Category: Literature

Julian, 1

Post author By C .T.
Post date May 28, 2017
7 Comments on Julian, 1

Julian presiding at a conference of Sectarians
(Edward Armitage, 1875)

Emperor Julian (Latin: Flavius Claudius Iulianus Augustus, 331/332 – 26 June 363) has been considered a hero of the resistance to Christianity. When in 2012 and 2013 I started to reproduce excerpts of Gore Vidal’s novel Julian I was typing directly from my book copy. Now that I have obtained the PDF I’ll be adding the complete text on Sundays. The following is a note that the author himself wrote for the first page of his novel in the early 1960s.

Robert Graves, when he came to publish his sequel to I, Claudius, remarked in a somewhat irritable preface that a good many reviewers seemed to think he had simply spun himself a novel from Suetonius’s gossip, which looked to them like a very easy thing to do. In Claudius the God, Graves struck back with a long bibliography, listing nearly every relevant text which has survived from the ancient world. Unfortunately, I have not read as much as all that. But to anticipate those who might think that one’s only source was the history of Ammianus Marcellinus (or even of Edward Gibbon), I have included at the end of the book a partial bibliography.

The Emperor Julian’s life is remarkably well documented. Three volumes of his letters and essays survive, while such acquaintances as Libanius and Saint Gregory of Nazianzus wrote vivid accounts of him. Though I have written a novel, not a history, I have tried to stay with the facts, only occasionally shifting things around. For instance, it is unlikely that Priscus joined Julian in Gaul, but it is useful to the narrative to have him there.

Julian has always been something of an underground hero in Europe. His attempt to stop Christianity and revive Hellenism exerts still a romantic appeal, and he crops up in odd places, particularly during the Renaissance and again in the nineteenth century. Two such unlikely authors as Lorenzo de’ Medici and Henilk Ibsen wrote plays about him. But aside from the unique adventure of Julian’s life, what continues to fascinate is the fourth century itself. During the fifty years between the accession of Julian’s uncle Constantine the Great and Julian’s death at thirty-two, Christianity was established. For better or worse, we are today very much the result of what they were then.

In naming cities, I give the modern rather than the ancient name (Milan, not Mediolanum), except when the original name is more familiar to us (Ephesus, not Selquk). Dates I put in our fashion, A.D. and B.C. Since Julian’s court was a military one, I have used our own army’s way of dating, i.e., 3 October 363. Currency is a tricky matter. No one is quite certain what the exact purchasing power of money was in the fourth century, but a gold solidus was probably worth about five dollars. Julian, Priscus and Libanius, the three narrators of this story, all wrote Greek. Their Latin was rather shaky, as they are quick to remind us, but they occasionally use Latin terms, much the way we do. For those readers who will search in vain for Julian’s famous last words, “Thou hast conquered, Galilean!”, he never said them. Theodoret must take credit for this fine rhetoric, composed a century after Julian’s death.

I should like to thank the American Academy at Rome and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens for letting me use their libraries.

G.V.

William Gayley Simpson

Post author By C .T.
Post date February 14, 2017

(1892-1991)

Last year a friend recommended me the great work of William Gayley Simpson, Which Way Western Man? that can be read online. Simpson lived 99 years and wrote that huge work, of 775 pages, throughout most of his life.

I have read some chapters of Which Way Western Man? and was impressed that, before the internet age, Simpson managed to move from an altruistic Christianity to a stance in which he defended Hitler. I will not read the whole book. It is a mixture of disparate writings. One of the earliest dates from 1930, the chapter dedicated to Jesus; another, his already racist view on life, of 1977.

Simpson could have become a B-type bicausalist, blaming Christianity even more than Jewry, since after his Franciscan stage he became a fanatical reader of Nietzsche. For example, on page 18 of Which Way he says about his Franciscan venture: “It was full of Christian pity. It is no less than a crime against life when the superior is sacrificed to the inferior… the kind of thing the great scholar and musical authority Schweitzer did for years in the jungles of Africa”.

This seems to vindicate what I have said about Albert Schweitzer. In another confession, hundreds of pages later (on page 499), we see how Simpson’s Christianity was involved in what Nietzsche calls the inversion of values:

In fairness to myself and to my reader, I must remind him that I approached this question, forty years ago, very definitely from the equalitarian side. In my student days, and for the nine years of my Franciscan venture that followed, with a belief in “universal love” and an outlook on life very like that of St. Francis of Assisi, I quite ignored race, and discounted it. Wherever I went, in our South as in our North, in the Orient as in my own country and among my own kind, I met men as I found them, and valued them for the worth that I sensed in them as individuals, without regard to their race, their nation, their family, class, or any other feature having to do with their origin or their associations. Provided that there was health of body and mind on both sides, I even openly declared my readiness to sanction racial intermarriage.

