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

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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.

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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] /

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Chapter 11: The Opening of the Egg. [134]

Cap. xi.

[HI 65] [135] On the evening of the third day, I kneel down on the rug and carefully open the egg. Something resembling smoke rises up from it and suddenly Izdubar is standing before me, enormous, transformed, and complete. His limbs are whole and I find no trace of damage on them. It's as if he had awoken from a deep sleep. He says:

"Where am I? How narrow it is here, how dark, how cool -- am I in the grave? Where was I? It seemed to me as if I had been outside in the universe -- over and under me was an endlessly dark star-glittering sky --
and I was in a passion of unspeakable yearning.
Streams of fire broke from my radiating body --
I surged through blazing flames --
I swam in a sea that wrapped me in living fires --
Full of light, full of longing, full of eternity --
I was ancient and perpetually renewing myself --
Falling from the heights to the depths,
and whirled glowing from the depths to the heights --
hovering around myself amidst glowing clouds --
as raining embers beating down like the foam of the surf, engulfing / [65/66] myself in stifling heat --
Embracing and rejecting myself in a boundless game --
Where was I? I was completely sun." [136]

***

I: "Oh Izdubar! Divine one! How wonderful! You are healed!"

***

"Healed? Was I ever sick? Who speaks of sickness? I was sun, completely sun. I am the sun."

***

An inexpressible light breaks from his body, a light that my eyes cannot grasp. I must cover my face and cast my gaze to the ground.

I: "You are the sun, the eternal light -- most powerful one, forgive me for carrying you."

Everything is quiet and dark. I look around me: the empty egg shell is lying on the rug. I feel myself, the floor, the walls: everything is as usual, utterly plain and utterly real. I would like to say that everything around me has turned to gold. But it is not true -- everything is as it always has been. Here reigned eternal light, immeasurable and overpowering. [137]

***

[2] [HI 66] It happened that I opened the egg and that the God left the egg. He was healed and his figure shone transformed, and I knelt like a child and could not grasp the miracle. He who had been pressed into the core of the beginning rose up, and no trace of illness could be found on him. And when I thought that I had caught the mighty one and held him in my cupped hands, he was the sun itself.

I wandered toward the East where the sun rises. I probably wanted to rise, too, as if I were the sun. I wanted to embrace the sun and rise with it into daybreak. But it came toward me and stood in my way. It told me that I had no chance of reaching the beginning. But I lamed the one who wanted to rush down in order to set with the sun in the womb of the night; he was deprived of all hope of reaching the blessed Western lands.

But behold! I caught the sun without realizing it and carried it in my hand. He who wanted to go down with the sun found me through his downgoing. I became his nocturnal mother who incubated the egg of the beginning. And he rose up, renewed, reborn to greater splendor.

While he rises, however, I go down. When I conquered the God, his force streamed into me. But when the God rested in the egg and awaited his beginning, my force went into him. And when he rose up radiantly, I lay on my face. He took my life with him. All my force was now in him. My soul swam like a fish in his sea of fire. But I lay in the frightful cool of the shadows of the earth and sank down deeper and deeper to the lowest darkness. All light had left me. The God rose in the Eastern lands and I fell into the horror of the underworld. I lay there like a child-bearer cruelly mauled and bleeding her life into the child, uniting life and death in a dying glance, the day's mother, the night's prey. My God had torn me apart terribly, he had drunk the juice of my life, he had drunk my highest power into him and became marvelous and strong like the sun, an unblemished God who bore no stigma or flaw. He had taken my wings from me, he had robbed me of the swelling force of my muscles, and the power of my will disappeared with him. He left me powerless and groaning.

/ [66/67] I did not know what was happening to me, since simply everything powerful, beautiful, blissful, and superhuman had leaked from my maternal womb; none of the radiant gold remained. Cruelly and unthinkably the sunbird spread its wings and flew up into infinite space. I was left with the broken shells and the miserable casing of his beginning; the emptiness of the depths opened beneath me.

