Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Wotanic Eruption
In the late nineteenth century, lightning struck from six thousand feet beyond man and time. A series of metaphysical propositions descended upon Nietzsche, which were given life in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. But that ecstatic work was also the beginning of his downfall, or so argues Jung in his seminar on that book. In this episode, we will go through Zarathustra's Prologue through the lens of analytical psychology and see what insights can be recovered from this magnificent but perilous book.
The transcript of this episode can be found on Substack at https://dionysophy.substack.com/p/thus-spoke-zarathustraa-wotanic-eruption
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References
00:00 - “Decision: I want to speak, and no longer Zarathustra.” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Briefe: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, vol 11, 25[277], 83) [found in Paul Bishop, Jung and the Epic of Transformation Volume 3, p. 86]
01:39 - “There are four parts in the book, and each of the first three parts was written within ten days, which is rather remarkable. The first was written on the Riviera, the second in the Sils Maria in the Engadine, and the third again on the Riviera; the fourth was written in different places and took longer. He says about his way of writing that it simply poured out of him, it was an almost autonomous production; with unfailing certainty the words presented themselves, and the whole description gives us the impression of the quite extraordinary condition in which he must have been, a condition of possession where he himself practically no longer existed. It was as if he were possessed by a creative genius that took his brain and produced this work out of absolute necessity and in a most inevitable way.” (Carl Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939 by C. G. Jung (NZ), p. 11)
See also https://www.reddit.com/r/Nietzsche/comments/181ldfz/comment/kad9z9m/
02:08 - “The fourth part of Thus Spake Zarathustra was printed at Nietzsche’s expense in forty copies only, and he intended to distribute them among his friends. But he could muster only seven people to whom to send the gift.” (Stefan Zweig, Nietzsche’s Seventh Solitude)
02:25 - “But ten months later he writes to his sister: ‘If all goes well, I shall need a publisher and printer for the fourth part of Zarathustra in January’ (B 15 Nov. 1884). He even goes on to talk about ‘the now unavoidable fifth and sixth parts (it cannot be helped, I must help my son Zarathustra to his beautiful death, or else he will give me no peace)’. But writing to an old friend three months later, he announces the existence of ‘a fourth (and last) part of Zarathustra, a kind of sublime finale, which is not at all meant for the public’ (B12 Feb. 1885). In April of 1885 forty-five copies of the Fourth Part were published privately at Nietzsche’s own expense and sent only to his closest friends. And so when the first edition of the complete Zarathustra appeared the following year, it was in three parts, with no mention of a fourth. Subsequent letters to his friends express a vehement desire never to have the Fourth Part made public.” (Graham Parkes, “Introduction” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Oxford)
Part One: Where is Nietzsche? (05:25)
06:50 - “Dr. Schlegel: Is it not more or less the same thing as Faust?—the experience of the unconscious, and the conscious views?
Dr. Jung: Yes, but there we have also a sort of elaboration. Goethe worked a lifetime on Faust in order to get it into shape, so we are not quite certain about the amount of immediate experience and what he as a poet put into it. That will remain in the dark forever. We have clear indications from Goethe himself, however, that he put many things into it quite intentionally. We could not know how much original experience there was without making the attempt to analyse very carefully what he could have drawn out of his knowledge of mystical literature, and what he only could have experienced.” (NZ, pp. 223-224)
07:30 - “If I speak in the spirit of this time . . ." (Carl Jung, The Red Book, The Way of What Is to Come)
10:07 - "My soul, where are you? . . ." (ibid., Refinding the Soul)
15:25 - “[Dr. Jung:] The perfectly good message Zarathustra delivers does not reach the man Nietzsche because he is in no relation to that teaching; he is not a part of the audience. Nowhere in Zarathustra can you find a place where Nietzsche really appears; he is nowhere among the audience. He is the preacher, but he does not listen at the same time. The man Nietzsche should appear among the friends or disciples of Zarathustra. We should encounter a passage where he says, “I met Zarathustra, I saw him,” or “He spoke to me.” Then we would be sure that he made a difference between himself and Zarathustra, and then only could he realize Zarathustra’s teaching. He would look at his own body, and would ask himself how he could translate Zarathustra’s teaching into his own life. The whole thing would have taken an entirely different course; we would behold an entirely different spectacle, and not the tragic fate brought about through that identification. . .
Mr. Baumann: There are certain examples. Dante, for instance, experienced everything with Virgilius. There were two in that case.