But it was my Christian tradition and my ignorance that spoke thus.

Let’s jump other hundreds of pages forward. On page 708 Which Way contains a passage summarizing the English Revolution in a couple of paragraphs:

In the reign of Charles I, King of England from 1625 until he was beheaded in 1649, the Jews had already been outlawed from English shores for about 350 years. Driven out of Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, many of them swarmed into Holland, where they soon made Amsterdam the financial capital of the world. Meanwhile England, without any Jews, had prospered mightily, had come to be known as “Merrie England,” had produced Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Age, and had destroyed the Spanish Armada; and by the time of Charles the First was showing signs of that expanding vitality that was to make her the greatest empire-builder in all history. This caused the Dutch Jews to lust for readmission to English soil, inasmuch as no animal makes so desirable a host for parasites as one that is healthy and growing. Cromwell came into a collision with the king that developed into a civil war.

He required money and all things needful for his army. The Jews agreed to be the suppliers on condition that, should he come out on top, he would have the ban against them lifted. In a few years the king’s head rolled, and Jews, mostly from Holland, swarmed in. Within two generations, they became the dominant financial power in the land and, as we have already seen, the Bank “of England” was set up, which, with its acknowledged privilege of enjoying “the interest on all moneys which it creates out of nothing,” became the model for all the central banking systems with which the Western world was gradually saddled.

On pages 755-6 Simpson responds to a liberal in such way that he should be cited today:

The very men of whom you have been at such pains to make mock, even in our universities —Gobineau, Chamberlain, Spengler, Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard, H.F.K. Guenther—yes, and Adolf Hitler and Lincoln Rockwell, too— we will gather up from the scrap heap where you have thrown them and done your best to bury them, and we will wash them clean that they may be seen in a true light for what they were, and will set them up before us as our exemplars, our teachers, our heroes and our inspirers.

Although Simpson never surpassed his bicausalism type-A, it is worth reading, in 762, how he portrays the Jew:

But in any case, so long as we retain control over our own society, we must establish it as our undeviating and relentless aim to make and to keep our people homogeneous. The Jews, of course, to their last gasp, will resort to their utmost cunning and marshall all their strength to bring any such effort to naught. For they know full well, as already observed more than once, that it has been only by maintaining an attitude of abhorrence toward all mixing with aliens that they have survived the centuries and have come to be the power in the world that they are today. And they are no less aware that the only means by which they can keep a creature of our size in leading strings to them is to get us to swallow the poison that they themselves keep so far away from, until we become a race of enfeebled, fawning, mixed-breed curs.

In that same page Simpson even vindicates nordicism: a taboo subject for the white nationalists of today:

Also, with homogeneity as our goal, we must sternly shut our doors against all immigrants who are not White. Indeed, in my own judgment, we should be wise to reject even those White people who do not stem from the countries of northwestern Europe.

It is a disgrace that books like this one, published in 1978, have not been reedited, translated and found in the bookstores of the West.

Tags Christian problem (CP), Jewish Question (JQ)

Feminism Liberalism Literature Manosphere

War of the sexes, 30

Freedom’s daughters

Harold A. Covington is a neonazi and a novelist. He advocates the creation of a new nation, a white Republic in the Pacific Northwest region of the US as a sanctuary to prevent the extinction of whites. Covington’s five novels present a fictionalized account of the rise of a future Northwest American Republic. This nation secedes from the US, ejects all non-white inhabitants from its territory and becomes a regional superpower, defeating US attempts to re-conquer it.

Corinna Burt (“Axis Sally”) was Covington’s personal assistant, co-host and appeared on his weekly podcasts numerous times. She apparently was screwing black guys while working with white supremacist Covington. After leaving Covington Burt went back to her vomit: bodybuilding and a pornstar job. The bitch even attacked Covington and white supremacy in her blog and in her YouTube channel.

How could this have happened to a novelist that has been compared to Homer by one of the finest Europeans intellectuals? The answer is simple: because Covington believes that in the coming racial wars women are interchangeable with men. He even coined a term for such women in his quintet, “gun bunnies.” If we keep in mind what John Sparks and the blogger have been saying in the last 29 entries we can see how silly this view is from the standpoint of natural science.

