The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung

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Chapter 13: The Sacrificial Murder. [146]

Cap. xiii.

[HI 76] But this was the vision that I did not want to see, the horror that I did not want to live: A sickening feeling of nausea sneaks up on me, and abominable, perfidious serpents wind their way slowly and cracklingly through parched undergrowth; they hang down lazily and disgustingly lethargic from the branches, looped in dreadful knots. I am reluctant to enter this dreary and unsightly valley, where the bushes stand in arid stony defiles. The valley looks so normal, its air smells of crime, of foul, cowardly deeds. I am seized by disgust and horror. I walk hesitantly over the boulders, avoiding every dark place for fear of treading on a serpent. The sun shines weakly out of a gray and distant sky, and all the leaves are shriveled. A marionette with a broken head lies before me amidst the stones -- a few steps further, a small apron -- and then behind the bush, the body of a small girl -- covered with terrible wounds -- smeared with blood. One foot is clad with a stocking and shoe, the other is naked and gorily crushed -- the head -- where is the head? The head is a mash of blood with hair and whitish pieces of bone, surrounded by stones smeared with brain and blood. My gaze is captivated by this awful sight -- a shrouded figure, like that of a woman, is standing calmly next to the child; her face is covered by an impenetrable veil. She asks me:

S: "What then do you say?"

I: "What should I say? This is beyond words."

S: "Do you understand this?"

I: "I refuse to understand such things. I can't speak about them without becoming enraged."

S: "Why become enraged? You might as well rage every day of your life, for these and similar things occur every day.

I: "But most of the time we don't see them."

S: "So knowing that they happen is not enough to enrage you?"

I: "If I merely have knowledge of something, it's easier and simpler. The horror is less real if all I have is knowledge."

S: "Step nearer and you will see that the body of the child has been cut open; take out the liver."

I: "I will not touch this corpse. If someone witnessed this, they would think that I'm the murderer."

S: "You are cowardly; take out the liver."

I: "Why should I do this? This is absurd."

S: "I want you to remove the liver. You must do it."

I: "Who are you to give me such an order?"

S: "I am the soul of this child. You must do this for my sake."

I: "I don't understand, but I'll believe you and do this horrific and absurd deed." / [76/77]

I reach into the child's visceral cavity -- it is still warm -- the liver is still firmly attached -- I take my knife and cut it free of the ligaments. Then I take it out and hold it with bloody hands toward the figure.

S: "I thank you."

I: "What should I do?"

S: "You know what the liver means, and you ought to perform the healing act with it." [147]

I: "What is to be done?"

S: "Take a piece of the liver, in place of the whole, and eat it."

I: "What are you demanding? This is absolute madness. This is desecration, necrophilia. You make me a guilty party to this most hideous of all crimes."

S: "You have devised the most horrible torment for the murderer, which could atone for his act. There is only one atonement: abase yourself and eat."

I: "I cannot -- I refuse -- I cannot participate in this horrible guilt."

S: "You share in this guilt."

I: "I? Share in this guilt?"

S: "You are a man, and a man has committed this deed."

I: "Yes, I am a man -- I curse whoever did this for being a man, and I curse myself for being a man."

S: "So, take part in his act, abase yourself and eat. I need atonement."

I: "So shall it be for your sake, as you are the soul of this child."

[John 6.54]

A famous saying of the Teacher is this one: "Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you will have no life in yourselves." This saying is not only beastly and absurd; it is more absurd than absurdity itself and more beastly than any beast: that a man should savor human flesh or drink the blood of a member of his own family or people -- and that by doing this he should obtain eternal life!

Tell us: in recommending this sort of practice, do you not reduce human existence to savagery of a most unimaginable sort? Rumor herself has not heard of such a weird twist on the practice of impiety. The shades of the Furies had not made such practices known even to barbarians. Even the Potideans would not have stooped to such a thing had they not been starving. Thyestes' banquet became [a feast of flesh] due to a sister's grief, and Tereus the Thracian ate such food against his will. Again: Harpagus was tricked by Astyages into eating the flesh of his beloved -- also against his will. Yet no one of sound mind has ever made such a dinner!

No one learned this sort of foulness from a chef. True, if you look up Scythian [practices] in the history books, or delve into the habits of the Macrobian Ethiopians, or if you venture out to sea to lands dotted through the world, you will certainly find people who feed on roots or eat reptiles or mice -- but they stop short of eating human flesh.

And so, what does this saying mean? Even if it carries some hidden meaning, that does not excuse its appearance, which seems to suggest that men are less than animals. No tale designed to fool the simple-minded is crueler or more deceptive [than this myth of the Christians].

-- Porphyry's Against the Christians: The Literary Remains, edited and translated by R. Joseph Hoffman

***

I kneel down on the stone, cut off a piece of the liver and put it in my mouth. My gorge rises -- tears burst from my eyes -- cold
sweat covers my brow -- a dull sweet taste of blood -- I swallow with desperate efforts -- it is impossible -- once again and once again -- I almost faint -- it is done. The horror has been accomplished. [148]

S: "I thank you."

She throws her veil back -- a beautiful maiden with ginger hair.

S: "Do you recognize me?"

I: "How strangely familiar you are! Who are you?"

S: "I am your soul." [149]

[2] The sacrifice has been accomplished: the divine child, the image of the God's formation, is slain, and I have eaten from the sacrificial flesh. [150] The child, that is, the image of the God's formation, not only bore my human craving, but also enclosed all the primordial and elemental powers that the sons of the sun possess as an inalienable inheritance. The God needs all this for his genesis. But when he has been created and hastens away into unending space, we need the gold of the sun. We must regenerate ourselves. But as the creation of a God is a creative act of highest love, the restoration of our human life signifies an act of the Below. This is a great and dark mystery. Man cannot accomplish this act solely by himself, but is assisted by evil, which does it instead of man. But man must recognize his complicity in the act of evil. He must bear witness to this recognition by eating from the bloody sacrificial flesh. Through this act he testifies that he is a man, that he recognizes good as well as evil, and that he destroys the image of the God's formation through withdrawing his life force, with which he also dissociates himself from the God. This occurs for the salvation of the soul, which is the true mother of the divine child. / [77/78]

When it bore and gave birth to the God, my soul was of human nature throughout; it possessed the primordial powers since time immemorial, but only in a dormant condition. They flowed into forming the God, without my help. But through the sacrificial murder, I redeemed the primordial powers and added them to my soul. Since they became part of a living pattern, they are no longer dormant, but awake and active and irradiate my soul with their divine working. Through this it receives a divine attribute. Hence the eating of the sacrificial flesh aided its healing. The ancients have also indicated this to us, in that they taught us to drink the blood and eat the flesh of the savior. The ancients believed that this brought healing to the soul. [151]

***

There are not many truths, there are only a few. Their meaning is too deep to grasp other than in symbols. [152]

***

A God who is no stronger than man -- what is he? You still should taste holy dread. How would you be worthy of enjoying the wine and the bread if you have not touched the black bottom of human nature? Hence you are lukewarm and pale shadows, proud of your shallow coastlines and broad country roads. But the floodgates will be opened, there are inexorable things, from which only God can save you.

***

The primordial force is the radiance of the sun, which the sons of the sun have carried in themselves for aeons and pass on to their children. But if the soul dips into radiance, she becomes as remorseless as the God himself, since the life of the divine child, which you have eaten, will feel like glowing coals in you. It will burn inside you like a terrible, inextinguishable fire. But despite all the torment, you cannot let it be, since it will not let you be. From this you will understand that your God is alive and that your soul has begun wandering on remorseless paths. You feel that the fire of the sun has erupted in you. Something new has been added to you, a holy affliction.

Sometimes you no longer recognize yourself. You want to overcome it, but it overcomes you. You want to set limits, but it compels you to keep going. You want to elude it, but it comes with you. You want to employ it, but you are its tool; you want to think about it, but your thoughts obey it. Finally the fear of the inescapable seizes you, for it comes after you slowly and invincibly.

There is no escape. So it is that you come to know what a real God is. Now you'll think up clever truisms, preventive measures, secret escape routes, excuses, potions capable of inducing forgetfulness, but it's all useless. The fire burns right through you. That which guides forces you onto the way.

***

But the way is my own self, my own life founded upon myself. The God wants my life. He wants to go with me, sit at the table with me, work with me. Above all he wants to be ever-present. [153] But I'm ashamed of my God. I don't want to be divine but reasonable. The divine appears to me as irrational craziness. I hate it as an absurd disturbance of my meaningful human activity. It seems an unbecoming sickness which has stolen into the regular course of my life. Yes, I even find the divine superfluous. / [Image 79] [Image 80] [Image 81] [Image 82] [Image 83] [Image 84] [154] [Image 85] [Image 86] [Image 87] [Image 88] [Image 89] [155] [Image 90] [Image 91] [Image 92] [Image 93] [156] [Image 94] [157] [Image 95] [Image 96] [Image 97] / [78/98]

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Chapter 14: Divine Folly [158]

Cap. xiv.

[HI 98] [159] I am standing in a high hall. Before me I see a green curtain between two columns. The curtain parts easily. I see into a small deep room with bare walls. There is a small window with bluish glass above. I set foot on the stair leading up to this room between the pillars and enter. In the rear wall, I see a door right and left. It's as if I must choose between right and left.

I choose the right. The door is open, I enter: I'm in the reading room of a large library. In the background sits a small thin man of pale complexion, apparently the librarian. The atmosphere is troubling -- scholarly ambitions -- scholarly conceit -- wounded scholarly vanity. Apart from the librarian I see no one. I step toward him. He looks up from his book and says, "What do you want?"

I'm somewhat embarrassed, since I don't know what I really want: Thomas a Kempis crosses my mind.

I: "I'd like to have Thomas a Kempis's The Imitation of Christ." [160]

He looks at me somewhat astonished as if he didn't credit me with such an interest; he gives me an order-form to fill out. I too think that it's astonishing to ask for Thomas a Kempis.

"Are you surprised that I'm requesting Thomas's work?"

"Well, yes, the book is seldom asked for, and I wouldn't have expected this interest from you."

"I must confess that I'm also somewhat surprised by this inspiration, but recently I came across a passage from Thomas that made a particular impression on me. Why, I can't really say. If I remember correctly, it dealt with the problem of the Imitation of Christ."

"Do you have particular theological or philosophical interests, or -- "

"Do you mean -- whether I want to read it for the purpose of prayer?"

"Well, hardly."

"If I read Thomas a Kempis, I do so for the sake of prayer, or something similar, rather than out of scholarly interest."

"Are you that religious? I had no idea."

"You know that I value science extraordinarily highly. But there are actually moments in life where science also leaves us empty and sick. In such moments a book like Thomas's means very much to me since it is written from the soul."

"But somewhat old-fashioned. We can no longer get involved in Christian dogmatics these days, surely."

"We haven't come to an end with Christianity by simply putting it aside. It seems to me that there's more to it than we see."

"What is there about it? It's just a religion." / [98/99]

"For what reasons and moreover at what age do men set it aside? Presumably, most do so during their student days or perhaps even earlier. Would you call that a particularly discriminating age? And have you ever examined more closely the grounds on which people put aside positive religion? The grounds are mostly dubious, such as that the contents of belief clash with natural science or philosophy."

"In my view, such an objection should not necessarily be rejected out of hand, despite the fact that there are better reasons. For example, I consider the lack of a true and proper sense of actuality in religion a disadvantage. Incidentally, a host of substitutes now exists for the loss of opportunity for prayer caused by the collapse of religion. Nietzsche, for example, has written a more than veritable book of prayer, [161] not to mention Faust."

"I suppose that's correct in a certain sense. But especially Nietzsche's truth strikes me as too agitated and provocative --; it's good for those who are yet to be set free. For that reason his truth is good only for them. I believe that I've recently discovered that we also need a truth for those who are forced into a corner. It's possible that instead they need a depressive truth, which makes man smaller and more inward."

"Forgive me, but Nietzsche interiorizes man exceptionally well."

"Perhaps from your standpoint you're right, but I can't help feeling that Nietzsche speaks to those who need more freedom, not to those who clash strongly with life, who bleed from wounds, and who hold fast to actualities."

"But Nietzsche confers a precious feeling of superiority upon such people."

"I can't dispute that, but I know men who need inferiority, not superiority."

"You express yourself very paradoxically. I don't understand you. Inferiority can hardly be a desideratum."

"Perhaps you'll understand me better if instead of inferiority I say resignation, a word that one used to hear a lot of, but seldom anymore."

"It also sounds very Christian."

"As I said, there seem to be all sorts of things in Christianity that maybe one would do well to keep. Nietzsche is too oppositional. Like everything healthy and long-lasting, truth unfortunately adheres more to the middle way, which we unjustly abhor."

"I really had no idea that you take such a mediating position."

"Neither did I -- my position is not entirely clear to me. If I mediate, I certainly mediate in a very peculiar manner." At this moment the servant brought the book, and I took my leave from the librarian.

***

[2] The divine wants to live with me. My resistance is in vain. I asked my thinking, and it said: "Take as your model one that shows you how to live the divine." Our natural model is Christ. We have stood under his law since antiquity, first outwardly, and then inwardly. At first we knew this, and then knew it no longer. We fought against Christ, we deposed him, and we seemed to be conquerors. But he remained in us and mastered us.

It is better to be thrown into visible chains than into invisible ones. You can certainly leave Christianity, but it does not leave you. Your liberation from it is delusion. Christ is the way. You can certainly run away, but then you are no longer on the way. The way of Christ ends on the cross. Hence we are crucified with him in ourselves. With him, we wait until we die for our resurrection. [162] With Christ the living experience no resurrection, unless it occurs after death. [163]

"THE WORLD," says Dr. Martin Luther, "is ruled by God through a few heroes and pre-eminent persons."...I make this statement in advance that the reader may comprehend in what sense the year 1 is here chosen as the starting-point of our age....The actual life of the hero is, and cannot but be, the living source of all subsequent developments. The birth of Jesus Christ is the most important date in the whole history of mankind...In a certain sense we might truly say that "history" in the real sense of the term only begins with the birth of Christ. The peoples that have not yet adopted Christianity -- the Chinese, the Indians, the Turks and others -- have all so far no true history; all they have is, on the one hand, a chronicle of ruling dynasties, butcheries and the like....The Aryan Indian, for example, though he unquestionably possesses the greatest talent for metaphysics of any people that ever lived, and is in this respect far superior to all peoples of to-day, does not advance beyond inner enlightenment: he does not shape; he is neither artist nor reformer, he is content to live calmly and to die redeemed -- he has no history.

-- The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, by Houston Stewart Chamberlain

If I imitate Christ, he is always ahead of me and I can never reach the goal, unless I reach it in him. / [99/100] But thus I move beyond myself and beyond time, in and through which I am as I am. I thus blunder into Christ and his time, which created him thus and not otherwise. And so I am outside my time, despite the fact that my life is in this time and I am split between the life of Christ and my life that still belongs to this present time. But if I am truly to understand Christ, I must realize how Christ actually lived only his own life, and imitated no one. He did not emulate any model. [164]

If I thus truly imitate Christ, I do not imitate anyone, I emulate no one, but go my own way, and I will also no longer call myself a Christian. Initially, I wanted to emulate and imitate Christ by living my life, while observing his precepts. A voice in me protested against this and wanted to remind me that my time also had its prophets who struggle against the yoke with which the past burdens us. I did not succeed in uniting Christ with the prophets of this time. The one demands bearing, the other discarding; the one commands submission, the other the will. [165] How should I think of this contradiction without doing injustice to either? What I could not conjoin in my mind probably lends itself to living one after the other.

And so I decided to cross over into lower and everyday life, my life, and to begin down there, where I stood.

When thinking leads to the unthinkable, it is time to return to simple life. What thinking cannot solve, life solves, and what action never decides is reserved for thinking. If I ascend to the highest and most difficult on the one hand, and seek to eke out redemption that reaches even higher, then the true way does not lead upward, but toward the depths, since only my other leads me beyond myself. But acceptance of the other means a descent into the opposite, from seriousness into the laughable, from suffering into the cheerful, from the beautiful into the ugly, from the pure into the impure. [166]

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Chapter 15: Nox secunda [167]

Cap. xv.

[HI 100] On leaving the library, I stood in the anteroom again. [168] This time I look across to the door on the left. I put the small book into my pocket and go to the door; it is also open, and leads to a large kitchen, with a large chimney over the stove. Two long tables stand in the middle of the room, flanked by benches. Brass pots, copper pans, and other vessels stand on shelves along the walls. A large fat woman is standing at the stove -- apparently the cook -- wearing a checkered apron. I greet her, somewhat astonished. She too seems embarrassed. I ask her: "May I sit down for a while? It's cold outside and I must wait for something."

"Please have a seat."

She wipes the table in front of me. Having nothing else to do, I take out my Thomas and begin to read. The cook is curious and looks at me furtively. Every once in a while she goes past me.

"Excuse me, are you perhaps a clergyman?"

"No, why do you think so?"

"Oh, I just thought you might be because you are reading a small black book. My mother, may God rest her soul, left me such a book."

"I see, and what book might that be?"

"It is called The Imitation of Christ. It's a very beautiful book. I often pray with it in the evenings."

"You have guessed well. I too am reading The Imitation of Christ."

"I don't believe that a man like you would read such a book unless he were a pastor."

"Why shouldn't I read it? It also does me good to read a proper book."

"My mother, God bless her, had it with her on her deathbed, and she gave it to me before she died."

I browse through the book absentmindedly while she is speaking. My eyes fall on the following / [100/101] passage in the nineteenth chapter: "The righteous base their intentions more on the mercy of God, which in whatever they undertake they trust more than their own wisdom." [169]

This is the intuitive method that Thomas recommends, it occurs to me. [170] I turn to the cook: "Your mother was a clever woman, and she did well to give you this book."

"Yes, indeed, it has often comforted me in difficult hours, and it always provides good counsel."

I become immersed in my thoughts again: I believe one can also follow one's own nose. That would also be [171] the intuitive method. But the beautiful way in which Christ does this must nevertheless be of special value. I would like to imitate Christ -- an inner disquiet seizes me -- what is supposed to happen? I hear an odd swishing and whirring -- and suddenly a roaring sound fills the room like a horde of large birds -- with a frenzied flapping of wings -- I see many shadowlike human forms rush past and I hear a manifold babble of voices utter the words: "let us pray in the temple!"

"Where are you rushing off to?" I call out. A bearded man with tousled hair and dark shining eyes stops and turns toward me: "We are wandering to Jerusalem to pray at the most holy sepulcher."

"Take me with you."

[172] "You cannot join us, you have a body. But we are dead."

"Who are you?"

"I am Ezechiel, and I am an Anabaptist." [173]

"Who are those wandering with you?"

"These are my fellow believers."

"Why are you wandering?"

"We cannot stop, but must make a pilgrimage to all the holy places."

"What drives you to this?"

"I don't know. But it seems that we still have no peace, although we died in true belief."

"Why do you have no peace if you died in true belief?"

"It always seems to me as if we had not come to a proper end with life."

"Remarkable -- how so?"

"It seems to me that we forgot something important that should also have been lived."

"And what was that?"

"Would you happen to know?"

With these words he reaches out greedily and uncannily toward me, his eyes shining as if from inner heat.

"Let go, daimon, you did not live your animal." [174]

The cook is standing in front of me with a horrified face; she has taken me by the arm and grips me firmly. "For God's sake," she calls out, "Help, what's wrong with you? Are you in a bad way?"

I look at her astonished and wonder where I really am. But soon strange people burst in -- among them the librarian -- infinitely astonished and dismayed at first, then laughing maliciously: "Oh, I might have known! Quick, the police!"

Before I can collect myself, I am pushed through a crowd of people into a van. I am still clutching my copy of Thomas and ask myself: "What would he say to this new situation?" I open the booklet and my eyes fall on the thirteenth chapter, where it says: "So long as we live here on earth, we cannot escape temptation. There is no man who is so perfect, and no saint so sacred, that he cannot be tempted on occasion. Yes, we can hardly be without temptation." [175]

Wise Thomas, you always come up with the right answer. That crazy Anabaptist certainly had no such knowledge, or he might have made a peaceful end. He also could have read it in Cicero: rerum omnium satietas vitae facit satietatem -- satietas vitae tempus maturum mortis affert [satiety of all things causes satiety of life -- one is satiated with life and the time is ripe for death]. [176] This knowledge had evidently brought me into conflict with society. I was flanked by policemen left and right. "Well," I said to them, "you can let me go now." "Yes, we know all about this," / [101/102] one said laughing. "Now just you hold your peace," said the other sternly. So, we are obviously heading for the madhouse. That is a high price to pay. But one can go this way too, it seems. It's not so strange, since thousands of our fellows take that path.

***

We have arrived -- a large gate, a hall -- a friendly bustling superintendent -- and now also two doctors. One of them is a small fat professor.

Pr: "What's that book you've got there?"

"It's Thomas a Kempis, The Imitation of Christ."

Pr: "So, a form of religious madness, perfectly clear, religious paranoia. [177] -- You see, my dear, nowadays, the imitation of Christ leads to the madhouse."

"That is hardly to be doubted, professor."

Pr: "The man has wit -- he is obviously somewhat maniacally aroused. Do you hear voices?"

"You bet! Today it was a huge throng of Anabaptists that swarmed through the kitchen."

Pr: "Now, there we have it. Are the voices following you?"

"Oh no, Heaven forbid, I summoned them."

Pr: ''Ah, this is yet another case that clearly indicates that hallucinations directly call up voices. This belongs in the case history. Would you immediately make a note of that, doctor?"

"With all due respect, Professor, may I say that it is absolutely not abnormal, but much rather the intuitive method."

Pr: "Excellent. The fellow also uses neologisms. Well -- I suppose we have an adequately clear diagnosis. Anyway, I wish you a good recovery, and make sure you stay quiet."

"But professor, I'm not at all sick, I feel perfectly well."

Pr: "Look, my dear. You don't have any insight into your illness yet. The prognosis is naturally pretty bad, with at best limited recovery."

Superintendent: "Professor, can the man keep the book?"

Pr: "Well, I suppose so, as it seems to be a harmless prayer book."

