Nicholas Roerich: The Invincible (1874-1947)

        Serendipity

Dr. Cannon, a professor of physiology at Harvard University, recently gave a lecture in Peking about the meaning of success in scientific discoveries. After citing many examples of diversified scientific practice the professor came to the conclusion that “success follows only those who accept it.” An excellent formula, completely correct and applicable in all walks of life. Truly, in addition to conscientious, far-sighted work it is necessary to show the ability to perceive the symptoms of the germ of success. Many a time the occasion arose to write that success must be caught, realizing that it is an “easily frightened bird.” Many a time ancient proverbs have been quoted. “Risk not, gain not.” Different peoples, each in their own language, interpret them in their own way, yet in the same direction. An endless number of fairy tales and legends tell about unlucky simpletons who, because of their dullness, lost the Firebird. The fool was warned, “When you pluck the Fireblossom, do not look back.” But just at that moment something seemed to appear to him, the gaper naturally turned around, and all that had been found by him was lost. Verily, success must be seized—taken firmly, without retreat and in full striving. In this complete striving is expressed that faith which already borders upon great true knowledge.

In all these stories, which were warnings, there are always brought out many circumstances that aided the discovery of luck. Beginning with grey wolves or unknown benevolent beggars and passers-by many circumstances become helpers in success. One should also pay great attention to this inspired assistance. Not only should one discover such prepared assistants, but in the social structure it is also necessary to create conditions that act quickly. Precisely, such conditions should be created. The inception of success is not only a personal affair, it is a success of the state. Each private beneficient success is also the success of the government, which means the government itself must be consciously solicitous that such successes be attained. The attainment of all the best proceeds through all the highest. It means that the state, as such, should give to its citizens all of the best, all of the true culture.

As usual, we do not speak about quantity, but about quality. What of it if the newspapers come out containing many scores of pages, which because of their quality could be shortened successfully into half the amount! What of it, if all sorts of questionable restaurants and cabarets grow like mushrooms and choke up people’s thinking? Not without cause did some Easterner confuse the difference between a cafe chantant and a shaitan. Yesterday, in the middle of the desert, we listened to a radio. Listened for over two hours. We changed all possible radio waves, and visited the most diversified countries. And what did we hear? True, somewhere, it seems in America, a fragment from “Lohengrin” flashed out, but the rest was so much restaurant and fox trot music that once again we were horrified by what was filling space. After all, all of these sounds, manifested and not manifested, influence human consciousness.

It is sufficiently known that space is filled, but apparently it is not yet sufficiently assimilated that the filling of space is the greatest responsibility of humanity. The essence of quality is that very diversified building material, out of which is built the success of civilization and with it eventually that of culture. A man civilized by a fox trot will be lost on the paths leading to culture. For him these blessed pathways will already appear unattainable. “This is not for us.” “Aspirations are destined for us, but not their attainment.” This is the kind of pessimism into which not even a bad consciousness can fall, but the one weighed down by the baseness of daily life can. He who utters these negative, pessimistic words will thus renounce constructiveness. No matter how many times one may show to such a man the means of salutary successes, he will shrug them off as something unattainable, and will go to drown his sorrow in the nearest bar.

In this “drowning” of sorrow is evidenced a very cowardly pessimism. You see, the two-legged one has an urgent need to forcibly “drown” something. He thinks that he is drowning his sorrow, whereas he drowns his achievement or lets it go up in smoke. If at present space itself thunders with the horror of vulgarity, is it not the duty of every government to replace vulgarity with actions of high quality? Many a time we had occasion to say that the people are being slandered unjustly, in insisting that they demand vulgarity and meanness. Both of these are thrust upon them from an early age. But give beautiful harmony, beautiful singing, beautiful words, and the people will be drawn open-heartedly to them.

Dark forces are everywhere. Everywhere they conduct their destructive work, and they dream of depriving the nations of those achievements which are already destined. Of course, that which is destined can be considerably delayed, but nevertheless it will reveal itself. Each such delay is an abominable crime against mankind. Each one who wishes to drive someone into the darkness and deprive him of light is but a co-worker of darkness. But nations, as such, are by no means co-workers of darkness. No matter by what means the servants of darkness induce them to commit abominations and vulgarity, sooner or later they sober up. Whole masses arise and rebel against all kinds of “drownings, fumes, and poisonings.” Blessings to that government which understands that one cannot keep the people on a low level, giving them products of low quality. Then space itself will not roar and howl, but will merge into the Beautiful. Whether successes be in scientific discoveries, whether they be in ennobling creativeness, finally, whether they be in simple daily life, which also is in need of good fortune, is immaterial—success must be perceived everywhere and accepted. Sufficient is told in fairy tales about gapers and simpletons who let their luck slip. The age of building a new culture should be the age of successful people, who, each one in his way, will find his treasure-trove, his destined success. “Success follows those who accept it.”

                                                                                                                                                                                Tzagan Kure 

                                                                                                                                                                                May 30, 1935

Epictetus: The art of living (AD 55–135)

        The Soul's Cry

Philosophy's main task is to respond to the soul's cry; to make sense of and thereby free ourselves from the hold of our griefs and fears. Philosophy calls us when we've reached the end of our rope. The insistent feeling that something is not right with our lives and the longing to be restored to our better selves will not go away. Our fears of death and being alone, our confusion about love and sex, and our sense of impotence in the face of our anger and outsized ambitions bring us to ask our first sincere philosophical questions. It's true: there is no obviously apparent meaning to our lives. Cruelty, injustice, bodily discomfort, illness, annoyances, and inconveniences big and small are the prosaic facts of any day. So what do we do about this? How do we—in spite of the pain and suffering in the outside world and our own wayward emotions—live ennobled lives rather than succumbing to a despairing numbness and merely coping like a mule with tedium and unbidden responsibilities. When the soul cries out, it is a sign that we have arrived at a necessary, mature stage of self-reflection. The secret is not to get stuck there dithering or wringing your hands, but to move forward by resolving to heal yourself. Philosophy asks us to move into courage. Its remedy is the unblinking excavation of the faulty and specious premises on which we base our lives and our personal identity. 

