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

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Chapter 1: The Red One [4]

Cap. i.

[HI 2] [5] The door of the Mysterium has closed behind me. I feel that my will is paralyzed and that the spirit of the depths possesses me. I know nothing about a way. I can therefore neither want this nor that, since nothing indicates to me whether I want this or that. I wait, without knowing what I'm waiting for. But already in the following night I felt that I had reached a solid point. [6]

[7] I find that I am standing on the highest tower of a castle. The air tells me so: I am far back in time. My gaze wanders widely over solitary countryside, a combination of fields and forests. I am wearing a green garment. A horn hangs from my shoulder. I am the tower guard. I look out into the distance. I see a red point out there. It comes nearer on a winding road, disappearing for a while in forests and reappearing again: it is a horseman in a red coat, the red horseman. He is coming to my castle: he is already riding through the gate. I hear steps on the stairway, the steps creak, he knocks: a strange fear comes over me: there stands the Red One, his long shape wholly shrouded in red, even his hair is red. I think: in the end he will turn out to be the devil.

***

The Red One: "I greet you, man on the high tower. I saw you from afar, looking and waiting. Your waiting has called me."

I: "Who are you?"

T. R.: "Who am I? You think I am the devil. Do not pass judgment. Perhaps you can also talk to me without knowing who I am. What sort of a superstitious fellow are you, that immediately you think of the devil?"

I: "If you have no supernatural ability, how could you feel that I stood waiting on my tower, looking out for the unknown and the new? My life in the castle is poor, since I always sit here and no one climbs up to me."

T. R.: "So what are you waiting for?"

I: "I await all kinds of things, and especially I'm waiting for some of the world's wealth, which we don't see here, to come to me."

T.R.: "So, I have come to absolutely the right place. I have wandered a long time through the world, seeking those like you who sit upon a high tower on the lookout for things unseen."

I: "You make me curious. You seem to be a rare breed. Your appearance is not ordinary, and then too -- forgive me -- it seems to me that you bring with you a strange air, something worldly, something impudent, or exuberant, or -- in fact -- something pagan."

T.R.: "You don't offend me, on the contrary, you hit your nail on the head. But I'm no old pagan as you seem to think."

I: "I don't want to insist on that. You are also not pompous and Latin enough. You have nothing classical about you. You seem to be a son of our time, but as I must remark, a rather unusual one. You're no real pagan, but the kind of pagan who runs alongside our Christian religion."

T.R.: "You're truly a good diviner of riddles. You're doing better than many others who have totally mistaken me."

I: "You sound cool and sneering. Have you never broken your heart over the holiest mysteries of our Christian religion?"

T.R.: "You're an unbelievably ponderous and serious person. Are you always so urgent?"

I: "I would before God always like to be as serious and true to myself as I try to be. However, that certainly becomes difficult in your presence. You bring a certain gallows air with you, and you're bound to be from the black school of Salerno, [8] where pernicious arts are taught by pagans and the descendants of pagans."

T.R.: "You're superstitious and too German. You take literally what the scriptures say, otherwise you could not judge me so hard."

/ [2/3] I: "A hard judgment is the last thing I would want. But my nose does not play tricks on me. You're evasive, and don't want to reveal yourself. What are you hiding?"

(The Red One seems to get redder, his garments shine like glowing iron.)

T. R.: "I hide nothing from you, you true-hearted soul. I simply amuse myself with your weighty seriousness and your comic veracity. This is so rare in our time, especially in men who have understanding at their disposal."

I: "I believe you cannot fully understand me. You apparently compare me with those whom you know. But I must say to you for the sake of truth that I neither really belong to this time nor to this place. A spell has banished me to this place and time for years. I am really not what you see before you."

T. R.: "You say astounding things. Who are you then?"

I: "That is irrelevant. I stand before you as that which I presently am. Why am I here and like this, I do not know. But I do know that I must be here to justify myself according to my best knowledge. I know just as little who you are, as you know who I am."

T.R.: "That sounds very strange. Are you something of a saint? Hardly a philosopher, since you have no aptitude for scholarly language. But a saint? Surely that. Your solemnity smells of fanaticism. You have an ethical air and a simplicity that smacks of stale bread and water."

I: "I can say neither yes nor no: you speak as one trapped in the spirit of this time. It seems to me that you lack the terms of comparison."

T.R.: "Perhaps you attended the school of the pagans? You answer like a sophist. [9] How can you then measure me with the yardstick of the Christian religion, if you are no saint?"

I: "It seems to me, though, that one can apply this yardstick even if one is no saint. I believe I have learned that no one is allowed to avoid the mysteries of the Christian religion unpunished. I repeat: he whose heart has not been broken over the Lord Jesus Christ drags a pagan around in himself who holds him back from the best."

T.R.: "Again this old tune? What for, if you are not a Christian saint? Are you not a damned sophist after all?"

I: "You are ensnared in your own world. But you certainly seem to think that one can assess the worth of Christianity correctly without being a downright saint."

T.R.: "Are you a doctor of theology, who examines Christianity from the outside and appreciates it historically, and therefore a sophist after all?"

I: "You're stubborn. What I mean is that it's hardly a coincidence that the whole world has become Christian. I also believe that it was the task of Western man to carry Christ in his heart and to grow with his suffering, death, and resurrection."

T.R.: "Well, there are also Jews who are good people and yet had no need for your solemn gospels."

I: "You are, it seems to me, no good reader of people: have you never noticed that the Jew himself lacks something -- one in his head, another in his heart, and he himself feels that he lacks something?"

T.R.: "Indeed I'm no Jew, but I must come to the Jew's defense: you seem to be a Jew hater."

I: "Well, now you speak like all those Jews who accuse anyone of Jew hating who does not have a completely favorable judgment, while they themselves make the bloodiest jokes about their own kind. Since the Jews only too clearly feel that particular lack and yet do not want to admit it, they are extremely sensitive to criticism. Do you believe that Christianity left no mark on the souls of men? And do you believe that one who has not experienced this most intimately can still partake of its fruit?" [10]

T. R.: "You argue your case well. But your solemnity?! You could make matters much easier for yourself. If you're no saint, I really don't see why you have to be so solemn. You wholly spoil the fun. What the devil is troubling you? Only Christianity with its mournful escape from the world can make people / [3/4] so ponderous and sullen."

I: "I think there are still other things that bespeak seriousness."

T. R.: "Oh, I know, you mean life. I know this phrase. I too live and don't let my hair turn white over it. Life doesn't require any seriousness. On the contrary, it's better to dance through life." [11]

I: "I know how to dance. Yes, would we could do it by dancing! Dancing goes with the mating season. I know that there are those who are always in heat, and those who also want to dance for their Gods. Some are ridiculous and others enact Antiquity, instead of honestly admitting their utter incapacity for such expression."

T.R.: "Here, my dear fellow, I doff my mask. Now I grow somewhat more serious, since this concerns my own province. It's conceivable that there is some third thing for which dancing would be the symbol."

***

The red of the rider transforms itself into a tender reddish flesh color. And behold -- Oh miracle -- my green garments everywhere burst into leaf.

***

I: "Perhaps too there is a joy before God that one can call dancing. But I haven't yet found this joy. I look out for things that are yet to come. Things came, but joy was not among them."

T. R.: "Don't you recognize me, brother, I am joy!"

I: "Could you be joy? I see you as through a cloud. Your image fades. Let me take your hand, beloved, who are you, who are you?" Joy? Was he joy?

***

[2] Surely this red one was the devil, but my devil. That is, he was my joy, the joy of the serious person, who keeps watch alone on the high tower -- his red-colored, red-scented, warm bright red joy. [12] Not the secret joy in his thoughts and in his looking, but that strange joy of the world that comes unsuspected like a warm southerly wind with swelling fragrant blossoms and the ease of living. You know it from your poets, this seriousness, when they expectantly look toward what happens in the depths, sought out first of all by the devil because of their springlike joy. [13] It picks up men like a wave and drives them forth. Whoever tastes this joy forgets himself. [14] And there is nothing sweeter than forgetting oneself. And not a few have forgotten what they are. But even more have taken root so firmly that not even the rosy wave is able to uproot them. They are petrified and too heavy, while the others are too light.

I earnestly confronted my devil and behaved with him as with a real person. This I learned in the Mysterium: to take seriously every unknown wanderer who personally inhabits the inner world, since they are real because they are effectual. [15] It does not help that we say in the spirit of this time: there is no devil. There was one with me. This took place in me. I did with him what I could. I could speak with him. A religious conversation is inevitable with the devil, since he demands it, if one does not want to surrender to him unconditionally. Because religion is precisely what the devil and I cannot agree about. I must have it out with him, as I cannot expect that he as an independent personality would accept my standpoint without further ado.

THE DEVIL. What is the use of knowing?

DON JUAN. Why, to be able to choose the line of greatest advantage instead of yielding in the direction of the least resistance. Does a ship sail to its destination no better than a log drifts nowhither? The philosopher is Nature's pilot. And there you have our difference: to be in hell is to drift: to be in heaven is to steer....

THE DEVIL. Well, well, go your way, Senor Don Juan. I prefer to be my own master and not the tool of any blundering universal force. I know that beauty is good to look at; that music is good to hear; that love is good to feel; and that they are all good to think about and talk about. I know that to be well exercised in these sensations, emotions, and studies is to be a refined and cultivated being. Whatever they may say of me in churches on earth, I know that it is universally admitted in good society that the prince of Darkness is a gentleman; and that is enough for me. As to your Life Force, which you think irresistible, it is the most resistible thing in the world for a person of any character. But if you are naturally vulgar and credulous, as all reformers are, it will thrust you first into religion, where you will sprinkle water on babies to save their souls from me; then it will drive you from religion into science, where you will snatch the babies from the water sprinkling and inoculate them with disease to save them from catching it accidentally; then you will take to politics, where you will become the catspaw of corrupt functionaries and the henchman of ambitious humbugs; and the end will be despair and decrepitude, broken nerve and shattered hopes, vain regrets for that worst and silliest of wastes and sacrifices, the waste and sacrifice of the power of enjoyment: in a word, the punishment of the fool who pursues the better before he has secured the good.

DON JUAN. But at least I shall not be bored. The service of the Life Force has that advantage, at all events. So fare you well, Senor Satan....

THE DEVIL. [gloomily] His going is a political defeat. I cannot keep these Life Worshippers: they all go....There is something unnatural about these fellows. Do not listen to their gospel, Senor Commander: it is dangerous. Beware of the pursuit of the Superhuman: it leads to an indiscriminate contempt for the Human. To a man, horses and dogs and cats are mere species, outside the moral world. Well, to the Superman, men and women are a mere species too, also outside the moral world. This Don Juan was kind to women and courteous to men as your daughter here was kind to her pet cats and dogs; but such kindness is a denial of the exclusively human character of the soul.

THE STATUE. And who the deuce is the Superman?

THE DEVIL. Oh, the latest fashion among the Life Force fanatics. Did you not meet in Heaven, among the new arrivals, that German Polish madman—what was his name? Nietzsche?

-- Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy, by Bernard Shaw

I would be fleeing if I did not try to come to an understanding with him. If ever you have the rare opportunity to speak with the devil, then do not forget to confront him in all seriousness. He is your devil after all. The devil as the adversary is your own other standpoint; he tempts you and sets a stone in your path where you least want it.

Taking the devil seriously does not mean going over to his side, or else one becomes the devil. Rather it means coming to an understanding. Thereby you accept your other standpoint. With that the devil fundamentally loses ground, and so do you. And that may be well and good.

Although the devil very much abhors religion for its particular solemnity and candor, it has become apparent, however, that it is precisely through religion that the devil can be brought to an understanding. What I said about dancing struck him because I spoke about something that belonged in his own domain. He fails to take seriously only what concerns others because that is the peculiarity of all devils. In such a manner, I arrive at his seriousness, and with this we reach common / [4/5] ground where understanding is possible. The devil is convinced that dancing is neither lust nor madness, but an expression of joy, which is something proper to neither one nor the other. In this I agree with the devil. Therefore he humanizes himself before my eyes. But I turn green like a tree in spring.

Yet that joy is the devil, or that the devil is joy, has got to worry you. I pondered this for over a week, and I fear that it has not been enough. You dispute the fact that your joy is your devil. But it seems as if there is always something devilish about joy. If your joy is no devil for you, then possibly it is for your neighbors, since joy is the most supreme flowering and greening of life. This knocks you down, and you must grope for a new path, since the light in that joyful fire has completely gone out for you. Or your joy tears your neighbor away and throws him off course, since life is like a great fire that torches everything in its vicinity. But fire is the element of the devil.

When I saw that the devil is joy, surely I would have wanted to make a pact with him. But you can make no pact with joy, because it immediately disappears. Therefore you cannot capture the devil either. Yes, it belongs to his essence that he cannot be captured. He is stupid if he lets himself be caught, and you gain nothing from having yet one more stupid devil. The devil always seeks to saw off the branch on which you sit. That is useful and protects you from falling asleep and from the vices that go along with it.

The devil is an evil element. But joy? If you run after it, you see that joy also has evil in it, since then you arrive at pleasure and from pleasure go straight to Hell, your own particular Hell, which turns out differently for everyone. [16]

Through my coming to terms with the devil, he accepted some of my seriousness, and I accepted some of his joy. This gave me courage. But if the devil has gotten more earnest, one must brace oneself. [17] It is always a risky thing to accept joy, but it leads us to life and its disappointment, from which the wholeness of our life becomes. [18]

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Chapter 2: The Castle in the Forest [19]

Cap. ii.

[HI 5] [20] In the second night thereafter, I am walking alone in a dark forest and I notice that I have lost my way. [21] I am on a dark cart track and stumble through the darkness. I finally come to quiet, dark swamp water, and a small old castle stands at its center. I think it would be good to ask here for the night's lodgings. I knock on the door, I wait a long time, it begins to rain. I have to knock again. Now I hear someone coming: the door opens. A man in an old fashioned garment, a servant, asks what I want. I ask about lodgings for the night, and he lets me enter a dark vestibule. Then he leads me up an old, worn-out stairway. At the top I come to a wider and higher hall-like space with white walls, lined with black chests and wardrobes.

I am led into a kind of reception room. It is a simple space with old upholstered furniture. The dim light of an antiquated lamp lights the room only very meagerly. The servant knocks on a side door and then quietly opens it. I scan it swiftly: it's a scholar's study, with bookshelves on all four walls and a large writing desk, at which an old man sits wearing a long black robe. He beckons me to draw closer. The air in the room is heavy and the old man seems careworn. He is not without dignity -- he seems to be one of those who have as much dignity as one can be granted. He has that modest-fearful look of scholarly men who have long since been squashed to nothing by the abundance of knowledge. I think that he is a real / [5/6] scholar who has learned great modesty before the immensity of knowledge and has given himself tirelessly to the material of science and research, anxiously and equably appraising, as if he personally had to represent the working out of scientific truth.

He greets me embarrassed, as if absent and defensive. I do not wonder about this since I look like an ordinary person. Only with difficulty can he turn his gaze away from his work. I repeat my request for lodgings for the night. After a longer pause the old man remarks, "So, you want to sleep, then please yourself." I notice that he is absentminded, and therefore ask him to instruct the servant to show me a chamber. To this he says, "You are demanding, wait, I cannot just drop everything!" He sinks again into his book. I wait patiently. After a while he looks up astonished: "What do you want here? Oh -- forgive me -- I totally forgot that you are waiting here. I'll call the servant straightaway." The servant comes and leads me to a small chamber on the same floor with bare white walls and a large bed. He wishes me good night and withdraws.

As I am tired, I undress immediately and go to bed, after I have snuffed out the candle. The sheet is uncommonly rough and the pillow hard. My errant way has led me to a strange place: a small old castle whose scholarly owner is apparently spending the evening of his life alone with his books. No one else seems to be living in the house apart from the servant who lives over there in the tower. An ideal though solitary existence, I think, this life of the old man with his books. And here my thoughts linger for a long time, until I finally notice that another thought doesn't let go of me, namely that the old man has hidden his beautiful daughter here -- a vulgar idea for a novel -- an insipid, worn-out theme -- but the romantic can be felt in every limb -- a real novelistic idea -- a castle in a forest -- solitary night -- an old man petrified in his books, protecting a costly treasure and enviously hiding it from all the world -- what ridiculous thoughts come to me! Is it Hell or purgatory that I must also contrive such childish dreams on my wanderings? But I feel impotent to elevate my thoughts to something a bit stronger or more beautiful. I suppose I must allow these thoughts to come. What good would it do to push them away -- they will come again -- better to swallow this stale drink than keep it in the mouth. So what does this boring heroine look like? Surely blonde, pale -- blue eyes -- hoping longingly that every lost wanderer is her savior from the paternal prison -- Oh, I know this hackneyed nonsense -- I'd rather sleep -- why the devil must I plague myself with such empty fantasies?

Sleep does not come. I toss and turn -- sleep still does not come -- must I finally harbor this unsaved soul in myself? And is it this that will not let me sleep? Have I such a novelistic soul? That's all I needed -- this would be agonizingly ridiculous. Does this bitterest of all drinks never end? It must already be midnight -- and still sleep does not come. What in the wide world, then, won't let me sleep? Is it something to do with this chamber? Is the bed bewitched? It's terrible, what sleeplessness can drive a man to -- even the most absurd and superstitious theories. It seems to be cool, I'm freezing -- perhaps that's what keeps me from sleeping -- it's really uncanny here -- Heaven knows what goes on here -- weren't those steps just now? No, that must have been outside -- I roll over, firmly closing my eyes, I simply must sleep. Wasn't that the door just now? My God, someone is standing there! Am I seeing straight? -- a slim girl, pale as death, standing at the door? For Heaven's sake, what is this? She's coming nearer!