The best way to illustrate Covington’s feminist views is simply quoting from what he wrote in the last novel of his quintet, Freedom’s Sons, a book of almost a thousand pages. In the prologue he wrote:

Wingfield scowled after her: “I’m sorry if my order to keep our female comrades out of direct combat ruffled their feathers, and I know they’re all as brave as lions or they wouldn’t be here…” [p. xxxvii]

Brave as men. Really? Where’s the historical precedent that soldier women have joined men on the front during the bloody battles that marked the destiny of the nations?

A number of Nationalist soldiers wearing NDF [Northwest Defense Force] tiger-stripes—mostly female, in view of Wingfield’s ban on women in direct combat for the operation—were manning the electronic gear and talking into microphones, wireless phones, and typing on laptops. [p. xli]

From the feminist viewpoint the Northwest American Republic looks like Murka II, and to boot, Murkans incorporate second-wave feminism (keep in mind the blogger’s analysis of feminism in the previous posts).

“Okay, comrades, we’re going to have a major troop movement of about four thousand men crossing the enemy’s front, and we need to make sure they don’t get hammered by the heavy stuff,” called out Wingfield. “Who’s hooked up with artillery fire control?”

A woman soldier raised her hand. “I am sir.” [xliii]

Covington is no natural scientist. The point of keeping women away from the front is that their wombs are too precious for the fulfillment of the fourteen words. In addition to their lower strength, lower resistance and lower IQs you simply cannot endanger them as if they were mere grunts.

“Two of ’em at least are gone, sir,” Lieutenant Campbell said. “We have a Threesec spotter doing a Tarzan act up on top of the I-5. She climbed up there onto a beam or something pretty high up, where she can see over what’s left of the buildings along the river. She’s got a set of field glasses, one of our radios she got from somewhere, and a wireless laptop. What she can’t see, she can get off Google and CNN. She has a bird’s eye view of Edgewater golf course, the Arboretum and Delta Park East. She’s calling in to C Battery, that’s the 155s on the corner of Maritime and Columbia, and also to the Sector Two mortar crews’ fire control officer. That’s about twenty-five pieces, eighty-one mils mostly. She’s dropping some heavy shit on those niggers along MLK and all the way down to Bridgeton.”

“She?” shouted Wingfield in exasperation. “Judas priest, did none of you ladies understand my order to stay out of direct contact with the enemy? I thought I was supposed to be a general or something? Army Council says so, anyway. Didn’t any of these mutinous gals get the memo?”

“This girl says she’s Third Section and she knows you, sir,” replied Campbell. “Anyway, she didn’t ask me or anybody else here. She just went out there on her own. First we heard of it was when she started calling in to C Battery a few minutes ago.”

“Pipe it up so I can hear whatever the hell she’s doing,” ordered Wingfield. [p. xliv]

What would a Nazi of the 1930s think of this American neonazi? This fictional liberalism looks like a typical Jewish psyop to sabotage the military of an Aryan nation.

In the first chapter of Freedom’s Sons, “A Madhouse of Ministries” Covington wrote what is perhaps the most offensive lines of his long novel:

The new government department consisted of 32 people plus himself, about evenly split between male and female. [p. 8]

So in Covington’s “Nazi” cabinet more women were appointed than what Donald Trump is appointing for his cabinet this very day! Another offensive line appears a few pages ahead:

“A lot of Christians and general Neanderthal male chauvinist types want to go back to an all-male army.” [p. 23]

The only Neanderthal is he who believes that only the Christians have had all-male armies. You can imagine what would have happened to the Muslims in their battles with us if they harbored armies evenly split between male and female, and let’s not talk about the non-Christian Spartans or the ancient Romans.

“No more. From now on citizenship and the right to vote is something that has to be earned, and right now the only ones who have earned it are those who fought in the NVA [Northwest Volunteer Army] and the NDF. I have been told that there will be ways in which non-NVA veterans may apply for and receive third-class citizenship, which will get you one vote. Us guys who put our lives on the line for our race and our new nation will have two or three votes each, that’s true, but that’s as it should be. And there’s other ways you can get a vote. For example, one of the things they’re talking about at the Convention in Olympia is allowing mothers with children to get third class citizenship right away, so long as you’re willing to take the oath of loyalty to the Republic. We understand that the results of an election that allows only NVA and NDF people to vote would be considered morally questionable, and so for the first couple of years until we can work up a whole new order of society and a whole new way of doing things, we’ll be kind of playing it by ear. [p. 43]

Unlike the Third Reich democracy continues in the Northwest American Republic and to boot women can vote. What would the blogger think (remember that the welfare state is related to women’s suffrage)?