The real purpose of philosophy

True philosophy doesn't involve exotic rituals, mysterious liturgy, or quaint beliefs. Nor is it just abstract theorizing and analysis. It is, of course, the love of wisdom. It is the art of living a good life. As such, it must be rescued from religious gurus and from professional philosophers lest it be exploited as an esoteric cult or as a set of detached intellectual techniques or brain teasers to show how clever you are. Philosophy is intended for everyone, and it is authentically practiced only by those who wed it with action in the world toward a better life for all.

Philosophy's purpose is to illuminate the ways our soul has been infected by unsound beliefs, untrained tumultuous desires, and dubious life choices and preferences that are unworthy of us. Self-scrutiny applied with kindness is the main antidote. Besides rooting out the soul's corruptions, the life of wisdom is also meant to stir us from our lassitude and move us in the direction of an energetic, cheerful life. 

Skilled use of logic, disputation, and the developed ability to name things correctly are some of the instruments philosophy gives us to achieve abiding clear-sightedness and inner tranquility, which is true happiness.

This happiness, which is our aim, must be correctly understood. Happiness is commonly mistaken for passively experienced pleasure or leisure. That conception of happiness is good only as far as it goes. The only worthy object of all our efforts is a flourishing life.

True happiness is a verb. It's the ongoing dynamic performance of worthy deeds. The flourishing life, whose foundation is virtuous intention, is something we continually improvise, and in doing so our souls mature. Our life has usefulness to ourselves and to the people we touch. 

We become philosophers to discover what is really true and what is merely the accidental result of flawed reasoning, recklessly acquired erroneous judgments, well-intentioned but misguided teachings of parents and teachers, and unexamined acculturation. 

To ease our soul's suffering, we engage in disciplined introspection in which we condut thought-experiments to strengthen our ability to distinguish between wholesome and lazy, hurtful beliefs and habits.

Epictetus  circa A.D. 100 
as interpreted by Sharon Lebelle

Manly Palmer Hall: The secret teachings of all ages (1928)

   The 
     Dionysiac 
             Architects 

The most celebrated of the ancient fraternities of artisans was that of the Dionysiac Architects. This organization was composed exclusively of initiates of the Bacchus-Dionysos cult and was peculiarly consecrated to the science of building and the art of decoration. Acclaimed as being the custodians of a secret and sacred knowledge of architectonics, its members were entrusted with the design and erection of public buildings and monuments. The superlative excellence of their handiwork elevated the members of the guild to a position of surpassing dignity; they were regarded as the master craftsmen of the earth. Because of the first dances held in honor of Dionysos, he was considered the founder and patron of the theater, and the Dionysians specialized in the construction of buildings adapted for the presentation of dramatic performances. In the circular or semicircular orchestra they invariably erected an altar to  Æschylus, the famous Greek poet, that while appearing in one of his own plays he was suspected by a mob of angry spectators of revealing one of the profound secrets of the Mysteries and was forced to seek refuge at the altar of Dionysos. So carefully did the Dionysiac Architects safeguard the secrets of their craft that only fragmentary records exist of their esoteric teachings. John A. Weisse thus sums up the meager data available concerning the order:

"They made their appearance certainly not later than 1000 B.C., and appear to have enjoyed particular privileges and immunities. They also possessed secret means of recognition, and were bound together by special ties only known to themselves. The richer of this fraternity were bound to provide for their poorer brethren. They were divided into communities, governed by a Master and Wardens, and called γυνοικιαι (connected houses). They held a grand festival annually, and were held in high esteem. Their ceremonials were regarded as sacred. It has been claimed that Solomon, at the instance of Hiram, King of Tyre, employed them at his temple and palaces. They were also employed at the construction of the Temple of Diana at Ephesus. They had means of intercommunication all over the then known world, and from them, doubtless, sprang the guilds of the Traveling Masons known in the Middle Ages." (See The Obelisk and Freemasonry.)

The fraternity of the Dionysiac Architects spread throughout all of Asia Minor, even reaching Egypt and India. They established themselves in nearly all the countries bordering on the Mediterranean, and with the rise of the Roman Empire found their way into Central Europe and even into England. The most stately and enduring buildings in Constantinople, Rhodes, Athens, and Rome were erected by these inspired craftsmen. One of the most illustrious of their number was Vitruvius, the great architect, renowned as the author of De Architectura Libri Decem. In the various sections of his book Vitruvius gives several hints as to the philosophy underlying the Dionysiac concept of the principle of symmetry applied to the science of architecture, as derived from a consideration of the proportions established by Nature between the parts and members of the human body. The following extract from Vitruvius on the subject of symmetry is representative:

"The design of a temple depends on symmetry, the principles of which must be most carefully observed by the architect. They are due to proportion, in ἀναλογία. Proportion is a correspondence among the measures of the members of an entire work, and of the whole to a certain part selected as standard. From this result the principles of symmetry. Without symmetry and proportion there can be no principles in the design of any temple; that is, if there is no precise relation between its members, as in the case of those of a well shaped man. For the human body is so designed by nature that the face, from the chin to the top of the forehead and the lowest roots of the hair, is a tenth part of the whole height; the open hand from the wrist to the tip of the middle finger is just the same; the head from the chin to the crown is an eighth, and with the neck and shoulder from the top of the breast to the lowest roots of the hair is a sixth; from the middle of the breast to the summit of the crown is a fourth. If we take the height of the face itself, the distance from the bottom of the chin to the under side of the nostrils [and from that point] to a line between the eyebrows is the same; from there to the lowest roots of the hair is also a third, comprising the forehead. The length of the foot is one sixth of the height of the body; of the forearm, one fourth; and the breadth of the breast is also one fourth. The other members, too, have their own symmetrical proportions, and it was by employing them that the famous painters and sculptors of antiquity attained to great and endless renown."