"Have you come at last?" she asks quietly. Impossible -- this is a cruel mistake -- the novel wants to become real -- does it want to grow into some silly ghost story? To what nonsense am I damned? Is it my soul that harbors such novelistic brilliance? Must this, too, happen to me? I am truly in Hell -- the worst awakening after death, to be resurrected in a lending library! Have I held the men of my time and their taste in such contempt that I must live in Hell and write out the novels that I have already spat on long ago? Does the lower half of average human taste also claim holiness and invulnerability, so that we might not say any bad word / [6/7] about it without having to atone for the sin in Hell?

She says, "Oh, so you too think me common? Do you too let yourself be deluded by the wretched delusion that I belong in a novel? You as well, whom I hoped had thrown off appearances and striven after the essence of things?"

I: "Forgive me, but are you real? It's the sorriest likeness to those foolishly threadbare scenes in novels for me to assume that you are not simply some unfortunate product of my sleepless brain. Is my doubt then truly confirmed by a situation that conforms so thoroughly with a sentimental romance?"

She: "You wretch, how can you doubt that I am real?"

She falls to her knees at the foot of my bed, sobbing and holding her face in her hands. My God, in the end is she really real, and do I do her an injustice? My pity awakens.

I: "But for Heaven's sake, tell me one thing: in all earnestness must I assume that you are real?"

She weeps and does not answer.

I: "Who are you, then?"

She: "I am the old man's daughter. He holds me here in unbearable captivity, not out of envy or hate, but out of love, since I am his only child and the image of my mother, who died young."

I scratch my head: is this not some hellish banality? Word for word, pulp fiction from the lending library! Oh you Gods, where have you led me? It's enough to make one laugh, it's enough to make one weep -- to be a beautiful sufferer, a tragic shattered person is difficult, but to become an ape, you beautiful and great ones? To you the banal and eternally ridiculous, the unutterably hackneyed and emptied out, is never set like a gift of Heaven in uplifted praying hands.

But still she lies there, crying -- yet what if she were real? Then she would be worth feeling sorry for, every man would have compassion for her. If she is a decent girl, what must it have cost her to enter into the room of a strange man! And to overcome her shame in this way?

I: "My dear child, I believe you, despite everything, that you are real. What can I do for you?"

She: "Finally, finally a word from a human mouth!"

***

She gets up, her face beaming. She is beautiful. A deep purity rests in her look. She has a beautiful and unworldly soul, one that wants to come into the life of reality, to all reality worthy of pity, to the bath of filth and the well of health. Oh this beauty of the soul! To see it climb down into the underworld of reality -- what a spectacle!

She: "What can you do for me? You have already done much for me. You spoke the redeeming word when you no longer placed the banal between you and me. Know then: I was bewitched by the banal."

I: "Woe is me, you now become very fairy-tale-like."

She: "Be reasonable, dear friend, and do not stumble now over the fabulous, since the fairy tale is the great mother of the novel, and has even more universal validity than the most-avidly read novel of your time. And you know that what has been on everyone's lips for millennia, though repeated endlessly, still comes nearest the ultimate human truth. So do not let the fabulous come between us." [22]

I: "You are clever and do not seem to have inherited the wisdom of your father. But tell me, what do you think of the divinity, of the so-called ultimate truths? I found it very strange to seek them in banality. According to their nature, they must be quite uncommon. Think only of our great philosophers."

She: "The more uncommon these highest truths are, the more inhuman must they be and the less they speak to you as something valuable or meaningful concerning human essence and being. Only what is human and what you call banal and hackneyed / [7/8] contains the wisdom that you seek. The fabulous does not speak against me but for me, and proves how universally human I am and how much I too not only need redemption but also deserve it. For I can live in the world of reality as well or better than many others of my sex."

I: "Strange maiden, you are bewildering -- when I saw your father, I hoped he would invite me to a scholarly conversation. He did not, and I was aggrieved at him because of this, since his distracted slackness hurt my dignity. But with you I find it much better. You give me matters to ponder. You are uncommon."

She: "You are mistaken, I am very common."

I: "I can't believe that. How beautiful and worthy of adoration is the expression of your soul in your eyes. Happy and enviable is the man who will free you."

She: "Do you love me?"

I: "By God, I love you -- but -- unfortunately I am already married."

She: "So -- you see: even banal reality is a redeemer. I thank you, dear friend, and I bring you greetings from Salome."

With these words her shape dissolves into darkness. Dim moonlight penetrates the room. Where she stood something shadowy lies -- it is a profusion of red roses. [23]

***

[2] [24] If no outer adventure happens to you, then no inner adventure happens to you either. The part that you take over from the devil -- joy, that is -- leads you into adventure. In this way you will find your lower as well as your upper limits. It is necessary for you to know your limits. If you do not know them, you run into the artificial barriers of your imagination and the expectations of your fellow men. But your life will not take kindly to being hemmed in by artificial barriers. life wants to jump over such barriers and you will fall out with yourself. These barriers are not your real limits, but arbitrary limitations that do unnecessary violence to you. Therefore try to find your real limits. One never knows them in advance, but one sees and understands them only when one reaches them. And this happens to you only if you have balance. Without balance you transgress your limits without noticing what has happened to you. You achieve balance, however, only if you nurture your opposite. But that is hateful to you in your innermost core, because it is not heroic.

My spirit reflected on everything rare and uncommon, it pried its way into unfound possibilities, toward paths that lead into the hidden, toward lights that shine in the night. And as my spirit did this, everything ordinary in me suffered harm without my noticing it, and it began to hanker after life, since I did not live it. Hence this adventure. I was smitten by the romantic. The romantic is a step backward. To reach the way, one must sometimes also take a few steps backward. [25]

In the adventure I experienced what I had witnessed in the Mysterium. What I saw there as Salome and Elijah became in life the old scholar and his pale, locked-up daughter. What I live is a distorted likeness of the Mysterium. Following the romantic way I reached the awkwardness and ordinariness of life, where I run out of thoughts and almost forget myself. What I formerly loved I must now experience as feeble and wasted, and what I formerly derided I had to envy as towering and helplessly crave. I accepted the absurdity of this adventure. No sooner had this happened than I also saw how the maiden transformed herself and signified an autonomous meaning. One inquires into the desire of the ridiculous, and that is enough for it to change.

What about masculinity? Do you know how much femininity man lacks for completeness? Do you know how much masculinity woman lacks for completeness? You seek the feminine in women and the masculine in men. And thus there are always only men and women. But where are people? You, man, should not seek the feminine in women, but seek and recognize it in yourself, as you / [8/9] possess it from the beginning. It pleases you, however, to play at manliness, because it travels on a well-worn track. You, woman, should not seek the masculine in men, but assume the masculine in yourself, since you possess it from the beginning. But it amuses you and is easy to play at femininity, consequently man despises you because he despises his femininity. But humankind is masculine and feminine, not just man or woman. You can hardly say of your soul what sex it is. But if you pay close attention, you will see that the most masculine man has a feminine soul, and the most feminine woman has a masculine soul. The more manly you are, the more remote from you is what woman really is, since the feminine in yourself is alien and contemptuous. [26]

If you take a piece of joy from the devil and set off on adventures with it, you accept your pleasure. But pleasure immediately attracts everything you desire, and then you must decide whether your pleasure spoils or enhances you. If you are of the devil, you will grope in blind desire after the manifold, and it will lead you astray. But if you remain with yourself, as a man who is himself and not of the devil, then you will remember your humanity, women per se as a man, but as a human being, that is to say, as if you were of the same sex as her. You will recall your femininity. It may seem to you then as if you were unmanly, stupid, and feminine so to speak. But you must accept the ridiculous, otherwise you will suffer distress, and there will come a time, when you are least observant, when it will suddenly round on you and make you ridiculous. It is bitter for the most masculine man to accept his femininity, since it appears ridiculous to him, powerless and tawdry.

Yes, it seems as if you have lost all virtue, as if you have fallen into debasement. It seems the same way to the woman who accepts her masculinity. [27] Yes, it seems to you like enslavement. You are a slave of what you need in your soul. The most masculine man needs women, and he is consequently their slave. Become a woman yourself, [28] and you will be saved from slavery to woman. You are abandoned without mercy to woman so long as you cannot fend off mockery with all your masculinity. It is good for you once to put on women's clothes: people will laugh at you, but through becoming a woman you attain freedom from women and their tyranny. The acceptance of femininity leads to completion. The same is valid for the woman who accepts her masculinity.

The exclusive Ak-Sar-Ben club, comprised of the leading figures in the Omaha business community, flaunts its bizarre rituals in its own publicity material. A 1967 book on Ak-Sar-Ben by Arvid E. Nelson, Jr., commissioned by the Ak-Sar-Ben Board of Governors, displayed this picture of a 1923 Ak-Sar-Ben festivity, showing male Ak-Sar-Ben members dressed as Egyptian dancing girls.

Two years after the raid on King's credit union, as the legislative Franklin committee's original term drew to a close, an old hand in Nebraska politics reflected on the events of the past 24 months. "The Omaha business community," he said, "the Ak- Sar-Ben crowd, has really closed ranks behind Alan Baer, Andersen and the rest of them. The word has gone out: layoff the Franklin investigation. Most of the Senators are terrified. These guys make and break political careers. They give a lot of campaign money, and many of the Senators get what are generously called 'consulting fees,' or sometimes positions -- no-show jobs, really -- with the big firms up there. That's the way it's done. It's not uncommon for a big company to have more than one Senator on a $50,000 retainer."

Who were "these guys," the Ak-Sar-Ben crowd?

Visit the Omaha Public Library to look up the boards of directors of big Omaha companies, and you will find names that are listed on board after board. Take a few of those -- say, Walter Scott, Jr., chairman and CEO of the construction giant, Peter Kiewit and Sons Corporation; Charles "Mike" Harper, chairman and CEO of the $20 billion per year food conglomerate ConAgra; Michael H. Walsh, CEO of Union Pacific Railroad, a major force in Nebraska for over a hundred years -- and ask the librarian to help find information on these men. The reply will likely be something like what one library staffer told a friend of mine in 1991: "These are businessmen all right, but they are intensely secretive. We have very little on them."

For over a century, the Omaha business community has been organized around the Knights of Ak-Sar-Ben, a quasi-freemasonic social organization, centered on a racetrack and fairgrounds in Omaha. Spell "Nebraska" backwards and you get its name. Founded in 1895, Ak-Sar-Ben functions as a sort of central committee of the corporate elite, and a self-perceived oligarchy for the city.

Every year Ak-Sar-Ben celebrates a ritual coronation of the "King of Ak-Sar-Ben," generally an older corporate executive, and his Queen, generally the younger wife or daughter of another man in the club. The king for 1990 was Mike Harper of ConAgra. Here, and at debutante balls and other affairs organized for the younger generation, the lords and ladies of Ak-Sar-Ben establish their social pecking order. The rituals and "den shows" mimic ceremonies from different lands, real and invented, and always pagan. Past Ak-Sar-Ben festivity themes included: "The Roman Hippodrome," "King Arthur's Wild Goats," "Trouble in the Tropics," and "Hi-Jinx in Hades." Sometimes the men and boys of Ak-Sar-Ben paraded in women's clothing, or dressed as Egyptian goddesses.

Ak-Sar-Ben's clout is so legendary, that Omaha Mayor P.J. Morgan, himself a member of the Ak-Sar-Ben social set, could make political hay by a demagogic attack on it. In 1990, during a squabble with Ak-Sar-Ben over where a new stadium would be constructed, Morgan blustered, "Frankly, I'm just sick and tired of a small handful of people who think that they can control this city and county without regard to feelings, sentiments and desires of the honest, hard-working people who are the real foundation of this city."

Sensitive to this widespread perception, ConAgra's Harper, speaking as chairman of Ak-Sar-Ben's Board of Governors, replied in a special World-Herald column on December 9, 1990, "Ak Knights Don't Control City." Just because the individuals and corporations on Ak-Sar-Ben's board had given over $50 million to various causes over the past 20 years, wrote Harper, ticking off a list of most of the public facilities in Omaha, that did not mean they had clout. I am at a loss to see how contributions to reputable charities can be associated with political power."

Harper's own company flaunted its political power over the city and the state, just a few years ago. According to "Omaha Held Hostage," a May 1989 article in Progressive magazine, ConAgra threatened in 1987, to pull out of Omaha, unless the city granted it a choice piece of free land, sewage, paving and a host of other benefits, which will ultimately total as much as $60 million, for a new corporate headquarters. The city acquiesced. Later the same year, when the Nebraska Legislature was on the verge of removing personal property tax exemptions on purchases of jet airplanes and mainframe computers, Harper put out the word to the legislature: Change the tax bill, or ConAgra leaves Nebraska. The bill was changed.

***

Ak-Sar-Ben has been ruled for decades by its Board of Governors, a roster of sixteen influentials (increased to twenty, in 1990, "to better represent the entire community," according to Mike Harper), most of whom are chief executives of major corporations. In the late 1980s, the board included:

Charles "Mike" Harper, President and CEO, ConAgra
William A. Fitzgerald, President and CEO, Commercial Federal Savings and Loan
Bruce Lauritzen, President, First National Bank of Omaha
David A. Rismiller, Chairman and CEO, FirsTier Financial, Inc.
Walter Scott, Jr., President and CEO, Peter Kiewit &Sons, Inc.
Thomas J. Skutt, Chairman and CEO, Mutual of Omaha
Michael H. Walsh, Chairman, Union Pacific Railroad
Michael Yanney, Chairman and CEO, America First Cos.

These corporations poured millions into the Franklin Credit Union, in the form of deposits and outright contributions. Their executives supported King, in arrangements both informal and formal.

Bill Fitzgerald, Knight of Ak-Sar-Ben and president of Commercial Federal Savings and Loan, helped his friend Larry King with advice. When the jig was up for Franklin and the Consumer Services Organization, King's close associate CSO director Barbara Moore could find employment with Walter Scott's wife, Sue.

Mutual of Omaha placed funds in the credit union, while Thomas Skutt, chief executive of this insurance giant, co-chaired a $1.3 million fundraising drive for Franklin, with Harold Andersen.

The Franklin Credit Union had two boards. The small, governing board included Larry King, Jarrett Webb and James C. Hart, Jr., the secretary, who were named as child abusers by victim-witnesses before the Legislature's Franklin committee. The firms run by the Knights of Ak-Sar-Ben, along with other prestigious Omaha corporations and law firms, showed up on the larger, "Advisory Board."

On the Franklin Community Federal Credit Union Advisory Board were:

Chairman Harold Andersen, publisher, World-Herald
Rep. Hal Daub (R-2nd Congressional District)
N.P. Dodge II, President, N.P. Dodge Real Estate
Lamont Wallin, Kutak, Rock, & Huie law firm
L.B. Thomas, Vice President, ConAgra
Jerome Jamrog, Senior Vice President, Commercial Federal Savings and Loan
Arnold Nesbitt, Senior Assistant Manager, Union Pacific Railroad
David Hinton, Assistant Dean, College of Public Affairs, University of Nebraska, Omaha
Louis Lamberty, County Surveyor
Samuel Marvin, President, R-Lynn, Inc., Council Bluffs, Iowa
Leslie McAuley, Supervisor, Director of Quality Control, Northwest Bell
Donald Miller, Vice President, Omaha National Bank
Carolyn Rothery, Byrne & Randall, P.C., Omaha
Dale Wolforth, Vice President (ret.), Murray State Bank
John S. Zeilinger, attorney, Baird-Holz, Omaha
Michael Albert, President, Albert Food Brokerage
Angelo Amato, General Superintendent Customer Records Department, M.U.D.
David Ambrose, Professor, Department of Marketing, University of Nebraska, Omaha
Joseph Barker III, Massachusetts Mutual Insurance Company
Dana "Woody" Bradford, Bradford, Coenen, & Ashford
Leo Eisenstatt, Erickson, Sederstrom, Leigh, Eisenstatt, Johnson, Kinnamon
James Healy, Administrator of Urban Affairs, Northern Natural Gas

L.B. "Red" Thomas headed up finances for ConAgra, which put funds into Franklin certificates of deposit. Union Pacific, and its executives acting as individuals, poured in money, while Union Pacific officer Arnold Nesbitt sat on the board.

Ak-Sar-Ben interfaced with the Franklin credit union proper, but also with individuals in the orbit of Larry King. One of its biggest financial contributors in recent years was the department store heir and child abuser, Alan Baer. Catering for Ak-Sar-Ben was Gary West, bartender from the Max gay bar.

-- The Franklin Cover-Up -- Child Abuse, Satanism, and Murder in Nebraska, by John W. DeCamp

The feminine in men is bound up with evil. I find it on the way of desire. The masculine in the woman is bound up with evil. Therefore people hate to accept their own other. But if you accept it, that which is connected with the perfection of men comes to pass: namely, that when you become the one who is mocked, the white bird of the soul comes flying. It was far away, but your humiliation attracted it. [29] The mystery draws near to you, and things happen around you like miracles. A gold luster shines, since the sun has risen from its grave. As a man you have no soul, since it is in the woman; as a woman you have no soul, since it is in the man. But if you become a human being, then your soul comes to you.

If you remain within arbitrary and artificially created boundaries, you will walk as between two high walls: you do not see the immensity of the world. But if you break down the walls that confine your view, and if the immensity and its endless uncertainty inspire you with fear, then the ancient sleeper awakens in you, whose messenger is the white bird. Then you need the message of the old tamer of chaos. There in the whirl of chaos dwells eternal wonder. Your world begins to become wonderful. Man belongs not only to an ordered world, he also belongs in the wonder-world of his soul. Consequently you must make your ordered world horrible, so that you are put off by being too much outside yourself.

