 27 September:

Dear friend…

As far as the title was concerned, my own reservations had anticipated your very human objection: I finally found in the words of the prologue the formula which will perhaps also satisfy the need felt by you.

What you write about ‘heavy artillery’ I simply have to accept, being as I am about to finish the first book of the Transvaluation. It really ends with horrible detonations: I don’t think that in all literature you will find anything parallel to this first book as far as orchestral sonority (including cannon fire) is concerned. —The new title (which brings with it very minor modifications in three or four passages) will be:

Twilight of the Idols
or
How to Philosophise with the Hammer
by
F.N.

Proofreading was completed at the beginning of November, and on the 25th of the same month, Nietzsche received the first copies of the work. It would be the last of his writings to reach his hands while he was still lucid (Twilight of the Idols would go on sale at the beginning of the following year).

Categories
Friedrich Nietzsche

Crusade

against the Cross, 17

Nietzsche was already forty years old when, in May 1885, his sister Elisabeth (pictured above) married Dr Ludwig Bernhard Förster, a man wise on the Jewish problem. The newlyweds moved to Paraguay to found a Jew-free New Germania. The quixotic enterprise would obviously fail because the only way to achieve such an ideal would have been to conquer the country militarily.

Nietzsche, for his part, finding himself isolated (‘in my most dreadful times of loneliness’) and without social recognition, began to use his soliloquies, missives and philosophy to boost his self-esteem and increasingly overvalue himself: dangerous medicine, for it can lead to a delirium of grandeur. An unpublished draft for a four-part work, which was to be called Noon and Eternity, and which opens with a great hubbub of heralds’ trumpets, announces: ‘The Earth now appears as a marble workshop: a ruling race of indispensable violence is needed’.

In May 1886, when Nietzsche was living in Nice, he published Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. But the futurist philosopher had, as he put it, a ‘dog’s life’ and never understood the rustic, though healthy, flourishing anti-Semitism of the time; or why his sister had become involved with Dr Förster.

After his dreadful experience with Lou, Nietzsche didn’t dare to make any further advances towards women. Nevertheless, he composed music for a poem by Lou, which was later adapted for choir and orchestra by Peter Gast, and then recorded and published. Nietzsche always hoped that his friend Gustav Krug would perform this work in Cologne.

In Monte Carlo, Nietzsche heard the overture to Parsifal for the first time and was rapt. To Gast, he wrote in January 1887: ‘Has Wagner ever composed anything better?’ The following month Nietzsche read, for the first time, Dostoevsky and in July he published On the Genealogy of Morals, written in Sils-Maria, where he makes mention of a term that would become famous in the next century, ‘the blond beast’.

When confronted with the contents of this book we see that, although Nietzsche had lost all his social faculties, he had reached the peak of his intellectual maturity: for the first time in Christendom someone had detected how the Judaic infection had corrupted our souls through the magic of the New Testament! The book is divided into three parts. The first part is a treatise on the psychology of Christianity: a movement that rebelled against the dominance of the aristocratic values of the Greco-Roman world (see the quotations from On the Genealogy of Morals on pages 116-118 of The Fair Race).

A digression is in order here. One of the older commenters on this site never understood why I reject the US as a project of nationhood. I reject it precisely because that country was founded from this inversion of aristocratic values, something that is noticeable even from the time of the American Revolutionary War of Independence, led by Washington (one hundred years before the publication of On the Genealogy of Morals, the Constitution of the US was signed in 1787 in Philadelphia).

In his 1887 book Nietzsche realised that the motive of the early Judeo-Christians was the thirst for revenge of the priestly people par excellence: the Jews. I would add that it shouldn’t surprise us that creating a new nation by the founding cucks, who never rejected the Bible, will end up in New Zion (consider how now the government wants to use the law to equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism!). This inversion, Nietzsche tells us, calls evil what was once good, and today’s neo-Christianity (‘liberalism’) is heir to this inversion of the values. Everything inspired by the Bible is not a religion of love, Nietzsche discovered: it is a religion of the deepest hatred of what is good and noble.