The edifices raised by the Dionysiac Builders were indeed "sermons in stone." Though unable to comprehend fully the cosmic principles thus embodied in these masterpieces of human ingenuity and industry, even the uninitiated were invariably overwhelmed by the sense of majesty and symmetry resulting from the perfect coordination of pillars, spans, arches, and domes. By variations in the details of size, material, type, arrangement, ornamentation, and color, these inspired builders believed it possible to provoke in the nature of the onlooker certain distinct mental or emotional reactions. Vitruvius, for example, describes the disposition of bronze vases about a room so as to produce certain definite changes in the tone and quality of the human voice. In like manner, each chamber in the Mysteries through which the candidate passed had its own peculiar acoustics. Thus in one chamber the voice of the priest was amplified until his words caused the very room to vibrate, while in another the voice was diminished and softened to such a degree that it sounded like the distant tinkling of silver bells. Again, in some of the underground passageways the candidate was apparently bereft of the power of speech, for though he shouted at the top of his voice not even a whisper was audible to his ears. After progressing a few feet, however, he would discover that his softest sigh would be reechoed a hundred times. 

The supreme ambition of the Dionysiac Architects was the construction of buildings which would create distinct impressions consistent with the purpose for which the structure itself was designed. In common with the Pythagoreans, they believed it possible by combinations of straight lines and curves to induce any desired mental attitude or emotion. They labored, therefore, to the end of producing a building perfectly harmonious with the structure of the universe itself. They may have even believed that an edifice so constructed because it was in no respect at variance with any existing reality would not be subject to dissolution but would endure throughout the span of mortal time. As a logical deduction from their philosophic trend of thought, such a building--en rapport with Cosmos--would also have become an oracle. Certain early works on magical philosophy hint that the Ark of the Covenant was oracular in character because of specially prepared chambers in its interior. These by their shape and arrangement were so attuned to the vibrations of the invisible world that they caught and amplified the voices of the ages imprinted upon and eternally existent in the substance of the astral light.

Unskilled in these ancient subtleties of their profession, modern architects often create architectural absurdities which would cause their creators to blush with shame did they comprehend their actual symbolic import. Thus, phallic emblems are strewn in profusion among the adornments of banks, office buildings, and department stores. Christian churches also may be surmounted with Brahmin or Mohammedan domes or be designed in a style suitable for a Jewish synagogue or a Greek temple to Pluto. These incongruities may be considered trivial in importance by the modern designer, but to the trained psychologist the purpose for which a building was erected is frustrated in large measure by the presence of such architectural discordances. Vitruvius thus defines the principle of propriety as conceived and applied by the Dionysians:

"Propriety is that: perfection of style which comes when a work is authoritatively constructed on approved principles. It arises from prescription (Greek θεματισμῷ), from usage, or from nature. From prescription, in the case of hypæthral edifices, open to the sky, in honour of Jupiter Lightning, the Heaven, the Sun, or the Moon: for these are gods whose semblances and manifestations we behold before our very eyes in the sky when it is cloudless and bright. The temples of Minerva, Mars, and Hercules will be Doric, since the virile strength of these gods makes daintiness entirely inappropriate to their houses. In temples to Venus, Flora, Proserpine, Spring-Water, and the Nymphs, the Corinthian order will be found to have peculiar significance, because these are delicate divinities and so its rather slender outlines, its flowers, leaves, and ornamental volutes will lend propriety where it is due. The construction of temples of the Ionic order to Juno, Diana, Father Bacchus, and the other gods of that kind, will be in keeping with the middle position which they hold; for the building of such will be an appropriate combination of the severity of the Doric and the delicacy of the Corinthian."

In describing the societies of Ionian artificers, Joseph Da Costa declares the Dionysiac rites to have been founded upon the science of astronomy, which by the initiates of this order was correlated to the builder's art. In various documents dealing with the origin of architecture are found hints to the effect that the great buildings erected by these initiated craftsmen were based upon geometrical patterns derived from the constellations. Thus, a temple might be planned according to the constellation of Pegasus or a court of judgment modeled after the constellation of the Scales. The Dionysians evolved a peculiar code by which they were able to communicate with one another in the dark and both the symbols and the terminology of their guild were derived, in the main, from the elements of architecture.

While stigmatized as pagans by reason of their philosophic principles, it is noteworthy that these Dionysiac craftsmen were almost universally employed in the erection of early Christian abbeys and cathedrals, whose stones even to this very day bear distinguishing marks and symbols cut into their surfaces by these illustrious builders. Among the ornate carvings upon the fronts of great churches of the Old World are frequently found representations of compasses, squares, rules, mallets, and clusters of builders' tools skillfully incorporated into mural decorations and even placed in the hands of the effigies of saints and prophets standing in exalted niches. A great mystery was contained in the ancient portals of the Cathedral Of Notre Dame which were destroyed during the French Revolution, for among their carvings were numerous Rosicrucian and Masonic emblems; and according to the records preserved by alchemists who studied their bas-reliefs, the secret processes for metallic transmutation were set forth in their grotesque yet most significant figures.

The checkerboard floor upon which the modern Freemasonic lodge stands is the old tracing board of the Dionysiac Architects, and while the modern organization is no longer limited to workmen's guilds it still preserves in its symbols the metaphysical doctrines of the ancient society of which it is presumably the outgrowth. The investigator of the origin of Freemasonic symbolism who desires to trace the development of the order through the ages will find a practical suggestion in the following statement of Charles W. Heckethorn:

"But considering that Freemasonry is a tree the roots of which spread through so many soils, it follows that traces thereof must be found in its fruit; that its language and ritual should retain much of the various sects and institutions it has passed through before arriving at their present state, and in Masonry we meet with Indian, Egyptian, Jewish, and Christian ideas, terms therefrom the supreme ambition of their craft and symbols." (See The Secret Societies of All Ages and Countries.)

The Roman Collegia of skilled architects were apparently a subdivision of the greater Ionian body, their principles and organization being practically identical with the older Ionian institution. It has been suspected that the Dionysians also profoundly influenced early Islamic culture, for part of their symbolism found its way into the Mysteries of the dervishes. At one time the Dionysians referred to themselves as Sons of Solomon, and one of the most important of their symbols was the Seal of Solomon--two interlaced triangles. This motif is frequently seen in conspicuous parts of Mohammedan mosques. The Knights Templars--who were suspected of anything and everything--are believed to have contacted these Dionysiac artificers and to have introduced many of their symbols and doctrines into mediæval Europe. But Freemasonry most of all owes to the Dionysiac cult the great mass of its symbols and rituals which are related to the science of architecture. From these ancient and illustrious artisans it also received the legacy of the unfinished Temple of Civilization-that vast, invisible structure upon which these initiated builders have labored continuously since the inception of their fraternity. This mighty edifice, which has fallen and been rebuilt time after time but whose foundations remain unmoved, is the true Everlasting House of which the temple on the brow of Mount Moriah was but an impermanent symbol.