Your soul is in great need, because drought weighs on its world. If you look outside yourselves, you see the far-off forest and mountains, and above them your vision climbs to the realms of the stars. And if you look into yourselves, you will see on the other hand the nearby as far-off and infinite, since the world of the inner is as infinite as the world of the outer. Just as you become a part of the manifold essence of the world through your bodies, so you become a part of the manifold essence of the inner world through your soul. This inner world is truly infinite, in no way poorer than the outer one. Man lives in two worlds. A fool lives here or there, but never here and there.

[30] Perhaps you think that a man who consecrates his life to research leads a spiritual life and that his soul lives in / [9/10] larger measure than anyone else's. But such a life is also external, just as external as the life of a man who lives for outer things. To be sure, such a scholar does not live for outer things but for outer thoughts -- not for himself, but for his object. If you say of a man that he has totally lost himself to the outer and wasted his years in excess, you must also say the same of this old man. He has thrown himself away in all the books and thoughts of others. Consequently his soul is in great need, it must humiliate itself and run into every stranger's room to beg for the recognition that he fails to give her.

Therefore you see those old scholars running after recognition in a ridiculous and undignified manner. They are offended if their name is not mentioned, cast down if another one says the same thing in a better way, irreconcilable if someone alters theirs views in the least. Go to the meetings of scholars and you will see them, these lamentable old men with their great merits and their starved souls famished for recognition and their thirst which can never be slaked. The soul demands your folly, not your wisdom.

Therefore, because I rise above gendered masculinity and yet do not exceed the human, the feminine that is contemptible to me transforms itself into a meaningful being. This is the most difficult thing -- to be beyond the gendered and yet remain within the human. If you rise above the gendered with the help of a general rule, you become the same as that rule and overreach the human. Therefore you become dry, hard, and inhuman.

You may go past the gendered for human reasons, and never for the sake of a general rule that remains the same in the most diverse situations, and therefore never has a perfect validity for each single situation. If you act from your humanity, you act from that particular situation without general principle, with only what corresponds to the situation. Thus you do justice to the situation, perhaps at the expense of a general rule. That should not be too painful for you, because you are not the rule. There is something else that is human, something all too human, and whoever has ended up there will do well to remember the blessing of the general rule. [31] For the general rule also has meaning and has not been set up for fun. It comprises much venerable work of the human spirit. Such persons are not capable of a general principle above the gendered, but only their imagination is capable of what they have lost. They have become their own imagination and arbitrariness, to their own detriment. They need to remember the gendered, so that they wake from their dreams to reality.

It is as agonizing as a sleepless night to fulfill the beyond from the here and now, namely the other and the opposing in myself. It sneaks up like a fever, like a poisonous fog. And when your senses are excited and stretched to the utmost, the daimonic comes as something so insipid and worn out, so mild and stale, that it makes you sick. Here you would gladly stop feeling across to your beyond. Startled and disgusted, you long for the return of the supernal beauties of your visible world. You spit out and curse everything that lies beyond your lovely world, since you know that it is the disgust, scum, refuse of the human animal who stuffs himself in dark places, creeps along sidewalks, sniffs out every blessed angle, and from the cradle to the grave enjoys only what has already been on everyone's lips.

But here you may not stop -- do not place your disgust between your here-and-now and your beyond. The way to your beyond leads through Hell and in fact through your own wholly particular Hell, whose bottom consists of knee-deep rubble, whose air is the spent breath of millions, whose fires are dwarflike passions, and whose devils are chimerical sign-boards.

Everything odious and disgusting is your own particular Hell. How can it be otherwise? Every other Hell was at least worth seeing or full of fun. But that is never Hell. Your Hell is made up of all the things that you always ejected from your sanctuary with a curse and a kick of the foot. When you step into your own Hell, never think that you come like one suffering in beauty, or as a proud pariah, but you come like a stupid and curious fool and gaze in wonder at the scraps that have fallen from your table. [32] / [10/11]

You really want to rage, but you see at the same time how well rage suits you. Your hellish absurdity stretches for miles. Good for you if you can swear! You will find that profanity is lifesaving. Thus if you go through Hell, you should not forget to give due attention to whatever crosses your path. Quietly look into everything that excites your contempt or rage; thereby you accomplish the miracle that I experienced with the pale maiden. You give soul to the soulless, and thereby it can come to something out of horrible nothingness. Thus you will redeem your other into life. Your values want to draw you away from what you presently are, to get you ahead of and beyond yourself. Your being, however, pulls you to the bottom like lead. You cannot at the same time live both, since both exclude each other. But on the way you can live both. Therefore the way redeems you. You cannot at the same time be on the mountain and in the valley, but your way leads you from mountain to valley and from valley to mountain. Much begins amusingly and leads into the dark. Hell has levels. [33]

[admin]

Chapter 3: One of the Lowly [34]

Cap. iii.

[HI II] In the following night, [35] I found myself wandering once more, in a homely, snow-covered country. A gray evening sky covers the sun. The air is moist and frosty. Someone who does not look trustworthy has joined me. Most notably, he has only one eye and a few scars on his face. He is poor and dirtily clothed, a tramp. He has a black stubble beard that has not seen a razor for a long time. I have a good walking stick for any eventuality. "It's damned cold," he remarks after a while. I agree. After a longer pause he asks: "Where are you going?"

I: ''I'm going to the next village, where I plan to stay overnight."

He: "I'd like to do that too, but will hardly manage to get a bed."

I: "Have you no money? Well, let us see. Are you out of work?"

He: "Yes, times are bad. Until a few days ago, I was working for a locksmith. But then he had no more work. Now I'm traveling and looking for work."

I: "Wouldn't you work for a farmer? There is always a shortage of farm labor."

He: "Working for a farmer doesn't suit me. That means getting up early in the morning -- the work is hard and wages are low."

I: "But it's always much more beautiful in the country than in a town."

He: "It's boring in the country, one meets nobody."

I: "Well, but there are also villagers."

He: "But there is no mental stimulation, the farmers are clods."

I look at him astonished. What, he still wants mental stimulation?

Better that he honestly earn his keep, and when he has done that he can think of stimulation. / [11/12]

I: "But tell me, what kind of mental stimulation is there in the city?"

He: "You can go to the cinema in the evenings. That's great and it's cheap. You get to see everything that happens in the world."

I have to think of Hell, where there are also cinemas for those who despised this institution on earth and did not go there because everyone else found it to their taste.

I: "What interested you most about the cinema?"

He: "One sees all sorts of stunning feats. There was one man who ran up houses. Another carried his head under his arm. Another even stood in the middle of a fire and wasn't burnt. Yes, it's really remarkable, the things that people can do."

And that's what this fellow calls mental stimulation! But wait -- that does seem remarkable: didn't the saints also carry their heads under their arms? [36] Didn't Saint Francis and Saint Ignatius levitate -- and what about the three men in the fiery furnace? [37] Isn't it a blasphemous idea to consider the Acta Sanctorum as historical cinema? [38] Oh, today's miracles are simply somewhat less mythical than technical. I regard my companion with feeling -- he lives the history of the world -- and I?

I: "Certainly, it's very well done. Did you see anything else like this?"

He: "Yes, I saw how the King of Spain was murdered."

I: "But he wasn't murdered at all."

He: "Well, that doesn't matter; in that case it was one of those damned capitalist kings. At least they got one of them. If all of them were taken out, the people would be free."

Not a word more dare I say: Wilhelm Tell, a work by Friedrich Schiller -- the man is standing right in the thick of it, in the stream of heroic story. One who announces the murder of the tyrant to a sleeping people. [39]

We have arrived at the inn, a country tavern -- a reasonably clean parlor -- a few men sit with beer in the corner. I am recognized as a "gentleman" and led into the better corner where a chequered cloth covers the end of a table. The other sits down at the far end of the table, and I decide to have him served a proper evening meal. He is already looking at me full of expectation and hunger -- with his one eye.

I: "Where did you lose your eye?"

He: "In a brawl. But I also got my knife into the other fellow pretty nicely. After that he got three months. They gave me six. But it was beautiful in prison. At the time the building was completely new. I worked in the locksmith's. There wasn't much to do and yet there was enough to eat. Prison really isn't all that bad."

I look around to make sure that no one is listening to me talking with a former convict. But no one seems to have noticed. I seem to have ended up in well-to-do company. Are there also prisons in Hell for those who never saw the inside of one while they were alive? Incidentally -- mustn't it be a peculiarly beautiful feeling to hit bottom in reality at least once, where there is no going down any further, but only upward beckons at best? Where for once one stands before the whole height of reality?

He: "So after that there I was, out on the street, since they banished me. Then I went to France. It was lovely there."

What demands beauty makes! Something can be learned from this man.

I: "Why did you have this brawl?"

He: "It was over a woman. She was carrying his bastard but I wanted to marry her. She was already due. After that she didn't want to anymore. I haven't heard from her."

I: "How old are you now?"

He: "I'll be thirty-five in spring. Once I find a proper job we can get married right off. I'll find myself one, I will. There's something wrong with my lungs, though. But that'll soon get better again."

/ [12/13] He has a coughing fit. I think that the prospects are not good and silently admire the poor devil's unswerving optimism.

After dinner I go to bed in a humble room. I hear how the other settles into his lodging for the night next door. He coughs several times. Then he falls still. Suddenly I awaken again at an uncanny moan and gurgle mixed with a half-stifled cough. I listen tensely -- no doubt, it's him. It sounds like something dangerous. I jump up and throw something on. I open the door of his room. Moonlight floods it. The man lies still dressed on a sack of straw. A dark stream of blood is flowing from his mouth and forming a puddle on the floor. He moans half choking and coughs out blood. He wants to get up but sinks back again -- I hurry to support him but I see that the hand of death lies on him. He is sullied with blood twice over. My hands are covered with it. A rattling sigh escapes from him. Then every stiffness loosens, a gentle shudder passes over his limbs. And then everything is deathly still.

Where am I? Are there also cases of death in Hell for those who have never thought about death? I look at my bloodstained hands -- as if I were a murderer ... Is it not the blood of my brother that sticks to my hands? The moon paints my shadow black on the white walls of the chamber. What am I doing here? Why this horrible drama? I look inquiringly at the moon as a witness. How does this concern the moon? Has it not already seen worse? Has it not shone a hundred thousand times into broken eyes? This is certainly of no avail to its eternal craters -- one more or less. Death? Does it not uncover the terrible deceit of life? Therefore it is probably all the same to the moon, whether and how one passes away Only we kick up a fuss about it -- with what right?

What did this one do? He worked, lazed about, laughed, drank, ate, slept, gave his eye for the woman, and for her sake forfeited his good name; furthermore, he lived the human myth after a fashion, he admired the wonder-workers, praised the death of the tyrant, and vaguely dreamed of the freedom of the people. And then -- then he miserably died -- like everyone else. That is generally valid. I sat down on the floor. What shadows over the earth! All lights gutter out in final despondency and loneliness. Death has entered -- and there is no one left to grieve. This is a final truth and no riddle. What delusion could make us believe in riddles?

***

[2] We stand on the spiky stones of misery and death.

A destitute joins me and wants admittance into my soul, and I am thus not destitute enough. Where was my destitution when I did not live it? I was a player at life, one who thought earnestly about life and lived it easily. The destitute was far away and forgotten. Life had become difficult and murkier. Winter kept on going, and the destitute stood in snow and froze. I join myself with him, since I need him. He makes living light and easy. He leads to the depths, to the ground where I can see the heights. Without the depths, I do not have the heights. I may be on the heights, but precisely because of that I do not become aware of the heights. I therefore need the bottommost for my renewal. If I am always on the heights, I wear them out and the best becomes atrocious to me.

But because I do not want to have it, my best becomes a horror to me. Because of that I myself become a horror, a horror to myself and to others, and a bad spirit of torment. Be respectful and know that your best has become a horror, with that you save yourself and others from useless torment. A man who can no longer climb down from his heights is sick and he brings himself and others to torment. If you have reached your depths, then you see your height light up brightly over you, worthy of desire and far-off, as if unreachable, since secretly you would prefer not to reach it since it seems unattainable to you. For you also love to praise your heights when you are low and to tell yourself that you would have only left them with pain, and that you did not live so long as you missed them. It is a good thing that you have almost become the other nature that makes you speak this way. But at bottom you know that it is not quite true.

At your low point you are no longer distinct from your fellow beings. You are not ashamed and do not regret it, since as you live the life of your fellow beings and descend to their lowliness / [13/14] you also climb into the holy stream of common life, where you are no longer an individual on a high mountain, but a fish among fish, a frog among frogs.

Your heights are your own mountain, which belongs to you and you alone. There you are individual and live your very own life. If you live your own life, you do not live the common life, which is always continuing and never-ending, the life of history and the inalienable and ever-present burdens and products of the human race. There you live the endlessness of being, but not the becoming. Becoming belongs to the heights and is full of torment. How can you become if you never are? Therefore you need your bottommost, since there you are. But therefore you also need your heights, since there you become.

If you live the common life at your lowest reaches, then you become aware of your self. If you are on your heights, then you are your best, and you become aware only of your best, but not that which you are in the general life as a being. What one is as one who becomes, no one knows. But on the heights, imagination is at its strongest. For we imagine that we know what we are as developing beings, and even more so, the less we want to know what we are as beings. Because of that we do not love the condition of our being brought low, although or rather precisely because only there do we attain clear knowledge of ourselves.

Everything is riddlesome to one who is becoming, but not to one who is. He who suffers from riddles should take thought of his lowest condition; we solve those riddles from which we suffer, but not those which please us.

To be that which you are is the bath of rebirth. In the depths, being is not an unconditional persistence but an endlessly slow growth. You think you are standing still like swamp water, but slowly you flow into the sea that covers the earth's greatest deeps, and is so vast that firm land seems only an island imbedded in the womb of the immeasurable sea.

As a drop in the ocean you take part in the current, ebb and flow. You swell slowly on the land and slowly sink back again in interminably slow breaths. You wander vast distances in blurred currents and wash up on strange shores, not knowing how you got there. You mount the billows of huge storms and are swept back again into the depths. And you do not know how this happens to you. You had thought that your movement came from you and that it needed your decisions and efforts, so that you could get going and make progress. But with every conceivable effort you would never have achieved that movement and reached those areas to which the sea and the great wind of the world brought you.

From endless blue plains you sink into black depths; luminous fish draw you, marvelous branches twine around you from above. You slip through columns and twisting, wavering, dark-leaved plants, and the sea takes you up again in bright green water to white, sandy coasts, and a wave foams you ashore and swallows you back again, and a wide smooth swell lifts you softly and leads you again to new regions, to twisting plants, to slowly creeping slimy polyps, and to green water and white sand and breaking surf.

But from far off your heights shine to you above the sea in a golden light, like the moon emerging from the tide, and you become aware of yourself from afar. And longing seizes you and the will for your own movement. You want to cross over from being to becoming, since you have recognized the breath of the sea, and its flowing, that leads you here and there without your ever adhering; you have also recognized its surge that bears you to alien shores and carries you back, and gargles you up and down.

You saw that it was the life of the whole and the death of each individual. You felt yourself entwined in the collective death, from death to the earth's deepest place, from death in your own strangely breathing depths. Oh -- you long to be beyond; despair and mortal fear seize you in this death that breathes slowly and streams back and forth eternally. All this light and dark, warm, tepid, and cold water, all these wavy, swaying, twisting plantlike animals and bestial plants, all these nightly wonders become a horror to you, and you long for the sun, for light dry air, for firm stones, for a fixed place and straight lines, for the motionless and firmly held, for rules and preconceived purpose, for singleness and your own intent.

The knowledge of death came to me that night, from the dying that engulfs the world. I saw how we live toward death, how the swaying golden wheat sinks together under the scythe of the reaper, / [14/15] like a smooth wave on the sea-beach. He who abides in common life becomes aware of death with fear. Thus the fear of death drives him toward singleness. He does not live there, but he becomes aware of life and is happy, since in singleness he is one who becomes, and has overcome death. He overcomes death through overcoming common life. He does not live his individual being, since he is not what he is, but what he becomes.

One who becomes grows aware of life, whereas one who simply exists never will, since he is in the midst of life. He needs the heights and singleness to become aware of life. But in life he becomes aware of death. And it is good that you become aware of collective death, since then you know why your singleness and your heights are good. Your heights are like the moon that luminously wanders alone and through the night looks eternally clear. Sometimes it covers itself and then you are totally in the darkness of the earth, but time and again it fills itself out with light. The death of the earth is foreign to it. Motionless and clear, it sees the life of the earth from afar, without enveloping haze and streaming oceans. Its unchanging form has been solid from eternity. It is the solitary clear light of the night, the individual being, and the near fragment of eternity.

From there you look out, cold, motionless, and radiating. With otherworldly silvery light and green twilights, you pour out into the distant horror. You see it but your gaze is clear and cold. Your hands are red from living blood, but the moonlight of your gaze is motionless. It is the life blood of your brother, yes, it is your own blood, but your gaze remains luminous and embraces the entire horror and the earth's round. Your gaze rests on silvery seas, on snowy peaks, on blue valleys, and you do not hear the groaning and howling of the human animal.

The moon is dead. Your soul went to the moon, to the preserver of souls. [40] Thus the soul moved toward death. [41] I went into the inner death and saw that outer dying is better than inner death. And I decided to die outside and to live within. For that reason I turned away [42] and sought the place of the inner life.

[admin]

Chapter 4: The Anchorite

Cap. iv. Dies 1. [43]

[HI 15] On the following night, [44] I found myself on new paths; hot dry air flowed around me, and I saw the desert, yellow sand all around, heaped up in waves, a terrible irascible sun, a sky as blue as tarnished steel, the air shimmering above the earth, on my right side a deeply cut valley with a dry river bed, some languid grass and dusty brambles. In the sand I see the tracks of naked feet that lead up from the rocky valley to the plateau. I follow them along a high dune. Where it falls off, the tracks move off to the other side. They appear to be fresh, and old half-worn-away footprints run alongside. I pursue them attentively: again they follow the slope of the dune, now they flow into another set of footprints -- but it is the same / [15/16] set that I have already followed, the one ascending from the valley.