No wonder that a powerful nation under the sky of this inversion ended up not only assassinating the Third Reich, but defaming it after its death and, with it, condemning the Aryan race to eventual extinction. I write these paragraphs shortly after Putin and the Russians celebrated, in grand style, Stalin’s victory over Hitler; and on this day they launched a major military assault against enemy forces in Ukraine. This is what prompted my digression. Had it not been for Christian and neo-Christian Anglo-Americans, this May we might be celebrating the defeat of Stalin by the Nazis in a transvalued world: something that the American racial right is still unable to see. But let us return to our German philosopher.

In the autumn of 1887 Nietzsche’s old friend Paul Deussen decided to visit him at Sils-Maria with his wife. His report is worth reading because it paints a very good picture of the hermit:

With a beating heart I rushed to meet my friend and, deeply moved, embraced him after fourteen years of separation. But what changes had taken place in him during that time! The proud attitude, the elastic step, and the flowing words of another time were no longer there. He seemed to be slurring and leaning a little to one side: quite often his speech became clumsy and clipped. Perhaps he wasn’t having a good day either.

‘Dear friend,’ he said gloomily, as he pointed to some passing clouds, ‘to be able to concentrate my thoughts I must have a blue sky above me’. Then he took us to his favourite places. I especially remember a grassy spot, situated next to a chasm, above a mountain stream that roared past in the depths. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘is where I like to lie and where I have my best thoughts’…

The next morning he took me to his dwelling, or as he put it, to his cave…

We left in the afternoon, and Nietzsche accompanied us to the next village, an hour down the valley. Here he spoke once more of the gloomy omens which, alas, were so soon to be fulfilled. When we parted he had tears in his eyes, which I had never noticed in him before. I would never see him again in his right mind.

On the day spring broke out in 1888, Nietzsche asked Gast where he should now go, always in search of the ideal sky: ‘Zurich? Never! The Italian lakes—suffocating, depressing! Switzerland? Still too wintry, cloudy, misty’. In his reply, Gast, his best correspondent who didn’t like to leave Venice, recommended Turin as an intermediate station.

At the beginning of April 1888, Nietzsche left for Turin. This was the year when Van Gogh, who used to paint with as much frenzy as Nietzsche would write that year, would paint his most famous self-portrait and Vase with Fourteen Sunflowers.

Nietzsche felt very much at home in the Italian city—he didn’t even seem much affected by the clouds. Not long afterwards a Danish newspaper reached him with the wonderful news that a professor, Georg Brandes, had started a series of lectures on his books.

Categories
Autobiography Friedrich Nietzsche Poetry

Crusade

against the Cross, 16

Can a book like Thus Spake Zarathustra, which I have heard of being recommended to high school kids to read, be a good book for our sacred words? I would say that if the System recommends it, it cannot be a good book, even though it sometimes says things so beautiful and profound that it is possible to quote it tersely.

In general, I don’t like Zarathustra for the same reason that I don’t like Mein Kampf: it cannot be read with the intensity of a novel that itches you to know the ending. For a book to be truly a work of art it is vital not only for its content to be germane but how it has been put together. While the content of the three volumes of The Gulag Archipelago is important, very few will read the trilogy because it is boring. It needed an editor to condense it into one, with Solzhenitsyn’s approval (as happened in real life), to make it both vital and aesthetic. Only then could I read it as if it was a highly entertaining novel! But it is still worth saying something about the book that would make Nietzsche famous.

This soul in sorrow was pregnant with ideas, pregnant with the sun (his Zarathustra begins with a hymn to the sun) and he gave birth to what he himself called ‘my son Zarathustra’. The eruption of feelings that motivated him to write, at the time of Richard Wagner’s death (Nietzsche sent a letter of condolence to Cosima), must be understood as the resolution of an intellectual crisis.

I never tire of repeating that his father and both his grandfathers were Lutherans; that his paternal grandfather was a Superintendent, the equivalent of a bishop, and that as a child Nietzsche was intensely pious. As he grew up, the hermit of Sils-Maria burst out of this iron pietism: a supernova-like explosion of feelings repressed during his upbringing, releasing the vital energy once locked up.