Aside from the operative aspect of their order, the Dionysiac Architects had a speculative philosophic code. Human society they considered as a rough and untrued ashlar but lately chiseled from the quarry of elemental Nature. This crude block was the true object upon which these skilled craftsmen labored--polishing it, squaring it, and with the aid of fine carvings transforming it into a miracle of beauty. While mystics released their souls from the bondage of matter by meditation and philosophers found their keenest joy in the profundities of thought, these master workmen achieved liberation from the Wheel of Life and Death by learning to swing their hammers with the same rhythm that moves the swirling forces of Cosmos. They venerated the Deity under the guise of a Great Architect and Master Craftsman who was ever gouging rough ashlars from the fields of space and truing them into universes. The Dionysians affirmed constructiveness to be the supreme expression of the soul, and attuning themselves with the ever-visible constructive natural processes going on around them, believed immortality could be achieved by thus becoming a part of the creative agencies of Nature. 

Vincent van Gogh: The Letters (1853-1890)

Letter 218 
The Hague, 21 July 1882

Dear brother,

It is already late, but I felt like writing to you again anyway. You are not here - but I need you and sometimes feel that we are not far away from each other. Today I promised myself something, that is, to treat my illness, or rather what remains of it, as if it didn't exist. Enough time has been lost, work must go on. So, well or not well, I am going back to drawing regularly from morning until night. I don't want anybody to be able to say to me again, “Oh! but those are only old drawings.” I drew a study today of the baby's little cradle with a few touches of colour in it. I am also at work on one like one of those meadows I sent you recently. My hands have become a little too white for my liking, but that's too bad. I'm going to go back outdoors again, a possible relapse matters less to me than staying away from work any longer. Art is jealous, she does not like taking second place to an illness. Hence I shall humour her. So you will, I hope, be receiving a few more reasonably acceptable things shortly. People like me really should not be ill. I would like to make it perfectly clear to you how I look at art. To get to the essence of things one must work long and hard. What I want and have as my aim is infernally difficult to achieve, and yet I don't think I am raising my sights too high. I want to make drawings that touch some people. “Sorrow” is a small beginning - perhaps such little landscapes as the “Meerdervoort Avenue,” the “Rijswijk Meadows,” the “Fish-Drying Barn,” are also a small beginning. There is at least something straight from my own heart in them. What I want to express, in both figure and landscape, isn't anything sentimental or melancholy, but deep anguish. In short, I want to get to the point where people say of my work: that man feels deeply, that man feels keenly. In spite of my so-called coarseness - do you understand? - perhaps even because of it. It seems pretentious to speak this way now, but that is the reason why I want to put all my energies into it.

What am I in the eyes of most people - a nonentity, an eccentric or an unpleasant person - somebody who has no position in society and never will have, in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then - even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love malgré tout [in spite of everything], based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest comers. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.

Other things increasingly lose their hold on me, and the more they do so the more quickly my eye lights on the picturesque. Art demands dogged work, work in spite of everything and continuous observation. By dogged, I mean in the first place incessant labour, but also not abandoning one's views upon the say-so of this person or that.

Pollard birches, pencil, ink heightened with opaque white (1884)

I am not without hope, brother, that within a few year's time, or perhaps even now, little by little you will be seeing things I have done that will give you some satisfaction after all your sacrifices. I have had very little contact with other painters lately. I haven't been the worse for it. It isn't the language of painters so much as the language of nature that one should heed.I can understand better now than I could six months ago why Mauve said: don't talk to me about Dupré, I'd rather you talked about the bank of that ditch, or something of that sort. That may sound a bit strong, and yet it is absolutely right. The feeling for things themselves, for reality, is of greater importance than the feeling for painting; anyway it is more productive and more inspiring.

Because I now have such a broad, such an expansive feeling for art and for life itself, of which art is the essence, it sounds so shrill and false when people like Tersteeg do nothing but harry one.

For my own part, I find that many modern pictures have a peculiar charm which the old ones lack. To me, one of the highest and noblest expressions of art will always be that of the English, for instance Millais and Herkomer and Frank Holl. What I would say with respect to the difference between old and present-day art is - perhaps the modern artists are deeper thinkers.

There is a great difference in sentiment between, for instance, Chill October by Millais and Bleaching Ground at Overveen by Ruysdael. And equally between Irish Emigrants by Holl and the women reading from the Bible by Rembrandt. Rembrandt and Ruysdael are sublime, for us as well as for their contemporaries, but there is something in the moderns that seems to us more personal and intimate.

It is the same with Swain's woodcuts and those of the old German masters.

Olive trees in a mountain landscape (1889)

And so it was a mistake when the modem painters thought it all the rage to imitate the old ones a few years ago. That's why I think old Millet is right to say, `Il me semble absurde que les hommes veuillent paraître autre chose que ce qu'ils sont. [It seems absurd to me that people want to seem other than they are.] That may seem trite, and yet it is as unfathomably deep as the ocean, and personally I am all for taking it to heart. I just wanted to tell you that I am going to get back to working regularly again, and must do so quand même [at that] - and I'd just like to add that I look forward so much for a letter - and for the rest, I bid you goodnight. Goodbye, with a handshake,

                                                                                                                Ever yours,

                                                                                                                                                                Vincent

Please remember the thick Ingres if you can, enclosed is another sample. I still have a supply of the thin kind. I can do watercolour washes on the thick Ingres, but on the sans fin, for instance, it always goes blurry, by no fault of mine. I hope that by keeping hard at it I shall draw the little cradle another hundred times, besides what I did today.