Now my clothes are inventoried -- then the bath -- and now I'm taken off to the ward. I enter a large sickroom, where I'm told to get into bed. The person to my left is lying motionless with a transfixed gaze, while the one to the right appears to possess a brain whose girth and weight are shrinking. I enjoy perfect silence. The problem of madness is profound. Divine madness -- a higher form of the irrationality of the life streaming through us -- at any rate a madness that cannot be integrated into present-day society -- but how? What if the form of society were integrated into madness? At this point things grow dark, and there is no end in sight. [178]

[2] [HI 102] The growing plant sprouts a sapling on its right-hand side, and when this is completely formed, the natural urge to grow will not develop beyond the final bud but flows back into the stem, into the mother of the sprig, paving an uncertain way in the dark and through the stem, and finally finding the right position on the left where it sprouts a new sapling. But this new direction of growth is completely opposed to the previous one. And yet the plant nevertheless grows regularly in this way, without overstraining or disturbing its balance.

On the right is my thinking, on the left is my feeling. I enter the space of my feeling which was previously unknown to me, and see with astonishment the difference between my two rooms. I cannot help laughing -- many laugh instead of crying. I have stepped from the right foot onto the left, and wince, struck by inner pain. The difference between hot and cold is too great. I leave the spirit of this world which has thought Christ through to the end, and step over into that other funny-frightful realm in which I can find Christ again.

The "imitation of Christ" led me to the master himself and to his astonishing kingdom. I do not know what I want there; I can only follow the master who governs this other realm in me. In this realm other laws are valid than the guidelines of my wisdom. Here, the "mercy of God," which I had never relied on, for good practical reasons, is the highest law of action. The "mercy of God" signifies a particular / [102/103] state of the soul in which I entrust myself to all neighbors with trembling and hesitation and with the mightiest outlay of hope that everything will work out well.

I can no longer say that this or that goal should be reached, or that this or that reason should apply because it is good; instead I grope through mist and night. No line emerges, no law appears; instead everything is thoroughly and convincingly accidental, as a matter of fact even terribly accidental. But one thing becomes dreadfully clear, namely that contrary to my earlier way and all its insights and intentions, henceforth all is error. It becomes ever more apparent that nothing leads, as my hope sought to persuade me, but that everything misleads.

And suddenly to your shivering horror it becomes clear to you that you have fallen into the boundless, the abyss, the inanity of eternal chaos. It rushes toward you as if carried by the roaring wings of a storm, the hurtling waves of the sea.

Every man has a quiet place in his soul, where everything is self-evident and easily explainable, a place to which he likes to retire from the confusing possibilities of life, because there everything is simple and clear, with a manifest and limited purpose. About nothing else in the world can a man say with the same conviction as he does of this place: "You are nothing but ... " and indeed he has said it.

And even this place is a smooth surface, an everyday wall, nothing more than a snugly sheltered and frequently polished crust over the mystery of chaos. If you break through this most everyday of walls, the overwhelming stream of chaos will flood in. Chaos is not single, but an unending multiplicity. It is not formless, otherwise it would be single, but it is filled with figures that have a confusing and overwhelming effect due to their fullness. [179]

These figures are the dead, not just your dead, that is, all the images of the shapes you took in the past, which your ongoing life has left behind, but also the thronging dead of human history, the ghostly procession of the past, which is an ocean compared to the drops of your own life span. I see behind you, behind the mirror of your eyes, the crush of dangerous shadows, the dead, who look greedily through the empty sockets of your eyes, who moan and hope to gather up through you all the loose ends of the ages, which sigh in them. Your cluelessness does not prove anything. Put your ear to that wall and you will hear the rustling of their procession.

Now you know why you lodged the simplest and most easily explained matters in just that spot, why you praised that peaceful seat as the most secure: so that no one, least of all yourself, would unearth the mystery there. For this is the place where day and night agonizingly merge. What you excluded from your life, what you renounced and damned, everything that was and could have gone wrong, awaits you behind that wall before which you sit quietly.

If you read the books of history, you will find men who sought the strange and incredible, who ensnared themselves and who were held captive by others in wolves' lairs; men who sought the highest and the lowest, and who were wiped by fate, incomplete, from the tablets of the living. Few of the living know of them, and these few appreciate nothing about them, but shake their heads at such delusion.

While you mock them, one of them stands behind you, panting from rage and despair at the fact that your stupor does not attend to him. He besieges you in sleepless nights, sometimes he takes hold of you in an illness, sometimes he crosses your intentions. He makes you overbearing and greedy, he pricks your longing for everything, which avails you nothing, he devours your success in discord. He accompanies you as your evil spirit, to whom you can grant no release.

Have you heard of those dark ones who roamed incognito alongside those who ruled the day, conspiratorially causing unrest? Who devised cunning things and did not shrink from any crime to honor their God?

Beside them place Christ, who was the greatest among them. It was too little for him to break the world, so he broke himself. And therefore he was the greatest of them all, and the powers of this world did not reach him. But I speak of the dead who fell prey to power, broken by force and not by themselves. Their hordes people the land of the soul. If you accept / [103/104] them, they fill you with delusion and rebellion against what rules the world. From the deepest and from the highest they devised the most dangerous things. They were not of a common nature, but fine blades of the hardest steel. They would have nothing to do with the small lives of men. They lived on the heights and accomplished the lowest. They forgot only one thing: they did not live their animal.

The animal does not rebel against its own kind. Consider animals: how just they are, how well-behaved, how they keep to the time-honored, how loyal they are to the land that bears them, how they hold to their accustomed routes, how they care for their young, how they go together to pasture, and how they draw one another to the spring. There is not one that conceals its overabundance of prey and lets its brother starve as a result. There is not one that tries to enforce its will on those of its own kind. Not a one mistakenly imagines that it is an elephant when it is a mosquito. The animal lives fittingly and true to the life of its species, neither exceeding nor falling short of it.

He who never lives his animal must treat his brother like an animal. Abase yourself and live your animal so that you will be able to treat your brother correctly. You will thus redeem all those roaming dead who strive to feed on the living. And do not turn anything you do into a law, since that is the hubris of power. [180]

When the time has come and you open the door to the dead, your horrors will also afflict your brother, for your countenance proclaims the disaster. Hence withdraw and enter solitude, since no one can give you counsel if you wrestle with the dead. Do not cry for help if the dead surround you, otherwise the living will take flight, and they are your only bridge to the day. Live the life of the day and do not speak of mysteries, but dedicate the night to bringing about the salvation of the dead.

For whoever well-meaningly tears you away from the dead has rendered you the worst service, since he has torn your life branch from the tree of divinity. He also sins against restoring what was created and later subjugated and lost. [181] "For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected the same in hope, because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now."

Every step upward will restore a step downward so that the dead will be delivered into freedom. The creating of the new shrinks from the day since its essence is secret. It prepares the destruction of precisely this day in the hope of leading it over into a new creation. Something evil is attached to the creation of the new, which you cannot proclaim loudly. The animal that looks for new hunting grounds cowers slinking and sniffing on dark paths and does not want to be surprised.

Please consider that it is the suffering of the creative that they carry something evil in them, a leprosy of the soul that separates them from its danger. They could praise their leprosy as a virtue and could indeed do so out of virtuousness. But this would be doing what Christ does, and would therefore be his imitation. For only one was Christ and only one could violate the laws as he did. It is impossible to commit higher infringements on his path. Fulfill that which comes to you. Break the Christ in yourself so that you may arrive at yourself and ultimately at your animal which is well-behaved in its herd and unwilling to infringe its laws. May it suffice in terms of transgression that you do not imitate Christ, since thereby you take a step back from Christianity and a step beyond it. Christ brought salvation through adeptness, and ineptitude will save you.

Have you counted the dead whom the master of sacrifice honored? Have you asked them for whose sake they believe they have suffered death? Have you entered the beauty of their thoughts and the purity of their intention? "And they shall go forth, and look upon the carcasses of the men that have transgressed against me: for their worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched." [182]

Thus do penance, consider what fell victim to death for the sake of Christianity, lay it before you and force yourself to accept it. For the dead need salvation. The number of the unredeemed dead has become greater than the number of living Christians; therefore it is time that we accept the dead. [183]

Do not throw yourself against what has become, enraged or bent on destruction. What will you put in its place? Do you not know that if you are successful in destroying what has become, you will then turn the will of destruction against yourself? But anyone who makes destruction their goal will perish through self-destruction. Much rather respect what has become, since reverence is a blessing.

Then turn to the dead, [184] listen to their lament and accept them with love. Be not their blind spokesman, [185] / [104/105] [Image 105] [186] / [105/106] there are prophets who in the end have stoned themselves. But we seek salvation and hence we need to revere what has become and to accept the dead, who have fluttered through the air and lived like bats under our roofs since time immemorial. The new will be built on the old and the meaning of what has become will become manifold. Your poverty in what has become you will thus deliver into the wealth of the future.

***

What seeks to distance you from Christianity and its holy rule of love are the dead, who could find no peace in the Lord since their uncompleted work has followed them. A new salvation is always a restoring of the previously lost. Did not Christ himself restore bloody human sacrifice, which better customs had expelled from sacred practice since days of old? Did he not himself reinstate the sacred practice of the eating of human sacrifice? In your sacred practice, that which earlier laws condemned will once again be included.

However, just as Christ brought back human sacrifice and the eating of the sacrificed, all this happened to him and not to his brother, since Christ placed above it the highest law of love, so that no brother would come to harm as a result, but so that all could rejoice in the restoration. The same thing happened as in ancient times, but now under the law of love. [187] So if you have no reverence for what has become, you will destroy the law of love. [188] And what will become of you then? You will be forced to restore what was before, namely violent deeds, murder, wrongdoing, and contempt of your brother. And one will be alien to the other, and confusion will rule.

Therefore you should have reverence for what has become, so that the law of love may become redemption through the restoration of the lower and of the past, not perdition through the boundless mastery of the dead. But the spirits of those who die before their time will live, for the sake of our present incompleteness, in dark hordes in the rafters of our houses and besiege our ears with urgent laments, until we grant them redemption through restoring what has existed since ancient times under the rule of love.

What we call temptation is the demand of the dead who passed away prematurely and incomplete through the guilt of the good and of the law: For no good is so complete that it could not do injustice and break what should not be broken.

***

We are a blinded race. We live only on the surface, only in the present, and think only of tomorrow: We deal roughly with the past in that we do not accept the dead. We want to work only with visible success. Above all we want to be paid. We would consider it insane to do hidden work that does not visibly serve men. There is no doubt that the necessity of life forced us to prefer only those fruits one can taste. But who suffers more from the tempting and misleading influence of the dead than those who have gone wholly missing on the surface of the world?

There is one necessary but hidden and strange work -- a major work -- which you must do in secret, for the sake of the dead. He who cannot attain his own visible field and vineyard is held fast by the dead, who demand the work of atonement from him. And until he has fulfilled this, he cannot get to his outer work, since the dead do not let him. He shall have to search his soul and act in stillness at their behest and complete the mystery, so that the dead will not let him. Do not look forward so much, but back and into yourself, so that you will not fail to hear the dead.

It belongs to the way of Christ that he ascends with few of the living, but many of the dead. His work was the salvation of the despised and lost, for whose sake he was crucified between two criminals.

I suffer my agony between two madmen. I enter the truth if I descend. Become accustomed to being alone with the dead. It is difficult, but this is precisely how you will discover the worth of your living companions.

What the ancients did for their dead! You seem to believe that you can absolve yourself from the care of the dead, and from the work that they so greatly demand, since what is dead is past. You excuse yourself with your disbelief in the immortality of the soul. Do you think that the dead do not exist because you have devised the impossibility of immortality? You believe in your idols of words. The dead produce effects, that is sufficient. In the inner world there is no explaining away, as little as you can explain away the sea in the outer world. You must finally understand your purpose in explaining away, namely to seek protection. [189]

I accepted the chaos, and in the following night, my soul approached me. / [106/108] [Image 107] /

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Chapter 16: Nox tertia [190]

Cap. xvi.

[HI 108] [191] My soul spoke to me in a whisper, urgently and alarmingly: "Words, words, do not make too many words. Be silent and listen: have you recognized your madness and do you admit it? Have you noticed that all your foundations are completely mired in madness? Do you not want to recognize your madness and welcome it in a friendly manner? You wanted to accept everything. So accept madness too. Let the light of your madness shine, and it will suddenly dawn on you. Madness is not to be despised and not to be feared, but instead you should give it life."

I: "Your words sound hard and the task you set me is difficult."

S: "If you want to find paths, you should also not spurn madness, since it makes up such a great part of your nature."

I: "I didn't know that this is so."

S: "Be glad that you can recognize it, for you will thus avoid becoming its victim. Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical. Man strives toward reason only so that he can make rules for himself. Life itself has no rules. That is its mystery and its unknown law. What you call knowledge is an attempt to impose something comprehensible on life."

I: "That all sounds very desolate, but nevertheless it prompts me to disagree."

S: "You have nothing to disagree with -- you are in the madhouse." There stands the fat little professor -- had he spoken this way? And had I taken him for my soul?

Prof: "Yes, my dear, you are confused. Your speech is completely incoherent."

I: "I too believe that I've completely lost myself. Am I really crazy? It's all terribly confusing."

Prof: "Have patience, everything will work out. Anyway, sleep well."

I: "Thank you, but I'm afraid."

***

Everything inside me is in utter disarray. Matters are becoming serious, and chaos is approaching. Is this the ultimate bottom? Is chaos also a foundation? If only there weren't these terrible waves. Everything breaks asunder like black billows. Yes, I see and understand: it is the ocean, the almighty nocturnal tide -- a ship moves there -- a large steamer -- I'm just about to enter the smoking parlor -- many people -- beautiful clothes -- they all look at me astonished -- someone comes up to me and says: "What's the matter? You look just like a ghost! What happened?"

I: "Nothing -- that is -- I believe that I have gone crazy -- the floor sways -- everything moves --"

Someone: "The sea is somewhat rough this evening, that's all -- have a hot toddy -- you're seasick."

I: "You're right, I am seasick, but in a special way -- I'm really in a madhouse."

Someone: "Well now, you're joking again, life is returning."

I: "Do you call that wit? Just now the professor pronounced me truly and utterly mad."

The fat little professor is actually sitting at a green-covered table playing cards. He turns toward me when he hears me speak and laughs: "Well, where did you get to? Come here. Would you like a drink too? You're quite a character, I must say. You've put all the ladies in quite a flurry this evening."

I: "Professor, for me this is no longer a joke. Just now I was your patient --"

The parlor erupts in unbridled laughter.

Prof: "I hope that I haven't upset you too much."

I: "Well, to be committed is no small matter."

The person to whom I had been speaking before suddenly comes up to me and looks me in the face. He is a man with a black beard, a tousled head of hair, and dark shining eyes. He speaks to me vehemently: "Something worse happened to me, it's five years now that I've been here."

I realize that it is my neighbor, who has apparently awakened from his apathy and is now sitting on my bed. He goes on speaking fiercely and urgently: "But I am Nietzsche, only rebaptized, I am also Christ, the Savior, and appointed to save the world, but they won't let me."

I: "Who won't let you?"

The fool: "The devil. We are in Hell. But of course, you haven't noticed it yet. I didn't realize until the second year of my time here that the director is the devil."

I: "You mean the professor? That sounds incredible."

The fool: "You're an ignoramus. I was supposed to marry the mother of God long ago. [192] But the professor, that devil, has her in his power. Every evening when the sun goes down he gets her with child. In the morning before sunrise she gives birth to it. Then all the devils come together and kill the child in a gruesome / [108/110] [Image 109] [193] / manner. I distinctly hear his cries."

I: "But what you have told me is pure mythology."

The fool: "You're crazy and understand nothing of it. You belong in the madhouse. My God, why does my family always shut me in with crazy people? I'm supposed to save the world, I'm the Savior!"

He lies down again and sinks back into his lassitude. I clutch the sides of my bed to protect myself against the terrible waves. I stare at the wall, so that I can at least latch onto something with my eyes. A horizontal line runs along the wall, which is painted a darker color beneath. A radiator stands in front of it -- it is a railing and I can see the sea beyond it. The line is the horizon. And there the sun now rises in red glory, solitary and magnificent -- in it is a cross from which a serpent hangs -- or is it a bull, slit open, as at the slaughterhouse, or is it an ass? I suppose it is really a ram with a crown of thorns -- or is it the crucified one, myself? The sun of martyrdom has arisen and is pouring bloody rays over the sea. This spectacle lasts a long time, the sun rises higher, its rays grow brighter [194] and hotter and the sun burns down white on a blue sea. The swell has subsided. A charitable and quiet summer dawn lies on the shimmering sea. The salty smell of water rises up. A faint wide surf breaks on the sand with a dull thunder, and returns incessantly, twelve times, the strokes of the world clock [195] -- the twelfth hour is complete. And now silence enters. No noise, no breeze. Everything is rigid and deathly still. I wait, secretly anxious. I see a tree arise from the sea. Its crown reaches to Heaven and its roots reach down into Hell. I am completely alone and disheartened and gaze from afar. It is as if all life had flown from me and completely passed into the incomprehensible and fearful. I am utterly weak and incapable. "Salvation," I whisper. A strange voice speaks: "There is no salvation here, [196] you must remain calm, or you will disturb the others. It is night and the other people want to sleep." I see, it's the attendant. The room is dimly lit by a weak lamp and sadness weighs on the room.

I: "I couldn't find the way."

He says: "You don't need to find a way now."

He speaks the truth. The way, or whatever it might be, on which people go, is our way, the right way. There are no paved ways into the future. We say that it is this way, and it is. We build roads by going on. Our life is the truth that we seek. Only my life is the truth, the truth above all. We create the truth by living it.

[2] This is the night in which all the dams broke, where what was previously solid moved, where the stones turned into serpents, and everything living froze. Is this a web of words? If it is, it is a hellish web for those caught in it.

There are hellish webs of words, only words, but what are words? Be tentative with words, value them well, take safe words, words without catches, do not spin them with one another so that no webs arise, for you are the first who is ensnared in them. [197] For words have meanings. With words you pull up the underworld. Word, the paltriest and the mightiest. In words the emptiness and the fullness flow together. Hence the word is an image of God. The word is the greatest and the smallest that man created, just as what is created through man is the greatest and the smallest.

So if I fall prey to the web of words, I fall prey to the greatest and the smallest. I am at the mercy of the sea, of the inchoate waves that are forever changing place. Their essence is movement and movement is their order. He who strives against waves is exposed to the arbitrary. The work of men is steady but it swims upon chaos. The striving of men seems like lunacy to him who comes from the sea. But men consider him mad. [198]He who comes from the sea is sick. He can hardly bear the gaze of men. For to him they all seem to be drunk and foolish from sleep-inducing poisons. They want to come to your rescue, and as for accepting help, for sure you would like less of that, rather than swindling your way into their company and being completely like one who has never seen the chaos but only talks about it.

But for him who has seen the chaos, there is no more hiding, because he knows that the bottom sways and knows what this swaying means. He has seen the order and the disorder of the endless, he knows the unlawful laws. He knows the sea and can never forget it. The chaos is terrible: days full of lead, nights full of horror.

But just as Christ knew that he was the way, the truth, and the life, in that the new torment and the renewed salvation came into the world through him, [199] I know that chaos must come over men, and that the hands of those who unknowingly and unsuspectingly break through the thin walls that separate us from the sea are busy. For this is our way, our truth, and our life.

Just as the disciples of Christ recognized that God had become flesh and lived among them as a man, we now recognize that the anointed of this time is a God who does not appear in the flesh; he is no man and yet is a son of man, but in spirit and not in flesh; hence he can be born only through the spirit of men as the conceiving womb of the God. [200] What is done to this God you do to the lowest in yourself, under the law of love according to which nothing is cast out. For how else should your lowest be saved from depravity? / [110/112] [Image 111] [201] / Who should accept the lowest in you, if you do not? But he who does it not from love but from pride, selfishness, and greed, is damned. None of the damnation is cast out either. [202]

If you accept the lowest in you, suffering is unavoidable, since you do the base thing and build up what lay in ruin. There are many graves and corpses in us, an evil stench of decomposition. [203] Just as Christ through the torment of sanctification subjugated the flesh, so the God of this time through the torment of sanctification will subjugate the spirit. Just as Christ tormented the flesh through the spirit, the God of this time will torment the spirit through the flesh. For our spirit has become an impertinent whore, a slave to words created by men and no longer the divine word itself. [204]

The lowest in you is the source of mercy. We take this sickness upon ourselves, the inability to find peace, the baseness, and the contemptibility so that the God can be healed and radiantly ascend, purged of the decomposition of death and the mud of the underworld. The despicable prisoner will ascend to his salvation shining and wholly healed. [205]

Is there a suffering that would be too great to want to undergo for our God? You only see the one, and do not notice the other. But when there is one, so there is also another and that is the lowest in you. But the lowest in you is also the eye of the evil that stares at you and looks at you coldly and sucks your light down into the dark abyss. Bless the hand that keeps you up there, the smallest humanity, the lowest living thing. Quite a few would prefer death. Since Christ imposed bloody sacrifice on humanity, the renewed God will also not spare bloodshed.

***

Wherefore art thou red in thine apparel, and thy garments like him that treadeth in the winefat? I have trodden the winepress alone and no one is with me. I have trodden myself down in my anger, and trampled upon myself in my fury. Hence my blood has spattered my clothes, and I have stained my robe. For I have afforded myself a day of vengeance, and the year to redeem myself has come. And I looked around, and there was none to help; and I wondered that there was no one who stood by me: therefore my own arm must save me, and my fury upheld me. And I trod myself down in my rage, and made myself drunk in my fury, and spilt my blood on the earth. [206] For I took my misdeed upon myself so that the God would be healed.

Just as Christ said that he did not come to make peace but brought the sword, [207] so he in whom Christ becomes complete will not give himself peace, but a sword. He will rebel against himself and one will be turned against the other in him. He will also hate that which he loves in himself. He will be castigated in himself, mocked, and given over to the torment of crucifixion, and no one will aid him or soothe his torment.

Just as Christ was crucified between the two thieves, our lowest lies on either side of our way. And just as one thief went to Hell and the other rose up to Heaven, the lowest in us will be sundered in two halves on the day of our judgment. The one is destined for damnation and death, and the other will rise up. [208] But it will take a long time until you see what is destined for death and what is destined for life, since the lowest in you is still unseparated and one, and in a deep sleep.