His translator, Hollingdale, makes a sharp observation about Nietzsche’s previous books. From the one he wrote on Schopenhauer onwards, they all led him to scepticism, not unlike the nihilism in vogue in the 19th century. This is one of the problems that contemporary racialists have detected: the loss of Christian faith doesn’t translate into, say, a scientific vision like those texts of Charles Darwin where he said that blacks, now considered an obsolete race of Homo sapiens, were to be exterminated. Instead, apostasy leads either to atheistic hyper-Christianity—the opposite of Darwin: negrolatry!—or to the nihilistic liberalism we complain so much about in the West’s darkest hour. In Nietzsche’s spiritual odyssey all his books, Hollingdale said, from the second of his Untimely Meditations to The Gay Science, he reached the end of the road: not axiological hyper-Christianity but nihilism. If Nietzsche had stayed there, let’s say as the typical 19th-century freethinker who so angered Wagner, he wouldn’t have gone down in the history of the great philosophers.

But he didn’t stay there. The pietistic armour that had imprisoned his spirit in a torment like that of the iron maiden had to fly into a thousand pieces. And this intellectual crisis gave birth to the religious figure of Zarathustra: a process begun in August 1881 when Nietzsche was assailed by the thought of the eternal return. It was then that he began to devise his philosophy of Amor fati without realising that, rather than in an iron maiden, he was locked in a sort of Russian doll. He blew up the first iron shell, yes: but he didn’t realise that it, in turn, was wrapped in another shell, insofar as Amor fati was but the post-theistic phase of ‘Thy will be done’, i.e. the phase without a personal god. In other words, with what Nietzsche calls in Zarathustra his ‘abysmal thinking’ we see that he was still a victim of the ogre of the pietistic superego.

To his astonishment, after having deluded himself that he would go to Bayreuth to ingratiate himself with all his old friends (remember the letter to his sister: ‘I no longer want to be alone and wish to learn to be a man again’), with Lou’s refusal he suddenly found himself on square one: alone. It is not surprising that Zarathustra begins with a hermit who wants to return to his village only to be mocked by the people, and has to return to his cave. The worst thing is that Nietzsche was to stay that way, alone, from the end of 1882 to the beginning of 1883.

In January of the latter year came the furious eruption: something which in my soliloquies I call the vindication of Id. Nietzsche underwent an inner transformation similar to those who suffer from colour blindness and are given special glasses so that they can see colours for the first time in their lives: they burst into tears. The tremendous eruption of feelings, thanks to which he was able to write the first part of Zarathustra, feelings so suppressed not only in Schulpforta but in the dense intergenerational atmosphere of clerics, would continue, later on, with the second and third parts: the latter even in a state of greater euphoria—the culmination of the book!—written in January 1884. The overman, the death of God, the will to power, Amor fati, the eternal return, the great noon: these were the intense colours that Nietzsche could at last see, so vivid that he couldn’t interrupt the weeping (by way of anticlimax, he would write the fourth part of Zarathustra at the end of 1884).

But the unconscious eruption of the central ideas of the Zarathustra had already been coming, as Hollingdale detectively surmised, from the earliest years of his life, albeit distorted and unrecognisably. Can you see, as I said to Thankmar this morning, why I try to protect myself from religious aggression (even horribler than Nietzsche’s Lutheran home) in a healthy way, instead of wayward defence mechanisms?

One of the reasons I generally dislike the book is that it suffers from the poets’ secrets that require the most erudite exegesis to unravel. For example, Werner Ross claims that the passage in Zarathustra that begins with ‘I saw his woman’ and then speaks of a ‘doll up lie’ and that ‘every time a saint and a goose mate’, when checked against Nietzsche’s letters he deduces that Elisabeth was the goose and Lou the doll up lie! And the same can be said of an important figure in Zarathustra: Ariadne. It is only thanks, years later, to the letters of madness that we discover that Ariadne was none other than Cosima Wagner! Why not state things clearly from the beginning, with the real names, as I do in my autobiography, instead of such esoteric circumlocutions that only the author understands?

In Thus Spake Zarathustra we see that Nietzsche’s alter ego didn’t offer his philosophy indiscriminately. First, he spoke to all the people gathered in the marketplace. But the death of God—the central theme of the first part—and the will to power are ideas that Zarathustra announces only to his disciples. And of the eternal return Zarathustra speaks exclusively to himself. Similarly, some chapters are narrative, others have a doctrinal character, and others of a lyrical nature represent the pinnacle of the work: oratory turned into music (a dozen years earlier Baudelaire had already created a new genre: poetic prose). Although in the second part of the book the central theme is the will to power, the final chapter of that part already brings to the fore, in a sinister manner, the revelation of the eternal return.