Henceforth I follow the footprints downward in astonishment. I soon reach the hot red rocks corroded by the wind. On the stone the footprints are lost but I see where the rock falls off in layers and I climb down. The air glows and the rock burns my soles. Now I have reached the bottom; there are the tracks again. They lead along the winding of the valley, a short distance. Suddenly I stand before a small hut covered in reeds and made of mud bricks. A rickety wooden plank forms the door where a cross has been painted in red. I open it quietly. A haggard man covered in a white linen mantle is sitting on a mat with his back leaning against the wall. Across his knees lies a book in yellow parchment, with beautiful black handwriting -- a Greek gospel, without doubt. I am with an anchorite of the Libyan desert. [45]

I: ''Am I disturbing you, father?"

A: "You do not disturb me. But do not call me father. I am a man like you. What is your desire?"

I: "I come without desire, I have come to this place in the desert by chance, and found tracks in the sand up there that led me in a circle to you."

A: "You found the tracks of my daily walks at daybreak and sunset."

I: "Excuse me if I interrupt your devotion, it is a rare opportunity for me to be with you. I have never before seen an anchorite."

A: "There are several others whom you can see further down in this valley. Some have huts like me, others live in the graves that the ancients have hollowed out in these rocks. I live uppermost in the valley, because it is most solitary and quiet here, and because here I am closest to the peace of the desert."

I: "Have you already been here long?"

A: "I have lived here for perhaps ten years, but really, I can no longer remember exactly how long it is. It could also be a few more years. Time passes so quickly."

I: "Time passes quickly? How is that possible? Your life must be frightfully monotonous."

A: "Time certainly passes quickly for me. Much too quickly even. It seems you are a pagan?"

I: "Me? No -- not exactly. I was raised in the Christian faith."

A: "Well, then, how can you ask whether time drags on for me? You must know what preoccupies a man who is grieving. Only idlers grow bored."

I: "Again, forgive me, my curiosity is great, what then do you occupy yourself with?"

A: ''Are you a child? To begin with you see that I am reading, and that I keep regular hours."

I: "But I can see nothing at all with which you could occupy yourself here. You must have read this book from cover to cover often enough. And if it is the gospels, as I suppose, then I am sure you already know them by heart."

A: "How childishly you speak! Surely you know that one can read a book many times -- perhaps you almost know it by heart, and nevertheless it can be that, when you look again at the lines before you, certain things appear new or even new thoughts occur to you that you did not have before. Every word can work productively in your spirit. And finally if you have once left the book for a week and you take it up again after your spirit has experienced various different changes, then a number of things will dawn on you."

I: "I have difficulty grasping this. The book remains one and the same, certainly a wonderfully profound, yes, even divine matter, but surely not rich enough to fill countless years."

A: "You are astonishing. How, then, do you read this holy book? Do you really always see only one and the same meaning in it? Where do you come from? You are truly a pagan."

I: "I beg you, please don't hold it against me if I read like a pagan. Let me talk with you. I am here to learn from you. Consider me as an ignorant student, which I am in these matters."

A: "If I call you a pagan, don't take it as an insult. I used to be a pagan, too, exactly like you as I / [16/17] well remember. Therefore how can I blame you for your ignorance?"

I: "Thank you for your patience. But it matters very much to me to know how you read and what you take from this book."

A: "Your question is not easy to answer. It's easier to explain colors to a blind person. You must know one thing above all: a succession of words does not have only one meaning. But men strive to assign only a single meaning to the sequence of words, in order to have an unambiguous language. This striving is worldly and constricted, and belongs to the deepest layers of the divine creative plan. On the higher levels of insight into divine thoughts, you recognize that the sequence of words has more than one valid meaning. Only to the all-knowing is it given to know all the meanings of the sequence of words. Increasingly we try to grasp a few more meanings."

I: "If I understand you correctly, you think that the holy writings of the New Testament also have a doubleness, an exoteric and an esoteric meaning, as a few Jewish scholars contend concerning their holy books."

A: "This bad superstition is far from me. I observe that you are wholly inexperienced in divine matters."

I: "I must confess my deep ignorance about these things. But I am eager to experience and understand what you think about the multifaceted meaning of the sequence of words."

A: "Unfortunately I am in no position to tell you everything I know about it. But at least I will try to make the elements clear to you. Because of your ignorance I will therefore begin elsewhere this time: What you need to know is that before I became acquainted with Christianity, I was a rhetorician and philosopher in the city of Alexandria. I had a great throng of students, including many Romans, a few barbarians, and also some Gauls and Britons. I taught them not only the history of Greek philosophy but also the new systems, among them the system of Philo, whom we call the Jew. [46] He was a clever head, but fantastically abstract, as the Jews are wont to be when they devise systems; moreover he was a slave of his own words. I added my own, and wove an atrocious web of words in which I ensnared not only my listeners, but also myself. We rioted terribly among words and names, our own miserable creatures, and accorded divine potency to them. Yes, we even believed in their reality, and believed that we possessed the divine and had committed it to words."

I: "But Philo Judeaus, if this is who you mean, was a serious philosopher and a great thinker. Even John the Evangelist included some of Philo's thoughts in the gospel."

A: "You are right. It is to Philo's credit that he furnished language like so many other philosophers. He belongs to the language artists. But words should not become Gods." [47]

I: "I fail to understand you here. Does it not say in the gospel according to John: God was the Word. It appears to make quite explicit the point which you have just now rejected."

A: "Guard against being a slave to words. Here is the gospel: read from that passage where it says: In him was the life. What does John say there?" [48]

I: "'And life was the light of men and the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not understood it. But it became a person sent from God, by the name of John, who came as a witness and to be a witness of the light. The genuine light, which illuminates each person, came into the world: He was in the world, and the world became through him, and the world did not recognize him.' -- That is what I read here. But what do you make of this?"

A: "I ask you, was this : [Logos] a concept, a word? It was a light, indeed a man, and lived among men. You see, Philo only lent John the word so that John would have at his disposal the word '' alongside the word 'light' to describe the son of man. John gave to living men the meaning of the , but Philo gave as the dead concept that usurped life, even the divine life. Through this the dead does not gain life, and the living is killed. And this was also my atrocious error."

O: "I see what you mean. This thought is new to me and seems worth consideration. Until now it always seemed to me / [17/18] as if it were exactly that which was meaningful in John, namely that the son of man is the , in that he thus elevates the lower to the higher spirit, to the world of the . But you lead me to see the matter conversely, namely that John brings the meaning of the down to man."

A: "I learned to see that John has in fact even done the great service of having brought the meaning of the up to man."

I: "You have peculiar insights that stretch my curiosity to the utmost. How is that? Do you think that the human stands higher than the?"

A: "I want to answer this question within the scope of your understanding: if the human God had not become important above everything, he would not have appeared as the son in the flesh, but in the ." [49]

I: "That makes sense to me, but I confess that this view is surprising to me. It is especially astonishing to me that you, a Christian anchorite, have come to such views. I would not have expected this of you."

A: "As I have already noticed, you have a completely false idea of me and my essence. Let me give you a small example of my preoccupation. I've spent many years alone with the process of unlearning. Have you ever unlearned anything? -- Well, then you should know how long it takes. And I was a successful teacher. As you know, for such people to unlearn is difficult or even impossible. But I see that the sun has gone down. Soon it will be completely dark. Night is the time of silence. I want to show you your place for the night. I need the morning for my work but after midday you can come to me again if you like. Then we will continue our conversation."

He leads me out of the hut, the valley is covered in blue shadows. The first stars are already glittering in the sky. He leads me around the corner of a rock: we are standing at the entrance of a [50] grave cut into the stone. We step in. Not far from the entrance lies a heap of reeds covered with mats. Next to it there is a pitcher of water, and on a white cloth there are dried dates and black bread.

A: "Here is your place and your supper. Sleep well, and do not forget your morning prayer, when the sun rises."

***

[2] The solitary lives in endless desert full of awesome beauty. He looks at the whole and at inner meaning. He loathes manifold diversity if it is near him. He looks at it from afar in its totality. Consequently silvery splendor and joy and beauty cloak diversity for him. What is near him must be simple and innocent, since close at hand the manifold and complicated tear and break through the silvery splendor. No cloudiness of the sky, no haze or mist is allowed to be around him, otherwise he cannot look at the distant manifold in the whole. Consequently the solitary loves the desert above all, where everything nearby is simple and nothing turbid or blurred lies between him and the far-away.

***

The life of the solitary would be cold were it not for the immense sun, which makes the air and rocks glow. The sun and its eternal splendor replace for the solitary his own life warmth.

His heart longs for the sun.

He wanders to the lands of the sun.

He dreams of the flickering splendor of the sun, of the hot red stones spread out at midday, of the golden hot rays of dry sand. / [18/19]

The solitary seeks the sun and no one else is so ready to open his heart as he is. Therefore he loves the desert above all, since he loves its deep stillness.

He needs little food since the sun and its glow nourish him. Consequently the solitary loves the desert above all since it is a mother to him, giving him food and invigorating warmth at regular hours.

In the desert the solitary is relieved of care and therefore turns his whole life to the sprouting garden of his soul, which can flourish only under a hot sun. In his garden the delicious red fruit grows that bears swelling sweetness under a tight skin.

You think that the solitary is poor. You do not see that he strolls under laden fruit trees and that his hand touches grain a hundredfold. Under dark leaves the overfull reddish blossoms swell toward him from abundant buds, and the fruit almost bursts with thronging juices. Fragrant resins drip from his trees and under his feet thrusting seed breaks open.

If the sun sinks onto the plane of the sea like an exhausted bird, the solitary envelops himself and holds his breath. He does not move and is pure expectancy until the miracle of the renewal of light rises in the East.

Brimful delicious expectation is in the solitary. [51]

The horror of the desert and of withered evaporation surround him, and you do not understand how the solitary can live. / [19/20]

But his eye rests on the garden, and his ears listen to the source, and his hand touches velvet leaves and fruit, and his breath draws in sweet perfumes from blossom-rich trees.

He cannot tell you, since the splendor of his garden is so abundant. He stammers when he speaks of it, and he appears to you to be poor in spirit and in life. But his hand does not know where it should reach, in all this indescribable fullness.

He gives you a small insignificant fruit, which has just fallen at his feet. It appears worthless to you, but if you consider it, you will see that this fruit tastes like a sun which you could not have dreamt of. It gives off a perfume which confuses your senses and makes you dream of rose gardens and sweet wine and whispering palm trees. And you hold this one fruit in your hands dreaming, and you would like the tree in which it grows, the garden in which this tree stands, and the sun which brought forth this garden.

And you yourself want to be that solitary who strolls with the sun in his garden, his gaze resting on pendant flowers and his hand brushing a hundredfold of grain and his breath drinking the perfume from a thousand roses.

Dull from the sun and drunk from fermenting wines, you lie down in ancient graves, whose walls resound with many voices and many colors of a thousand solar years.

When you grow, then you see everything living again as it was. And / [20/21] when you sleep, you rest, like everything that was, and your dreams echo softly again from distant temple chants.

You sleep down through the thousand solar years, and you wake up through the thousand solar years, and your dreams full of ancient lore adorn the walls of your bedchamber.

You also see yourself in the totality.

***

You sit and lean against the wall, and look at the beautiful, riddlesome totality. The Summa [52] lies before you like a book, and an unspeakable greed seizes you to devour it. Consequently you lean back and stiffen and sit for a long time. You are completely incapable of grasping it. Here and there a light flickers, here and there a fruit falls from high trees which you can grasp, here and there your foot strikes gold. But what is it, if you compare it with the totality; which lies spread out tangibly close to you? You stretch out your hand, but it remains hanging in invisible webs. You want to see it exactly as it is but something cloudy and opaque pushes itself exactly in between. You would like to tear a piece out of it; it is smooth and impenetrable like polished steel. So you sink back against the wall, and when you have crawled through all the glowing hot crucibles of the Hell of doubt, you sit once more and lean back, and look at the wonder of the Summa that lies spread out before you. Here and there a light flickers, here and there a fruit falls. For you it is all too little. But you begin to be satisfied with yourself, and you pay no attention to the years passing away. What are years? What is hurrying time to him that sits under a tree? Your time passes like a breath of air and you wait for the next light, the next fruit.

***

The writing lies before you and always says the same, if you believe in words. But if you believe in things in whose places only words stand, you never come to the end. And yet you must go an endless road, since life flows not only down a finite path but also an infinite one. But the unbounded makes you [53] anxious since the unbounded is fearful and your humanity rebels against it. Consequently you seek limits and restraints so that you do not lose yourself, tumbling into infinity. Restraint becomes imperative for you. You cry out for the word which has one meaning and no other, so that you escape boundless ambiguity. The word becomes your God, since it protects you from the countless possibilities of interpretation. The word is protective magic against the daimons of the unending, which tear at your soul and want to scatter you to the winds. You are saved if you can say at last: that is that and only that. You speak the magic word, and the limitless is finally banished. Because of that men seek and make words. [54]

He who breaks the wall of words overthrows Gods and defiles temples. The solitary is a murderer. He murders the people, because he thus thinks and thereby breaks down ancient sacred walls. He calls up the daimons of the boundless. And he sits, leans back, and does not hear the groans of mankind, whom the fearful fiery smoke has seized. And yet you cannot find the new words if you do not shatter the old words. But no one should shatter the old words, unless he finds the new word that is a firm rampart against the limitless and grasps more life in it than in the old word. A new word is a new God for old men. Man remains the same, even if you create a new model of God for him. He remains an imitator. What was word, shall become man. The word created the world and came before the world. It lit up like a light in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it. [55] And thus the word should become what the darkness can comprehend, since what use is the light if the darkness does not comprehend it? But your darkness should grasp the light.

***

The God of words is cold and dead and shines from afar like the moon, mysteriously and inaccessibly. Let the word return to its / [22/23] creator, to man, and thus the word will be heightened in man. Man should be light, limits, measure. May he be your fruit, for which you longingly reach. The darkness does not comprehend the word, but rather man; indeed, it seizes him, since he himself is a piece of the darkness. Not from the word down to man, but from the word up to man: that is what the darkness comprehends. The darkness is your mother; she behooves reverence, since the mother is dangerous. She has power over you, since she gave birth to you. Honor the darkness as the light, and you will illumine your darkness.

***

If you comprehend the darkness, it seizes you. It comes over you like the night with black shadows and countless shimmering stars. Silence and peace come over you if you begin to comprehend the darkness. Only he who does not comprehend the darkness fears the night. Through comprehending the dark, the nocturnal, the abyssal in you, you become utterly simple. And you prepare to sleep through the millennia like everyone else, and you sleep down into the womb of the millennia, and your walls resound with ancient temple chants. Since the simple is what always was. Peace and blue night spread over you while you dream in the grave of the millennia.

[admin]

Chapter 5: Dies II. [56]

Cap. v.

[HI 22] [57] [58] I awaken, the day reddens the East. A night, a wonderful night in the distant depths of time lies behind me. In what far-away space was I? What did I dream? Of a white horse? It seems to me as if I had seen this white horse on the Eastern sky over the rising sun. The horse spoke to me: What did it say? It said: "Hail him who is in darkness since the day is over him." There were four white horses, each with golden wings. They led the carriage of the sun, on which Helios stood with flaring mane. [59] I stood down in the gorge, astonished and frightened. A thousand black serpents crawled swiftly into their holes. Helios ascended, rolling upward toward the wide paths of the sky. I knelt down, raised my hands suppliantly, and called: "Give us your light, you are flame-curled, entwined, crucified and revived; give us your light, your light!" This cry woke me. Didn't Ammonius say yesterday evening: "Do not forget to say your morning prayer when the sun rises." I thought that perhaps he secretly worships the sun. / [22/23]

Outside a fresh morning wind rises. Yellow sand trickles in fine veins down the rocks. The redness expands across the sky and I see the first rays shoot up to the firmament. Solemn calm and solitude on all sides. A large lizard lies on a stone and awaits the sun. I stand as if spellbound and laboriously remember everything from yesterday, especially what Ammonius said. But what did he say? That the sequences of words have many meanings, and that John brought the to man. But that does not sound properly Christian. Is he perhaps a Gnostic? [60] No, that seems impossible to me, since they were really the worst of all the idolators of words, as he would probably put it.

The sun -- what fills me with such inner exaltation? I should not forget my morning prayer -- but where has my morning prayer gone? Dear sun, I have no prayer, since I do not know how one must address you. Have I already prayed to the sun? But Ammonius really meant that I should pray to God at the break of day. He probably does not know -- we have no more prayers. How should he know about our nakedness and poverty? What has happened to our prayers? I miss them here. This must really be because of the desert. It seems as if there ought to be prayers here. Is this desert so very bad? I think it is no worse than our cities. But why then do we not pray there? I must look toward the sun, as if it had something to do with this. Alas -- one can never escape the age-old dreams of mankind.

What shall I do this whole long morning? I do not understand how Ammonius could have endured this life for even a year. I go back and forth on the dried-up river bed and finally sit down on a boulder. Before me there are a few yellow grasses. Over there a small dark beetle is crawling along, pushing a ball in front of it -- a scarab. [61] You dear little animal, are you still toiling away in order to live your beautiful myth? How seriously and undiscouraged it works! If only you had a notion that you are performing an old myth, you would probably renounce your fantasies as we men have also given up playing at mythology.

The unreality nauseates one. What I say sounds very odd in this place, and the good Ammonious would certainly not agree with it. What am I actually doing here? No, I don't want to condemn him in advance, since I still haven't really understood what he actually means. He has a right to be heard. By the way, I thought differently yesterday. I was even very thankful to him that he wanted to teach me. But I'm being critical once again, and superior, and may well learn nothing. His thoughts are not that bad at all; they are even good. I don't know why I always want to put the man down.

