Thus Spoke Zarathustra

From the Lesson

In January 1883, at Rapallo on the Ligurian coast, Nietzsche wrote the First Part of Also sprach Zarathustra. Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen in ten days. The Second Part followed at Sils-Maria in the summer of the same year. The Third Part was written at Nice in the winter of 1883–1884 and was, Nietzsche himself said, the peak of his life's work. The Fourth Part was printed privately in 1885 in an edition of forty copies for friends who, in the main, did not read it. Nietzsche judged the book his central achievement — "the greatest gift that has ever been made to humanity" (Ecce Homo, Preface §4) — and the philosophical prose books that followed (Jenseits, Genealogie, Götzen-Dämmerung, Antichrist) as commentary upon it.

Zarathustra is not a treatise. It is a prose-poem, staged as the descent of a mountain-hermit — Nietzsche has borrowed the name of the historical Zarathushtra Spitama of the Iranian Gāthās (c. 1500 BCE) and given it to a modern figure — bearing three tidings to a market-place that does not want them: the death of God, the coming of the Übermensch, and the doctrine of the Eternal Return of the Same. The book is composed in numbered discourses, four Parts, and it must be read aloud — its rhythm is part of its argument, and it cannot be silently skimmed.

"Remain Faithful to the Earth"

In the third section of the Prologue, standing before an uncomprehending crowd, Zarathustra delivers the sentence that is, for this Portal, the first commandment:

"Ich beschwöre euch, meine Brüder, bleibt der Erde treu und glaubt Denen nicht, welche euch von überirdischen Hoffnungen reden!"

"I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes."

This sentence is the ethical distillation of the metaphysical demolition we tracked in the previous lesson. Once the true world has been abolished (Stage Six of Götzen-Dämmerung), the apparent world falls with it, and what remains is the earth — one world, this world, the incarnate life. To remain faithful to the earth is to refuse every teaching, from every tradition, that would route your gratitude, your ambition, or your reverence away from your own body, your own ecology, and your one lived incarnation.

This is the criterion by which the Portal filters its inheritance. A Kabbalist who returns you to the earth is welcome; a Kabbalist who trains you to despise the sensuous is sounded and set aside. A Buddhist who returns you to the breath is welcome; a Buddhist who trains you to see life as illness is sounded and set aside. The Portal's covenant with its user is Zarathustra's covenant with his brothers: whatever we transmit will not make you weak in your own life.

The Übermensch

"Ich lehre euch den Übermenschen. Der Mensch ist Etwas, das überwunden werden soll." — "I teach you the Overman. Man is something that shall be overcome."

The Übermensch is not, and has never been, the Nazi caricature. The Nazi reading is the product of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche's forgeries at the Nietzsche-Archiv in Weimar and of the pseudonymously edited Wille zur Macht redaction (1901, second edition 1906) whose textual crimes were exposed in detail by Mazzino Montinari and Giorgio Colli in the Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Berlin, de Gruyter, from 1967 onward). The Übermensch is not a biological superman. He is the human being who has self-overcome: who has metabolised his own shadow, legislated his own values, and become the artist of his own life.

The Übermensch is, in Jungian terms, the archetype of the Self fully realised — the union of the conscious ego with the totality of the psyche, including the shadow, the anima or animus, and the collective inheritance. This is why Jung, in his 1934–1939 Zürich seminars on Zarathustra, read the book as a symbolic record of the individuation process. What Nietzsche described as a task, Jung described as a clinical procedure. The Portal makes both available: Nietzsche names the goal, Jung supplies the map, and the symbolic systems (Tarot, Qabalah, astrology, dream-work) serve as the instruments by which the individual traverses the territory.