If I accept the lowest in me, I lower a seed into the ground of Hell. The seed is invisibly small, but the tree of my life grows from it and conjoins the Below with the Above. At both ends there is fire and blazing embers. The Above is fiery and the Below is fiery. Between the unbearable fires grows your life. You hang between these two poles. In an immeasurably frightening movement the stretched hanging welters up and down. [209]

We thus fear our lowest, since that which one does not possess is forever united with the chaos and takes part in its mysterious ebb and flow. Insofar as I accept the lowest in me -- precisely that red glowing sun of the depths -- and thus fall victim to the confusion of chaos, the upper shining sun also rises. Therefore he who strives for the highest finds the deepest.

To deliver the men of his time from the stretched hanging, Christ effectively took this torment upon himself and taught them: "Be crafty like serpents and guileless like doves." [210] For craftiness counsels against chaos, and guilelessness veils its terrible aspect. Thus men could take the safe middle path, hedged both upward and downward.

But the dead of the Above and the Below mounted, and their demands grew ever louder. And both the noble and the wicked rose up again and, unaware, broke the law of the mediator. They flung open doors both above and below: They drew many after them to higher and lower madness, thereby sowing confusion and preparing the way of what is to come.

But he who goes into the one and not also at the same time into the other by accepting what comes toward him, will simply teach and live the one and turn it into a reality. For he will be its victim. When you go into the one and hence consider the other approaching you as your enemy, you will fight against the other. You will do so because you fail to recognize that the other is also in you. On the contrary, you think that the other comes somehow from without and you think that you also catch sight of it in the views and actions of your fellow men which clash with yours. You thus fight the other and are completely blinded.

But he who accepts what approaches him because it is also in him, quarrels and wrangles no more, but looks into himself and keeps silent. / [112/114] [Image 113] [211] /

***

He sees the tree of life, whose roots reach into Hell and whose top touches Heaven. He also no longer knows differences: [212] who is right? What is holy? What is genuine? What is good? What is correct? He knows only one difference: the difference between below and above. For he sees that the tree of life grows from below to above, and that it has its crown at the top, clearly differentiated from the roots. To him this is unquestionable. Hence he knows the way to salvation.

To unlearn all distinctions save that concerning direction is part of your salvation. Hence you free yourself from the old curse of the knowledge of good and evil. Because you separated good from evil according to your best appraisal and aspired only to the good and denied the evil that you committed nevertheless and failed to accept, your roots no longer suckled the dark nourishment of the depths and your tree became sick and withered.

Therefore the ancients said that after Adam had eaten the apple, the tree of paradise withered. [213] Your life needs the dark. But if you know that it is evil, you can no longer accept it and you suffer anguish and you do not know why. Nor can you accept it as evil, else your good will reject you. Nor can you deny it since you know good and evil. Because of this the knowledge of good and evil was an insurmountable curse.

But if you return to primal chaos and if you feel and recognize that which hangs stretched between the two unbearable poles of fire, you will notice that you can no longer separate good and evil conclusively, neither through feeling nor through knowledge, but that you can discern the direction of growth only from below to above. You thus forget the distinction between good and evil, and you no longer know it as long as your tree grows from below to above. But as soon as growth stops, what was united in growth falls apart and once more you recognize good and evil.

You can never deny your knowledge of good and evil to yourself so that you could betray your good in order to live evil. For as soon as you separate good and evil, you recognize them. They are united only in growth. But you grow if you stand still in the greatest doubt, and therefore steadfastness in great doubt is a veritable flower of life.

He who cannot bear doubt does not bear himself. Such a one is doubtful; he does not grow and hence he does not live. Doubt is the sign of the strongest and the weakest. The strong have doubt, but doubt has the weak. Therefore the weakest is close to the strongest, and if he can say to his doubt: "I have you," then he is the strongest. [214] But no one can say yes to his doubt, unless he endures wide-open chaos. Because there are so many among us who can talk about anything, pay heed to what they live. What someone says can be very much or very little. Thus examine his life.

My speech is neither light nor dark, since it is the speech of someone who is growing.

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Chapter 17: Nox quarta [215]

Cap. xvii

[HI 114] [216] 1 hear the roaring of the morning wind, which comes over the mountains. The night is overcome, when all my life was subject to eternal confusion and stretched out between the poles of fire.

My soul speaks to me in a bright voice: "The door should be lifted off its hinges to provide a free passage between here and there, between yes and no, between above and below, between left and right. Airy passages should be built between all opposed things, light smooth streets should lead from one pole to the other. Scales should be set up, whose pointer sways gently. A flame should burn that cannot be blown out by the wind. A stream should flow to its deepest goal. The herds of wild animals should move to their feeding grounds along their old game paths. Life should proceed, from birth to death, from death to birth, unbroken like the path of the sun. Everything should proceed on this path."

Thus speaks my soul. But I toy casually and terribly with myself. Is it day or night? Am I asleep or awake? Am I alive or have I already died?

Blind darkness besieges me -- a great wall -- a gray worm of twilight crawls along it. It has a round face and laughs. The laughter is convulsive and actually relieving. I open my eyes: the fat cook is standing before me: "You're a sound sleeper, I must say. You've slept for more than an hour."

I: "Really? Have I slept? I must have dreamed, what a dreadful play! Did I fall asleep in this kitchen? Is this really the realm of mothers?" [217]

"Have a glass of water, you're still thoroughly drowsy."

I: 'Yes, this sleep can make one drunk. Where is my Thomas? There it lies, open at the twenty-first chapter: "My soul, in everything and yet beyond everything, you must find your rest in the Lord, for he is the eternal rest of the saints." [218]

I read this sentence aloud. Is not every word followed by a question mark?

"If you fell asleep with this sentence, you must really have had a beautiful dream."

I: "I certainly dreamed, and I will think about the dream. Incidentally, can you tell me whose cook you are?"

"The librarian's. He loves good cooking and I have been with him for many years." / [114/116] [Image 115] [219] /

I: "Oh, I had no idea that the librarian had such a cook."

"Yes, you must know that he's a gourmet."

I: "Farewell, madam cook, and thank you for the accommodation."

"You are most welcome and the pleasure was entirely mine."

Now I am outside. So that was the librarian's cook. Does he really know what food is prepared inside? He has certainly never gone in there for a temple sleep. [220] I think that I'll return the Thomas a Kempis to him. I enter the library.

L: "Good evening, here you are again."

I: "Good evening, Sir, I've come to return the Thomas. I sat down for a bit in your kitchen next door to read, without suspecting that it's your kitchen."

L: "Please, there's no problem whatsoever. Hopefully my cook received you well."

I: "I can't complain about the reception. I even had an afternoon sleep over Thomas."

L: "That doesn't surprise me. These prayer books are terribly boring."

I: "Yes, for people like us. But your cook finds the little book very edifying."

L: "Well yes, for the cook."

I: "Allow me the indiscrete question: have you ever had an incubation sleep in your kitchen?"

L: "No, I've never entertained such a strange idea."

I: "Let me say that you'd learn a lot that way about the nature of your kitchen. Good night, Sir!"

After this conversation I left the library and went outside into the anteroom where I approached the green curtains. I pushed them aside, and what did I see? I saw a high-ceilinged hall before me -- with a supposedly magnificent garden in the background -- Klingsor's magical garden, it occurred to me at once. I had entered a theater; those two over there are part of the play: Amfortas and Kundry, or rather, just what am I looking at? It is the librarian and his cook. He is ailing and pale, and has a bad stomach, she is disappointed and furious. Klingsor is standing to the left, holding the feather the librarian used to tuck behind his ear. How closely Klingsor resembles me! What a repulsive play! But look, Parsifal enters from the left. How strange, he also looks like me. Klingsor venomously throws the feather at Parsifal. But the latter catches it calmly.

The scene changes: It appears that the audience, in this case me, joins in during the last act. One must kneel down as the Good Friday service begins: Parsifal enters -- slowly, his head covered with a black helmet. The lionskin of Hercules adorns his shoulders and he holds the club in his hand; he is also wearing modern black trousers in honor of the church holiday. I bristle and stretch out my hand avertingly, but the play goes on. Parsifal takes off his helmet. Yet there is no Gurnemanz to atone for and consecrate him. Kundry stands in the distance, covering her head and laughing. The audience is enraptured and recognizes itself in Parsifal. He is I. I take off my armor layered with history and my chimerical decoration and go to the spring wearing a white penitent's shirt, where I wash my feet and hands without the help of a stranger. Then I also take off my penitent's shirt and put on my civilian clothes. I walk out of the scene and approach myself -- I who am still kneeling down in prayer as the audience. I rise and become one with myself. [221]

***

[2] What would mockery be, if it were not true mockery? What would doubt be, if it were not true doubt? What would opposition be, it if were not true opposition? He who wants to accept himself must also really accept his other. But in the yes, not every no is true, and in the no, every yes is a lie. But since I can be in the yes today and in the no tomorrow, yes and no are both true and untrue. Whereas yes and no cannot yield because they exist, our concepts of truth and error can.

I presume you would like to have certainty with regard to truth and error? Certainty within one or the other is not only possible, but also necessary, although certainty in one is protection and resistance against the other. If you are in one, your certainty about the one excludes the other. But how can you then reach the other? And why can the one not be enough for us? One cannot be enough for us since the other is in us. And if we were content with one, the other would suffer great need and afflict us with its hunger. But we misunderstand this hunger and still believe that we are hungry for the one and strive for it even more adamantly.

Through this we cause the other in us to assert its demands on us even more strongly. If we are then ready to recognize the claim of the other in us, we can cross over into the other to satisfy it. But we can thus reach across, since the other has become conscious to us. Yet if our blinding through the one is strong, we become even more distant from the other, and a disastrous chasm between the one and the other opens up in us. The one becomes surfeited and the other becomes too hungry. The satiated grows lazy and the hungry grows weak. And so we suffocate in fat, consumed by lack.

This is sickness, but you see a lot of this type. It must be so, but it need not be so. There are grounds and causes enough that it is so, but we also want it not / [116/117] to be so. For man is afforded the freedom to overcome the cause, for he is creative in and of himself. If you have reached that freedom through the suffering of your spirit to accept the other despite your highest belief in the one, since you are it too, then your growth begins.

If others mock me, it is nevertheless them doing this, and I can attribute guilt to them for this, and forget to mock myself. But he who cannot mock himself will be mocked by others. So accept your self-mockery so that everything divine and heroic falls from you and you become completely human. What is divine and heroic in you is a mockery to the other in you. For the sake of the other in you, set off your admired role which you previously performed for your own self and become who you are.

He who has the luck and misfortune of a particular talent falls prey to believing that he is this gift. Hence he is also often its fool. A special gift is something outside of me. I am not the same as it. The nature of the gift has nothing to do with the nature of the man who carries it. It often even lives at the expense of the bearer's character. His character is marked by the disadvantage of his gift, indeed even through its opposite. Consequently he is never at the height of his gift but always beneath it. If he accepts his other he becomes capable of bearing his gift without disadvantage. But if he only wants to live in his gift and consequently rejects his other, he oversteps the mark, since the essence of his gift is extra-human and a natural phenomenon, which he in reality is not. All the world sees his error, and he becomes the victim of its mockery. Then he says that others mock him, while it is only the disregard of his other that makes him ridiculous.

When the God enters my life, I return to my poverty for the sake of the God. I accept the burden of poverty and bear all my ugliness and ridiculousness, and also everything reprehensible in me. I thus relieve the God of all the confusion and absurdity that would befall him if I did not accept it. With this I prepare the way for the God's doing. What should happen? Has the darkest abyss been emptied and exhausted? Or what stands and waits down there, impending and red-hot? [Image 117] [222]

/ [117/118] Which fire has not been put out and which embers are still ablaze? We sacrificed innumerable victims to the dark depths, and yet it still demands more. What is this crazy desire craving satisfaction? Whose mad cries are these? Who among the dead suffers thus? Come here and drink blood, so that you can speak. [223] Why do you reject the blood? Would you like milk? Or the red juice of the vine?

"His eyes shall be red with wine": this is the intoxicating celestial wine from which the masters of the Torah drink. "And his teeth white with milk", because the Torah is both wine and milk, the Oral and the Written Law.

 -- The Zohar, translated by Harry Sperling and Maurice Simon

Perhaps you would rather have love? Love for the dead? Being in love with the dead? Are you perhaps demanding the seeds of life for the faded thousand-year-old body of the underworld? An unchaste incestuous lust for the dead? Something that makes the blood run cold. Are you demanding a lusty commingling with corpses? I spoke of "acceptance" -- but you demand "to seize, embrace, copulate?" Are you demanding the desecration of the dead? That prophet, you say, lay on the child, and placed his mouth on the child's mouth, and his eyes on its eyes, and his hands on its hands and he thus splays himself over the boy, so that the child's body became warm. But he rose again and went here and there in the house before he mounted anew and spread himself over him again. The boy snorted seven times. Then the boy opened his eyes. So shall your acceptance be, so shall you accept, not cool, not superior, not thought out, not obsequious, not as a self-chastisement, but with pleasure, precisely with this ambiguous impure pleasure, whose ambiguity enables it to unite with the higher, with that holy-evil pleasure of which you do not know whether it be virtue or vice, with that pleasure which is lusty repulsiveness, lecherous fear, sexual immaturity. One wakens the dead with this pleasure.

"AND IT CAME TO PASS WHEN PHARAOH SENT AWAY THE PEOPLE, ETC. R. Simeon discoursed here on the verse: "A prayer of Habakkuk the prophet upon shigionoth" (Hab. III, 1). 'Why', he said, 'is this vision of Habakkuk designated "prayer", a title unique in the prophetic writings? Why do we find only a prayer of Habakkuk and not of Isaiah or Jeremiah? To explain this we must go back to the tradition which says that he was the son of the Shunammite woman who befriended Elisha, and that his name contains an allusion to Elisha's words, "about this set time, according to the time of life, thou wilt embrace (hobeketh) a son" (2 Kings IV, 16). The promise was fulfilled, but the child subsequently died. Why? Because it was given to her and not to her husband; it came from the "feminine" region alone, and everything emanating from the feminine principle ends in death. Elisha, seeing that the child was dead, realized the reason; and therefore, "he lay upon the child, and put his mouth upon his mouth, and his eyes upon his eyes, and his hands upon his hands, and he stretched himself upon the child, and the flesh of the child waxed warm"); that is to say, he connected him with another supernal region where there is an abundance of life, not uprooting the child from the former region, but awakening a new spirit from above and restoring his soul to him. "And the child sneezed seven times, and the child opened his eyes". Now this child became the prophet Habakkuk. The duplicate form of his name (Habakkuk instead of Habuk = embraced) suggests that he owed his life to two "embracings": one of his mother, and one of Elisha, one coming from the sphere to which he was attached at first, and the other from the higher supernal grade.

 -- The Zohar, translated by Harry Sperling and Maurice Simon

Your lowest is in a sleep resembling death and needs the warmth of life which contains good and evil inseparably and indistinguishably. That is the way of life; you can call it neither evil nor good, neither pure nor impure. Yet this is not the goal, but the way and the crossing. It is also sickness and the beginning of recovery. It is the mother of all abominable deeds and all salutary symbols. It is the most primordial form of creation, the very first dark urge that flows through all secret hiding places and dark passages, with the unintentional lawfulness of water and from unexpected places in the loose soil, swelling from the finest cracks to fructify the dry soil. It is the very first, secret teacher of nature, teaching plants and animals the most astonishing and supremely clever skills and tricks, which we hardly know how to fathom. It is the great sage who has superhuman knowledge, who has the greatest of all the sciences, who makes order out of confusion, and who prophesies the future clairvoyantly out of ungraspable fullness. It is the serpentlike, perishable and beneficial, the dreadfully and ridiculously daimonic. It is the arrow that always hits the weakest spot, the spring root which opens the sealed treasure chambers.

You can call it neither clever nor stupid, neither good nor evil, since its nature is inhuman throughout. It is the son of the earth, the dark one whom you should awaken. [224] It is man and woman at the same time and immature sex, rich in interpretation and misinterpretation, so poor in meaning and yet so rich. This is the dead that cried loudest, that stood right at the bottom and waited, that suffered worst. It desired neither blood nor milk nor wine for the sacrifice of the dead, but the willingness of our flesh. Its longing paid no heed to the torment of our spirit which struggled and tortured itself to devise what cannot be devised, that hence tore itself apart and sacrificed itself. Not until our spirit lay dismembered on the altar did I hear the voice of the son of the earth, and only then did I see that he was the great suffering one, who needed salvation. He is the chosen one since he was the most rejected. It is bad to have to say this, but perhaps I hear badly, or perhaps I misunderstand what the depths say. It is miserable to say as much, and yet I must say it.

The depths are silent. He has arisen and now beholds the light of the sun and is among the living. Restlessness and discord rose up with him, doubt and the fullness of life.

Amen, it is finished. What was unreal is real, what was real is unreal. However, I may not, I do not want to, I cannot. Oh human wretchedness! Oh unwillingness in us! Oh doubt and despair. This is really Good Friday, upon which the Lord died and descended into Hell and completed the mysteries. [225] This is the Good Friday when we complete the Christ in us and we descend to Hell ourselves. This the Good Friday on which we moan and cry to will the completion of Christ, for after his completion we go to Hell. Christ was so powerful that his realm covered all the world and only Hell lay outside it.

Who succeeded in crossing the borders of this realm with good grounds, pure conscience, and obeying the law of love? Who among the living is Christ and journeys to Hell in living flesh? Who is it that expands the realm of Christ with Hell? Who is it that is full of drunkenness while sober? Who is it that descended from being one into being two? Who is it that tore apart his own heart to unite what has been separated?

I am he, the nameless one, who does not know himself and whose name is concealed even from himself. I have no name, since I have not yet existed, but have only just become. To myself I am an Anabaptist and a stranger. I, who I am, am not it. But I, who will be I before me and after me, am it. In that I abased myself, I elevated myself as another. In that I accepted myself, I divided myself into two, and in that I united myself with myself, I became the smaller part of myself. I am this in my consciousness. However, I am thus in my consciousness as if I were also separated from it. I am / [Image 119] [226] / [118/120] not in my second and greater state, as if I were this second and greater one myself, but I am always in ordinary consciousness, yet so separate and distinct from it, as if I were in my second and greater state, but without the consciousness of really being it. I have even become smaller and poorer, but precisely because of my smallness I can be conscious of the nearness of the great.

***

I have been baptized with impure water for rebirth. A flame from the fire of Hell awaited me above the baptismal basin. I have bathed myself with impurity and I have cleansed myself with dirt. I received him, I accepted him, the divine brother, the son of the earth, the two-sexed and impure, and overnight he has become a man. His two incisors have broken through and light down covers his chin. I captured him, I overcame him, I embraced him. He demanded much from me and yet brought everything with him. For he is rich; the earth belongs to him. But his black horse has parted from him.

***

Truly, I have shot down a proud enemy, I have forced a greater and stronger one to be my friend. Nothing should separate me from him, the dark one. If I want to leave him, he follows me like my shadow. If I do not think of him, he is still uncannily near. He will turn into fear if I deny him. I must amply commemorate him, I must prepare a sacrificial meal for him. I fill a plate for him at my table. Much that I would have done earlier for men, I now must do for him. Hence they consider me selfish, for they do not know that I go with my friend, and that many days are consecrated to him. [227] But unrest has moved in, a quiet underground earthquake, a distant great roaring. Ways have been opened to the primordial and to the future. Miracles and terrible mysteries are close at hand. I feel the things that were and that will be. Behind the ordinary the eternal abyss yawns. The earth gives me back what it hid. / [120/122][Image 121] [228] [229] [230] / [Image 122] [231] [232] / [122/124][Image 123] [233] /

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Chapter 18: The Three Prophecies

Cap. xviii

[HI 124] [234] Wondrous things came nearer. I called my soul and asked her to dive down into the floods, whose distant roaring I could hear. This happened on 22 January of the year 1914, as recorded in my black book. And thus she plunged into the darkness like a shot, and from the depths she called out: "Will you accept what I bring?"

I: "'I will accept what you give. I do not have the right to judge or to reject."

S: "So listen. There is old armor and the rusty gear of our fathers down here, murderous leather trappings hanging from them, worm-eaten lance shafts, twisted spear heads, broken arrows, rotten shields, skulls, the bones of man and horse, old cannons, catapults, crumbling firebrands, smashed assault gear, stone spearheads, stone clubs, sharp bones, chipped arrowhead teeth -- everything the battles of yore have littered the earth with. Will you accept all this?"

I: "I accept it. You know better, my soul."

S: "I find painted stones, carved bones with magical signs, talismanic sayings on hanks of leather and small plates of lead, dirty pouches filled with teeth, human hair and fingernails, timbers lashed together, black orbs, moldy animal skins -- all the superstitions hatched by dark prehistory. Will you accept all this?"

I: "I accept it all, how should I dismiss anything?"

S: "But I find worse: fratricide, cowardly mortal blows, torture, child sacrifice, the annihilation of whole peoples, arson, betrayal, war, rebellion -- will you also accept this?"

I: ''Also this, if it must be. How can I judge?"

S: "I find epidemics, natural catastrophes, sunken ships, razed cities, frightful feral savagery, famines, human meanness, and fear, whole mountains of fear."

I: "So shall it be, since you give it."

S: "I find the treasures of all past cultures, magnificent images of Gods, spacious temples, paintings, papyrus rolls, sheets of parchment with the characters of bygone languages, books full of lost wisdom, hymns and chants of ancient priests, stories told down the ages through thousands of generations."

I: "That is an entire world -- whose extent I cannot grasp. How can I accept it?"

S: "But you wanted to accept everything? You do not know your limits. Can you not limit yourself?"

I: "I must limit myself. Who could ever grasp such wealth?"

S: "Be content and cultivate your garden with modesty." [235]

I: "I will. I see that it is not worth conquering a larger piece of the immeasurable, but a smaller one instead. A well-tended small garden is better than an ill-tended large garden. Both gardens are equally small when faced with the immeasurable, but unequally cared for."

S: "Take shears and prune your trees."

***

[2] From the flooding darkness the son of the earth had brought, my soul gave me ancient things that pointed to the future. She gave me three things: The misery of war, the darkness of magic, and the gift of religion.