Woe betide the mother who gives birth to a God! If she gives birth to a wounded and pain-stricken God, a sword will pierce her soul. But if she gives birth to an unblemished God, then Hell will open to her, from which monstrous serpents will rise convulsively to suffocate the mother with miasma. Birth is difficult, but a thousand times more difficult is the hellish afterbirth. [138] All the dragons and monstrous serpents of eternal emptiness follow behind the divine son.

What remains of human nature when the God has become mature and has seized all power? Everything incompetent, everything powerless, everything eternally vulgar, everything adverse and unfavorable, everything reluctant, diminishing, exterminating, everything absurd, everything that the unfathomable night of matter encloses in itself, that is the afterbirth of the God and his hellish and dreadfully deformed brother.

The God suffers when man does not accept his darkness. Consequently men must have a suffering God, so long as they suffer from evil. To suffer from evil means: you still love evil and yet love it no longer. You still hope to gain something, but you do not want to look closely for fear that you might discover that you still love evil. The God suffers because you continue to suffer from loving evil. You do not suffer from evil because you recognize it, but because it affords you secret pleasure, and because you believe it promises the pleasure of an unknown opportunity.

So long as your God suffers, you have sympathy with him and with yourself. You thus spare your Hell and prolong his suffering. If you want to make him well without engaging in secret sympathy with yourself, evil puts a spoke in your wheel -- the evil whose form you generally recognize, but whose hellish strength in yourself you do not know. Your unknowing stems from the previous harmlessness of your life, from the peaceful passage of time, and from the absence of the God. But if the God draws near, your essence starts to seethe and the black mud of the depths whirls up.

Man stands between emptiness and fullness. If his strength combines with fullness, it becomes fully formative. There is always something good about such formation. If his strength combines with emptiness, it has a dissolving and destructive effect, since emptiness can never be formed, but only strives to satisfy itself at the cost of fullness. Combined thus human force turns emptiness into evil. If your force shapes fullness, it does so because of its association with fullness. But to ensure that your formation continues to exist, it must remain tied to your strength. Through constant shaping, you gradually lose your force, since ultimately all force is associated with the shapeliness that has been given form. Ultimately, where you mistakenly imagine that you are rich, you have actually become poor, and you stand amidst your forms like a beggar. That is when the blinded man is seized by an increasing desire to give shape to things, since he believes that manifold increased formation will satisfy his desire. Because he has spent his force, he becomes desirous; he begins to compel others into his service and takes their force to pursue his own designs.

In this moment, you need evil. When you notice that your strength is coming to an end and desire sets in, you must withdraw it from what has been formed into your emptiness; through this association with the emptiness you will succeed in dissolving the formation in you. You will thus regain your freedom, in that you have saved your strength from oppressive association with the object. So long as you persist with the standpoint of the good, you cannot dissolve your formation, precisely because it is what is good. You cannot dissolve good with good. You can dissolve good only with evil. For your good also leads ultimately to death through its progressive binding of your force by progressively binding your force. You are entirely unable to live without evil.

Your shaping first produces an image of your formation within you. This image remains in you and / [67/68] it is the first and unmediated expression of your shaping. It then produces precisely through this image an outer one, which can exist without you and outlive you. Your strength is not directly linked to your outer formation, but only through the image that remains in you. When you set about dissolving your formation with evil, you do not destroy the outer shape, or else you would be destroying your own work. But what you do destroy is the image that you have formed in yourself. For it is this image that clings to your force. You will need evil to dissolve your formation, and to free yourself from the power of what has been, to the same extent which this image fetters your strength.

Hence their formation causes many good persons to bleed to death, because they cannot attend to evil in the same measure. The better one is and the more attached one is to one's formation, the more one will lose one's force. But what happens when the good person has lost their force completely to their formation? Not only will they seek to force others into the service of their formation with unconscious cunning and power, but they will also become bad in their goodness without knowing it, since their longing for satisfaction and strengthening will make them more and more selfish. But because of this the good ones will ultimately destroy their own work, and all those whom they forced into the service of their own work will become their enemies, because they will have alienated them. But you will also secretly begin to hate whoever alienates you from yourself against your own wishes, even if this were in the best interest of things. Unfortunately, the good person who has bound his strength will all too easily find slaves for his service, since there are more than plenty who yearn for nothing more strongly than to be alienated from themselves under a good pretext.