Dr. Jung: That is a good example. He makes a difference between himself and the dynamis; he is not identical with the psychopompos. Virgilius is to him of course this same archetype, but it is a different kind of teaching. It is the message of the Middle Ages.” (NZ, pp. 203-204)
15:55 - This part was inspired by THE PHILOSOPHY OF ZARATHUSTRA (ZOROASTER), https://jasonrezajorjani.substack.com/p/the-philosophy-of-zarathustra-zoroaster
16:50 - “People have no real conceptions of good and evil. They think morality is whether one follows the moral law or not. But that is absolutely not a moral question. Such a question begins at all only when the moral law no longer provides any information.” (Carl Jung and Aniela Jaffé, Jung’s Life and Works, p. 191)
20:42 - “Nietzsche considered the choice of the name to be of great historical importance, because he held that Zoroaster the Persian was really the inventor of the moral conflict between good and evil, a fact which is hardly to be denied. As he lived in about the eighth century B.C., he probably had the priority of that idea. So Nietzsche says that Zoroaster must come back in order to make restitution. Therefore: his aspiration to be beyond good and evil. This is of course the idea of liberation from the pairs of opposites which is indispensable for the integration of the individual. Individuation is impossible as long as one is split into pairs of opposites. They must be overcome; how, of course, is the great question, but it must be done from a standpoint which is beyond good and evil.” (NZ, p. 209)
21:28 - “The overcoming of morality through itself—through truthfulness, the overcoming of the moralist through his opposite—through me—: that is what the name Zarathustra means in my mouth.” (Ecce Homo, Why I am a Fatality, par 3)
“Now this was the model for Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. It had nothing to do with the Mazdaznan sect. I think it is rather, as he says, that that figure was an experience of old standing; it was the early experience of the old wise man. You know, we often speak of that figure as a personification of the inherited wisdom of the ages, the truth that has become instinctive through experience, one could say, having been lived millions of times, a sort of wisdom of nature that is born in us and to which we owe the coordination of our whole biological as well as psychological system—that old experience which is still visible in our dreams and in our instincts. This is the mental or spiritual aspect of a perfectly natural fact, namely, the teleology of a living system. So Nietzsche chose a most dignified and worthy model for his old wise man, because to him it was that same kind of experience.” (NZ, p. 9)
Part Two: Zarathustra addresses the sun (26:05)
28:50 - “[Dr. Jung:] To what fact do those thirty years refer? As far as I know, there is no definite chronology in Zarathustra’s life except the age when he died, seventy-seven years.
Mr. Allemann: It refers to the age of Christ.
Dr. Jung: Yes, the legendary age of Christ when he began his teaching career; that at once creates an identity between Zarathustra and the Christ.” (NZ, p. 12)
30:32 - “Mr. Allemann: Thirty plus ten makes about the age of Nietzsche when he wrote.
Dr. Jung: Yes, he was thirty when he left and forty when he had accomplished the accumulation of wisdom.” (NZ, p. 15)
31:07 - “You would understand this symbol of the sun as an objectivation of his own superhuman consciousness, which he has acquired through his life on that high level? Yes, the sun surely is the symbol of the center of consciousness, it is the principle of consciousness because it is light. When you understand a thing, you say: “I see”—and in order to see you need light. . . .
We may suppose, then, that this sun he is talking to is really the great light that he received and talked to every day, which is of course the great clarity of his lonely consciousness.” (NZ, pp. 16-17)
32:10 - “When he was up at Sils Maria which is nearly six thousand feet above sea level, he used to speak of being six thousand feet above good and evil—above ordinary humanity, that is.” (NZ, p. 15)
32:25 - “[Dr. Jung:] So the work of Zarathustra begins with the idea of his setting like the sun, der Untergang Zarathustras. Then he necessarily comes down into what?
Mr. Allemann: Into the world of ordinary humanity, of collectivity.
Dr. Jung: Well, it is quite certain that when he leaves the sun of consciousness, he will come to some form of the unconscious. The question is now, of course, will the unconscious then be projected, or will it be in forma pura? If in its pure form it will not be projected, he will then enter the unconscious. That would be the night sea journey. So as you say, it is the descent into the ordinary world in which unconsciousness is the ruling factor, for consciousness in the ordinary world plays a very small part; it is chiefly instinctive.” (NZ, pp. 19-20)
Part Three: Zarathustra meets the hermit (32:28)
36:55 - “We were speaking last time of Zarathustra as representing the archetypal figure of the old wise man. . .