Written 21 July 1882 in The Hague. 
Translated by Mrs.  Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, 
edited by Robert Harrison, number 218 

Friedrich von Schiller: Letters upon the esthetic education of Man (1759-1805)

            Letter III

MAN is not better treated by nature in his first start than her other works are; so long as he is unable to act for himself as an independent intelligence, she acts for him. But the very fact that constitutes him a man is, that he does not remain stationary, where nature has placed him, that he can pass with his reason, retracing the steps nature had made him anticipate, that he can convert the work of necessity into one of free solution, and elevate physical necessity into a moral law.   When man is raised from his slumber in the senses, he feels that he is a man, he surveys his surroundings, and finds that he is in a state. He was introduced into this state, by the power of circumstances, before he could freely select his own position. But as a moral being he cannot possibly rest satisfied with a political condition forced upon him by necessity, and only calculated for that condition; and it would be unfortunate if this did satisfy him. In many cases man shakes off this blind law of necessity, by his free spontaneous action, of which among many others we have an instance, in his ennobling by beauty and suppressing by moral influence the powerful impulse implanted in him by nature in the passion of love. Thus, when arrived at maturity, he recovers his childhood by an artificial process, he founds a state of nature in his ideas, not given him by any experience, but established by the necessary laws and conditions of his reason, and he attributes to this ideal condition an object, an aim, of which he was not cognisant in the actual reality of nature. He gives himself a choice of which he was not capable before, and sets to work just as if he were beginning anew, and were exchanging his original state of bondage for one of complete independence, doing this with complete insight and of his free decision. He is justified in regarding this work of political thraldom as non-existing, though a wild and arbitrary caprice may have founded its work very artfully; though it may strive to maintain it with great arrogance and encompass it with a halo of veneration. For the work of blind powers possesses no authority, before which freedom need bow, and all must be made to adapt itself to the highest end which reason has set up in his personality. It is in this wise that a people in a state of manhood is justified in exchanging a condition of thraldom for one of moral freedom.        

  

Now the term natural condition can be applied to every political body which owes its establishment originally to forces and not to laws, and such a state contradicts the moral nature of man, because lawfulness can alone have authority over this. At the same time this natural condition is quite sufficient for the physical man, who only gives himself laws in order to get rid of brute force. Moreover, the physical man is a reality, and the moral man problematical. Therefore when the reason suppresses the natural condition, as she must if she wishes to substitute her own, she weighs the real physical man against the problematical moral man, she weighs the existence of society against a possible, though morally necessary, ideal of society. She takes from man something which he really possesses, and without which he possesses nothing, and refers him as a substitute to something that he ought to posses and might possess; and if reason had relied too exclusively on him, she might, in order to secure him a state of humanity in which he is wanting and can want without injury to his life, have robbed him even of the means of animal existence which is the first necessary condition of his being a man. Before he had opportunity to hold firm to the law with his will, reason would have withdrawn from his feet the ladder of nature.       

  

The great point is therefore to reconcile these two considerations: to prevent physical society from ceasing for a moment in time, while the moral society is being formed in the idea; in other words, to prevent its existence from being placed in jeopardy, for the sake of the moral dignity of man. When the mechanic has to mend a watch, he lets the wheels run out, but the living watchworks of the state have to be repaired while they act, and a wheel has to be exchanged for another during its revolutions. Accordingly props must be sought for to support society and keep it going while it is made independent of the natural condition from which it is sought to emancipate it.           

  

This prop is not found in the natural character of man, who, being selfish and violent, directs his energies rather to the destruction than to the preservation of society. Nor is it found in his moral character, which has to be formed, which can never be worked upon or calculated on by the lawgiver, because it is free and never appears. It would seem therefore that another measure must be adopted. It would seem that the physical character of the arbitrary must be separated from moral freedom; that it is incumbent to make the former harmonize with the laws and the latter dependent on impressions; it would be expedient to remove the former still farther from matter and to bring the latter somewhat more near to it; in short to produce a third character related to both the others—the physical and the moral—paving the way to a transition from the sway of mere force to that of law, without preventing the proper development of the moral character, but serving rather as a pledge in the sensuous sphere of a morality in the unseen. 

Friedrich Nietzsche: Ecce Homo (1888)

 How One becomes 

            What One Is 

I now wish to relate the history of Zarathustra.  The fundamental idea of the work, the Eternal Recurrence, the highest formula of a life affirmation that can ever be attained was first conceived in the month of August 1881.  I made a note of the idea on a sheet of paper with the postscript: "Six thousand feet beyond man and time”.  That day I happened to be wandering through the woods beside the Lake of Silvaplana and 1 halted not far from Surlei beside a huge pyramidal block of stone.  It was then that the thought struck me.  Looking back now I find that exactly two months before this inspiration I had an omen of its coming in the form of a sudden and decisive change in my tastes—more particularly in music.  The whole of Zarathustra might perhaps be regarded as music.  At all events the essential condition of its production was a second birth within me— of the art of hearing.  In Recoaro a small mountain resort near Vicenza where I spent the spring of 1881, and my friend and maestro Peter Gast—who was also one who had been born again, discovered that the phoenix music hovered over us in lighter and brighter plumage than it had ever worn before.  When I then calculate from that day forward, the sudden production of the book under the most unlikely circumstances in February 1883—the last part out of which I quoted a few lines in my preface was written precisely in the hallowed hour when Richard Wagner died in Venice—I come to the conclusion that the period of gestation covered eighteen months. This period of exactly eighteen months might suggest at least to Buddhists that  I am in reality a female elephant.  The interval was devoted to the Gaya Scienza which contains hundreds of indications of the proximity of something unparalleled; for after all, it shows the beginning of Zarathustra since it presents Zarathustra’s fundamental thought in the last aphorism but one of the fourth book.  To this interval also belongs that Hymn to Life (for a mixed choir and orchestra) the score of which was published in Leipzig two years ago by E.  W.  Fritsch and which gave perhaps no slight indication of my spiritual state during this year in which the essentially affirmative pathos which I call the tragic pathos filled me to the highest degree.  One day people will sing it to my memory.  The text, let it be well understood— as there is some misunderstanding about this point— is not by me; it was the astounding inspiration of a young Russian lady Miss Lou von Salome with whom I was then on friendly terms.  He who is in any way able to make some sense of the last words of the poem will divine why I preferred and admired it: they possess greatness.   Pain is not regarded as an objection to existence: "And if you have no happiness now left to crown me—Lead on!  You have still your pain”.  Perhaps my music is also great in this passage.  (The last note of the clarinet is by the way C sharp not C.  The latter is a misprint.)  