If you are clever, you will understand that these three things belong together. These three mean the unleashing of chaos and its power, just as they also mean the binding of chaos. War is obvious and everybody sees it. Magic is dark and no one sees it. Religion is still to come, but it will become evident. Did you think that the horrors of such atrocious warfare would come over us? Did you think that magic existed? Did you think about a new religion? I sat up for long nights and looked ahead at what was to come and I shuddered. Do you believe me? I am not too concerned. What should I believe? What should I disbelieve? I saw and I shuddered.

But my spirit could not grasp the monstrous, and could not conceive the extent of what was to come. The force of my longing languished, and powerless sank the harvesting hands. I felt the burden of the most terrible work of the times ahead. I saw where and how, but no word can grasp it, no will can conquer it. I could not do otherwise, I let it sink again into the depths.

I cannot give it to you, and I can speak only of the way of what is to come. Little good will come to you from outside. What will come to you lies within yourself. But what lies there! I would like to avert my eyes, close my ears and deny all my senses; I would like to be someone among you, who knows nothing and who never saw anything. It is too much and too unexpected. But I saw it and my memory will not leave me alone. [236] Yet I curtail my longing, which would like to stretch out into the future, and I return to my small garden that presently blooms, and whose extent I can measure. It shall be well-tended.

The future should be left to those of the future. I return to the small and the real, for this is the great way; the way of what is to come. I return to my simple reality; to my undeniable and most minuscule being. And I take a knife and hold court over everything that has grown without measure and goal. Forests have grown around me, winding plants have climbed up me, and I am completely covered by endless proliferation. The depths are inexhaustible, they give everything. Everything is as good as nothing. Keep a little and you have something. To recognize and know your ambition and your greed, to gather / [124/126] [Image 125] [237] / your craving, to cultivate it, grasp it, make it serviceable, influence it, master it, order it, to give it interpretations and meanings, is extravagant.

It is lunacy; like everything that transcends its boundaries. How can you hold that which you are not? Would you really like to force everything which you are not under the yoke of your wretched knowledge and understanding? Remember that you can know yourself and with that you know enough. But you cannot know others and everything else. Beware of knowing what lies beyond yourself or else your presumed knowledge will suffocate the life of those who know themselves. A knower may know himself. That is his limit.

With a painful slice I cut off what I pretended to know about what lies beyond me. I excise myself from the cunning interpretive loops that I gave to what lies beyond me. And my knife cuts even deeper and separates me from the meanings that I conferred upon myself. I cut down to the marrow, until everything meaningful falls from me, until I am no longer as I might seem to myself until I know only that I am without knowing what I am.

I want to be poor and bare, and I want to stand naked before the inexorable. I want to be my body and its poverty. I want to be from the earth and live its law. I want to be my human animal and accept all its frights and desires. I want to go through the wailing and the blessedness of the one who stood alone with a poor unarmed body on the sunlit earth, a prey of his drives and of the lurking wild animals, who was terrified by ghosts and dreaming of distant Gods, who belonged to what was near and was enemy to the far-off, who struck fire from stones, and whose herds were stolen by unknowable powers that also destroyed the crops of his fields, and who neither knew nor recognized, but who lived by what lay at hand, and received by grace what lay far-off.

He was a child and unsure, yet full of certainty, weak and yet blessed with enormous strength. When his God did not help, he took another. And when this one did not help either, he castigated him. And behold: the Gods helped one more time. Thus I discard everything that was laden with meaning, everything divine and devilish with which chaos burdened me. Truly, it is not up to me to prove the Gods and the devils and the chaotic monsters, to feed them carefully, to warily drag them with me, to count and name them, and to protect them with belief against disbelief and doubt.

A free man knows only free Gods and devils that are self-contained and take effect on account of their own force. If they fail to have an effect, that is their own business, and I can remove this burden from myself. But if they are effective, they need neither my protection nor my care, nor my belief. Thus you may wait quietly to see whether they work. But if they do, be clever, for the tiger is stronger than you. You should be able to cast everything from you, otherwise you are a slave, even if you are the slave of a God. Life is free and chooses its way. It is limited enough, so do not pile up more limitation. Hence I cut away everything confining. I stood here, and there lay the riddlesome multifariousness of the world.

***

And a horror crept over me. Am I not the tightly bound? Is the world there not the unlimited? And I became aware of my weakness. What would poverty, nakedness and unpreparedness be without consciousness of weakness and without horror at powerlessness? Thus I stood and was terrified. And then my soul whispered to me:

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Chapter 19: The Gift of Magic

Cap. xix.

[HI 126] [238] "Do you not hear something?"

I: "I'm not aware of anything, what should I hear?"

S: ''A ringing."

I: "A ringing? What? I hear nothing."

S: "Listen harder."

I: "Perhaps something in the left ear. What could it mean?"

S: "Misfortune."

I: "I accept what you say. I want to have fortune and misfortune."

S: "Well, then, raise your hands and receive what comes to you."

I: "What is it? A rod? A black serpent? A black rod, formed like a serpent -- with two pearls as eyes -- a gold bangle around its neck. Is it not like a magical rod?"

S: "It is a magical rod."

I: "What should I do with magic? Is the magical rod a misfortune? Is magic a misfortune?"

S: "Yes, for those who possess it."

I: "That sounds like the sayings of old -- how strange you are, my soul! What should I do with magic?"

S: "Magic will do a lot for you."

I: I'm afraid that you're stirring up my desire and misunderstanding. You know that man never stops craving the black art and things that cost no effort."

S: "Magic is not easy, and it demands sacrifice."

I: "Does it demand the sacrifice of love? Of humanity? If it does, take the rod back."

S: "Don't be rash. Magic doesn't demand that sacrifice. It demands another sacrifice."

I: "What sacrifice is that?"

S: "The sacrifice that magic demands is solace."

I: "Solace? Do I understand correctly? Understanding you is unspeakably difficult. Tell me, what does this mean?"

S: "Solace is to be sacrificed."

I: "What do you mean? Should the solace that I give or the solace that I receive be sacrificed?"

S: "Both."

I: "I'm confused. This is too dark."

S: "You must sacrifice solace for the sake of the black rod, the solace you give and the solace you receive."

I: ''Are you saying that I shouldn't be allowed to receive the solace of those I love? And should give no solace to those I love? This means the loss of a piece of humanity, and what one calls severity toward oneself and others takes its place." [239]

S: "That is how it is."

I: "Does the rod demand this sacrifice?"

S: "It demands this sacrifice."

I: "Can I, am I allowed to make this sacrifice for the sake of the rod? Must I accept the rod?"

S: "Do you want to or not?"

I: "I can't say. What do I know about the black rod? Who gives it to me?"

S: "The darkness that lies before you. It is the next thing that comes to you. Will you accept it and offer it your sacrifice?"

I: It is hard to sacrifice to the dark, to the blind darkness -- and what a sacrifice!"

S: "Nature -- does nature offer solace? Does it accept solace?"

I: "You venture a heavy word. What solitude are you asking of me?"

S: "This is your misfortune, and -- the power of the black rod."

I: "How gloomily and full of foreboding you speak! Are you sheathing me in the armor / [126/128] [Image 127] [240] / of icy severity? Are you clasping my heart with a bronze carapace? I'm happy with the warmth of life. Should I miss it? For the sake of magic? What is magic?"

S: "You don't know magic. So don't judge. What are you bristling at?"

I: "Magic! What should I do with magic? I don't believe in it, I can't believe in it. My heart sinks -- and I'm supposed to sacrifice a greater part of my humanity to magic?

S: "I advise you, don't struggle against this, and above all don't act so enlightened, as if deep down you did not believe in magic."

I: "You're inexorable. But I can't believe in magic, or maybe I have a completely false idea of it."

S: "Yes, I gather that from what you're saying. Cast aside your blind judgment and critical gesture, otherwise you'll never understand. Do you still mean to waste years waiting?"

I: "Be patient, my science has not yet been overcome."

S: "High time that you overcame it!"

I: "You ask a great deal, almost too much. After all -- is science essential to life? Is science life? There are people who live without science. But to overcome science for the sake of magic? That's uncanny and menacing."

S: ''Are you afraid? Don't you want to risk life? Isn't it life that presents you with this problem?"

I: ''All this leaves me so dazed and confused. Won't you give me an enlightening word?"

S: "Oh, so it's solace you long for? Do you want the rod or don't you?"

I: "You tear my heart to pieces. I want to submit to life. But how difficult this is! I want the black rod because it is the first thing the darkness grants me. I don't know what this rod means, nor what it gives -- I only feel what it takes. I want to kneel down and receive this messenger of darkness. I have received the black rod, and now I hold it, the enigmatic one, in my hand; it is cold and heavy, like iron. The pearl eyes of the serpent look at me blindly and dazzlingly. What do you want, mysterious gift? All the darkness of all former worlds crowds together in you, you hard, black piece of steel! Are you time and fate? The essence of nature, hard and eternally inconsolable, yet the sum of all mysterious creative force? Primordial magic words seem to emanate from you, mysterious effects weave around you, and what powerful arts slumber in you? You pierce me with unbearable tension -- what grimaces will you make? What terrible mystery will you create? Will you bring bad weather, storms, cold, thunder and lightning, or will you make the fields fruitful and bless the bodies of pregnant women? What is the mark of your being? Or don't you need that, you son of the dark womb? Do you content yourself with the hazy darkness, whose concretion and crystal you are? Where in my soul do I shelter you? In my heart? Should my heart be your shrine, your holy of holies? So choose your place. I have accepted you. What crushing tension you bring with you! Isn't the bow of my nerves breaking? I've taken in the messenger of the night."

S: "The most powerful magic lives in it."

I: "I feel it and yet can't put into words the nightmarish power granted to it. I wanted to laugh, because so much alters in laughter, and resolves itself only there. But laughter dies in me. The magic of this rod is as solid as iron and as cold as death. Forgive me, my soul, I don't want to be impatient, but it seems to me that something has got to happen to break through this unbearable tension that came with the rod."

S: "Wait, keep your eyes and ears open."

I: "I'm shuddering, and I don't know why."

S: "Sometimes one must shudder before -- the greatest."

I: "I bow; my soul, before unknown forces -- I'd like to consecrate an altar to each unknown God. I must submit. The black iron in my heart gives me secret power. It's like defiance and like -- contempt for men." [241]

[2] Oh dark act, violation, murder! Abyss, give birth to the unredeemed. Who is our redeemer? Who our leader? Where are the ways through black wastes? God, do not abandon us! What are you summoning, God? Raise your hand up to the darkness above you, pray, despair, wring your hands, kneel, press your forehead into the dust, cry out, but do not name Him, do not look at Him. Leave Him without name and form. What should form the formless? Name the nameless? Step onto the great way and grasp what is nearest. Do not look out, do not want, but lift up your hands. The gifts of darkness are full of riddles. The way is open to whomever can continue in spite of riddles. Submit to the riddles and the thoroughly incomprehensible. There are dizzying / [128/130/ [Image 129] / bridges over the eternally deep abyss. But follow the riddles.

Endure them, the terrible ones. It is still dark, and the terrible goes on growing. Lost and swallowed by the streams of procreating life, we approach the overpowering, inhuman forces that are busily creating what is to come. How much future the depths carry! Are not the threads spun down there over millennia? [242] Protect the riddles, bear them in your heart, warm them, be pregnant with them. Thus you carry the future.

The tension of the future is unbearable in us. It must break through narrow cracks, it must force new ways. You want to cast off the burden, you want to escape the inescapable. Running away is deception and detour. Shut your eyes so that you do not see the manifold, the outwardly plural, the tearing away and the tempting. There is only one way and that is your way; there is only one salvation and that is your salvation. Why are you looking around for help? Do you believe that help will come from outside? What is to come will be created in you and from you. Hence look into yourself. Do not compare, do not measure. No other way is like yours. All other ways deceive and tempt you. You must fulfill the way that is in you.

Oh, that all men and all their ways become strange to you! Thus might you find them again within yourself and recognize their ways. But what weakness! What doubt! What fear! You will not bear going your way. You always want to have at least one foot on paths not your own to avoid the great solitude! So that maternal comfort is always with you! So that someone acknowledges you, recognizes you, bestows trust in you, comforts you, encourages you. So that someone pulls you over onto their path, where you stray from yourself, and where it is easier for you to set yourself aside. As if you were not yourself! Who should accomplish your deeds? Who should carry your virtues and your vices? You do not come to an end with your life, and the dead will besiege you terribly to live your unlived life. Everything must be fulfilled. Time is of the essence, so why do you want to pile up the lived and let the unlived rot?

***

Great is the power of the way. [243] In it Heaven and Hell grow together, and in it the power of the Below and the power of the Above unite. The nature of the way is magical, as are supplication and invocation; [244] malediction and deed are magical if they occur on the great way. Magic is the working of men on men, but your magic action does not affect your neighbor; it affects you first, and only if you withstand it does an invisible effect pass from you to your neighbor. There is more of it in the air than I ever thought. However, it cannot be grasped. Listen:

The Above is powerful,
The Below is powerful,
Twofold power is in the One.
North, come hither,
West, snuggle up,
East, flow upward,
South, spill over.

The winds in-between bind the
cross. The poles are united by the
intermediate poles in-between.
Steps lead from above to below.
Boiling water bubbles in
cauldrons. Red-hot ash envelops
the round floor. [245]
Night sinks blue and deep from
above, earth rises black from
below. / [Image 131] / [130/132]

A solitary is cooking up healing potions.
He makes offering to the four winds.
He greets the stars and touches the earth.
He holds something luminous in his hand.

Flowers sprout around him and the bliss of a new spring kisses all his limbs.

Birds fly around and the shy animals of the forest gaze at him.

He is far from men and yet the threads of their fate pass through his hands.

May your intercession be meant for him, so that his medicine grows ripe and strong and brings healing to the deepest wounds.

For your sake he is solitary and waits alone between Heaven and earth, for the earth to rise up to him and for Heaven to come down to him.

All peoples are still far off and stand behind the wall of darkness.

But I hear his words, which reach me from afar.

He has chosen a poor scribe, someone hard of hearing, who also stutters when he writes.

I do not recognize him, the solitary. What is he saying? He says: "I suffer fear and distress for the sake of man."

I dug up old runes and magical sayings for words never reach men. Words have become shadows.

Therefore I took old magical apparatuses and prepared hot potions and mixed in secrets and ancient powers, things that even the cleverest would not guess at.

I stewed the roots of all human thoughts and deeds.

I watched over the cauldron through many starry nights. The brew ferments forever. I need your intercession, your kneeling, your desperation and your patience. I need your ultimate and highest longing, your purest willing, your most humble subjugation.

Solitary, who are you waiting for? Whose help do you require? There is none who can rush to your aid, since all look to you and wait for your healing art.

We are all utterly incapable and need help more than you. Grant us help so that we can help you in return.

The solitary speaks: "will no one stand by me in this need? Should I leave my work to help you so that you can help me again? But how should I help you, if my brew has not grown ripe and strong? It was supposed to help you. What do you hope from me?"

Come to us! Why are you standing there cooking up marvels? What can your healing and magical potion do for us? Do you believe in healing potions? Look at life, behold how much it needs you! / [132/134] [Image 133] /

The solitary speaks: "Fools, can you not keep watch with me for an hour, [246] until the difficult and long-lasting achieves completion and the juice has ripened?

Just a little longer and fermentation will be complete. Why can't you wait? Why should your impatience destroy the highest opus?"

What highest opus? We are not alive; cold and numbness have seized us. Your opus, solitary one, will not be finished for aeons, even if it advances day after day.

The work of salvation is endless. Why do you want to wait for the end of this work? Even if your waiting turned you into stone for endless ages, you could not endure till the end. And if your salvation came to its end, you would have to be saved from your salvation again.

The solitary speaks: "What smooth-tongued lamentation reaches my ears! What whining! What foolish doubters you are! Unruly children! Persevere, it will be accomplished after this night!"

We will not wait a single night longer; we have persevered long enough. Are you a God, that a thousand nights are as one night to you? For us, this one night would be like a thousand nights. Abandon the work of salvation, and we will be saved. What stretch of ages are you saving us for?

The solitary speaks: "You embarrassing human swarm, you foolish bastard of God and cattle, I'm still lacking a piece of your precious flesh for my mixture. Am I truly your most valuable piece of meat? Is it worth my while to come to the boil for you? One let himself be nailed to the cross for you. One is truly enough. He blocks my way. Therefore neither will I walk on his ways, nor make for you any healing brew or immortal [247] blood potion, but rather I will abandon the potion and cauldron and occult work for your sake, since you can neither wait for nor endure the fulfillment. I throw down your intercession, your genuflection, your invocations. You can save yourselves from both your lack of salvation and your salvation! Your worth rose quite high enough because one died for you. Now prove your worth by each living for himself. My God, how difficult it is to leave a work unfinished for the sake of men! But for the sake of men, I abstain from being a savior. Lo! Now my potion has completed its fermentation. I did not mix a piece of myself into the drink, but I did slice in a piece of humanity, and behold, it clarified the murky foaming potion.

How sweet, how bitter
it tastes!
The Below is weak,
The Above is weak,

The form of the One
becomes double.
North, rise and be gone,
West, retire to your place,

East, spread yourself,
South, die down.
The winds in-between
loosen the crucified. / [134/135]]
[Image 135] [248] / [135/136]

The far poles are separated
by the poles in-between.
The levels are broad ways,
patient streets.
The bubbling pot grows cold.

The ash turns gray
beneath its ground.
Night covers the sky and far
below lies the black earth.

Day approaches, and above the clouds a distant sun.
No solitary cooks healing potions.
The four winds blow and laugh at their bounty.
And he mocks the four winds.
He has seen the stars and touched the earth.
Therefore his hand clasps something luminous
and his shadow has grown to Heaven. [Image 136]

The inexplicable occurs. You would very much like to forsake yourself and defect to each and every possibility: You would very much like to risk every crime in order to steal for yourself the mystery of the changeful. But the road is without end.

[admin]

Chapter 20: The Way of the Cross

Cap. xx. [249]

[HI 136] [250] I saw black serpent, [251] as it wound itself upward around the wood of the cross. It crept into the body of the crucified and emerged again transformed from his mouth. It had become white. It wound itself around the head of the dead one like a diadem, and a light gleamed above his head, and the sun rose shining in the east. I stood and watched and was confused and a great weight burdened my soul. But the white bird that sat on my shoulder spoke to me: [252] "Let it rain, let the wind blow, let the waters flow and the fire burn. Let each thing have its development, let becoming have its day."

***

[2] 2. Truly; the way leads through the crucified, that means through him to whom it was no small thing to live his own life, and who was therefore raised to magnificence. He did not simply teach what was knowable and worth knowing, he lived it. It is unclear how great one's humility must be to take it upon oneself to live one's own life. The disgust of whoever wants to enter into his own life can hardly be measured. Aversion will sicken him. He makes himself vomit. His bowels pain him and his brain sinks into lassitude. He would rather devise any trick to help him escape, since nothing matches the torment of one's own way. It seems impossibly difficult, so difficult that nearly anything seems preferable to this torment. Not a few choose even to love people for fear of themselves. I believe, too, that some commit a crime to pick a quarrel with themselves. Therefore I cling to everything that obstructs my way to myself.

3. [253] He who goes to himself, climbs down. Pathetic and ridiculous forms appeared to the greatest prophet who came before this time, and these were the forms of his own essence. He did not accept them, but exorcized them before others. Ultimately, however, he was forced to celebrate a Last Supper with his own poverty and to accept these forms of his own essence out of compassion, which is precisely that acceptance of the lowest in us. [254] But this enraged the mighty lion, who chased down the lost and restored it to the darkness of the depths. [255] And like all those with power, the one with the great name wanted to erupt from the womb of the mountain like the sun. [256] But what happened to him? His way led him before the crucified and he began to rage. He raged against the man of mockery and pain because the power of his own essence forced him to follow precisely this way as Christ had done before us. Yet he loudly proclaimed his power and greatness. No one speaks louder of his power and greatness than he from whom the earth disappears under his feet. Ultimately the lowest in him got to him, his incapacity, and this crucified his spirit, so that, as he himself had predicted, his soul died before his body. [257]

4. No one rises above himself who has not turned his most dangerous weapon against himself. One who wants to rise above himself shall climb down and hoist himself onto himself and lug himself to the place of sacrifice. But what must happen to a man until he realizes that outer visible success, that he can grasp with his hands, / [136/137] leads him astray. What suffering must be brought upon humanity, until man gives up satisfying his longing for power over his fellow man and forever wanting others to be the same. How much blood must go on flowing until man opens his eyes and sees the way to his own path and himself as the enemy; and becomes aware of his real success. You ought to be able to live with yourself but not at your neighbor's expense. The herd animal is not his brother's parasite and pest. Man, you have even forgotten that you too are an animal. You actually still seem to believe that life is better elsewhere. Woe unto you if your neighbor also thinks so. But you may be sure that he does. Someone must begin to stop being childish.

5. Your craving satisfies itself in you. You can offer no more precious a sacrificial meal to your God than yourself. May your greed consume you, for this wearies and calms it, and you will sleep well and consider the sun of each day as a gift. If you devour other things and other people, your greed remains eternally dissatisfied, for it craves more, the most costly -- it craves you. And thus you compel your desire to take your own way. You may ask others provided that you need help and advice. But you should make demands on no one, neither desiring nor expecting anything from anyone except from yourself. For your craving satisfies itself only within you. You are afraid of burning in your own fire. May nothing prevent you from doing so, neither anyone else's sympathy nor your more dangerous sympathy with yourself. Since you should live and die with yourself.

6. When the flame of your greed consumes you, and nothing remains of you but ash, so nothing of you was steadfast. Yet the flame in which you consumed yourself has illuminated many. But if you flee from your fire full of fear, you scorch your fellow men, and the burning torment of your greed cannot die out, so long as you do not desire yourself.

7. The mouth utters the word, the sign, and the symbol. If the word is a sign, it means nothing. But if the word is a symbol, it means everything. [258] When the way enters death and we are surrounded by rot and horror, the way rises in the darkness and leaves the mouth as the saving symbol, the word. It leads the sun on high, for in the symbol there is the release of the bound human force struggling with darkness. Our freedom does not lie outside us, but within us. One can be bound outside, and yet one will still feel free since one has burst inner bonds. One can certainly gain outer freedom through powerful actions, but one creates inner freedom only through the symbol.