You suffer from evil because you love it secretly and are unaware of your love. You wish to escape your predicament, and you begin to hate evil. And once more you are bound to evil through your hate, since whether you love or hate it, it makes no difference: you are bound to evil. Evil is to be accepted. What we want remains in our hands. What we do not want, and yet is stronger than us, sweeps us away and we cannot stop it without damaging ourselves, for our force remains in evil. Thus we probably have to accept our evil without love and hate, recognizing that it exists and must have its share in life. In doing so, we can deprive it of the power it has to overwhelm us.

***

When we have succeeded in making a God, and if through this creation our whole force has entered into this design, we are filled with an overwhelming desire to rise with the divine sun and to become a part of its magnificence. But we forget that we are then no more than hollow forms, since giving form to God has sapped us completely. We are not only poor but have become sluggish matter throughout, which would never be entitled to share in divinity.

Like a terrible suffering or an inescapable devilish persecution, the misery and neediness of our matter creeps up on us. The powerless matter begins to suckle and would like to swallow its shape back into itself again. But since we are always enamored of our own design, we believe that the God calls us to him, and we make desperate attempts to follow the God into the higher realm, or we turn preachingly and demandingly to our fellow men to at any rate force others into following the God. Unfortunately there are men who allow themselves to be persuaded into doing this, to their and our detriment.

Much undoing resides in this urge: since who could suspect that he who has made the God is himself condemned to Hell? But this is the way it is, because the matter that is stripped of the divine radiance of force is empty and dark. If the God alights from matter, we feel the emptiness of matter as one part of endless empty space.

Through haste and increased willing and action we want to escape from emptiness and also from evil. But the right way is that we accept emptiness, destroy the image of the form within us, negate the God, and descend into the abyss and awfulness of matter. The God as our work stands outside us and no longer needs our help. He is created and remains left to his own devices. A created work that perishes again immediately once we turn away from it is not worth anything, even if it / [68/69] were a God.

But where is the God after his creation and after his separation from me? If you build a house, you see it standing in the outer world. When you have created a God whom you cannot see with your own eyes, then he is in the spiritual world that is no less valuable than the outer physical world. He is there and does everything for you and others that you would expect from a God.

Thus your soul is your own self in the spiritual world. As the abode of the spirits, however, the spiritual world is also an outer world. Just as you are also not alone in the visible world, but are surrounded by objects that belong to you and obey only you, you also have thoughts that belong to you and obey only you. But just as you are surrounded in the visible world by things and beings that neither belong to you nor obey you, you are also surrounded in the spiritual world by thoughts and beings of thought that neither obey you nor belong to you. Just as you engender or bear your physical children, and just as they grow up and separate themselves from you to live their own fate, you also produce or give birth to beings of thought which separate themselves from you and live their own lives. Just as we leave our children when we grow old and give our body back to the earth, I separate myself from my God, the sun, and sink into the emptiness of matter and obliterate the image of my child in me. This happens in that I accept the nature of matter and allow the force of my form to flow into emptiness. Just as I gave birth anew to the sick God through my engendering force, I henceforth animate the emptiness of matter from which the formation of evil grows.

***

Nature is playful and terrible. Some see the playful side and dally with it and let it sparkle. Others see the horror and cover their heads and are more dead than alive. The way does not lead between both, but embraces both. It is both cheerful play and cold horror. [139] [Image 69] [140] / [69/71] [Image 70] / [Image 71] [141] / [Image 72]. / [71/73]

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Chapter 12: Hell

Cap. xii

[HI 73] On the second night [142] after the creation of my God, a vision made known to me that I had reached the underworld.