During the following winter I was living on that charmingly peaceful Gulf of Rapallo not far from Genoa which cuts inland between Chiavari and Cape Porto Fino.  My health was not very good; the winter was cold and exceptionally rainy; and the small albergo in which I lived was so close to the sea that at night my sleep was disturbed if the sea was rough.  These circumstances were surely the very opposite of what one would desire; and yet in spite of it all and as if in proof of my belief that everything decisive comes to life in defiance of every obstacle, it was precisely during this winter and in the midst of these unfavourable circumstances that my Zarathustra came into existence.  In the morning I used to start out in a southerly direction up the glorious road to Zoagli which rises up through a forest of pines and gives one a view far out to sea.  In the afternoon or as often as my health allowed I walked round the entire bay from Santa Margherita to beyond Porto Fino.  This spot affected me all the more deeply because it was so dearly loved by the Emperor Frederick III.  In the autumn of 1886  I chanced to be there again when he was revisiting this small forgotten world of happiness for the last time.  It was on these two walks that all Zarathustra came to me, above all Zarathustra himself as a type—I ought rather to say that it was on these walks that he waylaid me. 

2.

To understand this type one must first be quite clear concerning its fundamental physiological condition; this condition is what I call great health.  In regard to this ideal I cannot illustrate the concept more clearly or more personally than I have done already in one of the last aphorisms (No.  382) of the fifth book of the Gaya Scienza: "We new, nameless, ill-understood” so reads the passage, "we premature born, of a future yet unproved—we who have a new goal in view also require new means to that end, namely a new healthiness, a stronger, keener, tougher, bolder and merrier healthiness than any that has existed before.  He who longs to feel in his own soul the whole range of values and aims that have prevailed on earth and to have sailed around every coast of this ‘Mediterranean’ of ideals; who from the adventures of his own inmost experience wants to know how it feels to be a conqueror and discoverer of the ideal;—as also how feels an artist, the saint, legislator, sage, scholar, a man of piety and the divine Hermit of old;—such a man requires one thing above all for his purpose and that is great health—such health as he not only possesses but also must constantly acquire because he is continually sacrificing it again and again!  And now, after having been thus underway for some time, we Argonauts of the ideal, whose bravery is greater than prudence would allow and who are often shipwrecked and bruised but as I have said, healthier than others would like us to be, dangerously healthy, forever recovering our health—it would seem as if we had before us as a reward for all our toils a country still undiscovered the horizon of which no one has yet seen, a land beyond all lands and every refuge of the ideal that man has ever known, a world so overflowing with beauty, strangeness, doubt, the terrible and the divine that both our curiosity and our lust of possession are frantic with eagerness.  How, in the face of such vistas and with such burning desire in our conscience and knowledge could we still be content with the man of the present day?  Indeed, it is difficult to regard his worthiest aims and hopes with anything but ill-concealed amusement or perhaps it is inevitable that we give them no thought at all.  Another ideal now leads us on, a wonderful seductive ideal full of danger, the pursuit of which we would not want to urge upon anyone because we do not readily admit of anyone’s right to it: the ideal of a spirit who plays ingenuously, that is to say, involuntarily and as the outcome of superabundant energy and power, with everything that hitherto has been called holy, good, sacrosanct and divine; to whom even the loftiest thing that the people have with reason made their measure of value would be no better than a danger, a corruption, a degradation or at least a relaxation and temporary forgetfulness of self: the ideal of a humanly superhuman well-being and goodwill which often enough will seem inhuman—for example, when it stands beside all past seriousness on earth and all past solemnities in gesture, word, tone, glance, morality and task as their most lifelike and unconscious parody—but with which, perhaps the great seriousness first arises, the first question mark is placed, the fate of the soul changes course, the hour hand moves on, and tragedy begins”. 

3.

Has anyone at the end of the nineteenth century any distinct notion of what poets of a stronger age understood by the word inspiration?  If not, I will describe it.  If you had the slightest residue of superstition left in you it would hardly be possible to completely disregard the idea that one is the mere incarnation, a mouthpiece or a medium of an almighty power.  The idea of revelation in the sense of something which profoundly moves and provokes, becoming suddenly visible and audible with indescribable certainty and accuracy—is a simple description.  You hear—you do not seek; you take—and do not ask who gives: a thought suddenly flashes up like lightning, it comes as a necessity, without hesitation—I have never had any choice in the matter.  There is an ecstasy so great that the immense strain of it is sometimes relaxed by a flood of tears during which one does not know whether one is coming or going.  There is the feeling of completely being outside of oneself, with the very distinct consciousness of endless delicate shivers right down to one’s toes;—there is a depth of happiness in which the most painful and gloomy parts do not detract from the whole but are produced and required as necessary shades of colour amidst such an overflow of light.  There is an instinct for rhythmical relationships which embrace a whole world of forms: length, the need of an all-embracing rhythm, is almost the measure of the force of inspiration, a kind of compensation for its pressure and tension.  Everything happens quite involuntarily as if in a tempestuous outburst of freedom of absolute power and divinity.  The involuntary nature of the images and similes is the most remarkable thing; one loses all perception of what is imagery and metaphor; everything seems to present itself in the readiest, the truest and simplest means of expression.  It actually seems, to use one of Zarathustra’s own phrases, as if all things came together and offered themselves as images.  ("Here do all things come caressingly to your discourse and flatter you for they would wish to ride upon your back.  On every simile you rid here unto every truth.  Here fly open to you all the speech and word shrines of the world, here would all existence become speech, here would all Becoming learn of you how to speak”.)  This is my experience of inspiration.  I do not doubt but that I should have to go back thousands of years before I could find another who could say to me: "It is mine also”! 

4.