8. The symbol is the word that goes out of the mouth, that one does not simply speak, but that rises out of the depths of the self as a word of power and great need and places itself unexpectedly on the tongue. It is an astonishing and perhaps seemingly irrational word, but one recognizes it as a symbol since it is alien to the conscious mind. If one accepts the symbol, it is as if a door opens leading into a new room whose existence one previously did not know. But if one does not accept the symbol, it is as if one carelessly went past this door; and since this was the only door leading to the inner chambers, one must pass outside into the streets again, exposed to everything external. But the soul suffers great need, since outer freedom is of no use to it. Salvation is a long road that leads through many gates. These gates are symbols. Each new gate is at first invisible; indeed, it seems at first that / [137/138] it must be created, for it exists only if one has dug up the spring's root, the symbol.

To find the mandrake, one needs the black dog, [259] since good and bad must always be united first if the symbol is to be created. The symbol can be neither thought up nor found: it becomes. Its becoming is like the becoming of human life in the womb. Pregnancy comes about through voluntary copulation. It goes on through willing attention. But if the depths have conceived, then the symbol grows out of itself and is born from the mind, as befits a God. But in the same way a mother would like to throw herself on the child like a monster and devour it again.

In the morning, when the new sun rises, the word steps out of my mouth, but is murdered lovelessly; since I did not know that it was the savior. The newborn child grows quickly, if I accept it. And immediately it becomes my charioteer. The word is the guide, the middle way which easily oscillates like the needle on the scales. The word is the God that rises out of the waters each morning and proclaims the guiding law to the people. Outer laws and outer wisdom are eternally insufficient, since there is only one law and one wisdom, namely my daily law, my daily wisdom. The God renews himself each night.

The God appears in multiple guises; for when he emerges, he has assumed some of the character of the night and the nightly waters in which he slumbered, and in which he struggled for renewal in the last hour of the night. Consequently his appearance is twofold and ambiguous; indeed, it even tears at the heart and the mind. On emerging, the God calls me toward the right and the left, his voice calling out to me from both sides. Yet the God wants neither the one nor the other. He wants the middle way. But the middle is the beginning of the long road.

Man, however, can never see this beginning; he always sees only one and not the other, or the other and not the one, but never that which the one as well as the other encloses in itself. The point of origin is where the mind and the will stand still; it is a state of suspension that evokes my outrage, my defiance and eventually my greatest fear. For I can see nothing anymore and can no longer want anything. Or at least that is how it seems to me. The way is a highly peculiar standstill of everything that was previously movement, it is a blind waiting, a doubtful listening and groping. One is convinced that one will burst. But the resolution is born from precisely this tension, and it almost always appears where one did not expect it.

But what is the resolution? It is always something ancient and precisely because of this something new, for when something long since passed away comes back again in a changed world, it is new. To give birth to the ancient in a new time is creation. This is the creation of the new, and that redeems me. Salvation is the resolution of the task. The task is to give birth to the old in a new time. The soul of humanity is like the great wheel of the zodiac that rolls along the way. Everything that comes up in a constant movement from below to the heights was already there. There is no part of the wheel that does not come around again. Hence everything that has been streams upward there, and what has been will be again. For these are all things which are the inborn properties of human nature. It belongs to the essence of forward movement that what was returns. [260] Only the ignorant can marvel at this. Yet the meaning does not lie in the eternal recurrence of the same, [261] but in the manner of its recurring creation at any given time.

The meaning lies in the manner and the direction of the recurring creation. But how do I create my charioteer? Or do I want to be my own charioteer? I can guide myself only with will and intention. But will and intention are simply part of myself. Consequently they are insufficient to express my wholeness. Intention is what I can foresee, and willing is to want a foreseen goal. But where do I find the goal? I take it from what is presently known to me. Thus I set the present in place of the future. In this / [138/139] manner, though I cannot reach the future, I artificially produce a constant present. Everything that would like to break into this present strikes me as a disturbance, and I seek to drive it away so that my intention survives. Thus I close off the progress of life. But how can I be my own charioteer without will and intention? Therefore a wise man does not want to be a charioteer, for he knows that will and intention certainly attain goals but disturb the becoming of the future.

Futurity grows out of me; I do not create it, and yet I do, though not deliberately and willfully, but rather against will and intention. If I want to create the future, then I work against my future. And if I do not want to create it, once again I do not take sufficient part in the creation of the future, and everything happens then according to unavoidable laws to which I fall victim. The ancients devised magic to compel fate. They needed it to determine outer fate. We need it to determine inner fate and to find the way that we are unable to conceive. For a long time I considered what type of magic this would have to be. And in the end I found nothing. Whoever cannot find it within himself should become an apprentice, and so I took myself off to a far country where a great magician lived, of whose reputation I had heard.

[admin]

PART 1 OF 5

Chapter 21: The Magician [262]

Cap. xxi.

[HI: 139] {I} [1] [263] After a long search I found the small house in the country fronted by a large bed of tulips. This is where [Philemon], the magician, lives with his wife, [Baucis]. [Philemon] is one of those magicians who has not yet managed to banish old age, but who lives it with dignity, and his wife can only do the same. [264] Their interests seem to have become narrow, even childish. They water their bed of tulips and tell each other about the flowers that have newly appeared. And their days fade into a pale wavering chiaracuso, lit up by the past, only slightly frightened of the darkness of what is to come.

Why is a magician? [265] Does he conjure up immortality for himself, a life beyond? He was probably only a magician by profession, and he now appears to be a pensioned magician who has retired from service. His desirousness and creative drive have expired and he now enjoys his well-earned rest out of sheer incapacity, like every old man who can do nothing else than plant tulips and water his little garden. The magical rod lies in a cupboard together with the sixth and seventh books of Moses [266] and the wisdom of [Hermes Trismegitsus]. [267] is old and has become somewhat feeble-minded. He still murmurs a few magical spells for the well-being of bewitched cattle in return for some petty cash or a gift for the kitchen. But it is uncertain if these spells are still correct and whether he understands their meaning. It is also clear that it hardly matters what he murmurs, / [139/140] as the cattle might also get well on their own. There goes old in the garden, bent, with a watering can in his shaking hand. Baucis stands at the kitchen window and looks at him calmly and impassively. She has already seen this image a thousand times -- somewhat more infirm every time, feebler, seeing it a little less well every time since her eyesight gradually has become weaker. [268]

I stand at the garden gate. They have not noticed the stranger. ", old magician, how are you?" I call out to him. He does not hear me, seeming to be stone-deaf. I follow him and take his arm. He turns and greets me awkwardly and trembling. He has a white beard and thin white hair and a wrinkled face and there appears to be something about this face. His eyes are gray and old and something in them is strange, one would like to say alive. "I am well, stranger," he says, "but what are you doing here?"

I: "People tell me that you understand the black art. I am interested in that. Will you tell me about it?"

: "What should I tell you about? There is nothing to tell."

I: "Don't be ill-natured, old man, I want to learn."

: "You are certainly more learned than I. What could I teach you?"

I: "Do not be mean. I certainly don't intend to become your competitor. I'm just curious to know what you are up to and what magic you are performing."

: "What do you want? In the past I have helped people here and there who have been sick and disadvantaged."

I: "What exactly did you do?"

: "Well, I did it quite simply with sympathy."

I: " Old man, that word sounds comical and ambiguous."

: "How so?"

I: "It could mean that you helped people either by expressing compassion or by superstitious, sympathetic means."

: "Well, surely it would have been both."

I: "And that's all there was to your magic?"

: "There was more."

I: "What was it, tell me."

: "That is none of your business. You are impertinent and meddlesome."

I: "Please, don't take my curiosity badly. Recently I heard something about magic that awakened my interest in this bygone practice. And then I came to you because I heard that you understand the black art. If magic were still taught today at university, I would have studied it there. But the last college of magic was closed long ago. Today no professor knows anything anymore about magic. So do not be sensitive and miserly but tell me a bit about your art. Surely, you don't want to take your secrets with you to the grave, do you?"

: "Well, all you will do is laugh anyway. So why should I tell you anything? It would be better if everything were buried with me. It can always be rediscovered later. It will never be lost to humanity, since magic is reborn with each and every one of us."

I: "What do you mean? Do you believe that magic is really inborn in man?"

: "If I could, I would say, yes, of course, it is. But you will find this laughable."

I: "No, this time I will not laugh, because I have often wondered about the fact that all peoples in all times and in all places have the same magical customs. As you can see, I have already thought along similar lines."

: "What do you make of magic?"

I: "To put it plainly, nothing, or very little. It appears to me that magic is one of the vain tools of men inferior to nature. I can detect no other tangible meaning in magic."

: Your professors probably also know just as much."

I: "Yes, but what do you know about it?"

: ''I'd prefer not to say."

I: "Don't be so secretive, old man, otherwise I must assume that you know no more than I do."

: "Take it as you please."

I: "Your answer suggests that you most definitely understand more about it than others."

: "Comical fellow, how stubborn you are! But what I like about you is that your reason does not deter you."

I: "That's actually the case. Whenever I want to learn and understand something, I leave my so-called reason at home and give whatever it is that I am trying to understand the benefit of the doubt. I have learned this gradually, because nowadays the world of science is full of scary examples of the opposite."

: "In which case you could do very well for yourself." / [140/141]

I: "I hope so. Now, let us not stray from magic."

: "Why are you so determined about learning more about magic, if you claim that you have left your reason at home? Or would you not consider consistency part of reason?"

I: "I do -- I see, or rather, it seems as if you are quite an adept sophist, who skillfully leads me around the house and back to the door."

: "It seems that way to you because you judge everything from the standpoint of your intellect. If you forsake reason for a while, you will also give up consistency."

I: "That's a difficult test. But if I want to be adept at some point, I suppose I ought to submit to your request. Alright, I'm listening."

: "What do you want to hear?"

I: "You're not going to draw me out. I'm simply waiting for whatever you are going to say"

: "And what if I say nothing?"

I: "Well, then I'll withdraw somewhat embarrassed and think that is at the very least a shrewd fox, who definitely would have something to teach me."

: "With this, my boy, you have learned something about magic."

I: ''I'll have to chew on this. I must admit that this is somewhat surprising. I had imagined magic as being somewhat different."

: "Well, this shows you how little you understand about magic and how incorrect your notion of it is."

I: "If this should be the case, or that's how it is, then I must confess that I approached the problem completely incorrectly. I gather from what you are saying that these matters do not follow ordinary understanding."

: "Nor does magic."

I: "But you have not deterred me at all; on the contrary, I'm burning to hear even more. What I know up to now is essentially negative."

: "With this you have recognized a second main point. Above all, you must know that magic is the negative of what one can know."

I: "That, too, my dear , is a piece of knowledge that is hard to digest and causes me no small pain. The negative of what one can know? I suppose you mean that it cannot be known, don't you? This exhausts my understanding."

: "That is the third point that you must note as essential: namely, that there is nothing for you to understand."

I: "Well, I must confess that that is new and strange. So nothing at all about magic can be understood?"

: "Exactly. Magic happens to be precisely everything that eludes comprehension."

I: "But then how the devil is one to teach and learn magic?"

: "Magic is neither to be taught nor learned. It's foolish that you want to learn magic."

I: "But then magic is nothing but deception."

: "Watch out -- you have started reasoning again."

I: "It's difficult to exist without reason."

: "And that is exactly how difficult magic is."

I: "Well, in that case it's hard work. I conclude that it is an inescapable condition for the adept that he completely unlearns his reason."

: ''I'm afraid that is what it amounts to."

I: "Ye Gods, this is serious."

: "Not as serious as you think. Reason declines with old age, since it is an essential counterpart of the drives, which are much more intense in youth than in old age. Have you ever seen young magicians?"

I: "No, the magician is proverbially old."

: "You see, I'm right."

I: "But then the prospects of the adept are bad. He must wait until old age to experience the mysteries of magic."

: "If he gives up his reason before then, he can already experience something useful sooner."

I: "That seems to me to be a dangerous experiment. One cannot give up reason without further ado."

: "Nor can one / [141/142] simply become a magician."

I: "You lay damnable snares."

: "What do you want? Such is magic."

I: "Old devil, you make me envious of unreasoning old age."

: "Well, well, a youth who wants to be an old man! And why? He wants to learn magic and yet dares not to for the sake of his youth."

I: "You spread a terrible net, old trapper."

: "Perhaps you should still wait a few years with magic until your hair has gone gray and your reason has slackened somewhat."

I: "I don't want to listen to your scorn. Stupidly enough, I got caught up in your yarn. I can't make sense of you."

: "But stupidity would perhaps be progress on the way to magic."

I: "Incidentally, what on earth do you intend to achieve with your magic?"

: "I am alive, as you see."

I: "Other old men are, too."

: "Yes, but have you seen how?"

I: "Well, admittedly it was not a pleasant sight. Incidentally, time has left its mark on you, too."

: "I know."

I: "So, what gives you the advantage?"

: "It doesn't exactly meet the eye."

I: "What kind of advantage doesn't meet the eye?"

"I call that magic."

I: "You're moving in a vicious circle. May the devil get the better of you."

: "Well, that's another advantage of magic: not even the devil gets the better of me. You're beginning to understand magic, so I must assume that you have a good aptitude for it."

I: "Thank you, , that is enough; I feel dizzy. Goodbye!"

I leave the small garden and walk down the street. People are standing around in groups and glancing at me furtively. I hear them whispering behind my back: "Look, there he goes, old 's student. He spoke a long time with the old man. He has learned something. He knows the mysteries. If only I could do what he is able to do now." "Be quiet, you damned fools," I want to call out to them, but I cannot, since I do not know whether I have actually learned anything. And because I remain silent, they are even more convinced that I have received the black art from ."

***

[269] [2] [HI 142] It is an error to believe that there are magical practices that one can learn. One cannot understand magic. One can only understand what accords with reason. Magic accords with unreason, which one cannot understand. The world accords not only with reason but also with unreason. But just as one employs reason to make sense of the world, in that what is reasonable about it approaches reason, a lack of understanding also accords with unreason. / [142/143]

This meeting is magical and eludes comprehension. Magical understanding is what one calls noncomprehension. Everything that works magically is incomprehensible, and the incomprehensible often works magically. One calls incomprehensible workings magical. The magical always surrounds me, always involves me. It opens spaces that have no doors and leads out into the open where there is no exit. The magical is good and evil and neither good nor evil. Magic is dangerous since what accords with unreason confuses, allures and provokes; and I am always its first victim.

Where reason abides, one needs no magic. Hence our time no longer needs magic. Only those without reason needed it to replace their lack of reason. But it is thoroughly unreasonable to bring together what suits reason with magic since they have nothing to do with one another. Both become spoiled through being brought together. Therefore all those lacking reason quite rightly fall into superfluity and disregard. A rational man of this time will therefore never use magic. [270]

But it is another thing for whoever has opened the chaos in himself. We need magic to be able to receive or invoke the messenger and the communication of the incomprehensible. We recognized that the world comprises reason and unreason; and we also understood that our way needs not only reason but also unreason. This distinction is arbitrary and depends upon the level of comprehension. But one can be certain that the greater part of the world eludes our understanding. We must value the incomprehensible and unreasonable equally, although they are not necessarily equal in themselves; a part of the incomprehensible, however, is only presently incomprehensible and might already concur with reason tomorrow. But as long as one does not understand it, it remains unreasonable. Insofar as the incomprehensible accords with reason, one may try to think it with success; but insofar as it is unreasonable, / [143/144] one needs magical practices to open it up.

The practice of magic consists in making what is not understood understandable in an incomprehensible manner. The magical way is not arbitrary, since that would be understandable, but it arises from incomprehensible grounds. Besides, to speak of grounds is incorrect, since grounds concur with reason. Nor can one speak of the groundless, since hardly anything further can be said about this. The magical way arises by itself. If one opens up chaos, magic also arises.

One can teach the way that leads to chaos, but one cannot teach magic. One can only remain silent about this, which seems to be the best apprenticeship. This view is confusing, but this is what magic is like. Where reason establishes order and clarity, magic causes disarray and a lack of clarity. [271]One indeed needs reason for the magical translation of the not-understood into the understandable, since only by means of reason can the understandable be created. No one can say how to use reason, but it does arise if one tries to express only what an opening of chaos means. [272]

Magic is a way of living. If one has done one's best to steer the chariot, and one then notices that a greater other is actually steering it, then magical operation takes place. One cannot say what the effect of magic will be, since no one can know it in advance because the magical is the lawless, which occurs without rules and by chance, so to speak. But the condition is that one totally accepts it and does not reject it, in order to transfer everything to the growth of the tree. Stupidity too is part of this, which everyone has a great deal of, and also tastelessness, which is possibly the greatest nuisance.

Thus a certain solitude and isolation are inescapable conditions of life for the well-being of oneself and of the other, otherwise one cannot / [144/145] sufficiently be oneself. A certain slowness of life, which is like a standstill, will be unavoidable. The uncertainty of such a life will most probably be its greatest burden, but still I must unite the two conflicting powers of my soul and keep them together in a true marriage until the end of my life, since the magician is called and his wife . I hold together what Christ has kept apart in himself and through his example in others, since the more the one half of my being strives toward the good, the more the other half journeys to Hell.

When the month of the Twins had ended, the men said to their shadows: "You are I," since they had previously had their spirit around them as a second person. Thus the two became one, and through this collision the formidable broke out, precisely that spring of consciousness that one calls culture and which lasted until the time of Christ. [273] But the fish indicated the moment when what was united split, according to the eternal law of contrasts, into an underworld and upperworld. If the power of growth begins to cease, then the united falls into its opposites. Christ sent what is beneath to Hell, since it strives toward the good. That had to be. But the separated cannot remain separated forever. It will be united again and the month of the fish will soon be over. [274] We suspect and understand that growth needs both, and hence we keep good and evil close together. Because we know that too far into the good means the same as too far into evil, we keep them both together. [275]

But we thus lose direction and things no longer flow from the mountain to the valley, but grow quietly from the valley to the mountain. That which we can no longer prevent or hide is our fruit. The flowing stream becomes a lake and an ocean / [145/146] that has no outlet, unless its water rises to the sky as steam and falls from the clouds as rain. While the sea is a death, it is also the place of rising. Such is , who tends his garden. Our hands have been tied, and each must sit quietly in his place. He rises invisibly and falls as rain on distant lands. [276] The water on the ground is no cloud, which should rain. Only pregnant women can give birth, not those who have yet to conceive. [277]

***

[HI 146] But what mystery are you intimating to me with your name, Oh ? Truly you are the lover who once took in the Gods as they wandered the earth when everyone else refused them lodging. You are the one who unsuspectingly gave hospitality to the Gods; they thanked you by transforming your house into a golden temple, while the flood swallowed everyone else. You remained alive when chaos erupted. You it was who served in the sanctuary when the peoples called out in vain to the Gods. Truly, it is the lover who survives. Why did we not see that? And just when did the Gods manifest? Precisely when wished to serve the esteemed guests her only goose, that blessed stupidity: the animal fled to the Gods who then revealed themselves to their poor hosts, who had given their last. Thus I saw that the lover survives, and that he is the one who unwittingly grants hospitality to the Gods. [278]

Truly, Oh , I did not see that your hut is a temple, and that you, , and , serve in the sanctuary / [146/147] This magical power allows itself to be neither taught nor learned. Either one has it or does not have it. Now I know your final mystery: you are a lover. You have succeeded in uniting what has been sundered, that is, binding together the Above and Below. Have we not known this for a long time? Yes, we knew it, no, we did not know it. It has always been this way, and yet it has never been thus. Why did I have to wander such long roads before I came to , if he was going to teach me what has been common knowledge for ages? Alas, we have known everything since time immemorial and yet we will never know it until it is has been accomplished. Who exhausts the mystery of love?

[HI 147] Under which mask, Oh , are you hiding? You did not strike me as a lover. But my eyes were opened, and I saw that you are a lover of your soul, who anxiously and jealously guards its treasure. There are those who love men, and those who love the souls of men, and those who love their own soul. Such a one is , the host of the Gods.

You lie in the sun, Oh , like a serpent that coils around itself. Your wisdom is the wisdom of serpents, cold, with a grain of poison, yet healing in small doses. Your magic paralyzes and therefore makes strong people, who tear themselves away from themselves. But do they love you, are they thankful, lover of your own soul? Or do they curse you for your magical serpent poison? They keep their distance, shaking their heads and whispering together.

Are you still a man, , or / [147/148] is one not a man until one is a lover of one's own soul? You are hospitable, , you took the dirty wanderers unsuspectingly into your hut. Your house then became a golden temple, and did I really leave your table unsatisfied? What did you give me? Did you invite me for a meal? You shimmered multicolored and inextricable; nowhere did you give yourself to me as prey. You escaped my grasp. I found you nowhere. Are you still a man? Your kind is far more serpentlike.

I sought to grab hold of you and tear it out of you, since the Christians have learned to devour their God. And how long will it take for what happens to the God also to happen to man? I look into the vast land and hear nothing but wailing and see nothing but men consuming each other.

Oh , you are no Christian. You did not let yourself be engorged and did not engorge me. Because of this you have neither lecture halls nor columned halls teeming with students who stand around and speak of the master and soak up his words like the elixir of life. You are no Christian and no pagan, but a hospitable inhospitable one, a host of the Gods, a survivor, an eternal one, the father of all eternal wisdom.

But did I really leave you unsatisfied? No, I left you because I was really satisfied. Yet what did I eat? Your words gave me nothing. Your words left me to myself and my doubt. And so I ate myself. And because of this, Oh , you are no Christian, since you nourish yourself from yourself and force men to do the same. This displeases them most, since nothing disgusts the human animal more than itself. Because of this they would rather eat all crawling, hopping, swimming and flying creatures, yes, even their own species, before they nibble at themselves. But this nourishment is effective and one is soon satiated from it. Because of this, Oh , we rise satiated from your table.

Your way, Oh , is instructive. You leave me in a salutary darkness, where there is nothing for me to either see or look for. You are no light that shines in the darkness, [279] no savior who establishes an eternal truth and thus extinguishes the / [148/149] nocturnal light of human understanding. You leave room for the stupidity and jokes of others. You do not want, Oh blessed one, anything from the other, but instead you tend the flowers in your own garden. He who needs you asks you, and, Oh clever , I suppose that you also ask those from whom you need something and that you pay for what you receive. Christ has made men desirous forever since they expect gifts from their saviors without any service in return. Giving is as childish as power. He who gives presumes himself powerful. The virtue of giving is the sky-blue mantle of the tyrant. You are wise, Oh , you do not give. You want your garden to bloom, and for everything to grow from within itself.