When studying the Zarathustra the reader must always bear in mind that the book is intended to be a shadow of the Lutheran translation of the Bible, known to Nietzsche in detail from the early years of his life, including Luther’s syntactical construction.

Zarathustra speaks again and again of the tablets of the law to be broken—Nietzsche even asked his publisher to put a black bar on each page to represent his new tablets of the law! The mixture of the biographical account of Zarathustra with doctrinal sentences was copied by Nietzsche from the Christian gospels, and it is not surprising that he wanted to elevate his Zarathustra to the status of holy scripture. In my humble opinion, writing a parable of his spiritual odyssey rather than a vindictive autobiography, with all the repudiation of the family that in the next century I would begin to write, was a preamble to the breakdown that had already been foreshadowed. In fact, this whole period from August 1881 to December 1888 may be regarded as the genesis of the wayward defence mechanism which, in January 1889, would burn out the mind of the alienated philosopher.

Moreover, the light we occasionally see in Zarathustra is not a light of dawn. It is a mere lightning light at midnight. It illuminates everything but only for a fraction of a second. Then the thickest darkness returns. But I would like to mention a snapshot of what the lightning illuminated.

After Kalki, the surviving Aryan will realise that the immeasurable universe wasn’t designed to visit it as the mad earthling of the 20th and 21st century fantasised, but to know himself to the extent of knowing the universe and the Gods. In the trillions of galaxies each intelligent species stays at home, on its own planet, given the impossibility of crossing those billions of light-years of distance with manned devices—a pointless enterprise because the men we would leave behind would remain forever inaccessible. These are the words I like best from Zarathustra: I love those who do not first seek behind the stars for a reason to go under and be a sacrifice, but who sacrifice themselves for the earth, that the earth may some day become the overman’s.

Hitler also said that over-humanity could only be achieved by the Aryan on Earth…

In the 1880s only Peter Gast, the enemy of the Church, became a kneeling apostle, and about Zarathustra he wrote to his mentor something the latter loved: ‘Of this book one must wish to spread it like the Bible’. Gast was unaware that this was impossible insofar as Nietzsche’s was an artificial religion; a true religion, as Savitri Devi tells us, comes into being only when it arises spontaneously from the collective unconscious (like National Socialism).

Nietzsche’s Zarathustrian defence mechanism was very similar to my own. When in the 1980s, a century after Nietzsche’s mental agony, I tried to exorcise my parental introjects I fell into the greatest hells because I didn’t yet realise—as Nietzsche’s Amor fati—that the mechanism I elaborated was also a kind of neo-theology inspired by New Testament stories. I have spoken at length about this in the last chapter of my Hojas Susurrantes and need not summarise it here.

When Nietzsche was buried, his friends surrounded his grave and recited some of Zarathustra’s poems.

Categories
Friedrich Nietzsche Philosophy Theology

Crusade

against the Cross, 15

Of French origin, although German was the family language, Lou Salomé’s Huguenot ancestors arrived in St Petersburg in 1810. Her father Gustav Salomé had a successful military career and was appointed inspector of the army by Tsar Alexander II. He later married Louise Wilm, of Danish descent, nineteen years younger. The marriage produced six children: after five boys, a cute girl who was named after her mother.

Louise (later called Lou) grew up in a male environment, just the opposite of Nietzsche, who grew up in a female environment after his father’s untimely death. Lou’s birth coincided with the day of the abolition of slavery in Russia. As liberalism—what we call neo-Christianity—claims more and more equality, the abolition of slavery was the antecedent of equal rights for women: an ideal that appeared early in Lou’s life. Thus, contrary to the rules of her time, the teenager refused to receive religious confirmation.

At the age of eighteen, Lou began her studies under the guidance of Pastor Hendrick Gillot, who had her study the philosophers. Thin, blonde, flirtatious and with deep blue eyes, Gillot soon fell in love with her, ready to leave his family to marry the precocious brat, but Lou rejected him outright and realised that she had to go abroad. Her mother decided to accompany her.