I find myself in a gloomy vault, whose floor consists of damp stone slabs. In the middle there is a column from which ropes and axes hang. At the foot of the column there lies an awful serpentlike tangle of human bodies. At first I catch sight of the figure of a young maiden with wonderful red-gold hair -- a man of devilish appearance is lying half under her -- his head is bent backward -- a thin streak of blood runs down his forehead -- two similar daimons have thrown themselves over the maiden's feet and body. Their faces bear an inhuman expression -- the living evil -- their muscles are taut and hard, and their bodies sleek like serpents. They lie motionless. The maiden holds her hand over one eye of the man lying beneath her, who is the most powerful of the three -- her hand firmly clasps a small silver fishing rod that she has driven into the eye of the devil.

I break out in a profuse cold sweat. They wanted to torture the maiden to death, but she defended herself with the force of the most extreme despair, and succeeded in piercing the eye of the evil one with the little hook. If he moves, she will tear out his eye with a final jerk. The horror paralyzes me: what will happen? A voice speaks:

"The evil one cannot make a sacrifice, he cannot sacrifice his eye, victory is with the one who can sacrifice." [143]

***

[2] The vision vanished. I saw that my soul had fallen into the power of abysmal evil. The power of evil is unquestionable, and we rightfully fear it. Here no prayers, no pious words, no magical sayings help. Once raw power comes after you, there is no help. Once evil seizes you without pity, no father, no mother, no right, no wall and tower, no armor and protective power come to your aid. You fall powerless and forlorn into the hand of the superior power of evil. In this battle you are all alone. Because I wanted to give birth to my God, I also wanted evil. He who wants to create an eternal fullness will also create eternal emptiness. [144] You cannot undertake one without the other. But if you want to escape evil, you will create no God, everything that you do is tepid and gray. I wanted my God for the sake of grace and disgrace. Hence I also want my evil. If my God were not overpowering, neither would be my evil. But I want my God to be powerful and beyond all measure happy and lustrous. Only in this way do I love my God. And the luster of his beauty will also have me taste the very bottom of Hell.

My God rose in the Eastern sky, brighter than the heavenly host, and brought about a new day for all the peoples. This is why I want to go to Hell. Would a mother not want to give up her life for her child? How much easier would it be to give up my life if only my God could overcome the torment of the last hour of the night and victoriously break through the red mist of the morning? I do not doubt: I also want evil for the sake of my God. I enter the unequal battle, since it is always unequal and without doubt a lost cause. How terrible and despairing would this battle be otherwise? But precisely this is how it should and will be.

***

/ [73/74] Nothing is more valuable to the evil one than his eye, since only through his eye can emptiness seize gleaming fullness. Because the emptiness lacks fullness, it craves fullness and its shining power. And it drinks it in by means of its eye, which is able to grasp the beauty and unsullied radiance of fullness. The emptiness is poor, and if it lacked its eye it would be hopeless. It sees the most beautiful and wants to devour it in order to spoil it. The devil knows what is beautiful, and hence he is the shadow of beauty and follows it everywhere, awaiting the moment when the beautiful, writhing great with child, seeks to give life to the God.

If your beauty grows, the dreadful worm will also creep up you, waiting for its prey. Nothing is sacred to him except his eye, with which he sees the most beautiful. He will never give up his eye. He is invulnerable, but nothing protects his eye; it is delicate and clear, adept at drinking in the eternal light. It wants you, the bright red light of your life.

I recognize the fearful devilishness of human nature. I cover my eyes before it. I put out my hand to fend it off, if anyone wants to approach me for fear that my shadow could fall on him, or his shadow could fall on me, since I also see the devilish in him, who is the harmless companion of his shadow.

No one touches me, death and crime lie in wait for you and me. You smile innocently, my friend? Don't you see that a gentle flickering of your eye betrays the frightfulness whose unsuspecting messenger you are? Your bloodthirsty tiger growls softly; your poisonous serpent hisses secretly; while you, conscious only of your goodness, offer your human hand to me in greeting. I know your shadow and mine, that follows and comes with us, and only waits for the hour of twilight when he will strangle you and me with all the daimons of the night.

***

What abyss of blood-dripping history separates you from me! I grasped your hand and looked at you. I lay my head in your lap and felt the living warmth of your body on mine as if it were my own body -- and suddenly I felt a smooth cord around my neck, which choked me mercilessly; and a cruel hammer blow struck a nail into my temple. I was dragged by my feet along the pavement, and wild hounds gnawed my body in the lonely night.