I praise, Oh , your lack of acting like a savior; you are no shepherd who runs after stray sheep, since you believe in the dignity of man, who is not necessarily a sheep. But if he happens to be a sheep, you would leave him the rights and dignity of sheep, since why should sheep be made into men? There are still more than enough men.

You know, Oh , the wisdom of things to come; therefore you are old, oh so very ancient, and just as you tower above me in years, so you tower above the present in futurity, and the length of your past is immeasurable. You are legendary and unreachable. You were and will be returning periodically. Your wisdom is invisible, your truth is unknowable, entirely untrue in any given age, and yet true in all eternity, but you pour out living water, from which the flowers of your garden bloom, a starry water, a dew of the night.

What do you need, Oh ? You need men for the sake of small things, since everything greater and the greatest thing is in you. Christ spoiled men, since he taught them that they can be saved only by one, namely Him, the Son of God, and ever since men have been demanding the greater things from others, especially their salvation; and if a sheep gets lost / [149/150] somewhere, it accuses the shepherd. Oh , you are a man, and you prove that men are not sheep, since you look after the greatest in yourself, and hence fructifying water flows into your garden from inexhaustible jugs.

***

[HI 150] Are you lonely, Oh , I see no entourage and no companions around you; is only your other half. You live with flowers, trees, and birds, but not with men. Should you not live with men? Are you still a man? Do you want nothing from men? Do you not see how they stand together and concoct rumors and childish fairy tales about you? Do you not want to go to them and say that you are a man and a mortal as they are, and that you want to love them? Oh , you laugh? I understand you. Just now I ran into your garden and wanted to tear out of you what I had to understand from within myself.

Oh , I understand: immediately I made you into a savior who lets himself be consumed and bound with gifts. That's what men are like, you think; they are all still Christians. But they want even more: they want you as you are, otherwise you would not be to them and they would be inconsolable, if they could find no bearer for their legends. Hence they would also laugh, if you approached them and said you were as mortal as they are and want to love them. If you did that, you would not be . They want you, , but not another mortal who suffers from the same ills as they do.

I understand you, Oh , you are a true / [150/151] lover, since you love your soul for the sake of men, because they need a king who lives from himself and owes no one gratitude for his life. They want to have you thus. You fulfill the wish of the people and you vanish. You are a vessel of fables. You would besmirch yourself if you went to men as a man, since they would all laugh and call you a liar and a swindler, since is not a man.

I saw, Oh , that crease in your face: you were young once and wanted to be a man among men. But the Christian animals did not love your pagan humanity, since they felt in you what they needed. They always sought the branded one, and when they caught him somewhere in freedom, they locked him in a golden cage and took from him the force of his masculinity, so that he was paralyzed and sat in silence. Then they praise him and devise fables about him. I know, they call this veneration. And if they do not find the true one, they at least have a Pope, whose occupation it is to represent the divine comedy. But the true one always disowns himself, since he knows nothing higher than to be a man.

Are you laughing, Oh ? I understand you: it irked you to be a man like others. And because you truly loved being human, you voluntarily locked it away so that you could be for men at least what they wanted to have from you. Therefore I see you, Oh , not with men, but wholly with flowers, the trees and the birds and all waters flowing and still that do not besmirch your humanity. For you are not to the flowers, trees, and birds, but a man. Yet what solitude, what inhumanity! / [151/152]

***

[HI 152] Why are you laughing, Oh , I cannot fathom you. But do I not see the blue air of your garden? What happy shades surround you? Does the sun hatch blue midday specters around you?

Are you laughing, Oh ? Alas, I understand you: humanity has completely faded for you, but its shadow has arisen for you. How much greater and happier the shadow of humanity is than it is itself! The blue midday shadows of the dead! Alas, there is your humanity, Oh , you are a teacher and friend of the dead. They stand sighing in the shade of your house, they live under the branches of your trees. They drink the dew of your tears, they warm themselves at the goodness of your heart, they hunger after the words of your wisdom, which sounds full to them, full of the sounds of life. I saw you, Oh , at the noonday hour when the sun stood highest; you stood speaking with a blue shade, blood stuck to its forehead and solemn torment darkened it. I can guess, Oh , who your midday guest was. [280] How blind I was, fool that I am! That is you, Oh ! But who am I! I go my way, shaking my head, and people's looks follow me and I remain silent. Oh despairing silence! / [152/153] [HI 153]

***

Oh master of the garden! I see your dark tree from afar in the shimmering sun. My street leads to the valleys where men live. I am a wandering beggar. And I remain silent.

***

Killing off would-be prophets is a gain for the people. If they want murder, then may they kill their false prophets. If the mouth of the Gods remains silent, then each can listen to his own speech. He who loves the people remains silent. If only false teachers teach, the people will kill the false teachers, and will fall into the truth even on the way of their sins. Only after the darkest night will it be day. So cover the lights and remain silent so that the night will become dark and noiseless. The sun rises without our help. Only he who knows the darkest error knows what light is.

***

Oh master of the garden, your magical grove shone to me from afar. I venerate your deceptive mantle, you father of all will-o'-the-wisps. / [281] [Image I54] [282]

***

I continue on my way, accompanied by a finely polished piece of steel, hardened in ten fires, stowed safely in my robe. Secretly, I wear chain mail under my coat. Overnight I became fond of serpents, and I solved their riddle. I sit down next to them on the hot stones lying by the wayside. I know how to catch them cunningly and cruelly, those cold devils that prick the heel of the unsuspecting. I became their friend and played a softly toned flute. But I decorate my cave with their dazzling skins. As I walked on my way, I came to a red rock on which a great iridescent serpent lay. Since I had now learned magic from , I took out my flute again and played a sweet magical song to make her believe that she was my soul. When she was sufficiently enchanted, / [154/155] [Image 155] [283] {2} [I] [284] I spoke to her: "My sister, my soul, what do you say?" But she spoke, flattered and therefore tolerantly: "I let grass grow over everything that you do."

I: "That sounds comforting and seems not to say much."

S: "Would you like me to say much? I can also be banal, as you know, and let myself be satisfied that way."

I: "That seems hard to me. I believe that you stand in a close connection with everything beyond, / [155/156] [285] with what is greatest and most uncommon. Therefore I thought that banality would be foreign to you."

S: "Banality is my element."

I: "That would be less astonishing if I said it about myself."

S: "The more uncommon you are, the more common I can be. A true respite for me. I think you can sense that I don't need to torment myself today."

I: "I can feel it, and I'm worried that your tree will ultimately bear me no more fruit."

S: "Worried already? Don't be stupid, and let me rest."

I: "I notice that you like being banal. But I do not take you to heart, my dear friend, since I now know you much better than before."

S: "You're getting to be familiar. I'm afraid that you are beginning to lose respect."

I: "Are you upset? I believe that would be uncalled for. I'm sufficiently well-informed about the proximity of pathos and banality."

S: "So, have you noticed that the becoming of the soul follows a serpentine path? Have you seen how soon day becomes night, and night day? How water and dry land change places? And that everything spasmodic is merely destructive?"

I: "I believe that I saw all this. I want to lie in the sun on this warm stone for a while. Perhaps the sun will incubate me."

***

But the serpent crept up to me quietly and wound herself smoothly around my feet. [286] Evening fell and night came. I spoke to the serpent and said: "I don't know what to say. All pots are on the boil."

[287] S: ''A meal is being prepared."

I: "A Last Supper, I suppose?"

S: "A union with all humanity."

I: "A horrifying, sweet thought: to be both guest and dish at this meal." [288]

S: "That was also Christ's highest pleasure."

"How holy, how sinful, how everything hot and cold flows into one another! Madness and reason want to be married, the lamb and the wolf graze peacefully side by side. [289] It is all yes and no. The opposites embrace each other, see eye to eye, and intermingle. They recognize their oneness in agonizing pleasure. My heart is filled with wild battle. The waves of dark and bright rivers rush together, one crashing over the other. I have never experienced this before."

S: "That is new, my dear one, at least for you."

I: "I suppose you are mocking me. But tears and laughter are one. [290] / [156/157] I no longer feel like either, and I am rigid with tension. Loving reaches up to Heaven and resisting reaches just as high. They are entwined and will not let go of each other, since the excessive tension seems to indicate the ultimate and highest possibility of feeling."

S: "You express yourself emotionally and philosophically. You know that one can say all this much more simply. For example, one can say that you have fallen in love all the way from the worm up to Tristan and Isolde. [291]

I: "Yes, I know; but nonetheless --"

S: "Religion is still tormenting you, it seems? How many shields do you still need? Much better to say it straight out."

I: " You're not tripping me up."

S: "Well, what is it with morality? Have morality and immorality also become one today?"

I: "You're mocking me, my sister and chthonic devil. But I must say that those two that rose up to Heaven entwined are also good and evil. I'm not joking but I groan, because joy and pain sound shrill together."

S: "Where then is your understanding? You've gone utterly stupid. After all, you could resolve everything by thinking."

I: "My understanding? My thinking? I no longer have any understanding. It has grown impervious to me."

S: "You deny everything that you believed. You've completely forgotten who you are. You even deny Faust, who walked calmly past all the specters."

I: ''I'm no longer up to this. My spirit, too, is a specter."

S: "Ah, I see, you follow my teaching."

I: "Unfortunately, that's the case, and it has benefited me with painful joy."

S: "You turn your pain into pleasure. You are twisted, blinded; just suffer, you fool."

I: "This misfortune ought to make me happy."

***

The serpent now became angry and tried to bite my heart, but my secret armor broke her poisonous fang. [292] She drew back astonished and said hissing: "You actually behave as if you were unfathomable."

I: "That's because I have studied the art of stepping from the left foot onto the right and vice versa, which others have done unthinkingly from time immemorial."

The serpent raised herself again, as if accidentally / [157/158] holding her tail in front of her mouth, so that I should not see the broken fang. Proudly and calmly she said [293]: "So you have finally noticed this?" But I spoke to her smilingly: "The sinuous line of life could not escape me in the long run."

***

[2] [HI 158] Where is truth and faith? Where is warm trust? You find all this between men but not between men and serpents, even if they are serpent souls. But wherever there is love, the serpentlike abides also. Christ himself compared himself to a serpent, [294] and his hellish brother, the Antichrist, is the old dragon himself. [295] What is beyond the human that appears in love has the nature of the serpent and the bird, and the serpent often enchants the bird, and more rarely the bird bears off the serpent. Man stands in-between. What seems like a bird to you is a serpent to the other, and what seems like a serpent to you is a bird to the other. Therefore you will meet the other only in human form. If you want to become, then a battle between bird and serpent breaks out. And if you only want to be, you will be a man to yourself and to others. He who is becoming belongs in the desert or in a prison, for he is beyond the human. If men want to become, they behave like animals. No one saves us from the evil of becoming, unless we choose to go through Hell.

Why did I behave as if that serpent were my soul? Only, it seems, because my soul was a serpent. This knowledge gave my soul a new face, and I decided henceforth to enchant her myself and subject her to my power. Serpents are wise, and I wanted my serpent soul to communicate her wisdom to me. Never before had life been so doubtful, a night of aimless tension, being one in being directed against one another. Nothing moved, neither God nor the devil. So I approached the serpent that lay in the sun, as if she were unthinking. Her eyes were not visible, since they blinked in the shimmering sunshine, and / [158/160] [Image 159] [296] / {3} [I] I spoke to her [297]: "How will it be, now that God and the devil have become one? Are they in agreement to bring life to a standstill? Does the conflict of opposites belong to the inescapable conditions of life? And does he who recognizes and lives the unity of opposites stand still? He has completely taken the side of actual life, and he no longer acts as if he belonged to one party and had to battle against the other, but he is both and has brought their discord to an end. Through taking this burden from life, has he also taken the force from it?" [298]

The serpent turned and spoke ill-humoredly: "Truly, you pester me. Opposites were certainly an element of life for me. You probably will have noticed this. Your innovations deprive me of this source of power. I can neither lure you with pathos nor annoy you with banality. I am somewhat baffled."

I: "If you are baffled, should I give counsel? I would rather you dive down to the deeper grounds to which you have entry and ask Hades or the heavenly ones, perhaps someone there can give counsel."

S: "You have become imperious."

I: "Necessity is even more imperious than I. I must live and be able to move."

S: "You have the whole wide earth. What do you want to ask the beyond for?"

I: "It isn't curiosity that drives me, but necessity: I will not yield."

S: "I obey, but reluctantly. This style is new and unaccustomed to me."

I: ''I'm sorry, but there is pressing need. Tell the depths that prospects are not looking too good for us, because we have cut off an important organ from life. As you know, I'm not the guilty one, since you have led me carefully along this way."

S: [299] "You might have rejected the apple."

I: "Enough of these jokes. You know that story better than I do. I am serious. We need some air. Be on your way and fetch the fire. It has already been dark around me for too long. Are you sluggish or cowardly?"

S: ''I'm off to work. Take from me what I bring up." [300]

***

[HI 160] Slowly, the throne of the God ascends into empty space, followed by the holy trinity, all of Heaven, and finally Satan himself. He resists and clings to his beyond. He will not / [160/161] let it go. The upperworld is too chilly for him.

S: "Have you got tight hold of him?" [301]

I: "Welcome, hot thing of darkness! My soul probably pulled you up roughly?"

S: [302] ''Why this noise? I protest against this violent extraction."

I: "Calm down. I didn't expect you. You come last of all. You seem to be the hardest part."

S: "What do you want from me? I don't need you, impertinent fellow."

I: "It's a good thing we have you. You're the liveliest thing in the whole dogma." [303]

S: "What concern is your prattle to me! Make it quick. I'm freezing."

I: "Listen, something has just happened to us: we have united the opposites. Among other things, we have bonded you with God." [304]

S: "For God's sake, why this hopeless fuss? Why such nonsense?"

I: "Please, that wasn't so stupid. This unification is an important principle. We have put a stop to never-ending quarreling, to finally free our hands for real life."

***

S: "This smells of monism. I have already made note of some of these men. Special chambers have been heated for them."

I: "You're mistaken. Matters are not as rational with us as they seem to be. [305] We have no single correct truth either. Rather, a most remarkable and strange fact has occurred: after the opposites had been united, quite unexpectedly and incomprehensibly nothing further happened. Everything remained in place, peacefully and yet completely motionless, and life turned into a complete standstill."

S: "Yes, you fools, you certainly have made a pretty mess of things."

I: "Well, your mockery is unnecessary. Our intentions were serious."

S: "Your seriousness leads us to suffer. The ordering of the beyond is shaken to its foundations."

I: "So you realize that matters are serious. I want an answer to my question, what should happen under these circumstances? We no longer know what to do."

S: "Well, it is hard to know what to do, and difficult to give advice even if one would like to give it. You are blinded fools, a brashly impertinent people. Why didn't you stay out of trouble? How do you mean to understand the ordering of the world?"

I: "Your ranting suggests that you are quite thoroughly aggrieved. Look, the holy trinity is taking things coolly. It seems not to dislike the innovation."

S: ''Ah, the trinity is so irrational that one / [161/162] can never trust its reactions. I strongly advise you not to take those symbols seriously." [306]

I: "I thank you for this well-meant advice. But you seem to be interested. One would expect you to pass unbiased judgment on account of your proverbial intelligence."

S: "Me, unbiased! You can judge for yourself. If you consider this absoluteness in its completely lifeless equanimity, you can easily discover that the state and standstill produced by your presumptuousness closely resembles the absolute. But if I counsel you, I place myself completely on your side, since you too find this standstill unbearable."

I: "What? You take my side? That is strange."

S: "That's not so strange. The absolute was always adverse to the living. I am still the real master of life."

I: "That is suspicious. Your reaction is far too personal."

S: "My reaction is far from personal. I am utterly restless, quickly hurrying life. I am never contented, never unperturbed. I pull everything down and hastily rebuild. I am ambition, greed for fame, lust for action; I am the fizz of new thoughts and action. The absolute is boring and vegetative."

I: "Alright, I believe you. So -- just what do you advise?"

S: "The best advice I can give you is: revoke your completely harmful innovation as soon as possible."

I: "What would be gained by that? We'd have to start from scratch again and would infallibly reach the same conclusion a second time. What one has grasped once, one cannot intentionally not know again and undo. Your counsel is no counsel."

S: "But could you exist without divisiveness and disunity? You have to get worked up about something, represent a party, overcome opposites, if you want to live."

I: "That does not help. We also see each other in the opposite. We have grown tired of this game."

S: "And so with life."

I: "It seems to me that it depends on what you call life. Your notion of life has to do with climbing up and tearing down, with assertion and doubt, with impatient dragging around, / [162/163] [Image 163] [307] / [163/164] with hasty desire. You lack the absolute and its forbearing patience."

S: "Quite right. My life bubbles and foams and stirs up turbulent waves, it consists of seizing and throwing away, ardent wishing and restlessness. That is life, isn't it?"

I: "But the absolute also lives."

S: "That is no life. It is a standstill or as good as a standstill, or rather: it lives interminably slowly and wastes thousands of years, just like the miserable condition that you have created."

I: "You enlighten me. You are personal life, but the apparent standstill is the forbearing life of eternity, the life of divinity! This time you have counseled me well. I will let you go. Farewell."

***

[HI 164] Satan crawls deftly like a mole back into his hole again. The symbol of the trinity and its entourage rise up in peace and equanimity to Heaven. I thank you, serpent, for hauling up the right one for me. Everyone understands his words, since they are personal. We can live again, a long life. We can waste thousands of years.

***

[HI 164/2] [2] Where to begin, oh Gods? In suffering or in joy, or in the mixed feeling lying between? The beginning is always the smallest, it begins in nothing. If I begin there, I see the little drop of "something" that falls into the sea of nothingness. It is forever about beginning again down where the nothingness widens itself to unrestricted freedom. [308] Nothing has happened yet, the world has yet to begin, the sun is not yet born, the watery firmament has not been separated, [309] we have not yet climbed onto the shoulders of our fathers, since our fathers have not yet become. They have only just died and rest in the womb of our bloodthirsty Europe.

We stand in the vastness, wed to the serpent, and consider which stone could be the foundation stone of the building, / [164/165] which we do not yet know. The most ancient? It is suitable as a symbol. We want something graspable. We are weary of the webs that the day weaves and the night unpicks. The devil is probably supposed to create it, that paltry partisan with sham understanding and greedy hands? He emerged from the lump of manure in which the Gods had secured their eggs. I would like to kick the garbage away from me, if the golden seed were not in the vile heart of the misshapen form.

Arise then, son of darkness and stench! How firmly you cling to the rubble and waste of the eternal cesspit! I do not fear you, though I hate you, you brother of everything reprehensible in me. Today, you shall be forged with heavy hammers so that the gold of the Gods will spray out of your body. Your time is over, your years are numbered, and today your day of judgment has gone to smithereens. May your casings burst asunder, with our hands we wish to take hold of your seed, the golden one, and free it from slithery mud. May you freeze, devil, since we will cold-forge you. Steel is harder than ice. You shall fit into our form, you thief of the divine marvel, you mother ape, you who stuff your body with the egg of the Gods and thereby make yourself weighty. Hence we curse you, though not because of you, but for the sake of the golden seed.

What serviceable forms rise from your body, you thieving abyss! These appear as elemental spirits, dressed in wrinkled garb, Cabiri, with delightful misshapen forms, young and yet old, dwarfish, shriveled, unspectacular bearers of secret arts, possessors of ridiculous wisdom, first formations of the unformed gold, worms that crawl from the liberated egg of the Gods, incipient ones, unborn, still invisible. What should your appearance be to us? What new arts do you bear up from the inaccessible treasure chamber, the sun yoke from the egg of the Gods? You still have roots in the soil like plants and you are animal faces / [165/166] of the human body; you are foolishly sweet, uncanny, primordial, and earthly. We cannot grasp your essence, you gnomes, you object-souls.


You have your origin in the lowest. Do you want to become giants, you Tom Thumbs? Do you belong to the followers of the son of the earth? Are you the earthly feet of the Godhead? What do you want? Speak!" [310]

***

The Cabiri: "We come to greet you as the master of the lower nature."

I: "Are you speaking to me? Am I your master?"

The Cabiri: "You were not, but you are now."

I: "So you declare. And so be it. Yet what should I do with your following?"

The Cabiri: "We carry what is not to be carried from below to above. We are the juices that rise secretly, not by force, but sucked out of inertia and affixed to what is growing. We know the unknown ways and the inexplicable laws of living matter. We carry up what slumbers in the earthly, what is dead and yet enters into the living. We do this slowly and easily, what you do in vain in your human way. We complete what is impossible for you."

I: "What should I leave to you? Which troubles can I transfer to you? What should I not do, and what do you do better?"

The Cabiri: "You forget the lethargy of matter. You want to pull up with your own force what can only rise slowly, ingesting itself, affixed to itself from within. Spare yourself the trouble, or you will disturb our work."

I: "Should I trust you, you untrustworthy ones, you slaves and slave souls? Get to work. Let it be so."

[admin]

PART 2 OF 5 (CH. 21 CONT'D.)

***

[311] [HI 166] "It seems to me that I gave you a long time. Neither did I descend to you nor did I disturb your work. I lived in the light of day and did the work of the day. What did you do?"

The Cabiri: "We hauled things up, we built. We placed stone upon stone. Now you stand on solid ground."

I: "I feel the ground more solid. I stretch upward."

The Cabiri: "We forged a flashing / [166/167] sword for you, with which you can cut the knot that entangles you."

I: "I take the sword firmly in my hand. I lift it for the blow."

The Cabiri: "We also place before you the devilish, skillfully twined knot that locks and seals you. Strike, only sharpness will cut through it."

I: "Let me see it, the great knot, all wound round! Truly a masterpiece of inscrutable nature, a wily natural tangle of roots grown through one another! Only Mother Nature, the blind weaver, could work such a tangle! A great snarled ball and a thousand small knots, all artfully tied, intertwined, truly, a human brain! Am I seeing straight? What did you do? You set my brain before me! Did you give me a sword so that its flashing sharpness slices through my brain? What were you thinking of?" [312]

The Cabiri: "The womb of nature wove the brain, the womb of the earth gave the iron. So the Mother gave you both: entanglement and severing."