The first destination was Zurich, where Gottfried Kinkel, an apostle of women’s rights at universities, was teaching (the University of Zurich was the only university at the time that accepted women). Falling ill with a lung condition, Lou travelled to warmer climes in search of therapy, and with her mother came to Rome. Kinkel had recommended that they meet Malwilda von Meysenburg (Nietzsche’s very close friend), at whose house literary gatherings were held. In February 1882 Malwilda received the young Russian woman, who dressed sternly and never wore feminine ornaments. Paul Rée met her there and soon fell in love with her, but it occurred to both Rée and Malwilda to introduce Lou to Nietzsche.

He was then on one of his eternal healing journeys, always in search of a clear, cloudless sky, and had been to Messina. It is curious to note that when Nietzsche received Rée’s invitation, he replied with humour that indicated that he had overcome the depression that had led him to believe he would die at his father’s age: ‘I shall soon launch myself on the assault on her. —I need it in consideration of what I want to do for the next ten years’. He who yesterday was a candidate for death is now thinking of the great life!

When Nietzsche arrived in Rome he inquired where he could find Rée, and was told that he was visiting the Vatican. He went there to find him, who was with Lou, and asked them: ‘From which stars have we fallen to meet each other here?’ The retired professor was sixteen years older than Lou, who, at twenty-one, would soon captivate him with her feminine charms.

The ‘Trinity’, as the freethinkers Nietzsche, Rée and Lou called their alliance, had a problem: both father and son fell in love with the holy spirit, which would eventually arouse great jealousy on Nietzsche’s part, as they both made marriage proposals.

For Lou’s self-esteem—Rée bombarded her with letters—, it was in her interest to continue collecting men whose proposals she had rejected since her experience with her mentor Gillot. Thus, the following weeks and months passed with great sorrow for the lovers, who had never before faced such a woman. Nietzsche in particular, now almost in his forties, had fallen in love like an adolescent, so much so that he was now willing to go to Bayreuth if Lou would accompany him, and precisely at the premiere of Parsifal, even if it was a Christian play! Nietzsche would have given anything to travel with Lou to the premiere, and he wrote to his sister notifying her that he had regained his health, adding: ‘I no longer want to be alone and wish to learn to be a man again’. Elisabeth would meet Lou in Jena.

It is unnecessary to go into the details, but in discussing some of Nietzsche’s indecorous proposals, Elisabeth and Lou became deadly enemies—enemies, as only women can be to each other. Suffice it to say that the whole pathetic episode of Rée and Nietzsche’s falling in love, which separated the two friends, shows that this pair had no experience whatsoever with women, let alone liberated women. The philosopher who would preach that when a man goes out with a woman he should never forget the whip allowed himself to be photographed, literally, with a woman holding a whip behind him! Even in his amorous letters, the typical mistake of the inexperienced bachelor in his dealings with women is evident. Instead of being masculine, Nietzsche behaved like a supplicant bridegroom in search of the bride’s ‘yes’:

My dear Lou!

Sorry about yesterday!
A violent attack of my stupid headaches—today they have passed.
And today I see some things with new eyes.
At noon I’ll accompany Dornburg, but before that, we still have to talk for half an hour… yes?
Yes!
F.N.

It didn’t occur to the poorly pensioned man, clumsy and almost blind when he walked, that these weren’t ways of winning her over, least of all a woman of steel like Lou, brought up among Aryan men with connections in the army.

When Nietzsche would later become disappointed with Lou, he would write things like ‘frightfully repressed sensuality / delayed motherhood—due to sexual atrophy and delay’. Of course, at Schulpforta the children were never taught that male sexuality is literally a thousand per cent more intense than female sexuality, and perhaps Nietzsche believed that Lou’s sexuality wouldn’t be much different from his! Interestingly, in that list of Lou’s faults that Nietzsche noted, we read that one of them was that she was not ‘docile’.

Nietzsche had in mind not a new philosophical system but rather a new religion. And as a new religion that despised the weak and ennobled the strong, what he now needed was a new metaphysics and disciples, and in his fantasies he had designated Lou and Rée as the first. It didn’t occur to him that he was forcing things, that they both had their own goals in life. For example, the way he wanted to overcome the competition was incredibly clumsy. In Lebensrückblick (Life Review), Lou informs us that nothing had damaged her image of Nietzsche more than his attempts to demean Rée, and although the word wasn’t yet used, she blames him for lack of empathy: not realising that such a crude tactic was immediately detected as such.

