Zara

The passage continues, “'So bless me then, you calm eye that can look without envy upon all-too-great happiness! Bless the cup that wants to overflow in order that the water may flow golden from it and everywhere carry the reflection of your bliss! Behold, this cup wants to become empty again, and Zarathustra wants to become human again.’ Thus began Zarathustra’s going under.” 

Here ends The Gay Science as published in 1882. 

The final book as we know it today contains his revisions of 1887 which include a new introduction, a fifth section containing thirtynine additional aphorisms, and quite a few poems. But when, in 1883, he wrote the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the book takes up exactly where the original 1882 Gay Science left off. Between writing the two books he had lost Lou, and, in her, his chosen disciple. Faute de mieux, her role as the vehicle to ensure his mortal legacy was to be taken by Zarathustra. Often, outside the book, Nietzsche refers to Zarathustra as his son. 

Why did Nietzsche choose Zarathustra? Zarathustra, also called Zoroaster, was a Persian prophet who probably lived some time between the twelfth and sixth centuries before Christ. Zarathustra’s sacred text, the Zend-Avesta tells that the gods worshipped by the very ancient Persians were evil. Thus Zarathustra presented a key to the problem of evil that could never be answered by Judaism, Christianity or Islam, whose all-powerful gods were all-good. In Zoroastrianism the god of light and good is called Ahura Mazda (also known as Ormuzd). He is in constant conflict with the god of darkness and evil, Angra Mainyu (Ahriman), and his daevas. At the end of time, Ahura Mazda will score a final victory, but until then he is not in control of events. Consequently, Zoroastrianism, unlike the three great religions of the book, escapes the paradox of an all-powerful 

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Zarathustra’s ten years of solitude in the mountains between the ages of thirty and forty might stand for Nietzsche’s post-Basel decade of independent thinking, which was often conducted on high mountains. Zarathustra is forty, the same age as the writer Nietzsche is, when he comes down “to be among the people.” He carries down fire, as Prometheus had carried the fire that would transform cultures and civilizations and as the Holy Ghost had carried down tongues of fire at Pentecost. Fire bestows upon the chosen ones (the enlightened ones) the gift of “speaking in tongues,” i.e. in words that are universally comprehensible. It is a synonym for wisdom and for revelation. Zarathustra’s fire has the specific ability to scorch meaning into the meaninglessness of life following upon the death of God. His mouth alone (through Nietzsche’s) will be the first to address the nihilism, despair and devaluation of moral life that was reaching its fC crisis within the context of nineteenth-century materialism. 

All gods are dead, Zarathustra preaches. Now we want the superman to live. I teach you the superman. “Human being is something that must be overcome.”? 

What is man? A hybrid between plant and ghost. What is the superman? He is the meaning of the earth who remains faithful to the earth. He does not believe those who offer extra-terrestrial hopes: they are despisers of life, who die self-poisoned. 

The superman knows that whatever seems cruel, random or disastrous is not a punishment sent from the eternal reason-spider above to punish the sinner. There is no eternal reason-spider and no eternal reason-spiderweb. Rather, life is a dance floor for divine accidents.’° Meaning must be found through saying “yes” to the divine accidents on the dance floor. 

Zarathustra preaches to the villagers that man is a bridge, not a goal. This is man’s glory. The human is between beast and superman, a rope fastened over an abyss. 

On hearing this, Zarathustra’s first disciple emerges from the crowd to attempt to cross the abyss by walking the tightrope. A buf. foon jumps up and topples the tightrope walker, who falls to the ground and dies. Zarathustra takes the body of his first disciple, the tightrope walker, for burial. Ele is mocked by the common herd, Despite this, he resolves to show them the rainbow bridge that stretchcs-not to Valhalla the home of the gods, where Wagner’, tainbow bridge led-but to the state of becoming the superman. 

This he does by giving them his beatitudes (eighteen of them, Christ gave eight). They are not commandments and they are impenetrably mystical. The first reads: “I love those who do not know how to live except by going under, for they are those who cross over.” The last: “I love all those who are like heavy drops falling individually from the dark cloud that hangs over humanity: they herald the coming of the lightning, and as heralds they perish.”"' 

The sun stands at mid-day and he enjoys time with his animals. The eagle is “the proudest animal under the sun” and the serpent is coiled like a ring around the neck of the eagle. The serpent is “the wisest animal under the sun.” Nietzsche often took the eagle as standing for himself and the serpent as standing for Lou (the serpent is female and he uses the same word, Altigste, for the cleverness of Lou and the cleverness of the serpent). The two animals together hold an increasing significance for him. They recall many symbols, including the fatal omen that heralded the Fall of Troy (which may stand for the fall of any doctrine or civilization) when Apollo through a serpent cursed Cassandra who, like Nietzsche, was blessed with the gift of foreseeing the future. Cassandra’s curse, like Nietzsche’s, was that nobody would believe her words or her predictions. 