I: "Mysterious! Do you really want to make me the executioner of my own brain?"

The Cabiri: "It befits you as the master of the lower nature. Man is entangled in his brain and the sword is also given to him to cut through the entanglement."

I: "What is the entanglement you speak of?"

The Cabiri: "The entanglement is your madness, the sword is the overcoming of madness." [313]

I: "You offsprings of the devil, who told you that I am mad? You earth spirits, you roots of clay and excrement, are you not yourselves the root fibers of my brain? You polyp-snared rubbish, channels for juice knotted together, parasites upon parasites, all sucked up and deceived, secretly climbing up over one another by night, you deserve the flashing sharpness of my sword. You want to persuade me to cut through you? Are you contemplating self-destruction? How come nature gives birth to creatures that she herself wants to destroy?"

The Cabiri: "Do not hesitate. We need destruction since we ourselves are the entanglement. He who wishes to conquer new land / [167/168] brings down the bridges behind him. Let us not exist anymore. We are the thousand canals in which everything also flows back again into its origin."

I: "Should I sever my own roots? Kill my own people, whose king I am? Should I make my own tree wither? You really are the sons of the devil."

The Cabiri: "Strike, we are servants who want to die for their master."

I: "What will happen if I strike?"

The Cabiri: "Then you will no longer be your brain, but will exist beyond your madness. Do you not see, your madness is your brain, the terrible entanglement and intertwining in the connection of the roots, in the nets of canals, the confusion of fibers. Being engrossed in the brain makes you wild. Strike! He who finds the way rises up over his brain. You are a Tom Thumb in the brain, beyond the brain you gain the form of a giant. We are surely sons of the devil, but did you not forge us out of the hot and dark? So we have something of its nature and of yours. The devil says that everything that exists is also worthy, since it perishes. As sons of the devil we want destruction, but as your creatures we want our own destruction. We want to rise up in you through death. We are roots that suck up from all sides. Now you have everything that you need, therefore chop us up, tear us out."

I: "Will I miss you as servants? As a master I need slaves."

The Cabiri: "The master serves himself."

I: "You ambiguous sons of the devil, these words are your undoing. May my sword strike you, this blow shall be valid forever."

The Cabiri "Woe, woe! What we feared, what we desired, has come to pass."

***

/ [168/171] [Image 169] / [HI 171] I set foot on new land. Nothing brought up should flow back. No one shall tear down what I have built. My tower is of iron and has no seams. The devil is forged into the foundations. The Cabiri built it and the master builders were sacrificed with the sword on the battlements of the tower. Just as a tower surmounts the summit of a mountain on which it stands, so I stand above my brain, from which I grew. I have become hard and cannot be undone again. No more do I flow back. I am the master of my own self. I admire my mastery. I am strong and beautiful and rich. The vast lands and the blue sky have laid themselves before me and bowed to my mastery. I wait upon no one and no one waits upon me. I serve myself and I myself serve. Therefore I have what I need. [314]

My tower grew for several thousand years, imperishable. It does not sink back. But it can be built over and will be built over. Few grasp my tower, since it stands on a high mountain. But many will see it / [171/172] and not grasp it. Therefore my tower will remain unused. No one scales its smooth walls. No one lands on its pointed roof. Only he who finds the entrance hidden in the mountain and rises up through the labyrinths of the innards can reach the tower, and the happiness of he who surveys things from there and he who lives from himself. This has been attained and created. It has not arisen from a patchwork of human thoughts, but has been forged from the glowing heat of the innards; the Cabiri themselves carried the matter to the mountain and consecrated the building with their own blood as the sole keepers of the mystery of its genesis. I built it out of the lower and upper beyond and not from the surface of the world. Therefore it is new and strange and towers over the plains inhabited by humans. This is the solid and the beginning. [315]

***

[HI 172] I have united with the serpent of the beyond. I have accepted everything beyond into myself. From this I have built my beginning. When this work was completed, I was pleased, and I felt curious to know what might still lie in my beyond. So I approached my serpent and asked her / [172/173] amiably whether she would not like to creep over to bring me news of what was happening in the beyond. But the serpent was weary and said that she had no liking for this.

***

{4}[1] [316] I: "I don't want to force anything, but perhaps, who knows? We will still find out something useful." For a while the serpent hesitated, then she disappeared into the depths. Soon I heard her voice: "I believe that I have reached Hell. There is a hanged man here." A plain, ugly man with a contorted face stands before me. He has protruding ears and a hunchback. He said: "I am a poisoner who was condemned to the rope."

I: "What did you do?"

He: "I poisoned my parents and my wife."

I: "Why did you do that?"

He: "To honor God."

I: "What? To honor God? What do you mean by that?"

He: "First of all, everything that happens is for the honor of God, and secondly, I had my own ideas."

I: "What went through your mind?"

He: "I loved them and wanted to transport them more quickly from a wretched life into eternal blessedness. I gave them a strong, too strong a nightcap."

I: "And did this not lead you to find out what your own interest in this was?"

He: "I was now alone and very unhappy: I wanted to live for the sake of my two children, for whom I foresaw a better future. I was in better health than my wife, so / [173/174] I wanted to live."

I: "Did your wife agree to the murders?"

He: "No, she certainly would have consented, but she knew nothing of my intentions. Unfortunately, the murder was discovered and I was condemned to death."

I: "Have you found your relatives again in the beyond?"

He: "That's a strange and unlikely story. I suspect that I'm in Hell. Sometimes it seems as if my wife were here too, and sometimes I'm not sure, just as little as I'm sure of my own self."

I: "What is it like? Tell me."

He: "From time to time, she seems to speak to me and I reply. But we haven't spoken about either the murder or our children until now. We only speak together here and there, and only about trivial things, small matters from our earlier daily life, but completely impersonal, as if we no longer had anything to do with each other. But the true nature of things eludes me. I see even less of my parents; I believe that I have yet to meet my mother. My father was here once and said something about his tobacco pipe, which he had lost somewhere."

I: "But how do you pass your time?"

He: "I believe that there is no time with us, so there is none to spend. Nothing at all happens."

I: "Isn't that / [174/175] extremely boring?"

He: "Boring? I've never thought about it like that. Boring? Perhaps, but there's nothing interesting. In actual fact, it's pretty much all the same."

I: "Doesn't the devil ever torment you?"

He: "The devil? I've seen nothing of him."

I: "You come from the beyond and yet you have nothing to report? I find that hard to believe."

He: "When I still had a body, I often thought that surely it would be interesting to speak to one of the dead. But now the prospect means nothing much to me. As I said, everything here is impersonal and purely matter of fact. As far as I know, that's what they say."

I: "That is bleak. I assume that you are in the deepest Hell."

He: "I don't care. I guess I can go now, can't I? Farewell."

Suddenly he vanished. But I turned to the serpent [317] and said: "What should this boring guest from the beyond mean?"

S: "I met him over there, stumbling around restlessly like so many others. I chose him as the next best. He strikes me as a good example."

I: "But is the beyond so colorless?"

S: "It seems so; there is nothing but motion, when I make my way over there. Everything merely surges back and forth in a shadowy way. There is nothing personal whatsoever."

I: "What is it, then, with this damned personal quality? Satan recently made / [175/176] a strong impression on me, as if he were the quintessence of the personal."

S: "Of course he would, since he is the eternal adversary, and because you can never reconcile personal life with absolute life."

I: "Can't one unite these opposites?"

S: "They are not opposites, but simply differences. Just as little as you make the day the opposite of the year or the bushel the opposite of the cubit."

I: "That's enlightening, but somewhat boring."

S: "As always, when one speaks of the beyond. It goes on withering away, particularly since we have balanced the opposites and married. I believe the dead will soon become extinct."

***

[HI 176] [2] The devil is the sum of the darkness of human nature. He who lives in the light strives toward being the image of God; he who lives in the dark strives toward being the image of the devil. Because I wanted to live in the light, the sun went out for me when I touched the depths. It was dark and serpentlike. I united myself with it and did not overpower it. I took my part of the humiliation and subjugation upon myself, in that I took on the nature of the serpent.

If I had / [176/177] not become like the serpent, the devil, the quintessence of everything serpentlike, would have held this bit of power over me. This would have given the devil a grip and he would have forced me to make a pact with him just as he also cunningly deceived Faust. [318] But I forestalled him by uniting myself with the serpent, just as a man unites with a woman.

So I took away from the devil the possibility of influence, which only ever passes through one's own serpenthood, [319] which one commonly assigns to the devil instead of oneself. Mephistopheles is Satan, taken with my serpenthood. Satan himself is the quintessence of evil, naked and therefore without seduction, not even clever, but pure negation without convincing force. Thus I resisted his destructive influence and grasped him and fettered him firmly. His descendants served me and I sacrificed them with the sword.

Thus I built a firm structure. Through this I myself gained stability and duration and could withstand the fluctuations of the personal. Therefore the immortal in me is saved. Through drawing the darkness from my beyond over into the day, I emptied my beyond. Therefore the demands of the dead disappeared, as they were satisfied.

/ [177/178] I am no longer threatened by the dead, since I accepted their demands through accepting the serpent. But through this I have also taken over something of the dead into my day. Yet it was necessary, since death is the most enduring of all things, that which can never be canceled out. Death gives me durability and solidity. So long as I wanted to satisfy only my own demands, I was personal and therefore living in the sense of the world. But when I recognized the demands of the dead in me and satisfied them, I gave up my earlier personal striving and the world had to take me for a dead man. For a great cold comes over whoever in the excess of his personal striving has recognized the demands of the dead and seeks to satisfy them.

While he feels as if a mysterious poison has paralyzed the living quality of his personal relations, the voices of the dead remain silent in his beyond; the threat, the fear, and the restlessness cease. For everything that previously lurked hungrily in him no longer lives with him in his day. His life is beautiful and rich, since he is himself.

But whoever always wants only the fortune of others is ugly, since he / [178/179] cripples himself. A murderer is one who wants to force others to blessedness, since he kills his own growth. A fool is one who exterminates his love for the sake of love. Such a one is personal to the other. His beyond is gray and impersonal. He forces himself upon others; therefore he is cursed into forcing himself upon himself in a cold nothingness. He who has recognized the demands of the dead has banished his ugliness to the beyond. He no longer greedily forces himself upon others, but lives alone in beauty and speaks with the dead. But there comes the day when the demands of the dead also are satisfied. If one then still perseveres in solitude, beauty fades into the beyond and the wasteland comes over onto this side. A black stage comes after the white, and Heaven and Hell are forever there. [320]

***

{5}[I] [HI 179] Now that I had found the beauty in me and with myself, I spoke to my serpent [321]: "I look back as onto a work that has been accomplished."

Serpent: "Nothing is accomplished yet."

I: "What do you mean? Not accomplished?"

Se: "This is only the beginning."

I: "I think you are lying."

Se: "Whom are you quarreling with? Do you know better?"

I: "I know / [179/180] nothing, but I'd already gotten used to the idea that we had reached a goal, at least a temporary one. If even the dead are about to become extinct, what else is going to happen?"

Se: "But then the living must first begin to live."

I: "This remark could certainly be deeply meaningful, but it seems to be nothing but a joke."

Se: "You are getting impertinent. I'm not joking. Life has yet to begin."

I: "What do you mean by life?"

Se: "I say, life has yet to begin. Didn't you feel empty today? Do you call that life?"

I: "What you say is true, but I try to put as good a face as I can on everything and to settle for things."

Se: "That might be quite comfortable. But you really ought to make much higher demands."

I: "That I dread. I will certainly not assume that I could satisfy my own demands, but neither do I think that you are capable of satisfying them. However, it might be that once again I'm not trusting you enough. I suppose that might be so because I've drawn closer to you in human terms and find you so urbane."

Se: "That proves nothing. Just don't assume that somehow you could ever grasp me and embody me."

I: "So, what should it be? I'm ready."

Se: "You are entitled to a reward for / [180/181] what has been accomplished so far."

I: "A sweet thought, that payment could be made for this."

Se: "I give you payment in images. Behold:"

***

[HI 181] Elijah and Salome! The cycle is completed and the gates of the mysteries have opened again. Elijah leads Salome, the seeing one, by the hand. She blushes and lowers her eyes while lovingly batting her eyelids.

E: "Here, I give you Salome. May she be yours."

I: "For God's sake, what should I do with Salome? I am already married and we are not among the Turks." [322]

E: "You helpless man, how ponderous you are. Is this not a beautiful gift? Is her healing not your doing? Won't you accept her love as the well-deserved payment for your trouble?"

I: "It seems to me a rather strange gift, more burden than joy. I am happy that Salome is thankful to me and loves me. I love her too -- somewhat. Incidentally, the care I afforded her, was, literally, pressed out of me, rather than something I gave freely and intentionally. If my partly unintentional / [181/182] ordeal has had such a good outcome, I'm already completely satisfied."

Salome to Elijah: "Leave him, he is a strange man. Heaven knows what his motives are, but he seems to be serious. I'm not ugly and surely I'm generally desirable."

Salome to me: "Why do you refuse me? I want to be your maid and serve you. I will sing and dance before you, fend off people for you, comfort you when you are sad, laugh with you when you are happy. I will carry all your thoughts in my heart. I will kiss the words that you speak to me. I will pick roses for you each day and all my thoughts will wait upon you and surround you."

I: "I thank you for your love. It is beautiful to hear you speak of love. It is music and old, far-off homesickness. Look, my tears are falling because of your good words. I want to kneel before you and kiss your hands a hundred times, because they want to give me love. You speak so beautifully of love. One can never hear enough of love being spoken."

Sal: "Why only speak? I want to be yours, utterly and completely yours."

I: "You are like the serpent that coiled around me and pressed out my blood." [323] / [182/183] Your sweet words wind around me and I stand like someone crucified."

Sal: "Why still crucified?"

I: "Don't you see that unrelenting necessity has flung me onto the cross? It is impossibility that lames me."

Sal: "Don't you want to break through necessity? Is what you call a necessity really one?" [324]

I: "Listen, I doubt that it is your destiny to belong to me. I do not want to intervene in your utterly singular life, since I can never help you to lead it to an end. And what do you gain if one day I must lay you aside like a worn garment?"

Sal: "Your words are terrible. But I love you so much that I could also lay myself aside when your time has come."

I: "I know that it would be the greatest torment for me to let you go away. But if you can do this for me, I can also do it for you. I would go on without lament, since I have not forgotten the dream where I saw my body lying on sharp needles and a bronze wheel rolling over my breast, crushing it. I must think of this dream whenever I think of love. If it must be, I am ready."

Sal: "I don't want such a sacrifice. I want to bring you joy. Can I not be joy to you?"

I: "I don't know, perhaps, / [183/184] perhaps not."

Sal: "So then at least try."

I: "The attempt is the same as the act. Such attempts are costly."

Sal: "Won't you bear the cost for my sake?"

I: ''I'm rather too weak, too exhausted after what I have suffered because of you, still to be able to undertake further tasks for you. I would be overwhelmed."

Sal: "If you don't want to accept me, then surely I cannot accept you?"

I: "It's not a matter of acceptance; if it's about anything in particular, it's about giving."

Sal: "But I do give myself to you. Just accept me."

I: "As if that would settle the matter! But being entangled with love! Simply thinking about it is dreadful."

Sal: "So you really demand that I be and not be at the same time. That is impossible. What's wrong with you?"

I: "I lack the strength to hoist another fate onto my shoulders. I have enough to carry."

Sal: "But what if I help you bear this load?"

I: "How can you? You'd have to carry me, an untamed burden. Shouldn't I have to carry it myself?"

E: "You speak the truth. May each one carry his load. He who wants to burden others with his baggage is their slave. [325] It is not too difficult for anyone to lug themselves."

Sal: "But father, couldn't I help him bear part of his burden?"

I: "Then he'd be your slave." / [184/185]

Sal: "Or my master and ruler."

I: "That I shall not be. You should be a free being. I can bear neither slaves nor masters. I long for men."

Sal: "Am I not a human being?"

I: "Be your own master and your own slave, do not belong to me but to yourself. Do not bear my burden, but your own. Thus you leave me my human freedom, a thing that's worth more to me than the right of ownership over another person."

Sal: "Are you sending me away?"

I: ''I'm not sending you away. You must not be far from me. But give to me out of your fullness, not your longing. I cannot satisfy your poverty just as you cannot still my longing. If your harvest is rich, send me some fruit from your garden. If you suffer from abundance, I will drink from the brimming horn of your joy. I know that that will be a balm for me. I can satisfy myself only at the table of the satisfied, not at the empty bowls of those who yearn. I will not steal my payment. You possess nothing, so how can you give? Insofar as you give, you demand. Elijah, old man, listen: you have a strange gratitude. Do not give away your daughter, but set her / [185/186] on her own feet. She would like to dance, to sing or play the lute before people, and she would like their flashing coins thrown before her feet. Salome, I thank you for your love. If you really love me, dance before the crowd, please people so that they praise your beauty and your art. And if you have a rich harvest, throw me one of your roses through the window, and if the fount of your joy overflows, dance and sing to me once more. I long for the joy of men, for their fullness and freedom and not their neediness."

Sal: "What a hard and incomprehensible man you are."

E: "You have changed since I last saw you. You speak another language, one that sounds foreign to me."

I: "My dear old man, I'd like to believe that you find me changed. But you too seem to have changed. Where is your serpent?"

E: "She has gone astray. I believe she was stolen. Since then things have been somewhat gloomy with us. Therefore I would have been happy if you had at least accepted my daughter."

I: "I know where your serpent is. I have her. We fetched her from the underworld. She / [186/187] gave me hardness, wisdom, and magical power. We need her in the upperworld, since otherwise the underworld would have had the advantage, to our detriment."

E: "Away with you, accursed robber, may God punish you."

I: "Your curse is powerless. Whoever possesses the serpent cannot be touched by curses. No, be sensible, old man: whoever possesses wisdom is not greedy for power. Only the man who has power declines to use it. Do not cry, Salome, fortune is only what you yourself create and not what comes to you. Be gone, my unhappy friends, the night grows late. Elijah, expunge the false gleam of power from your wisdom, and you, Salome, for the sake of our love, do not forget to dance."

***

[2] [326] When everything was completed in me, I unexpectedly returned to the mysteries, to that first sight of the otherworldly powers of the spirit and desire. Just as I had achieved pleasure in myself and power over myself, Salome had lost pleasure in herself but learned love for the other, and Elijah had lost the power of his wisdom but he had learned to recognize the spirit of the other. Salome thus lost the power of temptation and has / [187/188] become love. As I have won pleasure in myself, I also want love for myself. But that really would be too much and would bind me like an iron ring that would stifle me. I accepted Salome as pleasure, and reject her as love. But she wants to be with me. How, then, should I also have love for myself? Love, I believe, belongs to others. But my love wants to be with me. I dread it. May the power of my thinking push it from me, into the world, into things, into men. For something should join men together, something should be a bridge. It is the most difficult temptation, if even my love wants me! Mysteries, open your curtains again! I want to wage this battle to its end. Come here, serpent of the dark abyss.

{6} [327] [1] I hear Salome still crying. What does she want, or what do I still want? It's a damnable payment you have given to me, a payment that one cannot touch without sacrifice. One that requires even greater sacrifice once one has touched it.

Serpent: [328] "Do you mean to live without sacrifice? Life must cost you something, mustn't it?"

I: "I have, I believe, already paid. I have rejected Salome. Is that not sacrifice enough?"

Se: "Too little for you. As has been said, you are allowed to make demands of yourself."

I: "You mean well with your damned logic: demanding in sacrifice? That / [188/189] isn't what I understood. My error has obviously been to my own benefit. Tell me, isn't it enough if I force my feeling into the background?"

Se: "You're not forcing your feeling into the background at all; rather it suits you much better not to agonize further over Salome."

I: "If you're speaking the truth, it's quite bad. Is that why Salome is still crying?"

Se: "Yes, it is."

I: "But what is to be done?"

Se: "Oh, you want to act? One can also think."

I: "But what is there to think? I confess that I know nothing to think here. Perhaps you have advice. I have the feeling that I must soar over my own head. I can't do that. What do you think?"

Se: "I think nothing and have no advice either."

I: "So ask the beyond, go to Heaven or Hell, perhaps there is advice there."

Se: "I am being pulled upward."

Then the serpent turned into a small white bird which soared into the clouds where she disappeared. My gaze followed her for a long time. [329]

Bird: "Do you hear me? I'm far off now. Heaven is so far away Hell is much nearer the earth. I found something for you, a discarded crown. It lay on a street in the immeasurable space of Heaven, a golden crown."

And now it already lies in [330] / [189/Draft] my hand, a golden royal crown, with lettering incised within; what does it say? "Love never ends." [331] A gift from Heaven. But what does it mean?

B: "Here I am, are you satisfied?"

I: "Partially -- at any rate I thank you for this meaningful gift. But it is mysterious, and your gift makes me well-nigh suspicious."

B: "But the gift comes from Heaven, you know."

I: "It's certainly very beautiful, but you know very well what we have grasped of Heaven and Hell."

B: "Don't exaggerate. After all, there is a difference between Heaven and Hell. I certainly believe, to judge from what I have seen, that just as little happens in Heaven as in Hell, though probably in another way. Even what does not occur cannot occur in a particular way."

I: "You speak in riddles that could make one ill if one took them to heart. Tell me, what do you make of the crown?"

B: "What do I make of it? Nothing. It truly speaks for itself."

I: "You mean, through the inscription it bears?"

B: "Precisely; I presume that makes sense to you?"

I: "To some extent, I suppose. But that keeps the question awfully in suspense."

B: "Which is how it is meant to be."

Now the bird suddenly turned into the serpent again. [332]

I: "You're unnerving."

Serpent: [333] "Only for him who isn't in agreement with me."

I: "That I am certainly not. But how could one? To hang in the air in such a way is gruesome."

Se: "Is this sacrifice too difficult for you? You must also be able to hang if you want to solve problems. Look at Salome!"

I, to Salome: "I see, Salome, that you are still weeping. You are not yet done for. I hover and curse my hovering. I am hanging for your sake and for mine. First I was crucified, now I'm simply hanging -- which is less noble, but no less agonizing [334]. Forgive me, for wanting to do you in; I thought of saving you as I did when I healed your blindness through my self-sacrifice. Perhaps I must be decapitated a third time for your sake, like your earlier friend John, who brought us the Christ of agony. Are you insatiable? Do you still see no way to become reasonable?"