Dear beetle, where have you gone? I can no longer see you -- Oh, you're already over there with your mythical ball. These little animals stick to things, quite unlike us -- no doubt, no change of mind, no hesitation. Is this so because they live their myth?

***

Dear scarab, my father, I honor you, blessed be your work -- in eternity -- Amen.

What nonsense am I talking? I'm worshiping an animal -- that must be because of the desert. It seems absolutely to demand prayers.

How beautiful it is here! The reddish color of the stones is wonderful; they reflect the glow of a hundred thousand past suns -- these small grains of sand have rolled in fabulous primordial oceans, over them swam primordial monsters with forms never beheld before. Where were you, man, in those days? On this warm sand lay your childish primordial animal ancestors, like children snuggling up to their mother.

O mother stone, I love you. I lie snuggled up against your warm body, your late child. Blessed be you, ancient mother.

/ [23/24] Yours is my heart and all glory and power -- Amen.

What am I saying? That was the desert. How everything appears so animated to me! This place is truly terrible. These stones -- are they stones? They seem to have gathered here deliberately. They're lined up like a troop transport. They've arranged themselves by size, the large ones stand apart, the small ones close ranks and gather in groups that precede the large ones. Here the stones form states.

Am I dreaming or am I awake? It's hot -- the sun already stands high -- how the hours pass! Truly, the morning is nearly over -- and how astonishing it has been! Is it the sun or is it these living stones, or is it the desert that makes my head buzz?

I go up the valley and before long I reach the hut of the anchorite. He is sitting on his mat lost in deep reflection.

I: "My father, I am here."

A: "How have you spent your morning?"

I: "I was surprised when you said yesterday that time passes quickly for you. I don't question you anymore and this will no longer surprise me. I've learned a lot. But only enough to make you an even greater riddle than you were before. Why, all the things that you must experience in the desert, you wonderful man! Even the stones are bound to speak to you."

A: '' I'm happy that you have learned to understand something of the life of an anchorite. That will make our difficult task easier. I don't want to intrude on your mysteries, but I feel that you come from a strange world that has nothing to do with mine."

I: "You speak truthfully. I'm a stranger here, more foreign than any you've ever seen. Even a man from Britain's remotest coast is closer to you than I am. Therefore have patience, master -- and let me drink from the source of your wisdom. Although the thirsty desert surrounds us, an invisible stream of living water flows here."

A: "Have you said your prayer?"

I: "Master, forgive me: I've tried, but I found no prayer. Yet I dreamed that I prayed to the rising sun."

A: "Don't worry yourself because of that. If you do find a word, your soul has nevertheless found inexpressible words to greet the break of day."

I: "But it was a heathen prayer to Helios."

A: "Let that suffice for you."

I: "But Oh master. I've prayed not only to the sun in a dream, but in my absentmindedness also to the scarab and the earth."

A: "Be astonished at nothing, and in no case condemn or regret it. Let us go to work. Do you want to ask something about the conversation we had yesterday?"

I: "I interrupted you yesterday when you spoke of Philo. You wanted to explain your notion of the various meanings of particular sequences of words."

A: "Well, I'll continue my account of how I was freed from the awful predicament of spinning words. A man my father had set free once came to me; this man, whom I'd been attached to since my childhood, spoke to me and said:

"Oh Ammonius, are you well?" "Certainly," I said. "as you can see. I am learned and have great success."

He: "I mean, are you happy and are you fully alive?"

I laughed: "As you can see, all is well."

The old man replied: "I saw how you lectured. You seemed to be anxious at the judgment of your listeners. You wove witty jokes into the lecture to please your listeners. You heaped up learned expressions to impress them. You were restless and hasty, as if still compelled to snatch up all knowledge. You are not in yourself."

Although these words at first seemed laughable to me, they still made an impression on me, and reluctantly I had to / [24/25] credit the old man, since he was right.

Then he said: "Dear Ammonius, I have delightful tidings for you: God has become flesh in his son and has brought us all salvation." "What are you saying," I called, "you probably mean Osiris, [62] who shall appear in the mortal body?"

"No," he replied, "this man lived in Judea and was born from a virgin."

I laughed and answered: "I already know about this; a Jewish trader has brought tidings of our virgin queen to Judea, whose image appears on the walls of one of our temples, and reported it as a fairy tale."

"No," the old man insisted, "he was the Son of God."

"Then you mean Horus, [63] the son of Osiris, don't you?" I answered.

"No, he was not Horus, but a real man, and he was hung from a cross."

"Oh, but this must be Seth, surely, whose punishments our old ones have often described."

But the old man stood by his conviction and said: "He died and rose up on the third day."

"Well, then he must be Osiris," I replied impatiently.

"No," he cried, "he is called Jesus the anointed one."

"Ah, you really mean this Jewish God, whom the poor honor at the harbor, and whose unclean mysteries they celebrate in cellars."

"He was a man and yet the Son of God," said the old man staring at me intently.

"That's nonsense, dear old man," I said, and showed him to the door. But like an echo from distant rock faces the words returned to me: a man and yet the Son of God. It seemed significant to me, and this phrase was what brought me to Christianity.

I: "But don't you think that Christianity could ultimately be a transformation of your Egyptian teachings?"

A: "If you say that our old teachings were less adequate expressions of Christianity, then I'm more likely to agree with you."

I: "Yes, but do you then assume that the history of religions is aimed at a final goal?"

A: "My father once bought a black slave at the market from the region of the source of the Nile. He came from a country that had heard of neither Osiris nor the other Gods; he told me many things in a more simple language that said the same as we believed about Osiris and the other Gods. I learned to understand that those uneducated Negroes unknowingly already possessed most of what the religions of the cultured peoples had developed into complete doctrines. Those able to read that language correctly could thus recognize in it not only the pagan doctrines but also the doctrine of Jesus. And it's with this that I now occupy myself. I read the gospels and seek their meaning which is yet to come. We know their meaning as it lies before us, but not their hidden meaning which points to the future. It's erroneous to believe that religions differ in their innermost essence. Strictly speaking, it's always one and the same religion. Every subsequent form of religion is the meaning of the antecedent."

I: "Have you found out the meaning which is yet to come?"

A: "No, not yet; it's very difficult, but I hope I'll succeed. Sometimes it seems to me that I need the stimulation of others, but I realize that those are temptations of Satan."

I: "Don't you believe that you'd succeed if you were nearer men?"

A: "Perhaps you're right."

He looks at me suddenly as if doubtful and suspicious. "But," he continues, "I love the desert, do you understand? This yellow, sun-glowing desert. Here you can see the countenance of the sun every day, you are alone, you can see glorious Helios -- no, that is pagan -- what's wrong with me? I'm confused -- you are Satan -- I recognize you -- give way, adversary!"

/ [25/26] He jumps up incensed and wants to lunge at me. But I am far away in the twentieth century. [64]

***

[2] [HI 26] He who sleeps in the grave of the millennia dreams a wonderful dream. He dreams a primordially ancient dream. He dreams of the rising sun.

If you sleep this sleep and dream this dream in this time of the world, you will know that the sun will also rise at this time. For the moment we are still in the dark, but the day is upon us.

He who comprehends the darkness in himself, to him the light is near. He who climbs down into his darkness reaches the staircase of the working light, fire-maned Helios.

His chariot ascends with four white horses, his back bears no cross, and his side no wound, but he is safe and his head blazes in the fire.

Nor is he a man of mockery, but of splendor and unquestionable force.

I do not know what I speak, I speak in a dream. Support me for I stagger, drunk with fire. I drank fire [for] centuries and plunged into the sun far at the bottom. And I rose up drunk from the sun, with a burning countenance and my head is ablaze.

Give me your hand, a human hand, so that you / [26/27] can hold me to the earth with it, for whirling veins of fire swoop me up, and exultant longing tears me toward the zenith.

***

But day is about to break, actual day, the day of this world. And I remain concealed in the gorge of the earth, deep down and solitary, and in the darkening shadows of the valley. That is the shadow and heaviness of the earth.

How can I pray to the sun, that rises far in the East over the desert? Why should I pray to it? I drink the sun within me, so why should I pray to it? But the desert, the desert in me demands prayers, since the desert wants to satisfy itself with what is alive. I want to beg God for it, the sun, or one of the other immortals.

I beg because I am empty and am a beggar. In the day of this world, I forget that I drank the sun and am drunk from its active light and singeing power. But I stepped into the shadows of the earth, and saw that I am naked and have nothing to cover my poverty. No sooner do you touch the earth than your inner life is over; it flees from you into things.

And a wondrous life arises in things. What you thought was dead and inanimate betrays a secret life and silent, inexorable intent. You have got caught up in a hustle and bustle where everything goes its own way with strange gestures, beside you, above you, beneath you, and through you; even the stones speak to you, and magical threads spin from you to things and from things to you. Far and near work within you and you work in a dark manner upon the near and the far. And you are always helpless and a prey.

But if you watch closely, you will see what you have never seen before, namely that things live their life, and that they live off you: the rivers bear your life to the valley, one stone falls upon another with your force, plants and animals also grow through you and they are the cause of your death. A leaf dancing in the wind dances with you; the irrational animal [65] guesses your thought and represents you. The whole earth sucks its life from you and everything reflects you again.

Nothing happens in which you are not entangled in a secret manner; for everything has ordered itself around you and plays your innermost. Nothing in you is hidden to things, no matter how remote, how precious, how secret it is. It inheres in things. Your dog robs you of your father, who passed away long ago, and looks at you as he did. The cow in the meadow has intuited your mother, and charms you with total calm and security. The stars whisper your deepest mysteries to you, and the soft valleys of the earth rescue you in a motherly womb.

Like a stray child you stand pitifully among the mighty, who hold the threads of your life. You cry for help and attach yourself to the first person that comes your way. Perhaps he can advise you, perhaps he knows the thought that you do not have, and which all things have sucked out of you.

***

I know that you would like to hear the tidings of he whom things have not lived, but who lived and fulfilled himself. For you are a son of the earth, sucked dry by the suckling earth, that can suck nothing out of itself, but suckles only from the sun. Therefore you would like to have tidings of the son of the sun, which shines and does not suckle.

/ [27/28] You would like to hear of the son of God, who shone and gave, who begot, and to whom life was born again, as the earth bears the sun green and colorful children.

You would like to hear of him, the radiating savior, who as a son of the sun cut through the webs of the earth, who sundered the magic threads and released those in bondage, who owned himself and was no one's servant, who sucked no one dry, and whose treasure no one exhausted.

You would like to hear of him who was not darkened by the shadow of earth, but illuminated it, who saw the thoughts of all, and whose thoughts no one guessed, who possessed in himself the meaning of all things, and whose meaning no thing could express.

***


The solitary fled the world; he closed his eyes, plugged his ears and buried himself in a cave within himself but it was no use. The desert sucked him dry, the stones spoke his thoughts, the cave echoed his feelings, and so he himself became desert, stone, and cave. And it was all emptiness and desert, and helplessness and barrenness, since he did not shine and remained a son of the earth who sucked a book dry and was sucked empty by the desert. He was desire and not splendor, completely earth and not sun.

Consequently he was in the desert as a clever saint who very well knew that otherwise he was no different from the other sons of the earth. If he would have drunk of himself he would have drunk fire.

***

The solitary went into the desert to find himself. But he did not want to find himself but rather the manifold meaning of holy scripture. You can suck the immensity of the small and the great into yourself and you will become emptier and emptier, since immense fullness and immense emptiness are one and the same. [66]

He wanted to find what he needed in the outer. But you find manifold meaning only in yourself not in things, since the manifoldness of meaning is not something that is given at the same time, but is a succession of meanings. The meanings that follow one another do not lie in things, but lie in you, who are subject to many changes, insofar as you take part in life. Things also change, but you do not notice this if you do not change. But if you change, the countenance of the world alters. The manifold sense of things is your manifold sense. It is useless to fathom it in things. And this probably explains why the solitary went into the desert, and fathomed the thing but not himself.

And therefore what happened to every desirous solitary also happened to him: the devil came to him with smooth tongue and clear reasoning and knew the right word at the right moment. He lured him to his desire. I had to appear to him as the devil, since I had accepted my darkness. I ate the earth and I drank the sun, and I became a greening tree that stands alone and grows. [67] / [28/29]

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Chapter 6: Death. [68]

Cap. vi.

[HI 29] On the following night [69] I wandered to the northern land and found myself under a gray sky in misty-hazy cool-moist air. I strive to those lowlands where the weak currents, flashing in broad mirrors, stream toward the sea, where all haste of flowing becomes more and more dampened, and where all power and all striving unites with the immeasurable extent of the sea. The trees become sparse, wide swamp meadows accompany the still, murky water, the horizon is unending and lonely, draped by gray clouds. Slowly, with restrained breath, and with the great and anxious expectation of one gliding downward wildly on the foam and pouring himself into endlessness, I follow my brother, the sea. It flows softly and almost imperceptibly, and yet we continually approach the supreme embrace, entering the womb of the source, the boundless expansion and immeasurable depths. Lower yellow hills rise there. A broad dead lake widens at their feet. We wander along the hills quietly and they open up to a dusky, unspeakably remote horizon, where the sky and the sea are fused into infinity.

Someone is standing there, on the last dune. He is wearing a black wrinkled coat; he stands motionless and looks into the distance. I go up to him -- he is gaunt and with a deeply serious look in his eyes. I say to him:

"Let me stand beside you for a while, dark one. I recognized you from afar. There is only one who stands this way, so solitary and at the last corner of the world."

He answered: "Stranger, you may well stand by me, if it is not too cold for you. As you can see, I am cold and my heart has never beaten."

"I know, you are ice and the end; you are the cold silence of the stones; and you are the highest snow on the mountains and the most extreme frost of outer space. I must feel this and that's why I stand near you."

"What leads you here to me, you living matter? The living are never guests here. Well, they all flow past here sadly in dense crowds, all those above in the land of the clear day who have taken their departure, / [29/30] never to return again. But the living never come here. What do you seek here?"

"My strange and unexpected path led me here as I happily followed the way of the living stream. And thus I found you. I gather this is your place, your rightful place?"

"Yes, here it leads into the undifferentiable, where none is equal or unequal, but all are one with one another. Do you see what approaches there?"

"I see something like a dark wall of clouds, swimming toward us on the tide."

"Look more closely, what do you recognize?"

"I see densely pressed multitudes of men, old men, women, and children. Between them I see horses, oxen and smaller animals, a cloud of insects swarms around the multitude, a forest swims near, innumerable faded flowers, an utterly dead summer. They are already near; how stiff and cool they all look, their feet do not move, no noise sounds from their closed ranks. They are clasping themselves rigidly with their hands and arms; they are gazing beyond and pay us no heed -- they are all flowing past in an enormous stream. Dark one, this vision is awful."

"You wanted to stay by me, so get hold of yourself. Look!"

I see: "The first rows have reached the point where the surf and the stream flow together violently. And it looks as if a wave of air were confronting the stream of the dead together with the surging sea, whirling them up high, scattering them in black scraps, and dissolving them in murky clouds of mist. Wave after wave approaches, and ever new droves dissolve into black air. Dark one, tell me, is this the end?"

"Look!"

The dark sea breaks heavily -- a reddish glow spreads out in it -- it is like blood -- a sea of blood foams at my feet -- the depths of the sea glow -- how strange I feel -- am I suspended by my feet? Is it the sea or is it the sky? Blood and fire mix themselves together in a ball -- red light erupts from its smoky shroud -- a new sun escapes from the bloody sea, and rolls gleamingly toward the uttermost depths -- it disappears under my feet. [70]

I look around me, I am all alone. Night has fallen. What did Ammonius say? Night is the time of silence.

[2] [HI 30] I looked around me and I saw that the solitude expanded into the immeasurable, and pierced me with horrible coldness. The sun still glowed in me, but I could feel myself stepping into the great shadow: I follow the stream that makes its way into the depths, slowly and unperturbed, into the depths of what is to come.

And thus I went out in that night (it was the second night of the year 1914), and anxious expectation filled me. I went out to embrace the future. The path was wide and what was to come was awful. It was the enormous dying, a sea of blood. From it the new sun arose, awful and a reversal of that which we call day. We have seized the darkness and its sun will shine above us, bloody and burning like a great downfall.

When I comprehended my darkness, a truly magnificent night came over me and my dream plunged me into the depths of the millennia, and from it my phoenix ascended.

***

But what happened to my day? Torches were kindled, bloody anger and disputes erupted. As darkness seized the world, the terrible war arose and the darkness destroyed the light of the world, since it was incomprehensible to the darkness and good for nothing anymore. And so we had to taste Hell.

I saw which vices the virtues of this time changed into, how your mildness became hard, your goodness became brutality, your love became hate, and your understanding became madness. Why did you want to comprehend the darkness! But you had to or else it would have seized you. Happy the man who anticipates this grasp.

Did you ever think of the evil in you? Oh, you spoke of it, you mentioned it, and you confessed it smilingly, as a generally human vice, or a recurring misunderstanding. But did you know / [30/31] what evil is, and that it stands precisely right behind your virtues, that it is also your virtues themselves, as their inevitable substance? [71] You locked Satan in the abyss for a millennium, and when the millennium had passed, you laughed at him, since he had become a children's fairy tale. [72] But if the dreadful great one raises his head, the world winces. The most extreme coldness draws near.

With horror you see that you are defenseless, and that the army of your vices falls powerless to its knees. With the power of daimons, you seize the evil, and your virtues cross over to him. You are completely alone in this struggle, since your Gods have become deaf. You do not know which devils are greater, your vices, or your virtues. But of one thing you are certain, that virtues and vices are brothers.