Robert, this is Millie, one of my part-time admin assistants from the high school. She graduates in June and she’ll be doing her Labor Service here at UM along with night school for a teaching degree, and so she’s getting a head start on things now, after school.” [p. 195]

The Northwest American Republic is indeed a sort of the second incarnation of Murka. Women are still making careers like any other guy in today’s West. About a hundred pages later we read:

“So what can we throw against these bastards?” asked Morehouse.

“Almost five million men and women under arms, including our regulars, who are the best trained and most highly motivated individual soldiers in the world. [p. 288]

Neonazi women are perfectly interchangeable with neonazi men, even in the army. Let’s jump 235 pages ahead and hit this passage:

With Barrow was his blonde and Canadian-born wife, former NVA Captain Jane Chenault, who was now the senior Permanent Secretary for Education, essentially the senior civil servant working under the Cabinet Minister for that department. For the duration of the war, Jane had reverted to her reserve military rank of colonel, and she had promised her husband that if she were not allowed some role in the conquest of Canada, their future married life would be something to make him shudder. Like all wise husbands who know when their wives really mean it, Frank gave in immediately. Jane was proud and pleased to discover that her statuesque figure could still fit into her old Kevlar vest from her NVA days. [p. 524]

In Covington’s world white women are not only empowered, they are still doing shit tests—and men comply! No wonder why Uncle Harold misjudged the character of Corinna…

The novel actually ends on page 537. The remainder of the book is like the sixth novel of Covington’s saga about the creation of an ethnostate. My guess is that since Covington had promised his listeners that Freedom’s Sons would be his last novel, instead of recognizing that it was not the last one he decided to insert the rest of the manuscript under a single cover. But the plot of the rest of the book is so different that a future editor would separate the books.

In the climax of Freedom’s Sons a woman kills Hunter Wallace, the president of the United States, when he was about to nuke the racist ethnostate. Notice that the heroine is a woman.

In the remainder of the “fifth” novel, the Republic is consolidated. If you read it all together the remainder represents a big anticlimax. Covington even goes back to the detective fiction genre of the first novel that he wrote of this saga, The Hill of the Ravens. In this “sixth” novel another crime has to be solved within the now safe Republic. The very title of the first chapter of this “sixth” novel betrays that is another book altogether: “32 Years, Seven Months After Longview.” On the very first paragraphs of that chapter Covington wrote:

Colonel Robert Campbell, who at the age of 46 was now the head of the Civil Guard’s Montana regional Criminal Investigation Division, shook his salt- and-pepper head in bemused admiration. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I still can’t wrap my mind around it. Where the hell did you come from again?”

“From down in the number four traverse trench,” replied his daughter-in-law, Allura Myers Campbell, a graduate student in archaeology at the University of Montana. She was wearing khaki shorts, a khaki work shirt, mud-caked work boots and knee socks, and a large floppy straw hat to protect her head from the sun, which in May was already becoming uncomfortably hot in the pine hills of Lost Creek. [543]

Two pages later we learn that this woman is an intellectual:

“Nope, first time for both of us,” said Campbell. “Tom and I are going to be running point on the security aspect of this visitation of foreign eggheads. No offense, honey.”

“None taken,” said Allura with a merry laugh. “I am an egghead.” [p. 545]

Allura is a 22-year-old girl of the ethnostate. So women not only compete with men in the military but in the world of ideas. Covington doesn’t seem to realize that the feminist world he depicts is contradicted with what he himself writes on the next page: “…a wide range of uncles, aunts, grandparents, cousins” as if it was possible to have both radical feminism and prolific families within the same society.

Three hundred pages later, on page 852, a female character made me feel skeptical. Not even tough guys have that icy nerves that this woman showed in a mission. A few pages later we see that the novelist pays attention to the education of the girls—multiplying fractions! What about kitchen tasks or preparing them for motherhood? Is this a novel written by a traditionalist? Covington can’t have a cake and eat it. Either these traditional families make their women submit or they become Murka-like feminists. Covington seems to believe that with the liberties of his fantastic ethnostate these career women would simply chose having lots of kids. On page 864 we read:

She had experienced this on her first weekend at the Selkirk spread, when her new sisters and cousins had taken her down to Northwest Butte and gone on a shopping spree, fitting her out with a whole new wardrobe of hats, long dresses with fully sleeves, new lace-up shoes that displayed no immodest ankles, and assorted hats.