***

No one should be astonished that men are so far removed from one another that they cannot understand one another, that they wage war and kill one another. One should be much more surprised that men believe they are close, understand one another and love one another. Two things are yet to be discovered. The first is the infinite gulf that separates us from one another. The second is the bridge that could connect us. Have you considered how much unsuspected animality human company makes possible?

***

[145] When my soul fell into the hands of evil, it was defenseless except for the weak fishing rod which it could use, again with its power, to pull the fish from the sea of emptiness. The eye of the evil one sucked in all the force of my soul; only its will remained, which is just that small fish hook. I wanted evil, since I realized that I was not able to elude it. And because I wanted evil, my soul held the precious hook in its hand, that was supposed to strike the vulnerable place of the evil one. He who does not want evil will have no chance to save his soul from Hell. So long as he remains in the light of the upper world, he will become a shadow of himself. But his soul will languish in the dungeons of the daimons. This will act as a counterbalance that will forever constrain him. The higher circles of the inner world will remain unattainable for him. He remains where he was; indeed, he falls back. You know these people, and you know how extravagantly nature strews / [74/75] human life and force on barren deserts. You should not lament this, otherwise you will become a prophet, and will seek to redeem what cannot be redeemed. Do you not know that nature also dungs its fields with men? Take in the seeker, but do not go out seeking those who err. What do you know about their error? Perhaps it is sacred. You should not disturb the sacred. Do not look back and regret nothing. You see many near you fall? You feel compassion? But you should live your life, since then at least one in a thousand will remain. You cannot halt dying.

***

But why did my soul not tear out the eye of the evil one? The evil one has many eyes, and losing one amounts to losing none. But if she had done it, she would have come completely under the spell of the evil one. The evil one can only fail to make sacrifice. You should not harm him, above all not his eye, since the most beautiful would not exist if the evil one did not see it and long for it. The evil one is holy.

***

There is nothing the emptiness can sacrifice, since it always suffers lack. Only fullness can sacrifice, since it has fullness. Emptiness cannot sacrifice its hunger for fullness, since it cannot deny its own essence. Therefore we also need evil. But I can sacrifice my will to evil, because I previously received fullness. All strength flows back to me again, since the evil one has destroyed the image I had of the formation of the God. But the image of the God's formation in me was not yet destroyed. I dread this destruction, since it is terrible, an unprecedented desecration of temples. Everything in me strives against this abysmal abomination. For I still did not know what it means to give birth to a God. [Image 75] / [75/76]

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Chapter 13: The Sacrificial Murder. [146]

Cap. xiii.

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

S: "What then do you say?"

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

S: "Do you understand this?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

S: "I thank you."

I: "What should I do?"

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

I: "What is to be done?"

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

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

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

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

S: "You share in this guilt."

I: "I? Share in this guilt?"

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

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

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

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

[John 6.54]

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

S: "I thank you."

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

S: "Do you recognize me?"

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

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

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

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

***

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

***

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

***

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

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

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

***

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

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Chapter 14: Divine Folly [158]

Cap. xiv.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Well, hardly."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It also sounds very Christian."

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Chapter 15: Nox secunda [167]

Cap. xv.

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

"Please have a seat."

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

"Excuse me, are you perhaps a clergyman?"

"No, why do you think so?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Take me with you."

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

"Who are you?"

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

"Who are those wandering with you?"

"These are my fellow believers."

"Why are you wandering?"

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

"What drives you to this?"

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

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

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

"Remarkable -- how so?"

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

"And what was that?"

"Would you happen to know?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

"That is hardly to be doubted, professor."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Chapter 16: Nox tertia [190]

Cap. xvi.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The parlor erupts in unbridled laughter.

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

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

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

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

I: "Who won't let you?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[admin]

Chapter 17: Nox quarta [215]

Cap. xvii

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

L: "Well yes, for the cook."

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

***

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

[admin]

Chapter 18: The Three Prophecies

Cap. xviii

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

S: "Take shears and prune your trees."

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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