[73] We need the coldness of death to see clearly. Life wants to live and to die, to begin and to end. [74] You are not forced to live eternally, but you can also die, since there is a will in you for both. Life and death must strike a balance in your existence. [75] Today's men need a large slice of death, since too much incorrectness lives in them, and too much correctness died in them. What stays in balance is correct, what disturbs balance is incorrect. But if balance has been attained, then that which preserves it is incorrect and that which disturbs it is correct. Balance is at once life and death. For the completion of life a balance with death is fitting. If I accept death, then my tree greens, since dying increases life. If I plunge into the death encompassing the world, then my buds break open. How much our life needs death!

Joy at the smallest things comes to you only when you have accepted death. But if you look out greedily for all that you could still live, then nothing is great enough for your pleasure, and the smallest things that continue to surround you are no longer a joy. Therefore I behold death, since it teaches me how to live.

If you accept death, it is altogether like a frosty night and an anxious misgiving, but a frosty night in a vineyard full of sweet grapes. [76] You will soon take pleasure in your wealth. Death ripens. One needs death to be able to harvest the fruit. Without death, life would be meaningless, since the long-lasting rises again and denies its own meaning. To be, and to enjoy your being, you need death, and limitation enables you to fulfill your being.

***

[HI 31] When I see the lamentation and nonsense of the earth and consequently enter death with a covered head, then everything I see will indeed turn to ice. But in the shadow world the other rises, the red sun. [77] It rises secretly and unexpectedly, and my world revolves like a satanic apparition. I suspect blood and murder. Blood and murder alone are still exalted, and have their own peculiar beauty; one can assume the beauty of bloody acts of violence.

But it is the unacceptable, the awfully repulsive, that which I have forever rejected that rises in me. For if the wretchedness
and poverty of this life ends, another life begins in what is opposed to me. This is opposed to such an extent that I cannot conceive it. For it is opposed not according to the laws of reason, but thoroughly and according to its own nature. Yes, it is not only opposed, but repulsive, invisibly and cruelly repulsive, something that takes my breath away, that drains the power from my muscles, that confuses my senses, stings me poisonously from behind in the heel, and always strikes just where I did not suspect I possessed a vulnerable spot. [78]

It does not confront me like a strong enemy, manly and dangerously, but I perish on a dung heap, while peaceful chickens cackle around me, amazedly and mindlessly laying their eggs. A dog passes, lifts his leg over me, then trots off calmly. I curse the hour of my birth seven times, and if I do not choose to kill myself on the spot, I prepare to experience the hour of my second birth. The ancients said: Interfaeces et urinas nascimur. [79] For three nights I was assaulted by the horrors of birth. On the third night, jungle-like laughter pealed forth, for which nothing is too simple. Then life began to stir again. / [31/32]

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Chapter 7: The Remains of Earlier Temples [80]

Cap. vii.

[HI 32] [81] [82] Yet another new adventure occurred: wide meadows spread out before me -- a carpet of flowers -- soft hills -- a fresh green wood in the distance. I come across two strange journeymen -- probably two completely accidental companions: an old monk and a tall gangly thin man with a childish gait and discolored red clothes. As they draw near, I recognize the tall one as the red rider. How he has changed! He has grown old, his red hair has become gray, his fiery red clothes are worn out, shabby, poor. And the other? He has a paunch and appears not to have fallen on bad times. But his face seems familiar: by all the Gods, it's Ammonius!

What changes! And where are these utterly different people coming from? I approach them and bid them good day. Both look at me frightened and make the sign of the cross. Their horror prompts me to look down at myself. I am fully covered in green leaves, which spring from my body. I greet them a second time, laughing.

***

Ammonius exclaims horrified: ''Apage, Satanas!" [83]

The Red One: "Damned pagan riffraff!"

I: "But my dear friends, what's wrong with you? I'm the Hyperborean stranger, who visited you, Oh Ammonius, in the desert. [84] And I'm the watchman whom you, Red One, once visited."

Ammonius: "1 recognize you, you supreme devil. My downfall began with you."

The Red One looks at him reproachfully and gives him a poke in the ribs. The monk sheepishly stops. The Red One turns haughtily toward me.

R: ''Already at that time I couldn't help thinking that you lacked a noble disposition, notwithstanding your hypocritical seriousness. Your damned Christian play-act --"

At this moment Ammonius pokes him in the ribs and the Red One falls into an embarrassed silence. And thus both stand before me, sheepish and ridiculous, and yet pitiable.

I: "Wherefrom, man of God? What outrageous fate has led you here, let alone in the company of the Red One?"

A: "I would prefer not to tell you. But it does not appear to be a dispensation of God that one can escape. So know then that you, evil spirit, have done me a terrible deed. You seduced me with / [32/33] your accursed curiosity, desirously stretching my hand after the divine mysteries, since you made me conscious at that time that I really knew nothing about them. Your remark that I probably needed the closeness of men to arrive at the higher mysteries stunned me like infernal poison. Soon thereafter I called the brothers of the valley together and announced to them that a messenger of God had appeared to me -- so terribly had you blinded me -- and commanded me to form a monastery with the brothers.

"When Brother Philetus raised an objection, I refuted him with reference to the passage in the holy scriptures where it is said that it is not good for man to be alone. [85] So we founded the monastery, near the Nile, from where we could see the passing ships.

"We cultivated fat fields, and there was so much to do that the holy scriptures fell into oblivion. We became voluptuous, and one day I was filled with such terrible longing to see Alexandria again. I talked myself into believing that I wanted to visit the bishop there. But first I was intoxicated so much by life on the ship, and then by the milling crowds on the streets of Alexandria, that I became completely lost.

"As in a dream I climbed onto a large ship bound for Italy. I felt an insatiable greed to see the world. I drank wine and saw that women were beautiful. I wallowed in pleasure and wholly turned into an animal. When I climbed ashore in Naples, the Red One stood there, and I knew that I had fallen into the hands of evil."

R: "Be silent, old fool, if I had not been present, you would have become an outright pig. When you saw me, you finally pulled yourself together, cursed the drinking and the women, and returned to the monastery.

"Now hear my story, damned hobgoblin: I too fell into your snare, and your pagan arts also enticed me. After the conversation at that time, where you caught me in the fox trap with your remark about dancing, I became serious, so serious that I went into the monastery, prayed, fasted, and converted myself.

"In my blindness I wanted to reform the Church liturgy, and with the bishop's approval I introduced dancing.

"I became Abbot and, as such, alone had the sole right to dance before the altar, like David before the ark of the covenant. [86] But little by little, the brothers also began to dance; indeed, even the congregation of the faithful and finally the whole city danced.

"It was terrible. I fled into solitude and danced all day until I dropped, but in the morning the hellish dance began again.

"I sought to escape from myself and strayed and wandered around at night. In the daytime I kept myself secluded, and danced alone in the forests and deserted mountains. And thus gradually I came to Italy. Down there in the south, I no longer felt as I had felt in the north; I could mingle with the crowds. Only in Naples did I somewhat find my way again, and there I also found this ragged man of God. His appearance gave me strength. Through him I could regain my health. You've heard how he took heart from me, too, and found his way again."

A: "I must confess I did not fare so badly with the Red One; he's a toned-down type of devil."

R: "I must add that the monk is hardly the fanatical type, although I've developed a deep aversion against the whole Christian religion since my experience in the monastery."

I: "Dear friends, it does my heart good to see you enjoying yourselves together."

Both: "We are not pleased, mocker and adversary, clear off you robber, pagan!"

I: "But why are you traveling together, if you're not enjoying each other's company and friendship?"

A: "What can be done? Even the devil is necessary, since otherwise one has nothing that commands a sense of respect with people."

R: "Well, I need to come to an arrangement with the clergy, or else I will lose my clientele."

I: "Therefore the necessities of life have brought you together! So let's make peace and be friends."

Both: "But we can never be friends."

I: "Oh, I see, the system is at fault. You probably want to die out first? Now let me pass, you old ghosts!"

***

[2] [HI 33] When I had seen death and all the terrible solemnity that is gathered around it, and had become ice and night myself, an angry life and impulse rose up in me. My thirst for the rushing water of the deepest knowledge [87] began to clink with wine glasses; from afar I heard drunken laughter, laughing women and street noise. Dance music, /[33/34] stamping and cheering poured forth from all over; and instead of the rose-scented south wind, the reek of the human animal streamed over me. Luscious-lewd whores giggled and rustled along the walls, wine fumes and kitchen steam and the foolish cackling of the human crowd drew near in a cloud. Hot sticky tender hands reached out for me, and I was swaddled in the covers of a sickbed. I was born into life from below, and I grew up as heroes do, in hours rather than years. And after I had grown up, I found myself in the middle land, and saw that it was spring.

***

[HI 34] But I was no longer the man I had been, for a strange being grew through me. This was a laughing being of the forest, a leaf green daimon, a forest goblin and prankster, who lived alone in the forest and was itself a greening tree being, who loved nothing but greening and growing, who was neither disposed nor indisposed toward men, full of mood and chance, obeying an invisible law and greening and wilting with the trees, neither beautiful nor ugly, neither good nor bad, merely living, primordially old and yet completely young, naked and yet naturally clothed, not man but nature, frightened, laughable, powerful, childish, weak, deceiving and deceived, utterly inconstant and superficial, and yet reaching deep down, down to the kernel of the world.

I had absorbed the life of both of my friends; a green tree grew from the ruins of the temple. They had not withstood life, but, seduced by life, had become their own monkey business. They had got caught in the muck, and so they called the living a devil and traitor. Because both of them believed in themselves and in their own goodness, each in his own way, they ultimately became mired in the natural and conclusive burial ground of all outlived ideals. The most beautiful and the best, like the ugliest and the worst, end up someday in the most laughable place in the world, surrounded by fancy dress and led by fools, and go horror-struck to the pit of filth.

***

After the cursing comes laughter, so that the soul is saved from the dead.

Ideals are, according to their essence, desired and pondered; they exist to this extent, but only to this extent. Yet their effective being cannot be denied. He who believes he is really living his ideals, or believes he can live them, suffers from delusions of grandeur and behaves like a lunatic in that he stages himself as an ideal; but the hero has fallen. Ideals are mortal, so one should prepare oneself for their end: at the same time it probably costs you your neck. For do you not see that it was you who gave meaning, value, and effective force to your ideal? If you have become a sacrifice to the ideal, then the ideal cracks open, plays carnival with you, and goes to Hell on Ash Wednesday. The ideal is also a tool that one can put aside anytime, a torch on dark paths. But whoever runs around with a torch by day is a fool. How much my ideals have come down, and how freshly my tree greens!

***

[88] When I turned green, they stood there, the sad remains of earlier temples and rose gardens, and I recognized with a shudder their inner affinity. It seemed to me that they had established an indecent alliance. But I understood that this alliance had already existed for a long time. At a time when I still claimed that my sanctuaries were of crystal purity, and when I compared my friends to the perfume of the roses of Persia, [89] both of them formed an alliance of mutual silence.

They seemed to scatter, but secretly they worked together. The solitary silence of the temple lured me far away from men to the supernatural mysteries in which I lost myself to the point of surfeit. And while I struggled with God, the devil prepared himself for my reception, and tore me just as far to his side. There, too, I found no boundaries other than surfeit and disgust. I did not live, but was driven; I was a slave to my ideals. [90]

And thus they stood there, the ruins, quarreling with one another and unable to reconcile themselves to their common misery. Within myself I had become one as a natural being, but I was a hobgoblin [91] who frightened the solitary wanderer, and who avoided the places of men. But I greened and bloomed from within myself. I had still not become a man again who carried within himself the conflict between a longing for the world and a longing for the spirit. I did not live either of these longings, but I lived myself, and was a merrily greening tree in a remote spring forest. And thus I learned to live without the world and spirit; and I was amazed how well I could live like this.

But what about men, what about mankind? There they stood, the two deserted bridges that should lead across to mankind: one leads from above to below, and men glide down on it, which pleases them. / [34/35] The other leads from below to above and mankind groans upward on it. This causes them trouble. We drive our fellow men to trouble and joy. If I myself do not live, but merely climb, it gives others undeserved pleasure. If I simply enjoy myself, it causes others undeserved trouble. If I merely live, I am far removed from men. They no longer see me, and when they see me, they are astonished and shocked. I myself, however, quite simply living, greening, blooming, fading, stand like a tree always in the same spot and let the suffering and the joy of men pass over me with equanimity. And yet I am a man who cannot excuse himself from the discord of the human heart.

But my ideals can also be my dogs, whose yapping and squabbling do not disturb me. But at least then I am a good and a bad dog to men. But I have not yet achieved what should be, namely that I live and yet am a man. It seems to be nearly impossible to live as a man. As long as you are not conscious of your self you can live; but if you become conscious of your self, you fall from one grave into another. All your [92] rebirths could ultimately make you [93] sick. The Buddha therefore finally gave up on rebirth, for he had had enough of crawling through all human and animal forms. [94] After all the rebirths you still remain the lion crawling on the earth, the [Chameleon], a caricature, one prone to changing colors, a crawling shimmering lizard, but precisely not a lion, whose nature is related to the sun, who draws his power from within himself, who does not crawl around in the protective colors of the environment, and who does not defend himself by going into hiding. I recognized the chameleon and no longer want to crawl on the earth and change colors and be reborn; instead I want to exist from my own force, like the sun which gives light and does not suck light. That belongs to the earth. I recall my solar nature and would like to rush to my rising. But ruins [95] stand in my way. They say: "With regard to men you should be this or that." My chameleonesque skin shudders. They obtrude upon me and want to color me. But that should no longer be. Neither good nor evil shall be my masters. I push them aside, the laughable survivors, and go on my way again, which leads me to the East. The quarreling powers that for so long stood between me and myself lie behind me.

Henceforth I am completely alone. I can no longer say to you: "Listen!" or "you should," or "you could," but now I talk only with myself. Now no one else can do anything more for me, nothing whatsoever. I no longer have a duty toward you, and you no longer have duties toward me, since I vanish and you vanish from me. I no longer hear requests and no longer make requests of you. I no longer fight and reconcile myself with you, but place silence between you and me.

Your call dies away in the distance, and you cannot find my footprints. Together with the west wind, which comes from the plains of the ocean, I journey across the green countryside, I roam through the forests, and bend the young grass. I talk with trees and the forest wildlife, and the stones show me the way. When I thirst and the source does not come to me, I go to the source. When I starve and the bread does not come to me, I seek my bread and take it where I find it. I provide no help and need no help. If at any time necessity confronts me, I do not look around to see whether there is a helper nearby, but I accept the necessity and bend and writhe and struggle. I laugh, I weep, I swear, but I do not look around me.

On this way, no one walks behind me, and I cross no one's path. I am alone, but I fill my solitariness with my life. I am man enough, I am noise, conversation, comfort, and help enough unto myself. And so I wander to the far East. Not that I know anything about what my distant goal might be. I see blue horizons before me: they suffice as a goal. I hurry toward the East and my rising -- I will my rising. / [Image 36] [96] / [35/37]

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Chapter 8: First Day

Cap. viii. [97]

[HI 37] But on the third night, [98] a desolate mountain range blocks my way, though a narrow valley gorge allows me to enter. The way leads inevitably between two high rock faces. My feet are bare and injure themselves on the jagged rocks. Here the path becomes slippery. One-half of the way is white, the other black. I step onto the black side and recoil horrified: it is hot iron. I step onto the white half: it is ice. But so it must be. I dart across and onward, and finally the valley widens into a mighty rocky basin. A narrow path winds up along vertical rocks to the mountain ridge at the top.

As I approach the top, a mighty booming resounds from the other side of the mountain like ore being pounded. The sound gradually swells, and echoes thunderously in the mountain. As I reach the pass, I see an enormous man approach from the other side.

Two bull horns rise from his great head, and a rattling suit of armor covers his chest. His black beard is ruffled and decked with exquisite stones. The giant is carrying a sparkling double axe in his hand, like those used to strike bulls. Before I can recover from my amazed fright, the giant is standing before me. I look at his face: it is faint and pale and deeply wrinkled. His almond-shaped eyes look at me astonished. Horror takes hold of me: this is Izdubar, the mighty, the bull-man. He stands and looks at me: his face speaks of consuming inner fear, and his hands and knees tremble. Izdubar, the powerful bull trembling? Is he frightened? I call out to him:

***

"Oh, Izdubar, most powerful, spare my life and forgive me for lying like a worm in your path."

Iz: "I do not want your life. Where do you come from?"

I: "I come from the West."

Iz: "You come from the West? Do you know of the Western lands? Is this the right way to the Western lands?" [99]

I: "I come from a Western land, whose coast washes against the great Western sea."

Iz: "Does the sun sink in that sea? Or does it touch the solid land in its decline?"

I: "The sun sinks far beyond the sea."

Iz: "Beyond the sea? What lies there?"

I: "There is nothing but empty space there. As you know, the earth is round and moreover it turns around the sun."

Iz: "Damned one, where do you get such knowledge? So there is no immortal land where the sun goes down to be reborn? Are you speaking the truth?"

His eyes flicker with fury and fear. He steps a thundering pace closer. I tremble.

I: "Oh, Izdubar, most powerful one, forgive my presumptuousness, but I'm really speaking the truth. I come from a land where this is proven science and where people live who travel round the world with their ships. Our scholars know through measurement how far the sun is from each point of the surface of the earth. It is a celestial body that lies unspeakably far out in unending space."

Iz: "Unending -- did you say? Is the space of the world unending, and we can never reach the sun?"

I: "Most powerful one, insofar as you are mortal, you can never reach the sun."

I see him overcome with suffocating fear.

Iz: "I am mortal -- and I shall never reach the sun, and never reach immortality?"

He smashes his axe with a powerful, clanging blow on the rock.

Iz: "Be gone, miserable weapon. You are not much use. How should you be of use against infinity, against the eternal void, / [37/38] and against the unreplenishible? There is no one left for you to conquer. Smash yourself, what's it worth!"