Lou didn’t need Nietzsche. Nietzsche, the eternal bachelor whom Wagner had psychoanalysed well—to appease Eros the professor badly needed to get married!—did need Lou. Or rather, he didn’t need this liberated woman but one of the many ‘docile’ old-fashioned educated little women who at that time it wasn’t so difficult to ask for their hands. But the way Nietzsche wanted to pull her into his gravitational field was simply to imagine her as an apostle for his budding religion. In a letter to Overbeck, Nietzsche confessed: ‘At the moment—I don’t yet have a single disciple’. And in a missive to Malwilda, he clarifies: ‘By “disciple” I would understand a person who would swear an oath of unconditional fidelity to me—and for that, he would have to undergo a long period of trial and overcome difficult undertakings’.

The most sophisticated readers of Nietzsche’s work are unaware of his biography! It is very clear, from his own words, that he wanted to form a new cult. From this point of view the two scholarly, heavy treatises that Heidegger wrote about his favourite philosopher which begin with the lapidary sentence ‘Nietzsche, the name of the thinker attests to the content of his thought’ are rubbish! In the hundreds of pages that follow, Nietzsche the man is altogether missing, only his philosophical ‘insights’ are present!

Let’s not forget that Heidegger acknowledged to have read Luther. Much of the mission of the priest of holy words is to shake off the metaphysical cobwebs of the neo-theologians and to philosophise from the real world: the real biography of an Aryan man, the protection of his race and the analysis of his enemies.

It is more than significant that, before his death, the neo-theologian Heidegger claimed that philosophy had come to an end and that now ‘Only a God can save us’. He also claimed that for only a few months he had believed in National Socialism, and that during his ten months as rector of the University of Freiburg he refused NS orders to put up an anti-Jewry poster; to remove works by Jewish authors from the library, and to allow the burning of books at the university. But on one thing I agree with Heidegger: academic philosophy (i.e., neo-theology) is dead. The religion of sacred words must emerge, stripped now from all Christian vestiges, and not in the form of ontologies written in corrupted German.

Nietzsche wanted to create a religion very different from ours (the 14 and 4 words). In her Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken, published when the philosopher was already mad, Lou would reveal juicy anecdotes that open a window into his mind. In their conversations, Nietzsche revealed to Lou that he wanted to spend a decade of his life studying the natural sciences in order to obtain a scientific basis for his theory of the eternal return! Lou adds: ‘Only after whole years of absolute silence did he intend… to appear among men as the master of the eternal return’. The following passage is key to understanding how Nietzsche wanted to drag Lou toward the dark side of the force so to speak, as if this woman was to become a sort of Sith apprentice in the wake of the philosopher’s terrible revelation:

Then he rose to take his leave, and as we stood on the threshold his features suddenly transformed. With a fixed expression on his face, casting fearful glances around him, as if a terrible danger threatened us should any curious person eavesdrop on his words, muffling the sound of his voice with a hand to his mouth, he announced to me in a whisper the ‘secret’ that Zarathustra had whispered into the ear of Life, to which Life would have replied: ‘Do you know, Zarathustra? No one knows’. There was something extravagant—indeed, sinister—in the way Nietzsche communicated to me ‘the eternal return of the identical’, and the incredible transcendence of this idea.

In Freemasonry, they speak of ‘The Great Secret’ that only the highest initiates can have access to. What Lou says was the great secret of the religion that Nietzsche now wanted to inaugurate.

That the pensioned philologist wanted to make a new religion out of such an idea is noticeable in that he even wanted to erase the fact that this idea was traceable to his readings of Heraclitus. Instead, he wanted us to believe that Zarathustra arrived at the great secret by himself. The critic of mysticism had himself fallen into the initiatory practices of the ancient Greeks. Recall that for the Pythagoreans some mathematical findings were to be hidden from the people. Only the initiated were qualified for this knowledge, such as the existence of the dodecahedron.

But Heraclitus was not Zarathustra. Nietzsche put something of his own into this doctrine since he didn’t want it to be merely an updating of the old one.

It is not the professional philosophers, like Heidegger et al, who get to the heart of the matter but the biographers, and sometimes the translators. If any scholars had to delve into the marrow of Nietzsche’s thought, it was his translators into English and Spanish: Reginald John Hollingdale (1930-2001) and Andrés Sánchez Pascual (1936-). It was precisely because of Sánchez Pascual’s translations that I began to read Nietzsche in 1976 when I was seventeen years old; translations accompanied by countless erudite footnotes, without which it would have been impossible for me to understand the obscure passages of Nietzsche’s legacy.