For a few weeks afterwards I lay an invalid in Genoa.  Then followed a melancholy spring in Rome where I only just managed to live—and this was no easy matter.  This city which is absolutely unsuited to the poet-author of Zarathustra and for the choice of which I was not responsible made me absolutely miserable.  I tried to leave it.  I wanted to go to Aquila—the opposite of Rome in every respect and actually founded in a spirit of hostility towards that city just as I also shall found a city some day as a memento of an atheist and genuine enemy of the Church, a person very closely related to me, the great Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II.  But Fate hung heavy over all: I had to return again to Rome.  In the end I was obliged to be satisfied with the Piazza Barberini after I had exerted myself in vain to find an anti-Christian quarter.  I fear that on one occasion to avoid bad smells as much as possible I actually inquired at the Palazzo del Quirinale whether they could not provide a quiet room for a philosopher.  In a chamber high above the Piazza from which one had a good view of Rome and could hear the fountains splashing far below the loneliest of all songs was composed—The Night Song”.  About this time I was obsessed by an unspeakably sad melody the refrain of which I recognized in the words "dead through immortality”.  In the summer, finding myself once more in the sacred place where the first thought of Zarathustra flashed like a light across my mind I conceived the second part.  Ten days were enough.  Neither for the second, the first, nor the third part did I require a day longer.  In the ensuing winter beneath the halcyon sky of Nice which then for the first time poured its light into my life I found the third Zarathustra—and came to the end of my task: the whole task having occupied me scarcely a year.  Many hidden corners and heights in the country round Nice are made sacred for me by moments that I can never forget.  That decisive chapter entitled "Old and New Tables” was composed during the arduous ascent from the station Tol Eza—that wonderful Moorish hill castle in the rocks.  During those moments when my creative energy flowed most plentifully my muscular activity was always greatest.  The body is inspired: let us leave the question of "soul” out of it.  I might often have been seen dancing in those days and I could then walk for seven or eight hours on end over the hills without a suggestion of fatigue.  I slept well and laughed a good deal—I was perfectly robust and patient. 

5.

With the exception of these periods of industry lasting ten days the years I spent during the production of Zarathustra and those after were for me years of unparalleled distress.  One pays dearly for being immortal: one must die many times during his life.  There is such a thing as what I call the rancour of greatness: everything great, whether a work or a deed once it is completed turns immediately against its author.  The very fact that he is its author makes him weak.  He can no longer bear his own deeds.  He can no longer look it full in the face.  To have something at one’s back which one could never have willed, something to which the knot of human destiny is attached—and to be forced afterwards to bear it on one’s shoulders!  It almost crushes you!  The rancour of greatness!  A somewhat different experience is the uncanny silence that falls about one.  Solitude has seven skins— which nothing can penetrate.  One goes among men; one greets friends: but are met with a desert, the looks of those one meets no longer bear a greeting.  At the best one encounters a sort of revolt.  This feeling of revolt I suffered in varying degrees of intensity at the hands of almost everyone who came near me; it would seem that nothing inflicts a deeper wound than suddenly to make one’s distance felt.  Those noble natures are scarce who do not know how to live without reverence.  A third thing is the absurd susceptibility of the skin to small pin-pricks, a kind of helplessness in the presence of all small matters.  This seems to me a necessary outcome of the tremendous expenditure of all defensive energies which is the first condition of every creative act, of every act which comes from the most intimate, most secret and most concealed recesses of one’s being.  One’s lesser defences are thus as it were suspended and no fresh energy reaches them.  I even think it probable that one does not digest so well, that one is less willing to move and that one is much too open to sensations of coldness and suspicion; for in a large number of cases suspicion is merely an error in etiology.  On one occasion when I felt like this I became conscious of the proximity of a herd of cows some time before I could possibly have seen it with my eyes simply owing to a return in me of milder and more humane sentiments: they communicated warmth to me. 

6.

This work stands alone.  Do not let us mention the poets in the same breath: nothing perhaps has ever been produced out of such a superabundance of strength.  My concept "Dionysian” here became the supreme deed; compared with it everything that other men have done seems poor and limited.  The fact that a Goethe or a Shakespeare would not for an instant have known how to take breath in this atmosphere of passion and of the heights; the fact that by the side of Zarathustra Dante is no more than a believer and not one who first creates truth—that is to say not a world-ruling spirit, a Destiny; the fact that the poets of the Veda were priests and not even fit to unfasten Zarathustra’s sandals—all this is the least of the matter and gives no idea of the distance, of the azure solitude in which this work dwells.  Zarathustra has an eternal right to say: "I draw around me circles and holy boundaries.  Ever fewer are they that mount with me to ever loftier heights.  I build a mountain range of holier and holier mountains”.  If all the spirit and goodness of every great soul were collected together the whole could not create a single one of Zarathustra’s discourses.  The ladder upon which he rises and descends is of infinite length; he has seen further, he has willed further and gone further than any other man.  He contradicts with every word that he utters, this most affirmative of all spirits.  Through him all contradictions are bound up into a new unity.  The loftiest and the basest powers of human nature, the sweetest, the lightest and the most terrible rush forth from out one spring with everlasting certainty.  Until his coming no one knew what was height or depth and still less what was truth.  There is not a single passage in this revelation of truth which had already been anticipated and divined by even the greatest among men.  Before Zarathustra there was no wisdom, no psychology, no art of speech: in his book the most familiar and most everyday things speak of things as yet unheard.  The sentence quivers with passion.  Eloquence has become music.  Lightning bolts are hurled towards futures of which no one has ever dreamed before.  The most powerful use of metaphor that has yet existed is poor beside it and mere child’s play compared with this return of language to the nature of imagery.  See how Zarathustra goes down from the mountain and speaks the kindest words to every one!  See with what delicate fingers he touches even his adversaries the priests and how he suffers from themselves with them!  Here at every moment man is overcome and the concept "Superman” becomes the greatest reality—out of sight, almost far away beneath him lies all that which before has been called great in man.  The halcyon brightness, the light feet, the presence of wickedness and exuberance throughout and all that is the essence of the type Zarathustra was never dreamt of before as a prerequisite of greatness.  In precisely this space and in this accessibility to opposites Zarathustra feels himself the highest species of all living things: and when you hear his definition of this highest you will realize that his equal will not be found.  "The soul which has the longest ladder and can descend the deepest, The most spacious soul that can run and stray and rove furthest in its own self, The most necessary soul that out of desire hurls itself into chance, The stable soul that plunges into Becoming, the possessing soul that has to taste of willing and longing— The soul that flies from itself and overtakes itself in the widest sphere, The wisest soul to which foolishness speaks most sweetly, The most self-loving soul in whom all things have their rise and fall, their ebb and flow”— But this is the very idea of Dionysus.  Another consideration leads to this same conclusion.  The psychological problem presented by the type of Zarathustra is how he, who in an unprecedented manner says no and acts no in regard to all that which has been affirmed hitherto, how he can remain nevertheless an affirming spirit?  How can he who bears the heaviest destiny on his shoulders and whose very life task is a destiny yet be the lightest and the most transcending of spirits—for Zarathustra is a dancer?  How can he who has the harshest and most fearful grasp of reality and who has thought the most "abysmal thought” nevertheless avoid taking these things as objections to existence or even as objections to the eternal recurrence of existence?  How is it that on the contrary he finds reasons for being himself the eternal affirmation of all things, "the tremendous and unbounded saying of Yea and Amen”.  "Into every abyss I still bear the blessing of my affirmation to Life”.  But this once more is precisely the idea of Dionysus. 