It is the women who chose to dress like a pre-1960s western society, not the patriarchal codes what obliges them to do so. Concurrently, Covington wants us to believe that some of the liberated women of his ethnostate would choose to have eight kids! On page 867 we are told, again, that they have the right to vote and what is worse: these little women are now applying to get first-class citizenship.

By the end of the long novel, on page 908 we learn that Nightshade is a national heroine of the ethnostate. I have read the whole saga. When I devoured A Mighty Fortress a scene of this gun bunny, Nightshade, struck me as psycho. She got upset with a comrade in arms and intended to poke a switchblade through his eye. But of course “Nightshade” is a woman and, like the sexually-starved Wyoming males, Covington apparently writes to attract both male and female volunteers.

In conclusion, I stick to everything I published on January 1st about “ethnosuicidal nationalists.” The ideology of today’s racists is both part of the problem and part of the solution. Crossing the river from liberalism to the other side involves several stepping stones: Donald Trump’s Alt Light, the Altright (not yet a direct approach to the Jewish question), white nationalism (or southern nationalism), neonazism (which is but WN with Nazi paraphernalia) and reaching the other side, National Socialism.

I would like to finish this post telling that yesterday I received five books from Ostara Publications: Germania by Tacitus, The Origin and Deeds of the Goths by Jordanes, The Inequality of the Human Races by Arthur de Gobineau, The Racial Elements of European History by H.F.K. Günther and Hitler’s Second Book. How I wish that white nationalists jumped from the final stepping-stone to the safer shore of solid ground.

Tags United States

Civil war Justice / revenge Literature Mainstream media Sex William Shakespeare

Hamlet vs. Harold

Harold Covington’s novel The Hill of the Ravens is dedicated “To those who shall come after: from the time of struggle, we greet you.”

According to the internal narrative of the story, The Hill of the Ravens is the fourth book of the Northwest Quintet, though it’s the first novel of the Quintet that Covington wrote.

The Ten Principles of National Socialist Thought on pages 187-89 are a gem, of which I’ll excerpt just a few lines:

I. National Socialism above all represents living truth in its purest form

III. No one must be allowed to spoil what Nature created down through aeons of racial evolution. Your highest purpose in life is to carry on that evolution toward a stronger, better, more beautiful mankind

VIII. Every aspect of life must be judged in relation to the survival and improvement of your race; anything hindering these attainments must be ruthlessly rooted out and destroyed

X. Where there is a will, there is a way. Everything falls before the man of indomitable will. Suffering and sacrifice are necessary. We are hardening ourselves for the most decisive struggle in all human history.

These noble principles for elemental racial preservation explain a dialogue on page 278: “‘You a Nazi sir?’ ‘I am’.”

As long as we cannot openly say in the West that we are Nazis, the West, and especially the US (“the fount and wellspring of all that is evil in our time”—page 110) will be suicidal.

Consider principle III, “Every aspect of life must be judged in relation to the survival and improvement of your race; anything hindering these attainments must be ruthlessly rooted out and destroyed.” Compare its living truth to what’s happening to whites.

Throughout the West white birthrates have suffered a catastrophic decline. During this same period, ours has become the most sex-obsessed society in history. As Roger Devlin has demonstrated, these two trends are related. This is what The Hill of the Ravens, page 103, says: “The whole history of our race and our culture tells us that when women of child-bearing age remain unmarried and babies aren’t being born, then that is a sign that something is gravely wrong.” Principle III explains why in the novel’s Day of the Rope right after the revolution, mixed couples, mostly white women and their beasts of pleasure are targeted for destruction.

But not only the blood mixers got what they deserved in Covington’s novel. The traitorous media is beautifully handled. Reporters and media personnel were declared enemy combatants and legitimate military targets. Once the traitors understood that they would be held personally responsible for the content of their reportage, all of a sudden they got restrained. “They would either see the Party’s point of view, or else they’d see me.”

This said, The Hill of the Ravens has a fatal flaw.

On page 253 envious Covington depicts William Pierce as a Fed informant (see full article on this subject: here). Since his younger years Covington has built a fame of defaming his comrades, starting with Ben Klassen.