Hollingdale for his part made me see that Nietzsche had mixed what he had read in Schulpforta about Heraclitus with the ruthless Lutheran pietism with which he had been brought up—programmed, rather—: a mixture of Christian beatitudes with the terror of eternal damnation.

Let us remember what we have called on this site parental introjects, and that Nietzsche came from a family of theologians in both his father’s and his mother’s line. From his childhood, he had been imprinted with the idea of infinite individual responsibility in every personal affair, which would result in either reward or punishment. From this Nietzsche derived, according to R.J. Hollingdale, the idea of his new metaphysics. The question ‘Is this how you would do it an infinite number of times?’ or the imperative ‘Let us live in such a way that we wish to live again and live like this eternally!’ surpass even the categorical imperative of the other German philosopher whose Id had also been shattered by the bogeyman of the pietistic superego: Kant.

On the eternal return of the identical Nietzsche said that ‘a doctrine of this kind is to be taught as a new religion’, Zarathustra’s gospel. But even though it was a post-theistic religion, it was still in some ways the old one. This reminds me of what someone who was in Freemasonry once told me: that to enter that cult, the candidate was required to believe in the immortality of the human soul. In other words, it doesn’t matter that 19th-century Freemasons were rabid anti-clericals: they were still slaves to parental introjects (unlike Nietzsche, they even asked the novice to believe in the existence of God).

Hollingdale hit the nail. In his introduction to his translation of the Zarathustra, he interprets Nietzsche’s Amor fati as the Lutheran acceptance of life’s events as divinely willed, and the implication is that to hate our fate is blasphemous. For if in Lutheran pietism the events of life are divinely willed, it is impiety to wish that things should have turned out differently than they did.

Thus, the Nietzschean doctrine of eternal return was strongly influenced by Christian concepts of eternal life. Same song, different tune. When Hollingdale published a biography of Nietzsche, professor Marvin Rintala responded in The Review of Politics in January 1969 with a review saying that Hollingdale had failed to understand the essence of Pietist Lutheranism: ‘The great petition of the Lord’s Prayer is for Pietists “Thy will be done”.’ In his introduction to Penguin Books’ Thus spoke Zarathustra released after the biography of Nietzsche he had published, Hollingdale was honest enough to concede that he stood corrected, and writes: ‘This is much in line with the Christian origin of the conception of Zarathustra that I ought to have guessed even if I did not know it’.

Like the Freemasons, and despite the anti-clericalism that Nietzsche shared with them, none of them was free of the malware that our parents installed in our souls. With his Zarathustra, Nietzsche himself thus became a neo-theologian, and the same could be said of the much more recent New Age, and even of secular neo-Christianities as I have so often exposed on this site. There is always a neo-theological tail that drags even the most radical racialist into the abyss, as Balrog’s whip of fire dragged Gandalf into the bowels of the earth. Our mission is to cleanse these last vestiges of Christian programming, however recondite they may be hidden in the Aryan collective unconscious: something that can be done by fulfilling the commandment of the Delphic oracle, to know thyself (which is why I have written introspective autobiography).

But let us return to our biographee. By post, Nietzsche received a refusal from Lou, who went alone to Bayreuth where she had a great time and would even meet the great Wagner himself. (These were times when Nietzsche, for his part, was to receive the printing proofs of The Gay Science.) Never was he so close to despair and suicide as in the winter that followed his farewell to Lou. Eventually, this smart woman would write the novel Im Kampf um Gott (The Struggle for God). The central character is the son of a parish priest who falls in love with a girl…

‘Poor Nietzsche’—Wagner’s expression—didn’t impregnate Lou. But nine months after his amorous disaster, and in the greatest intoxication of Dionysian inspiration he ever suffered, he gave birth to his most beloved son, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Like Dante who never savagely possessed the body of his Beatrice he coveted so much—which is what he really needed instead of terrorising the Aryan man with hellish nonsense—, Nietzsche thus transformed his tragicomic private life into the high flights of lyricism, pushing the expressive power of the German language to its limits like no other poet.