7.

What language will such a spirit speak when he speaks unto his soul?  The language of the dithyramb.  I am the inventor of the dithyramb.  Listen to the manner in which Zarathustra speaks to his soul Before Sunrise.  Before my time such emerald joys and divine tenderness had found no tongue.  Even the profoundest melancholy of such a Dionysus takes shape as a dithyramb.  As an example of this I take "The Night Song”—the immortal lament of one who, thanks to his superabundance of light and power, thanks to his nature as a sun, is condemned never to love.  It is night: now do all gushing springs raise their voices.  And my soul too is a gushing spring.  It is night: now only do all lovers burst into song.  And my soul too is the song of a lover.  Something unquenched and unquenchable is within me that would raise its voice.  A craving for love is within me which itself speaks the language of love.  Light I am: I would that I were night!  This is my loneliness, that I am girded around with light.  Alas, why am I not dark and hidden like the night!  How joyfully would I then suck at the breasts of light!  And even you would I bless, you twinkling little stars and glow worms on high!  And be blessed in the gifts of your light.  But I live in my own light, I drink my own flames ever back into myself.  I know not the happiness of the hand stretched out to grasp; and often have I dreamt that stealing must be more blessed than taking.  I am forlorn that my hand may never rest from giving: I am destined to be envious of the expectant eyes that I see and nights made bright with longing.  Oh, the wretchedness of all those that give!  Oh, the eclipse of my sun!  The craving for desire!  That burning hunger of satiety!  They take what I give them; but do I touch their soul?  A gulf stands between giving and taking; and even the smallest gulf must be bridged at last.  A hunger is born out of my beauty: I wish that I might rob them of the gifts I have given:—thus do I thirst for wickedness.  To withdraw my hand when their hand is already waiting, hesitating like the waterfall that hesitates even in its fall:—thus do I thirst for wickedness.  My fullness longs for such vengeance: my loneliness gives birth to such spite.  My joy in giving died with the deed.  By its very fulfilment did my virtue grow weary of itself.  He who gives always runs the risk that he will lose all shame; he who is always giving grows callous in hand and heart.  My eyes no longer melt into tears at the shame of suppliants; my hand has become too hard to feel the quivering of heavy laden hands.  To where have you fled the tears of my eyes and the blossom of my heart?  Oh, the solitude of all those who give!  Oh the silence of all that give out light!  There are many suns that circle in the barrenness of space; they have discourse with the darkness—to me alone are they silent.  Alas, this is the hatred of light for that which gives light: pitiless it goes its way.  Unjust in its very heart to all that shines; coldness toward suns—thus does every sun go its way.  Like a storm do the suns fly upon their course: for such is their way.  They follow their own unbending will: that is their coldness.  Alas, it is you alone, you creatures of gloom, you spirits of the night that take your warmth from that which shines.  You alone take your milk and comfort from the breast of light.  Alas, about me there is ice, its coldness burns my hands!  Alas, there is within me a yearning to have your thirst!  It is night: I am sad that I must be light!  And thirst after darkness!  And for solitude!  It is night: now does my longing burst forth like a spring—I long to speak.  It is night: now do all gushing springs try their voices.  And my soul too is a gushing spring.  It is night: now only do all lovers burst into song.  And my soul too is the song of a lover”. 

8.

Such things have never before been written, never before been felt and never suffered: only a God, only Dionysus suffers in this way.  The reply to such a dithyramb on the sun’s solitude in light would be Ariadne.  Who knows except me who Ariadne is!  To all such riddles no one has ever found an answer; I doubt even whether anyone even saw a riddle here.  On one occasion Zarathustra clearly sets out his life-task—and it is also mine.  Let no one misunderstand its meaning.  It is an affirmation to the point of justifying, to the point of redeeming even the entire past.  I walk among men as among fragments of the future: of that future which I foresee.  And all my creativeness and labour is but this, that I may be able to compose all these fragments and riddles and sorry accidents into one piece.  And how could I bear to be a man if man were not also a poet, a riddle reader and a redeemer of chance!  To redeem all the past and to transform every ‘it was” into ‘thus would I have it’—that alone would be my salvation!  In another passage he defines as strictly as possible what to him alone "man” can be—not a subject for love nor yet for pity—Zarathustra became master even of his loathing of man: man is to him a thing unshaped, raw material, unworked stone that needs the sculptor’s chisel.  No longer to will, no longer to evaluate, no longer to create!  Oh, that this great weariness may never be mine!  Even in the lust of knowledge I feel only my will’s delight in begetting and becoming; and if there be innocence in my knowledge it is because my procreative will is in it.  Away from God and gods did this will lure me: what would there be to create if gods existed?  But again to man am I driven by my burning creative will; thus it drives the hammer to the stone.  Ah, you men within the stone, there sleeps an image for me, the image of all my dreams!  That it should have to sleep in the hardest and ugliest stone!  Now rages my hammer fiercely against its prison.  From the stone the fragments fly: and what is that to me?  I will complete it: for a shadow came to me—the most silent and lightest thing on earth came unto me!  The beauty of the Superman came unto me as a shadow.  My brethren!  What are the gods to me now?  Let me call attention to one last point.  The line in italics is my pretext for this remark.  A Dionysian life task needs the hardness of the hammer and one of its first essentials is without doubt the joy to be found even in destruction.  The command ‘become hard! ’, the deep conviction that all creators are hard, is the really distinctive sign of a Dionysian nature.