I have read most of Covington’s Quintet about the creation of a White Republic and found most of it inspiring. But Covington’s character flaw strongly reminds me the epigraph that Laurence Oliver chose for the beginning of his 1948 adaptation of Hamlet:

So oft it chances in particular men
That for some vicious mole of nature in them,
By the o’ergrowth of some complexion,
Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason,
Or by some habit grown too much; that these men–
Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect,
Their virtues else — be they as pure as grace,
Shall in the general censure take corruption
From that particular fault.

Tags National Socialism

Literature Table talks

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 87

Post author By C .T.
Post date September 3, 2015
2 Comments on Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 87

7th February 1942, evening

Books for young people.

I’ve just been reading a very fine article on Karl May. I found it delightful. It would be nice if his work were re-published. I owe him my first notions of geography, and the fact that he opened my eyes on the world. I used to read him by candle-light, or by moonlight with the help of a huge magnifying-glass. The first thing I read of that kind was The Last of the Mohicans. But Fritz Seidl told me at once: “Fenimore Cooper is nothing; you must read Karl May.” The first book of his I read was The Ride through the Desert. I was carried away by it. And I went on to devour at once the other books by the same author. The immediate result was a falling-off in my school reports.

Apart from the Bible, Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe are the two most often read books in the world. Cervantes’ book is the world’s most brilliant parody of a society that was in process of becoming extinct. At bottom, the Spaniards’ habits of life have scarcely changed since then. Daniel Defoe’s book gathers together in one man the history of all mankind. It has often been imitated, but none of these desert-island stories can compete with the original. One Christmas I was given a beautiful illustrated edition. Cervantes’ book has been illustrated by Gustave Doré in a style of real genius.

Tags Adolf Hitler

Friedrich Nietzsche Literature

Zarathustra’s prologue, 10

Thus Zarathustra had spoken to his heart when the sun stood at noon, then he gazed at the sky with a questioning look, for above him he heard the sharp cry of a bird. And behold! An eagle cut broad circles through the air, and upon it hung a snake, not as prey but as a friend, for the snake curled itself around the eagle’s neck.

“It is my animals!” said Zarathustra, and his heart was delighted.

“The proudest animal under the sun and the wisest animal under the sun – they have gone forth to scout.

They want to determine whether Zarathustra is still alive. Indeed, am I still alive?

I found it more dangerous among human beings than among animals; Zarathustra walks dangerous paths. May my animals guide me!”

When Zarathustra had said this he recalled the words of the saint in the woods, sighed and spoke thus to his heart:

“May I be wiser! May I be wise from the ground up like my snake!

But I ask the impossible, and so I ask instead of my pride that it always walk with my wisdom!

And if some day my wisdom abandons me – oh it loves to fly away! – may my pride then fly away with my folly!”

– Thus began Zarathustra’s going under.

______________________

The above German-English translation by Adrian del Caro is taken from Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Friedrich Nietzsche Literature

Zarathustra’s prologue, 9

Long Zarathustra slept, and not only the dawn passed over his face but the morning as well. At last, however, he opened his eyes: amazed Zarathustra looked into the woods and the silence, amazed he looked into himself. Then he stood up quickly, like a seafarer who all at once sees land, and he rejoiced, for he saw a new truth.[1] And thus he spoke to his heart:

“It dawned on me: I need companions, and living ones – not dead companions and corpses that I carry with me wherever I want.

Instead I need living companions who follow me because they want to follow themselves – wherever I want.

It dawned on me: let Zarathustra speak not to the people, but instead to companions! Zarathustra should not become the shepherd and dog of a herd!

To lure many away from the herd – for that I came. The people and herd shall be angry with me: Zarathustra wants to be called a robber by shepherds.

Shepherds I say, but they call themselves the good and the just. Shepherds I say: but they call themselves the faithful of the true faith.

Look at the good and the just! Whom do they hate most? The one who breaks their tablets of values, the breaker, the lawbreaker[2] – but he is the creative one.

Look at the faithful of all faiths! Whom do they hate most? The one who breaks their tablets of values, the breaker, the lawbreaker – but he is the creative one.

Companions the creative one seeks and not corpses, nor herds and believers. Fellow creators the creative one seeks, who will write new values on new tablets.

Companions the creative one seeks, and fellow harvesters; for to him everything stands ready for harvest.[3] But he lacks the hundred scythes, and so he plucks out spikes and is angry.

Companions the creative one seeks, and those who know how to whet their scythes. They shall be called annihilators and despisers of good and evil. But they are the harvesters and the celebrators. Fellow creators seeks Zarathustra, fellow harvesters and fellow celebrators Zarathustra seeks: what need does he have of herds and shepherds and corpses!