Sal: "My beloved, what can I do for you? I have utterly forsaken you."

I: "So why are you still crying? You know I can't bear seeing you in tears."

Sal: "I thought that you were invulnerable since you possessed the black serpent rod."

I: "The effect of the rod seems doubtful to me. But in one respect it does help me: at least I do not suffocate, although I have been strung up. The magic rod apparently helps me bear the hanging, surely a gruesome good deed and aid. Don't you at least want to cut the cord?"

Sal: "How can I? You are hanging too high. [335] High on the summit of the tree of life where I cannot reach. Can't you help yourself. you knower of serpent wisdom?"

I: "Must I go on hanging for long?"

Sal: "Until you have devised help for yourself."

I: "So at least tell me what you think of the crown that the bird of my soul fetched for me from Heaven."

Sal: "What are you saying? The crown? You have the crown? Lucky one, what are you complaining about?"

I: "A hanged king would like to change places with every blessed beggar on the country road who has not been hanged."

Sal (ecstatic): "The crown! You have the crown!"

I: "Salome, take pity on me. What is it with the crown?"

Sal (ecstatic): "The crown -- you are to be crowned! What blessedness for me and you!"

I: ''Alas, what do you want with the crown? I can't understand it and I'm suffering unspeakable torment."

Sal (cruelly): "Hang until you understand."

***

I remain silent and hang high above the ground on the swaying branch of the divine tree, for whose sake the original ancestors could not avoid sin. My hands are bound and I am completely helpless. So I hang for three days and three nights. From where should help come? There sits my bird, the serpent, which has put on her white feather dress.

Bird: "We'll fetch help from the clouds trailing above your head, when nothing else is of help to us."

I: "You want to fetch help from the clouds? How is that possible?"

B: "I will go and try."

The bird swings off like a rising lark, becomes smaller and smaller, and finally disappears in the thick gray veil of clouds covering the sky. My gaze follows her longingly and I make out nothing more than the endless gray cloudy sky above me, impenetrably gray; harmoniously gray and unreadable. But the writing on the crown -- that is legible. "Love never ends" -- does that mean eternal hanging? I was not wrong to be suspicious when my bird brought the crown, the crown of eternal life, the crown of martyrdom -- ominous things that are dangerously ambiguous.

I am weary; weary not only of hanging but of struggling after the immeasurable. The mysterious crown lies far below my feet on the ground, winking gold. I do not hover, no, I hang, or rather worse, I am hanged between sky and earth -- and do not tire of the state of hanging for I could indulge in it forever, but love never ends. Is it really true, shall love never end? If this was a blessed message to them, what is it for me?

"That depends entirely on the notion," an old raven suddenly said, perched on a branch not far from me, awaiting the funeral meal, and immersed in philosophizing.

I: "Why does it depend entirely on the notion?"

Raven: "On your notion of love and the other."

I: "I know, unlucky old bird, you mean heavenly and earthly love. [336] Heavenly love would be utterly beautiful, but we are men, and, precisely because we are men, I've set my mind on being a complete and full-fledged man."

R: "You're an ideologue."

I: "Dumb raven, be gone!" There, very close to my face, a branch moves, a black serpent has coiled itself around it and looks at me with the blinding pearly shimmer of its eyes. Is it not my serpent?

I: "Sister, and black rod of magic, where do you come from? I thought that I saw you fly to Heaven as a bird and now you are here? Do you bring help?"

Serpent: "I am only my own half; I'm not one, but two; I'm the one and the other. I am here only as the serpentlike, the magical. But magic is useless here. I wound myself idly around this branch to await further developments. You can use me in life, but not in hanging. In the worst case, I'm ready to lead you to Hades. I know the way there."

A black form condenses before me out of the air, Satan, with a scornful laugh. He calls to me: "See what comes from the reconciliation of opposites! Recant, and in a flash you'll be down on the greening earth."

I: "I won't recant, I'm not stupid. If such is the outcome of all this, let it be the end."

Se: "Where is your inconsistency? Please remember this important rule of the art of life."

I: "The fact that I'm hanging here is inconsistency enough. I've lived inconsistently ad nauseam. What more do you want?"

Se: "Perhaps inconsistency in the right place?"

I: "Stop it! How should I know what the right and the wrong places are?"

Satan: "Whoever gets on in a sovereign way with the opposites knows left from right."

I: "Be quiet, you're an interested party. If only my white bird came back with help; I fear I'm growing weak."

Se: "Don't be stupid, weakness too is a way; magic makes good the error."

Satan: "What, you've not yet once had the courage of weakness? You want to become a complete man -- are men strong?"

I: "White bird of mine, I suppose you can't find your way back? Did you get up and leave because you couldn't live with me? Ah, Salome! There she comes. Come to me, Salome! Another night has passed. I didn't hear you cry; but I hung and still hang."

Sal: "I haven't cried anymore, for good fortune and misfortune are balanced in me."

I: "My white bird has left and has not yet returned. I know nothing and understand nothing. Does this have to do with the crown? Speak!"

Sal: "What should I say? Ask yourself."

I: "I cannot. My brain is like lead, I can only whimper for help. I have no way of knowing whether everything is falling or standing still. My hope is with my white bird. Oh no, could it be that the bird means the same thing as hanging?"

Satan: "Reconciliation of the opposites! Equal rights for all! Follies!"

I: "I hear a bird chirping! Is that you? Have you come back?"

Bird: "If you love the earth, you are hanged; if you love the sky, you hover."

I: "What is earth? What is sky?"

B: "Everything under you is the earth, everything above you is the sky. You fly if you strive for what is above you; you are hanged if you strive for what is below you."

I: "What is above me? What is beneath me?"

B: "Above you is what is before and over you; beneath you is what comes back under you."

I: "And the crown? Solve the riddle of the crown for me!"

B: "The crown and serpent are opposites, and are one. Did you not see the serpent that crowned the head of the crucified?"

I: "What, I don't understand you."

B: "What words did the crown bring you? "Love never ends" -- that is the mystery of the crown and the serpent."

I: "But Salome? What should happen to Salome?"

B: "You see, Salome is what you are. Fly, and she will grow wings."

The clouds part, the sky is full of the crimson sunset of the completed third day. [337] The sun sinks into the sea, and I glide with it from the top of the tree toward the earth. Softly and peacefully night falls.

[2] Fear has befallen me. Whom did you carry to the mountain, you Cabiri? And whom have I sacrificed in you? You have piled me up yourselves, turning me into a tower on inaccessible crags, turning me into my church, my monastery, my place of execution, my prison. I am locked up and condemned within myself. I am my own priest and congregation, judge and judged, God and human sacrifice.

What a work you have accomplished, Cabiri! You have given birth to a cruel law from the chaos that cannot be revoked. It is understood and accepted.

***

The completion of the secret operation approaches. What I saw I described in words to the best of my ability. Words are poor, and beauty does not attend them. But is truth beautiful and beauty true? [338]

***

One can speak in beautiful words about love, but about life? And life stands above love. But love is the inescapable mother of life. Life should never be forced into love, but love into life. May love be subject to torment, but not life. As long as love goes pregnant with life, it should be respected; but if it has given birth to life from itself, it has turned into an empty sheath and expires into transience.

I speak against the mother who bore me. I separate myself from the bearing womb. [339] I speak no more for the sake of love, but for the sake of life.

The word has become heavy for me, and it barely wrestles itself free of the soul. Bronze doors have shut, fires have burned out and sunk into ashes. Wells have been drained and where there were seas there is dry land. My tower stands in the desert. Happy is he who can be a hermit in his own desert. He survives.

***

Not the power of the flesh, but of love, should be broken for the sake of life, since life stands above love. A man needs his mother until his life has developed. Then he separates from her. And so life needs love until it has developed, then it will cut loose from it. The separation of the child from the mother is difficult, but the separation of life from love is harder. Love seeks to have and to hold, but life wants more.

***

The beginning of all things is love, but the being of things is life. [340] This distinction is terrible. Why, Oh spirit of the darkest depths, do you force me to say that whoever loves does not live and whoever lives does not love? I always get it backward! Should everything be turned into its opposite? [341] Will there be a sea where 's temple stands? Will his shady island sink into the deepest ground? Into the whirlpool of the withdrawing flood that earlier swallowed all peoples and lands? Will the bottom of the sea be where Ararat arises? [342]

What repulsive words do you mutter, you mute son of the earth? You want to sever my soul's embrace? You, my son, do you thrust yourself between? Who are you? And who gives you the power? Everything that I strove for, everything I wrested from myself, do you want to reverse it again and destroy it? You are the son of the devil, to whom everything holy is inimical. You grow overpowering. You frighten me. Let me be happy in the embrace of my soul and do not disturb the peace of the temple.

Off with you, you pierce me with paralyzing force. For I do not want your way. Should I languidly fall at your feet? You devil and son of the devil, speak! Your silence is unbearable, and of awful stupidity.

I won my soul, and to what did she give birth for me? You, monster, a son, ha! -- a frightful miscreant, a stammerer, a newt's brain, a primordial lizard! You want to be king of the earth? You want to banish proud free men, bewitch beautiful women, break up castles, rip open the belly of old cathedrals? Dumb thing, a lazy bug-eyed frog that wears pond weed on his skull's pate! And you want to call yourself my son? You're no son of mine, but the spawn of the devil. The father of the devil entered into the womb of my soul and in you has become flesh.

I recognize you, , you most cunning of all fraudsters! You have deceived me. You impregnated my maidenly soul with the terrible worm. , damned charlatan, you aped the mysteries for me, you lay the mantle of the stars on me, you played a Christ-fool's comedy with me, you hanged me, carefully and ludicrously, in the tree just like Odin, [343] you let me devise runes to enchant Salome -- and meanwhile you procreated my soul with the worm, spew of the dust. Deception upon deception! Terrible devil trickery!

You gave me the force of magic, you crowned me, you clad me with the shimmer of power, that let me play a would-be Joseph father to your son. You lodged a puny basilisk in the nest of the dove.

My soul, you adulterous whore, you became pregnant with this bastard! I am dishonored; I, laughable father of the Antichrist! How I mistrusted you! And how poor was my mistrust, that it could not gauge the magnitude of this infamous act!

What do you break apart? You broke love and life in twain. From this ghastly sundering, the frog and the son of the frog come forth. Ridiculous -- disgusting sight! Irresistible advent! They will sit on the banks of the sweet water and listen to the nocturnal song of the frogs, since their God has been born as a son of frogs.

***

Where is Salome? Where is the unresolvable question of love? No more questions, my gaze turned to the coming things, and Salome is where I am. The woman follows your strongest, not you. Thus she bears you your children, in both a good and a bad way.

***

{7}[I] As I stood so alone on the earth, which was covered by rain clouds and falling night, my serpent [344] crept up to me and told me a story:

***

"Once upon a time there was a king and he had no children. But he would have liked to have a son. So he went to a wise woman who lived as a witch in the forest and confessed all his sins, as if she were a priest appointed by God. To this she said: 'Dear King, you have done what you should not have done. But since it has come to pass, it has come to pass, and we will have to see how you can do it better in the future. Take a pound of otter lard, bury it in the earth, and let nine months pass. Then dig up that place again and see what you find.' So the king went to his house, ashamed and saddened, because he had humiliated himself before the witch in the forest. Yet he listened to her advice, dug a hole in the garden at night, and placed a pot of otter lard in it, which he had obtained with some difficulty. Then he let nine months go by.

''After this time had passed he went again by night to the place where the pot lay buried and dug it up. To his great astonishment, he found a sleeping infant in the pot, though the lard had disappeared. He took out the infant and jubilantly brought it to his wife. She took it immediately to her breast and behold -- her milk flowed freely. And so the child thrived and became great and strong. He grew into a man who was greater and stronger than all others. When the king's son was twenty years old, he came before his father and said: 'I know that you have produced me through sorcery and that I was not born as one of men. You have made me from the repentance of your sins and this has made me strong. I am born from no woman, which makes me clever. I am strong and clever and therefore I demand the crown of the realm from you.' The old king was startled at his son's knowledge, but even more by his impetuous longing for regal power. He remained silent and thought: 'What has produced you? Otter lard. Who bore you? The womb of the earth. I drew you from a pot, a witch humiliated me.' And he decided to let his son be killed secretly.

"But because his son was stronger than others, he feared him and therefore he wanted to take refuge in a trick. He went again to the sorceress in the forest and asked her for advice. She said: 'Dear King, you confess no sin to me this time, because you want to commit a sin. I advise you to bury another pot with otter's lard and leave it to lie in the earth for nine months. Then dig it out again and see what has happened.' The king did what the sorceress advised him. And thenceforth his son became weaker and weaker, and when the king returned to the place where the pot lay after nine months, he could dig his son's grave at the same time. He lay the dead one in the fosse beside the empty pot.

"But the king was saddened, and when he could no longer master his melancholy, he returned yet again to the sorceress one night and asked her for advice. She spoke to him: 'Dear King, you wanted a son, but the son wanted to be king himself and also had the power and cleverness for it, and then you wanted your son no more. Because of this you lost your son. Why are you complaining? You have everything, dear King, that you wanted.' But the king said: 'You are right. I wanted it so. But I did not want this melancholy. Do you have any remedies against remorse?' The sorceress spoke: 'Dear King, go to your son's grave, fill the pot again with otter's lard, and after nine months see what you find in the pot.' The king did this, as he had been commanded, and henceforth he became happy and did not know why.

"When the nine months had passed, he dug out the pot again; the body had disappeared, but in the pot there lay a sleeping infant, and he realized that the infant was his dead son. He took the infant to himself, and henceforth he grew as much in a week as other infants grow in a year. And when twenty weeks had passed, the son came before the father again and claimed his realm. But the father had learned from experience and already knew for a long time how everything would turn out. After the son had voiced his demand, the old king got up from his throne and embraced his son with tears of joy and crowned him king. And so the son, who had thus become king, was grateful to his father and held him in high esteem, as long as his father was granted life."

***

But I spoke to my serpent: "In truth, my serpent, I didn't know that you are also a teller of fairy tales. So tell me, how should I interpret your fairy tale?"

Se: "Imagine that you are the old king and have a son."

I: "Who is the son?"

Se: "Well, I thought that you had just spoken of a son who doesn't make you very happy."

I: "What? You don't mean -- that I should crown him?"

Se: "Yes, who else?"

I: "That's uncanny. But what about the sorceress?"

Se: "The sorceress is a motherly woman whose son you should be, since you are a child renewing himself in you."

I: "Oh no, will it be impossible for me to be a man?"

Se: "Sufficient manhood, and beyond that fullness of childhood. Which is why you need the mother."

I: ''I'm ashamed to be a child."

Se: ''And thus you kill your son. A creator needs the mother, since you are not a woman."

I: "This is a terrible truth. I thought and hoped that I could be a man in every way."

Se: "You cannot do this for the sake of the son. To create means: mother and child."

I: "The thought that I must remain a child is unbearable."

Se: "For the sake of your son you must be a child and leave him the crown."

I: "The thought that I must remain a child is humiliating and shattering."

Se: ''A salutary antidote against power! [345] Don't resist being a child, otherwise you resist your son, [346] whom you want above all."

I: "It's true, I want the son and survival. But the price for this is high."

Se: "The son stands higher. You are smaller and weaker than the son. That is a bitter truth, but it can't be avoided. Don't be defiant, children must be well-behaved."

I: "Damned scorn!"

Se: "Man of mockery! I'll have patience with you. My wells should flow for you and pour forth the drink of salvation, if all lands parch with thirst and everyone comes to you begging for the water of life. So subject yourself to the son."

I: "Where am I going to take hold of the immeasurable? My knowledge and ability are poor, my power is not enough."

At which the serpent curled up, gathered herself into knots and said: "Do not ask after the morrow, sufficient unto you is the day. You need not worry about the means. Let everything grow, let everything sprout; the son grows out of himself."

***

[2] The myth commences, the one that need only be lived, not sung, the one that sings itself. I subject myself to the son, the one engendered by sorcery, the unnaturally born, the son of the frogs, who stands at the waterside and speaks with his fathers and listens to their nocturnal singing. Truly he is full of mysteries and superior in strength to all men. No man has produced him, and no woman has given birth to him.

The absurd has entered the age-old mother, and the son has grown in the deepest ground. He sprang up and was put to death. He rose again, was produced anew in the way of sorcery, and grew more swiftly than before. I gave him the crown that unites the separated. And so he unites the separated for me. I gave him the power and thus he commands, since he is superior in strength and cleverness to all others.

I did not give way to him willingly, but out of insight. No man binds Above and Below together. But he who did not grow like a man, and yet has the form of a man, is capable of binding them. My power is paralyzed, but I survive in my son. I set aside my concern that he may master the people. I am solitary, the people rejoice at him. I was powerful, now I am powerless. I was strong, now I am weak. Since then he has taken all the strength into himself. Everything has turned itself upside down for me.

I loved the beauty of the beautiful, the spirit of those rich in spirit, the strength of the strong; I laughed at the stupidity of the stupid, I despised the weakness of the weak, the meanness of the mean, and hated the badness of the bad. But now I must love the beauty of the ugly, the spirit of the foolish, and the strength of the weak. I must admire the stupidity of the clever, must respect the weakness of the strong and the meanness of the generous, and honor the goodness of the bad. Where does that leave mockery, contempt, and hatred?

They went over to the son as a token of power. His mockery is bloody, and how contemptuously his eyes flash! His hatred is a singing fire! Enviable one, you son of the Gods, how can one fail to obey you? He broke me in two, he cut me up. He yokes the separated. Without him I would fall apart, but my life went on with him. My love remained with me.

***

Thus I entered solitude with a black look on my face, full of resentment and outrage at my son's dominion. How could my son arrogate my power? I went into my gardens and sat down in a lonely spot on rocks by the water, and brooded darkly. I called the serpent, my nocturnal companion, who lay with me on the rocks through many twilights, imparting her serpent wisdom. But then my son emerged from the water, great and powerful, the crown on his head, with a swirling lion's mane, shimmering serpent skin covering his body; he said to me: [347]

{8} [1] "I come to you and demand your life."

I: "What do you mean? Have you even become a God?" [348]

He: "I rise again, I had become flesh, now I return to eternal glitter and shimmer, to the eternal embers of the sun, and leave you your earthliness. You will remain with men. You have been in immortal company long enough. Your work belongs to the earth."

I: "What a speech! Weren't you wallowing in the earth and the underearth?"

He: "I had become man and beast, and now ascend again to my own country."

I: "Where is your country?"

He: "In the light, in the egg, in the sun, in what is innermost and compressed, in the eternal longing embers. So rises the sun in your heart and streams out into the cold world."

I: "How you transfigure yourself!"

He: "I want to vanish from your sight. You ought to live in darkest solitude, men -- not Gods -- should illumine your darkness."

I: "How hard and solemn you are! I'd like to bathe your feet with my tears, dry them with my hair -- I'm raving, am I a woman?"

He: ''Also a woman, also a mother, pregnant. Giving birth awaits you."

I: "Oh holy spirit, grant me a spark of your eternal light!"

He: "You are with child."

I: "I feel the torment and the fear and the desolation of pregnant woman. Do you go from me, my God?"

He: "You have the child."

I: "My soul, do you still exist? You serpent, you frog, you magically produced boy whom my hands buried; you ridiculed, despised, hated one who appeared to me in a foolish form? Woe betide those who have seen their soul and felt it with hands. I am powerless in your hand, my God!"

He: "The pregnant woman belongs to fate. Release me, I rise to the eternal realm."

I: "Will I never hear your voice again? Oh damned deception! What am I asking? You'll talk to me again tomorrow, you'll chat over and over in the mirror."

He: "Do not rail. I will be present and not present. You will hear and not hear me. I will be and not be."

I: "You utter gruesome riddles."

He: "Such is my language and to you I leave the understanding. No one besides you has your God. He is always with you, yet you see him in others, and thus he is never with you. You strive to draw to yourself those who seem to possess your God. You will come to see that they do not possess him, and that you alone have him. Thus you are alone among men -- in the crowd and yet alone. Solitude in multitude -- ponder this."

I: "I suppose I ought to remain silent after what you have said, but I cannot; my heart bleeds when I see you go from me."

He: "Let me go. I shall return to you in renewed form. Do you see the sun, how it sinks red into the mountains? This day's work is accomplished, and a new sun returns. Why are you mourning the sun of today?"

I: "Must night fall?"

He: "Is it not mother of the day?"

I: "Because of this night I want to despair."

He: "Why lament? It is fate. Let me go, my wings grow and the longing toward eternal light swells up powerfully in me. You can no longer stop me. Stop your tears and let me ascend with cries of joy You are a man of the fields, think of your crops. I become light, like the bird that rises up into the skies of morning. Do not stop me, do not complain; already I hover, the cry of life escapes from me. I can no longer hold back my supreme pleasure. I must go up -- it has happened, the last cord tears away, my wings bear me up. I dive up into the sea of light. You who are down there, you distant, twilight being -- you fade from me."

I: "Where have you gone? Something has happened. I am lamed. Has the God not left my sight?"

***

Where is the God?

What has happened?

How empty, how utterly empty! Should I proclaim to men how you vanished? Should I preach the gospel of godforsaken solitude?

Should we all go into the desert and strew ashes on our heads, since the God has left us?

I believe and accept that the God [349] is something different from me.

He swung high with jubilant joy.

I remain in the night of pain.

No longer with the God, [350] but alone with myself.

***

Now shut, you bronze doors I opened to the flood of devastation and murder brooding over the peoples, opened so as to midwife the God.

Shut, may mountains bury you and seas flow over you. [351]

***

I came to my self, [352] a giddy and pitiful figure. My I! I didn't want this fellow as my companion. I found myself with him. I'd prefer a bad woman or a wayward hound, but one's own I -- this horrifies me.

[353] An opus is needed, that one can squander decades on, and do it out of necessity. I must catch up with a piece of the Middle Ages -- within myself. We have only finished the Middle Ages of -- others. I must begin early, in that period when the hermits died out. [354] Asceticism, inquisition, torture are close at hand and impose themselves. The barbarian requires barbaric means of education. My I, you are a barbarian. I want to live with you, therefore I will carry you through an utterly medieval Hell, until you are capable of making living with you bearable. You should be the vessel and womb of life, therefore I shall purify you.

The touchstone is being alone with oneself.

This is the way. [355]