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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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 ValuesThe 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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There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness. —Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I, Chapter 7, “On Reading and Writing”.
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).
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Of all that is written, I love only what a man has written with his own blood. —Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I, Chapter 7, ‘On Reading and Writing’.
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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).
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There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy. —Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I, Chapter 4, ‘On the despisers of the Body’.
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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.
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Oh how then could I not lust for eternity and for the nuptial ring of rings – the ring of recurrence!
Never yet have I found the woman from whom I wanted children, unless it were this woman whom I love: for I love you, oh eternity!
For I love you, oh eternity!
—Thus Spoke Zarathustra, last words of the last chapter of the third part.
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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.