And you, my first companion, take care! I buried you well in your tree, I concealed you well from the wolves.

But I am leaving you, the time is up. Between dawn and dawn a new truth came to me.

I shall not be a shepherd, nor a gravedigger. I do not want to even speak again with the people – for the last time have I spoken to a dead person.

I shall join the creators, the harvesters, the celebrators: I shall show them the rainbow and all the steps to the Overman.

I shall sing my song to lonesome and twosome hermits[4], and for him who still has ears for the unheard of, I shall make his heart heavy with my happiness.

I want to go to my goal, and I go my own way; over the hesitating and dawdling I shall leap. Thus let my going be their going under!”

______________________

The above German-English translation by Adrian del Caro is taken from Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Cambridge University Press, 2006). This Cambridge edition lacks the more detailed notes by Andrés Sánchez-Pascual in Así Habló Zaratustra (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2014), translated below.

Notes:

[1] In the fourth part, §1, “On the Higher Man,” Zarathustra would remember this “new truth.”

[2] Pun of the German words Brecher (destroyer, breaker) and Verbrecher (offender, criminal). Moses also breaks the tablets; see Exodus 32,19: “And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses’ anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount.” In this work Zarathustra uses numerous times this opposition.

[3] A reminiscence of the Gospel of Matthew 9:37: “The harvest truly is plenteous, but the labourers are few.”

[4] Play of German words Einsiedler (hermits) and Zweisiedler (the latter term created by Nietzsche refers to marriage, that is, the “solitude of two in company”).

Tags Genuine spirituality

Friedrich Nietzsche Literature

Zarathustra’s prologue, 8

When Zarathustra had said this to his heart, he hoisted the corpse onto his back and started on his way. And he had not yet gone a hundred paces when someone sneaked up on him and whispered in his ear – and behold! The one who spoke was the jester from the tower.

“Go away from this town, oh Zarathustra,” he said. “Too many here hate you. The good and the just[1] hate you and they call you their enemy and despiser; the believers of the true faith hate you and they call you the danger of the multitude. It was your good fortune that they laughed at you: and really, you spoke like a jester. It was your good fortune that you took up with the dead dog; when you lowered yourself like that, you rescued yourself for today. But go away from this town – or tomorrow I shall leap over you, a living man over a dead one.”

And when he had said this, the man disappeared, but Zarathustra continued his walk through dark lanes.

At the town gate he met the gravediggers. They shone their torches in his face, recognized Zarathustra and sorely ridiculed him. “Zarathustra is lugging away the dead dog: how nice that he’s become a gravedigger! For our hands are too pure for this roast. Would Zarathustra steal this morsel from the devil? So be it then! And good luck with your meal! If only the devil were not a better thief than Zarathustra! – he’ll steal them both, he’ll devour them both!” And they laughed and huddled together.

Zarathustra did not say a word and went on his way. By the time he had walked for two hours past woods and swamps, he had heard too much of the hungry howling of wolves and he grew hungry himself. And so he stopped at a lonely house in which a light was burning.

“Hunger falls upon me like a robber,” said Zarathustra. “In woods and swamps my hunger falls upon me and in the deep night. My hunger has odd moods. Often it comes to me only after a meal, and today it did not come the whole day: just where was it?”

And so Zarathustra pounded on the door to the house. An old man appeared, bearing a light, and he asked: “Who comes to me and to my bad sleep?”

“A living man and a dead one,” replied Zarathustra. “Give me food and drink, I forgot it during the day. Whoever feeds the hungry quickens his own soul – thus speaks wisdom.”[2]

The old man went away but returned promptly and offered Zarathustra bread and wine. “This is a bad region for those who hunger,” he said. “That is why I live here. Beast and human being come to me, the hermit. But bid your companion eat and drink, he is wearier than you.” Zarathustra replied: “My companion is dead, I would have a hard time persuading him.” “That does not concern me,” snapped the old man. “Whoever knocks at my house must also take what I offer him. Eat and take care!” –

Thereupon Zarathustra walked again for two hours, trusting the path and the light of the stars, for he was a practiced night-walker and loved to look in the face of all sleepers.[3] But as dawn greyed Zarathustra found himself in a deep wood and no more path was visible to him. Then he laid the dead man into a hollow tree – for he wanted to protect him from the wolves – and he laid himself down head first at the tree, upon the earth and the moss. And soon he fell asleep, weary in body but with a calm soul.