(In the West the sun sinks into the lap of glowing clouds in bright crimson.)

"So go away, sun, thrice-damned God, and wrap yourself in your immortality!"

(He snatches the smashed piece of his axe from the ground and hurls it toward the sun.)

"Here you have your sacrifice, your last sacrifice!"

He collapses and sobs like a child. I stand shaking and hardly dare stir.

Iz: "Miserable worm, where did you suckle on this poison?"

I: "Oh Izdubar, most powerful one, what you call poison is science. In our country we are nurtured on it from youth, and that may be one reason why we haven't properly flourished and remain so dwarfish. When I see you, however, it seems to me as if we are all somewhat poisoned." [100]

Iz: "No stronger being has ever cut me down, no monster has ever resisted my strength. But your poison, worm, which you have placed in my way has lamed me to the marrow. Your magical poison is stronger than the army of Tiamat." [101] (He lies as if paralyzed, stretched out on the ground.) "You Gods, help, here lies your son, cut down by the invisible serpent's bite in his heel. Oh, if only I had crushed you when I saw you, and never heard your words."

I: "Oh Izdubar, great and pitiable one, had I known that my knowledge could cut you down, I would have held my tongue. But I wanted to speak the truth."

Iz: "You call poison truth? Is poison truth? Or is truth poison? Do not our astrologers and priests also speak the truth? And yet theirs does not act like poison."

I: "Oh Izdubar, night is falling, and it will get cold up here. Shall I not fetch you help from men?"

Iz: "Let it be, and answer me instead."

I: "But we cannot philosophize here, of all places. Your wretched condition demands help."

Iz: "I say to you, let it be. If I should perish this night, so be it. Just give me an answer."

I: ''I'm afraid, my words are weak, if they are to heal."

Iz: "They cannot bring about something more grave. The disaster has already happened. So tell me what you know. Perhaps you even have a magic word that counteracts the poison."

I: "My words, ph most powerful one, are poor and have no magical power."

Iz: "No matter, speak!"

I: "I don't doubt that your priests speak the truth. It is certainly a truth, only it runs contrary to our truth."

Iz: ''Are there then two sorts of truth?"

I: "It seems to me to be so. Our truth is that which comes to us from the knowledge of outer things. The truth of your priests is that which comes to you from inner things."

Iz (half sitting up): "That was a salutary word."

I: ''I'm fortunate that my weak words have relieved you. Oh, if only I knew many more words that could help you. It has now grown cold and dark. I'll make a fire to warm us."

Iz: "Do that, as it might help." (I gathered wood and lit a big fire.) "The holy fire warms me. Now tell me, how did you make a fire so swiftly and mysteriously?"

I: ''All I need are matches. Look, they are small pieces of wood with a special substance at the tip. Rubbing them against the box produces fire."

Iz: "That is astonishing, where did you learn this art?"

I: "Everyone has matches where I come from. But this is the least of it. We can also fly with the help of useful machines." / 38/39

Iz: "You can fly like birds? If your words did not contain such powerful magic, I would say to you, you were lying."

I: I'm certainly not lying. Look, I also have a timepiece, for example, which shows the exact time of day."

Iz: "This is wonderful. It is clear that you come from a strange and marvelous land. You certainly come from the blessed Western lands. Are you immortal?"

I: "I -- immortal? There is nothing more mortal than we are."

Iz: "What? You are not even immortal and yet you understand such arts?"

I: "Unfortunately our science has still not yet succeeded in finding a method against death."

Iz: "Who then taught you such arts?"

I: "In the course of the centuries men have made many discoveries, through precise observation and the science of outer things."

Iz: "But this science is the awful magic that has lamed me. How can it be that you are still alive even though you drink from this poison every day?"

I: "We've grown accustomed to this over time, because men get used to everything. But we're still somewhat lamed. On the other hand, this science also has great advantages, as you've seen. What we've lost in terms of force, we've rediscovered many times through mastering the force of nature."

Iz: "Isn't it pathetic to be so wounded? For my part, I draw my own force from the force of nature. I leave the secret force to the cowardly conjurers and womanly magicians. If I crush another's skull to pulp, that will stop his awful magic."

I: "But don't you realize how the touch of our magic has worked upon you? Terribly, I think."

Iz: "Unfortunately, you are right."

I: "Now you perhaps see that we had no choice. We had to swallow the poison of science. Otherwise we would have met the same fate as you have: we'd be completely lamed, if we encountered it unsuspecting and unprepared. This poison is so insurmountably strong that everyone, even the strongest, and even the eternal Gods, perish because of it. If our life is dear to us, we prefer to sacrifice a piece of our life force rather than abandon ourselves to certain death."

Iz: "I no longer think that you come from the blessed Western lands. Your country must be desolate, full of paralysis and renunciation. I yearn for the East, where the pure source of our life-giving wisdom flows."

We sit silently at the flickering fire. The night is cold. Izdubar groans and looks up at the starry sky above.

Iz: "Most terrible day of my life -- unending -- so long -- so long -- wretched magical art -- our priests know nothing, or else they could have protected me from it -- even the Gods die, he says. Have you no Gods anymore?"

I: "No, words are all we have."

Iz: "But are these words powerful?"

I: "So they claim, but one notices nothing of this."

Iz: "We do not see the Gods either and yet we believe that they exist. We recognize their workings in natural events."

I: "Science has taken from us the capacity of belief." [102]

Iz: "What, you have lost that, too? How then do you live?"

I: "We live thus, with one foot in the cold and one foot in the hot, and for the rest, come what may!"

Iz: "You express yourself darkly."

I: "So it also is with us, it is dark."

Iz: "Can you bear it?"

I: "Not particularly well. I personally don't find myself at ease with it. For that reason, I've set out to the East, to the land of the rising sun, to seek the light that we lack. Where then does the sun rise?"

Iz: "The earth is, as you say, completely round. Thus the sun rises nowhere."

I: "I mean, do you have the light that we lack?" / 39/40

Iz: "Look at me: I flourished in the light of the Eastern world. From this you can measure how fruitful this light is. But if you come from such a dark land, then beware of such an overpowering light. You could go blind just as we all are somewhat blind."

I: "If your light is as fantastic as you are, then I will be careful."

Iz: "You do well by this."

I: "I long for your truth."

Iz: "As I long for the Western lands. I warn you."

Silence descends. It is late at night. We fall asleep next to the fire.

***

[2] [HI 40] I wandered toward the South and found the unbearable heat of solitude with myself. I wandered toward the North and found the cold death from which all the world dies. I withdrew to my Western land, where the men are rich in knowing and doing, and I began to suffer from the sun's empty darkness. And I threw everything from me and wandered toward the East, where the light rises daily. I went to the East like a child. I did not ask. I simply waited.

Cheerful flowery meadows and lovely spring forests hemmed my path. But in the third night, the heaviness came. It stood before me like a range of cliffs full of sorrowful desolation, and everything tried to deter me from following my life's path. But I found the entrance and the narrow way. The torment was great, since it was not for nothing that I had pushed the two dissipated and dissolute ones away from me. I unsuspectingly absorb what I reject. What I accept enters that part of my soul which I do not know; I accept what I do to myself, but I reject what is done to me.

So the path of my life led me beyond the rejected opposites, united in smooth and -- alas! -- extremely painful sides of the way which lay before me. I stepped on them but they burned and froze my soles. And thus I reached the other side. But the poison of the serpent, whose head you crush, enters you through the wound in your heel; and thus the serpent becomes more dangerous than it was before. Since whatever I reject is nevertheless in my nature. I thought it was without, and so I believed that I could destroy it. But it resides in me and has only assumed a passing outer form and stepped toward me. I destroyed its form and believed that I was a conqueror. But I have not yet overcome myself.

The outer opposition is an image of my inner opposition. Once I realize this, I remain silent and think of the chasm of antagonism in my soul. Outer oppositions are easy to overcome. They indeed exist, but nevertheless you can be united with yourself. They will indeed burn and freeze your soles, but only your soles. It hurts, but you continue and look toward distant goals.

As I rose to the highest point and my hope wanted to look out toward the East, a miracle happened: as I moved toward the East, one from the East hurried toward me and strove toward the sinking light. I wanted light, he wanted night. I wanted to rise, he wanted to sink. I was dwarfish like a child, while he was enormous like an elementally powerful hero. Knowledge lamed me, while he was blinded by the fullness of the light. And so we hurried toward each other; he, from the light; I, from the darkness; he, strong; I, weak; he, God; I, serpent; he, ancient; I, utterly new; he, unknowing; I, knowing; he, fantastic; I, sober; he, brave, powerful; I, cowardly, cunning. But we were both astonished to see one another on the border between morning and evening.

***

I was a child and grew like a greening tree and let the wind and distant cries and commotion of opposites / [40/41] blow calmly through my branches, I was a boy and mocked fallen heroes, I was a youth pushing aside their clutching grips left and right, and so I did not anticipate the Powerful, Blind, and Immortal One, who wandered longingly after the sinking sun, who wanted to cleave the ocean down to its bottom so he could descend into the source of life. That which hurries toward the rising is small, that which approaches the descent is great. Hence I was small, since I simply came from the depths of my descent. I had been where he yearned to be. He who descends is great, and it would be easy for him to smash me. A God who looks like the sun does not hunt worms. But the worm aims at the heel of the Powerful One and will prepare him for the descent that he needs. His power is great and blind. He is marvelous to look at and frightening. But the serpent finds its spot. A little poison and the great one falls. The words of the one who rises have no sound and taste bitter. It is not a sweet poison, but one that is fatal for all Gods.

***

Alas, he is my dearest, most beautiful friend, he who rushes across, pursuing the sun and wanting to marry himself with the immeasurable mother as the sun does. How closely akin, indeed how completely one are the serpent and the God! The word which was our deliverer has become a deadly weapon, a serpent that secretly stabs.

***

No longer do outer opposites stand in my way, but my own opposite comes toward me, and rises up hugely before me, and we block each other's way. The word of the serpent certainly defeats the danger, but my way remains barred, since I then had to fall from paralysis into blindness, just as the Powerful One fell into paralysis to escape his blindness. I cannot reach the blinding power of the sun, just as he, the Powerful One, cannot reach the ever-fruitful womb of darkness. I seem to be denied power, while he is denied rebirth, but I escape the blindness that comes with power and he escapes the nothingness that comes with death. My hope for the fullness of the light shatters, just as his longing for boundless conquered life shatters. I had felled the strongest, and the God climbs down to mortality.

***

[OB 41] The Mighty One fell, he lies on the ground. [103]

Power must subside for the sake of life.

The circumference of outer life should be made smaller.

Much more secrecy, solitary fires, fire, caverns, dark wide forests, sparsely peopled settlements, quietly flowing streams, silent winter and summer nights, small ships and carriages, and secure in dwellings the rare and precious.

From afar wanderers walk along solitary roads, looking here and there.

Hurrying becomes impossible, patience grows. / [41/42]

***

[OB 42] The noise of the days of the world falls silent, and the warming fire.

Sitting at the fire, the shades of those gone before wail softly and give news of the past.

Come to the solitary fire, you blind and lame ones and hear of both kinds of truth: the blind will be lamed and the lamed will be blinded, yet the shared fire warms both in the lengthening night.

An old secret fire burns between us, giving sparse light and ample warmth.

The primordial fire that conquers every necessity shall burn again, since the night of the world is wide and cold, and the need is great.

The well-protected fire brings together those from far away and those who are cold, those who do not see one another and cannot reach one another, and it conquers suffering and shatters need.

The words uttered at the fire are ambiguous and deep and show life the right way.

The blind shall be lamed, so that he will not run into the abyss, and the lamed shall be blind, so that he will not look at things beyond his reach with longing and contempt.

Both may be aware of their deep helplessness so that they will respect the holy fire again, as well as the shades sitting at the hearth, and the words that encircle the flames.

***

The ancients called the saving word the Logos, an expression of divine reason. [104] So much unreason / [42/43] was in man that he needed reason to be saved. If one waits long enough, one sees how the Gods all change into serpents and underworld dragons in the end. This is also the fate of the Logos: in the end it poisons us all. In time, we were all poisoned, but unknowingly we kept the One, the Powerful One, the eternal wanderer in us away from the poison. We spread poison and paralysis around us in that we want to educate all the world around us into reason.

Some have their reason in thinking, others in feeling. Both are servants of Logos, and in secret become worshipers of the serpent. [105]

You can subjugate yourself, shackle yourself in irons, whip yourself bloody every day: you have crushed yourself, but not overcome yourself. Precisely through this you have helped the Powerful One, strengthened your paralysis, and promoted his blindness. He would like to see it in others, and inflict it on them, and would like to force the Logos on you and others, longingly and tyrannically with blind obstinacy and vacant stubbornness. Give him a taste of Logos. He is afraid, and he already trembles from afar since he suspects that he has become outdated, and that a tiny droplet of the poison of Logos will paralyze him. But because he is your beautiful, much loved brother, you will act slavishly toward him and you would like to spare him as you have spared none of your fellow men. You spared no merry and no powerful means to strike your fellow men with the poisoned arrow. Paralyzed game is an unworthy prey. The powerful huntsman, who wrestles the bull to the ground and tears the lion to pieces and strikes the army of Tiamat, is your bow's worthy target. [106]

***

If you live as he whom you are, He will come running against you impetuously, and you can hardly miss him. He will lay violent hands on you and force you into slavery if you do not remember your terrible weapon, which you have always used in his service against yourself. You will be cunning, terrible, and cold if you make the beautiful and much loved fall. But you should not kill him, even if he suffers and writhes in unbearable agony. Bind the holy Sebastian to a tree and slowly and rationally shoot arrow after arrow into his twitching flesh. [107] When you do so, remind yourself that each arrow that strikes him spares one of your dwarfish and lame brothers. So you may shoot many arrows. But there is a misunderstanding that occurs all too frequently and is almost ineradicable: Men always want to destroy the beautiful and much loved outside of themselves, but never within themselves.

***

He, the beautiful and most loved one, came to me from the East, from just that place which I was seeking to reach. Admiringly I saw his power and magnificence, and I recognized that he was striving for precisely what I had abandoned, namely my dark human milling crowd of abjection. I recognized the blindness and unknowingness of his striving which worked against my desire, and I opened his eyes and lamed his powerful limbs with a poisoned stab. And he lay crying like a child, as that which he was, a child, a primordial grown child that required human Logos. So he lay before me, helpless, my blind God, who had become half-seeing and paralyzed. And compassion seized me, since it was plain to me that I should not let him die, he who approached me from the rising, from that place where he could be well, but which I could never reach. He whom I sought I now possessed. The East could give me nothing other than him, the sick and fallen one.

***

You need to undertake only half of the way, he will undertake the other half. If you go beyond him, blindness will befall you. If he goes beyond you, paralysis will befall him. Therefore, and insofar as it is the manner of the Gods to go beyond mortals, they become paralyzed, and become as helpless as children. Divinity and humanity should remain preserved, if man should remain before the God, and the God remain before man. The high-blazing flame is the middle way, whose luminous course runs between the human and the divine.

The divine primordial power is blind, since its face has become human. The human is the face of the Godhead. If the God comes near you, then plead for your life to be spared, since the God is loving horror. The ancients said: it is terrible to fall into the hands of the living God. [108] They spoke thus because they knew, since they were still close to the ancient forest, and they turned green like the trees in a childlike manner and ascended far away toward the East. / [43/44]

Consequently they fell into the hands of the living God. They learned to kneel and to lie with their faces down, to beg for pity, and they learned to live in servile fear and to be grateful. But he who saw him, the terrible beautiful one with his black velvet eyes and the long eyelashes, the eyes that do not see but merely gaze lovingly and fearfully, he has learned to cry out and whimper, so that he can at least reach the ear of the Godhead. Only your fearful cry can stop the God. And then you see that the God also trembles, since he stands confronting his face, his observing gaze in you, and he feels unknown power. The God is afraid of man.

***

If my God is lamed, I must stand by him, since I cannot abandon the much-loved. I sense that he is my lot, my brother, who abided and grew in the light while I was in the darkness and fed myself with poison. It is good to know such things: if we are surrounded by night, our brother stands in the fullness of the light, doing his great deeds, tearing up the lion and killing the dragon. And he draws his bow against ever more distant goals, until he becomes aware of the sun wandering high up in the sky and wants to catch it. But when he has discovered his valuable prey, then your longing for the light also awakens. You discard the fetters and take yourself to the place of the rising light. And thus you rush toward each other. He believed he could simply capture the sun and encountered the worm of the shadows. You thought that in the East you could drink from the source of the light, and catch the horned giant, before whom you fall to your knees. His essence is blind excessive longing and tempestuous force. My essence is seeing limitation and the incapacity of cleverness. He possesses in abundance what I lack. Consequently I will also not let him go, the Bull God, who once wounded Jacob's hip and whom I have now lamed. [109] I want to make his force my own.

It is therefore prudent to keep alive the severely afflicted so that his force continues to support me. We miss nothing more than divine force. We say, "Yes, indeed, this is how it should or could be. This or that should be achieved." We speak thus and stand thus, and look about us embarrassed, to see whether somehow something will occur. And should something happen, we look on and say: "Yes, indeed, we understand, it is this or that, or it is similar to this or that." And thus we speak and stand and look around to see whether somewhere something might happen. Something always happens, but we do not happen, since our God is sick. We have seen him dead with the venomous gaze of the Basilisk on his face, and we have understood that he is dead. We must think of his healing. And yet again I feel it quite clearly that my life would have broken in half had I failed to heal my God. Hence I abided with him in the long cold night. [Image 44] / [Image 45] [110] / [44/46]

[admin]

Chapter 9: Second Day

Cap. ix.