Narrative is now abandoned and Nietzsche gives us instead twenty-two aphoristic discourses on subjects ranging from individual virtue to what constitutes criminality, to how to make a good death. The full list comprises: 

On the Three Metamorphoses 

On the Teachers of Virtue 

On the Hinterworldly 

On the Despisers of the Body 

On the Passions of Pleasure and Pain On the Pale Criminal] 

On Reading and Writing 

On the Tree on the Mountain 

On the Preachers of Death 

On War and Warriors 

On the New Idol 

On the Flies of the Marketplace On Chastity 

On the Friend 

On a Thousand and One Goals On Love of the Neighbor 

On the Way of the Creator 

On Little Women Old and Young On the Adder’s Bite 

On Child and Marriage 

On Free Death 

On the Bestowing Virtue 

They give us Nietzsche's ideas on those subjects, couched in his alter ego Zarathustra’s archaic, biblical language. 

Unsurprisingly in view of his recent experience, women are now given very harsh treatment, in striking contrast to his gentle understanding of them in The Gay Science. Is it not better to fall into the hands of a murderer than into the dreams of a lustful woman? he asks. And the famous “You go to women? Do not forget the whip!” 

“On Free Death” is probably the section most revolutionary for his time. Christian teaching on suicide considered the ending of one’s own life an unforgivable sin. Suicides were buried in unhallowed ground outside the walls of the churchyard. This symbolized their soul’s eternal exclusion from Heaven. But Nietzsche suggests the option of voluntary euthanasia for those in intolerable pain, those who realize that their quality of life has vanished, or those who simply feel that their time has come. He recommends that they should be allowed voluntarily to end their own lives without whiff of criminality or eternal damnation. 

Each of the twenty-two discourses models how to live honorably and truthfully to the ideal of the superman who is non-religious, in. dependent, self-disciplined and creative. Each ends with the words “Thus spoke Zarathustra.” The book ends on an optimistic, ecstatic and characteristically opaque note: “And that is the great noon, where human beings stand at the midpoint of their course between animal and Ubermensch and celebrate their way to evening as their highest hope: for it is the way to a new morning. 

“*Then the one who goes under will bless himself, that he is one who crosses over; and the sun of his knowledge will stand at noon for him. 

“Dead are all gods: now we want the Ubermensch to live-Let this be our last will at the great noon!’

“Thus spoke Zarathustra.” 

The book is short, barely a hundred pages. Its cadences are poetic, repetitive, hypnotic, brief and dynamic. He said that he wrote it-or it wrote him-in ten days of ecstatic inspiration and revelation. In fact it probably took him a little longer, nearer a month. 

On February 14, 1883, he sent it to his publisher Schmeitzner, describing it in his covering letter as “a fifth gospel.” He went from Rapallo to Genoa to post it, maybe for the joy of launching it from the proper place on its symbolic voyage, or maybe for the advantage of the swifter postal service from Genoa. While he was there, he learned from a newspaper of Wagner’s death the previous day. He took it as an omen, a supernatural connection: another pair of rapiers clashing in mid-air. Bending the truth a little, he observed that the finishing section was accomplished precisely at that sacred hour when Richard Wagner died in Venice. 

Wagner’s soul was voyaging to join the other Argonauts of the spirit. Wagner, too, had once been wrapped in the seven skins of solitude of the visionary prophet. Now that he was dead, Wagner's earlier and purer self could be reclaimed. Nietzsche was therefore entitled to refer to Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a new Ring. His father Wagner was dead; his son Zarathustra was born. 

It was a mark of Nietzsche’s discretion and spiritual generosity that, as he revealed in a letter to Franz Overbeck a week after Wagner’s death, he had known for some time the import of Wagner’s wretched correspondence with his doctors. “Wagner was by far the fullest human being I have known, and in this respect I have had to forgo a great deal for six years. But something like a deadly offense came between us; and something terrible could have happened if he had lived longer.”*3 On April 21 he wrote more openly to the musician Peter Gast, “Wagner is rich in malicious ideas, but what do you say to his having exchanged letters on the subject (even with my doctors) to voice his belief that my altered way of thinking was a consequence of unnatural excesses, with hints of pederasty?” A few months later, in July, he also mentioned to Ida Overbeck an “abysmal treachery of revenge” that had come to his ears the preceding year. 

There had indeed been abysmal treachery and public humiliation, not only by Wagner, but by Lou and Rée as well.