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Notes:

[1] The verbal couple “the good and the just” will be repeated very many times throughout this work. Probably it is an imitation of another verbal couple “hypocrites and Pharisees,” which also appears frequently in the Gospels, and has the same meaning. See, for example, in the third part, “On Old and New Tablets” § 26: “My brothers! In whom does the greatest danger lie for all of future humanity? Is it not in the good and the just? – is it not in those who speak and feel in their hearts: ‘We already know what is good and just, and we have it too’.”

[2] A Psalm quote, 146: 5-7: “Blessed is he who feeds the hungry.”

[3] On this habit of Zarathustra “to look in the face of all sleepers” see also, in this same part, “On the Friend” and in the fourth part, “The Shadow.”

Friedrich Nietzsche Literature

Zarathustra’s prologue, 7

Meanwhile evening came and the market place hid in darkness. The people scattered, for even curiosity and terror grow weary. But Zarathustra sat beside the dead man on the ground and was lost in thought, such that he lost track of time. Night came at last and a cold wind blew over the lonely one. Then Zarathustra stood up and said to his heart:

“Indeed, a nice catch of fish Zarathustra has today! No human being did he catch[1], but a corpse instead.

Uncanny is human existence and still without meaning: a jester can spell its doom.

I want to teach humans the meaning of their being, which is the Overman, the lightning from the dark cloud ‘human being.’

But I am still far away from them, and I do not make sense to their senses. For mankind I am still a midpoint between a fool and a corpse.

The night is dark, the ways of Zarathustra are dark.[2] Come, my cold and stiff companion! I shall carry you where I will bury you with my own hands.”

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Notes:

[1] The term “fisher of men” is evangelical. See the Gospel of Matthew, 4, 19, “Follow me and I will make you fishers of men” (Jesus to Peter and Andrew). See also, in the fourth part, “The Honey Sacrifice.”

[2] Slightly modified version of Proverbs 4:19: “Dark is the way of the atheist” (Luther’s translation). Luther used the term gottlos (literally godless), an expression that will become a constant epithet of Zarathustra. But there are the “good and righteous”; see, in the third part, “On Virtue that Makes Small.” Then Zarathustra will appropriate with pride that label. The good and righteous are also the ones who call Zarathustra “the annihilator of morals”; see later, “On the Adder’s Bite.”

Friedrich Nietzsche Literature

Zarathustra’s prologue, 6

Then, however, something happened that struck every mouth silent and forced all eyes to stare. For in the meantime the tightrope walker had begun his work; he had emerged from a little door and was walking across the rope stretched between two towers, such that it hung suspended over the market place and the people. Just as he was at the midpoint of his way, the little door opened once again and a colorful fellow resembling a jester leaped forth and hurried after the first man with quick steps.

“Forward, sloth, smuggler, pale face! Or I’ll tickle you with my heel! What business have you here between the towers? You belong in the tower, you should be locked away in the tower, for you block the way for one who is better than you!”

And with each word he came closer and closer to him. But when he was only one step behind him, the terrifying thing occurred that struck every mouth silent and forced all eyes to stare: – he let out a yell like a devil and leaped over the man who was in his way. This man, seeing his rival triumph in this manner, lost his head and the rope. He threw away his pole and plunged into the depths even faster than his pole, like a whirlwind of arms and legs. The market place and the people resembled the sea when a storm charges in: everyone fled apart and into one another, and especially in the spot where the body had to impact.

But Zarathustra stood still and the body landed right beside him, badly beaten and broken, but not yet dead. After a while the shattered man regained consciousness and saw Zarathustra kneeling beside him. “What are you doing here?” he said finally. “I’ve known for a long time that the devil would trip me up. Now he is going to drag me off to hell: are you going to stop him?”

“By my honor, friend!” answered Zarathustra. “All that you are talking about does not exist. There is no devil and no hell. Your soul will be dead even sooner than your body[1] – fear no more!”

The man looked up mistrustfully. “If you speak the truth,” he said, “then I lose nothing when I lose my life. I am not much more than an animal that has been taught to dance by blows and little treats.”

“Not at all,” said Zarathustra. “You made your vocation out of danger, and there is nothing contemptible about that. Now you perish of your vocation, and for that I will bury you with my own hands.”

When Zarathustra said this the dying man answered no more, but he moved his hand as if seeking Zarathustra’s hand in gratitude. –

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Note:

[1] A development of this idea can be seen in this first part, “On the Despisers of the Body” and in the third part, “The Convalescent” §2: “Souls are as mortal as bodies.”