[HI 46] No dream gave me the saving word. [111] Izdubar lay silent and stiff all night, until daybreak. [112] I paced the mountain ridge, pondering, and looked back to my Western lands, where there is so much knowledge and so much possibility of help. I love Izdubar, and I do not want him to wither away miserably. But where should help come from? No one will travel the hot-cold path. And I? I am afraid to return to that path. And in the East? Was there possibly help there? But what about the unknown dangers that loomed there? I do not want to go blind. What use would that be to Izdubar? I cannot carry this lamed one as a blind man either. Yes, if I were powerful like Izdubar. What use is science here?

Toward evening I went up to Izdubar and spoke to him: "Izdubar, my prince, listen! I will not let you decline. The second evening is falling. We have no food and we are bound to die if I cannot find help. We cannot expect any help from the West, but help is possible from the East. Did you meet anyone on your way whom we could call on for help?"

Iz: "Let it be, may death come when it will."

I: "My heart bleeds at the thought of leaving you here without having done the upmost to help you."

Iz: "What help is your magical power to you? If you were strong, as I am, you could carry me. But your poison can only destroy and not help."

I: "If we were in my land, swift wagons could bring us help."

Iz: "If we were in my land, your poisoned barb would not have reached me."

I: "Tell me, do you know of no help from the side of the East?"

Iz: "The way there is long and lonely, and when you reach the plains after crossing the mountains, you will meet the powerful sun which will blind you."

I: "But what if I wandered by night and if I sheltered from the sun during the day?"

Iz: "In the night all the serpents and dragons crawl out of their holes and you, unarmed, will inevitably fall victim to them. Let it be! How would this help? My legs have withered and are numb. I prefer not to bring home the booty of this journey."

I: "Should I not risk everything?"

Iz: "Useless! Nothing is gained if you die."

I: "Let me think it over a bit, perhaps a saving thought will yet come to me."

I withdraw and sit down on a rock high above on the ridge of the mountain. And this speech began in me: Great Izdubar, you are in a hopeless position -- and I no less. [113] What can be done? It is not always necessary to act; sometimes thinking is better. I am basically convinced that Izdubar is hardly real in the ordinary sense, but is a fantasy. It would help if the situation were considered from another angle ... considered ... considered ... it is remarkable that even here thoughts echo; one must be quite alone. But this will hardly last. He will of course not accept that he is a fantasy, but instead claim that he is completely real and that he can only be helped in a real way: nevertheless, it would be worth trying this means once. I will appeal to him:

I: "My prince, Powerful One, listen: a thought came to me that might save us. I think that you are not at all real, but only a fantasy."

Iz: "I am terrified by this thought. It is murderous. Do you even mean to declare me unreal / [46/47] -- now that you have lamed me so pitifully?

I: "Perhaps I have not made myself clear enough, and have spoken too much in the language of the Western lands. I do not mean to say that you are not real at all, of course, but only as real as a fantasy. If you could accept this, much would be gained."

Iz: "What would be gained by this? You are a tormenting devil."

I: "Pitiful one, I will not torment you. The hand of the doctor does not seek to torment even if it causes grief. Can you really not accept that you are a fantasy?"

Iz: "Woe betide me! In what magic do you want to entangle me? Should it help me if I take myself for a fantasy?"

I: "You know that the name one bears means a lot. You also know that one often gives the sick new names to heal them, for with the new name, they come by a new essence. Your name is your essence."

Iz: "You are right, our priests also say this."

I: "So are you prepared to admit that you are a fantasy?"

Iz: "If it helps -- yes."

The inner voice now spoke to me as follows: while admittedly he is a fantasy now, the situation remains extremely complex. A fantasy cannot be simply negated and treated with resignation either. It calls for action. Anyway, he is a fantasy -- and thus considerably more volatile -- I think I can see a way forward: I can take him on my back for now. I went to Izdubar and said to him:

"A way has been found. You have become light, lighter than a feather. Now I can carry you." I put my arms round him and lift him up from the ground; he is lighter than air, and I struggle to keep my feet on the ground since my load lifts me up into the air.

Iz: "That was a masterstroke. Where are you carrying me?"

I: "I am going to carry you down into the Western land. My comrades will happily accommodate such a large fantasy. Once we have crossed the mountains and have reached the houses of hospitable men, I can calmly go about finding a means to restore you completely again."

Carrying him on my back, I climb down the small rock path with great care, more in danger of being whirled aloft by the wind than of losing balance because of my load and plunging down the mountainside. I hang on to my all too lightweight load. Finally we reach the bottom of the valley and the way of the hot and cold pain. But this time I am blown by a whistling East wind down through the narrow rocks and across the fields toward inhabited places, making no contact with the painful way. Spurred on, I hasten through beautiful lands. I see two people ahead of me: Ammonius and the Red One. When we are right behind them, they turn round and run off into the fields with horrified cries. I must have proved a strange sight indeed.

Iz: "Who are these misshapen ones? Are these your comrades?"

I: "These are not men, they are so-called relics of the past which one still often encounters in the Western lands. They used to be very important. They're now used mostly as shepherds."

Iz: "What a wondrous country! But look, isn't that a town? Don't you want to go there?"

I: "No, God forbid. I don't want a crowd to gather, since the enlightened live there. Can't you smell them? They're actually dangerous, since they cook the strongest poisons from which even I must protect myself. The people there are totally paralyzed, wrapped in a brown poisonous vapor and can only move with artificial means. / [47/48] But you need not worry. Night has almost fallen and no one will see us. Moreover, no one would admit to having seen me. I know an out of the way house here. I have close friends there who will take us in for the night."

Izdubar and I come to a quiet dark garden and a secluded house. I hide Izdubar under the drooping branches of a tree, go up to the door of the house, and knock. I ponder the door: it is much too small. I will never be able to get Izdubar through it. Yet -- a fantasy takes up no space! Why did this excellent thought not occur to me earlier? I return to the garden and with no difficulty squeeze Izdubar into the size of an egg and put him in my pocket. Then I walk into the welcoming house where Izdubar should find healing.

***

[2] [HI 48] [114] Thus my God found salvation. He was saved precisely by what one would actually consider fatal, namely by declaring him a figment of the imagination. How often has it been assumed that the Gods have been brought to their end in this way. [115] This was obviously a serious mistake, since this was precisely what saved the God. He did not pass away, but became a living fantasy, whose workings I could feel on my own body: my inherent heaviness faded and the hot and cold way of pain no longer burned and froze my soles. The weight no longer kept me pressed to the ground, but instead the wind carried me lightly like a feather, while I carried the giant. [116]

One used to believe that one could murder a God. But the God was saved, he forged a new axe in the fire, and plunged again into the flood of light of the East to resume his ancient cycle. [117] But we clever men crept around lamed and poisoned, and did not even know that we lacked something. But I loved my God, and took him to the house of men, since I was convinced that he also really lived as a fantasy, and should therefore not be left behind, wounded and sick. And hence I experienced the miracle of my body losing its heaviness when I burdened myself with the God.

St. Christopher, the giant, bore his burden with difficulty, despite the fact that he bore only the Christ child. [118] But I was as small as a child and bore a giant, and yet my burden lifted me up. The Christ child became an easy burden for the giant Christopher, since Christ himself said, "My yoke is sweet, and my burden is light." [119] We should not bear Christ as he is unbearable, but we should be Christs, for then our yoke is sweet and our burden easy. This tangible and apparent world is one reality, but fantasy is the other reality. So long as we leave the God outside us apparent and tangible, he is unbearable and hopeless. But if we turn the God into fantasy, he is in us and is easy to bear. The God outside us increases the weight of everything heavy, while the God within us lightens everything heavy. Hence all Christophers have stooped backs and short breath, since the world is heavy.

***

[HI 48/2] Many have wanted to get help for their sick God and were then devoured by the serpents and dragons lurking on the way to the land of the sun. They perished in the overbright day and have become dark men, since their eyes have been blinded. Now they go around like shadows and speak of the light but see little. But their God is in everything that they do not see: He is in the dark Western lands and he sharpens seeing eyes and he assists those cooking the poison and he guides serpents to the heels of the blind perpetrators. Therefore, if you are clever, take the God with you, then you know where he is. If you do not have him with you in the Western lands, he will come running to you at night with clanking armor and a crushing battle axe. [120] If you do not have him with you in the land of the dawn, then you will step unawares on the divine worm who awaits your unsuspecting heel. / [48/49]

***

[HI 49] You gain everything from the God whom you bear, but not his weapon, since he crushed it. He who conquers needs weapons. But what else do you want to conquer? You cannot conquer more than the earth. And what is the earth? It is round all over and hangs like a drop in the cosmos. You will not reach the sun, and your power will not even extend to the barren moon; you will conquer neither the sea, nor the snow on the poles, nor the sands of the desert, but only a few spots on the green earth. You will not conquer anything for any length of time. Your power will turn into dust tomorrow, for above all -- at the very least -- you must conquer death. So do not be a fool, throw down your weapon. God himself smashed his weapon. Armor is enough to protect you from fools who still suffer from the need to conquer. God's armor will make you invulnerable and invisible to the worst fools.

***

Take your God with you. Bear him down to your dark land where people live who rub their eyes each morning and yet always see only the same thing and never anything else. Bring your God down to the haze pregnant with poison, but not like those blinded ones who try to illuminate the darkness with lanterns which it does not comprehend. Instead, secretly carry your God to a hospitable roof. The huts of men are small and they cannot welcome the God despite their hospitality and willingness. Hence do not wait until rawly bungling hands of men hack your God to pieces, but embrace him again, lovingly, until he has taken on the form of his first beginning. Let no human eye see the much loved, terribly splendid one in the state of his illness and lack of power. Consider that your fellow men are animals without knowing it. So long as they go to pasture, or lie in the sun, or suckle their young, or mate with each other, they are beautiful and harmless creatures of dark Mother Earth. But if the God appears, they begin to rave, since the nearness of God makes people rave. They tremble with fear and fury and suddenly attack one another in fratricidal struggles, since one senses the approaching God in the other. So conceal the God that you have taken with you. Let them rave and maul each other. Your voice is too weak for those raging to be able to hear. Thus do not speak and do not show the God, but sit in a solitary place and sing incantations in the ancient manner:

Set the egg before you, the God in his beginning.
And behold it.
And incubate it with the magical warmth of your gaze.

[admin]

HERE THE INCANTATIONS BEGIN. / [49/50]

Chapter 10: The Incantations [121]

Cap. x.

[Image 50] [122]
Christmas has come. The God is in the egg.
I have prepared a rug for my God, an expensive red rug from the land of morning.
He shall be surrounded by the shimmer of magnificence of his Eastern land.
I am the mother, the simple maiden, who gave birth and did not know how.
I am the careful father, who protected the maiden.
I am the shepherd, who received the message as he guarded his herd at night on the dark fields. [123]

/ [50/51] [Image 51]
I am the holy animal that stood astonished and cannot grasp the becoming of the God.
I am the wise man who came from the East, suspecting the miracle from afar. [124]
And I am the egg that surrounds and nurtures the seed of the God in me.

/ [51/52] [Image 52]
The solemn hours lengthen.
And my humanity is wretched and suffers torment.
Since I am a giver of birth.
Whence do you delight me, oh God?
He is the eternal emptiness and the eternal fullness. [125]
Nothing resembles him and he resembles everything.
Eternal darkness and eternal brightness.
Eternal below and eternal above.
Double nature in one.
Simple in the manifold.
Meaning in absurdity.
Freedom in bondage.
Subjugated when victorious.
Old in youth.
Yes in no.

/ [Image 53] / [52/53] [Image 54]
Oh
light of the middle way,
enclosed in the egg,
embryonic, full of ardor, oppressed.
Fully expectant,
dreamlike, awaiting lost memories.
As heavy as stone, hardened.
Molten, transparent.
Streaming bright, coiled on itself.

/ [53/54] [Image 54] [126] [127]
Amen, you are the lord of the beginning.
Amen,
Amen, you are the flower that blooms over everything.

Amen, you are the deer that breaks out of the forest.
Amen, you are the song that sounds far over the water.
Amen, you are the beginning and the end.

/ [54/55] [Image 55] [128]
One word that was never spoken.
One light that was never lit up.
An unparalleled confusion.
And a road without end.

/ [55/56] [Image 56]
I forgive myself these words, as you also forgive me for wanting your blazing light.

/ [56/57] [Image 57]
Rise up, you gracious fire of old night.
I kiss the threshold of your beginning.
My hand prepares the rug and spreads abundant red flowers before you.
Rise up my friend, you who lay sick, break through the shell.
We have prepared a meal for you.
Gifts have been prepared for you.
Dancers await you.
We have built a house for you.

Your servants stand ready.
We drove herds together for you on green fields.
We filled
We set out fragrant fruit on golden dishes.
We knock at your prison and lay our ears against it.
The hours lengthen, tarry no longer.
We are wretched without you and our song is worn out.

/ [57/58] [Image 58] [129]
We are miserable without you and wear out our songs.
We spoke all the words that our heart gave us.
What else do you want?
What else shall we fulfill for you?
We open every door for you.
We bend our knees where you want us to.
We go to all points of the compass according to your wish.
We carry up what is below, and we turn what is above into what is below, as you command.
We give and take according to your wish.
We wanted to turn right, but go left, obedient to your sign. We rise and we fall, we sway and we remain still, we see and we are blind, we hear and we are deaf, we say yes and no, always hearing your word.
We do not comprehend and we live the incomprehensible.
We do not love and we live the unloved.
And we evolve around ourselves again and comprehend and live the understandable.
We love and live the loved, true to your law. / [58/59]

Come to us, we who are willing from our own will.
Come to us, we who understand you from our own spirit.
Come to us, we who will warm you at our own fire.
Come to us, we who will heal you with our own art.
Come to us, we who will produce you out of our own body.
Come, child, to father and mother.

[Image 59][130] / [59/60]
We asked earth.
We asked Heaven.
We asked the sea.
We asked the wind.
We asked the fire.
We looked for you with all the peoples.
We looked for you with all the kings.
We looked for you with all the wise.
We looked for you in our own heads and hearts.
And we found you in the egg. [Image 60] / [60/61]

I have slain a precious human sacrifice for you,
a youth and old man.
I have cut my skin with a knife.
I have sprinkled your altar with my own blood.
I have banished my father and mother so that you can live with me.
I have turned my night into day and went about at midday like a sleepwalker.
I have overthrown all the Gods, broken the laws, eaten the impure.
I have thrown down my sword and dressed in women's clothing.
I shattered my firm castle and played like a child in the sand.
I saw warriors form into line of battle and I destroyed my suit of armor with a hammer.
I planted my field and let the fruit decay.
I made small everything that was great and made everything great that was small.
I exchanged my furthest goal for the nearest, and so I am ready.

[Image 61] [131]

/ [61/62] [HI 62] However, I am not ready, since I have still not accepted that which chokes my heart. That fearful thing is the enclosing of the God in the egg. I am happy that the great endeavor has been successful, but my fear made me forget the hazards involved. I love and admire the powerful. No one is greater than he with the bull's horns, and yet I lamed, carried, and made him smaller with ease. I almost slumped to the ground with fear when I saw him, and now I rescue him with a cupped hand. These are the powers that make you afraid and conquer you; these have been your Gods and your rulers since time immemorial: yet you can put them in your pocket. What is blasphemy compared to this? I would like to be able to blaspheme against the God: That way I would at least have a God whom I could insult, but it is not worth blaspheming against an egg that one carries in one's pocket. That is a God against whom one cannot even blaspheme.

I hated this pitifulness of the God. My own unworthiness is already enough. It cannot bear my encumbering it with the pitifulness of the God. Nothing stands firm: you touch yourself and you turn to dust. You touch the God and he hides terrified in the egg. You force the gates of Hell: the sound of cackling masks and the music of fools approaches you. You storm Heaven: stage scenery totters and the prompter in the box falls into a swoon. You notice: you are not true, it is not true above, it is not true below, left and right are deceptions. Wherever you grasp is air, air, air.

But I have caught him, he who has been feared since time immemorial; I have made him small and my hand surrounds him. That is the demise of the Gods: man puts them in his pocket. That is the end of the story of the Gods. Nothing remains of the Gods other than an egg. And I possess this egg. Perhaps I can eradicate this last one and with this finally exterminate the race of Gods. Now that I know that the Gods have yielded to my power -- what are the Gods to me now? Old and overripe, they have fallen and been buried in an egg.

But how did this happen? I felled the Great One, I mourned him, I did not want to leave him, since I loved him because no mortal being rivals him. Out of love I devised the trick that relieved him of heaviness and freed him from the confines of space. I took from him -- out of love -- form and corporeality. I enclosed him in the maternal egg. Should I slay him, the defenseless one whom I loved? Should I shatter the delicate shell of his grave, and expose him to the weightlessness and unboundedness of the winds of the world? But did I not sing the incantations for his incubation? Did I not do this out of love for him? Why do I love him? I do not want to tear the love for the Great One from my heart. I want to love my God, the defenseless and hopeless one. I want to care for him, like a child.

Are we not sons of the Gods? Why should Gods not be our children? If my father the God should die, a God child should arise from my maternal heart. Since I love the God and do not want to leave him. Only he who loves the God can make him fall, and the God submits to his vanquisher and nestles in his hand and dies in the heart of him who loves him and promises him birth.

***

My God, I love you as a mother loves the unborn whom she carries in her heart. Grow in the egg of the East, nourish yourself from my love, drink the juice of my life so that you will become a radiant God. We need your light, Oh child. Since we go in darkness, light up our paths. May your light shine before us, may your fire warm the coldness of our life. We do not need your power but life.

***

/ [62/63] What does power avail us? We do not want to rule. We want to live, we want light and warmth, and hence we need yours. Just as the greening earth and every living body needs the sun, so we as spirits need your light and your warmth. A sunless spirit becomes the parasite of the body. But the God feeds the spirit. [Image 63] / [63/65] [Image 64] [132] [133] /