Whenever he appears, he also refers to a certain situation: there is some disorientation, a certain unconsciousness, people are in a sort of confusion and don’t know what to do. Therefore these Saoshyants, these wise men or prophets, appear in times of trouble, when mankind is in a state of confusion, when an old orientation has been lost and a new one is needed. So in the continuation of this chapter we see that Zarathustra appears in the moment when something has happened which made his presence necessary, and Nietzsche calls that the death of God; when God dies, man needs a new orientation. In that moment the father of all prophets, the old wise man, ought to appear to give a new revelation, to give birth to a new truth. That is what Nietzsche meant Zarathustra to be. The whole book is an extraordinary experience of that phenomenon, a sort of enthusiastic experience surrounded by all the paraphernalia, one could say, of true revelation. It would be quite wrong to assume that Nietzsche invented such a particular artifice in order to make an impression, for the sake of aesthetic effect or anything like that; it was an event which overcame him—he was overcome by that archetypal situation.” (NZ, p. 21 and p. 24)
37:21 - “And the language he puts into the mouth of Zarathustra—or which he allows him to pick out of himself—is of course inflated and therefore in many places much too big. Then, there is another reason why the language is so exaggerated. Do you know under what conditions that happens?—the condition in which you do things in a complicated way as if there were no simple way?” (NZ, p. 28)
“[C]ertain passages in Zarathustra are of supreme beauty, but others are in very bad taste, and the effect of the whole is somewhat endangered by that style.” (NZ, p. 30)
37:26 - “I want to know more . . ." (NZ, pp. 31-32)
37:46 - “The self is in it. That is the reason . . ." (NZ, p. 32)
39:30 - “[I]t all comes from the fact that we have no anima in Zarathustra. Only very near the end anima figures appear in the erotic poem “Unter Töchtern der Wüste.” [Among Daughters of the Desert”] We have here the most perverse phenomenon, the wise old man appearing as identical with Nietzsche himself without the anima. So it is quite unavoidable that Zarathustra sometimes shows symptoms of being the dancer, the anima. It takes the whole development of Zarathustra to call Nietzsche’s attention to the fact that there is an anima.” (NZ, p. 533)
41:12 - On furious tunes being played until Nietzsche’s fingernails bled. This is an interesting prefiguration of the later furious books he would write, especially given Zarathustra’s advice to “Write with blood.” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, VII: Reading and Writing)
“That is the way he dealt with friends, he was absolutely unable to adapt to people, and when they did not understand him right on the moment, he had no patience whatever. He was also exceedingly impatient with himself. He was terribly, recklessly impulsive. He liked to be invited to certain social gatherings, but if there was a piano, he played madly; he went at it till his finger nails bled. That is no exaggeration, it is a fact. On his other side, he was quite funny. In Basel it appealed to his fantasy to appear in society as an elegant Englishman. In those days Englishmen were considered the summit of everything marvelous, and they then used to wear grey gloves and grey top hats; so Nietzsche went about in a grey redingote, a grey top hat, and grey gloves, and thought he looked like an Englishman. And with that moustache!” (NZ, p. 17)
41:53 - “A man who teaches must at times grow noisy. In fact, he may have to scream and scream, although his aim is to make his students learn so quiet a thing as thinking. Nietzsche, most quiet and shiest of men, knew of this necessity. He endured the agony of having to scream.” (Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?, pp. 48-49)
Part Four: The Death of God (43:08)
43:15 - "Have you not heard of that madman . . ." (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science)
47:19 - “That night ΦΙΛΗΜΩΝ stood beside me and the dead drew near and lined the walls and cried out, “We want to know about God. Where is God? Is God dead?” But ΦΙΛΗΜΩΝ rose and said (and this is the second sermon to the dead): “God is not dead. He is as alive as ever.”” (Carl Jung, The Red Book, Scrutinies)
48:25 - “As for death among such beings, I have heard. . . ." (Plutarch, De Defectu Oraculorum)
51:20 - “Mrs. Baumann: It corresponds with the death of Pan two thousand years before.
Dr. Jung: Exactly. One reads in old Latin literature that two thousand years ago, the captain of a boat sailing from the Grecian islands to Ostia, the harbour of Rome, demanded an immediate interview with the emperor in order to report a most remarkable event which had taken place when he was sailing through the Archipelago. He had passed in the night an island where there was an extraordinary noise; he heard people shouting: Pan megistos ethneken, Pan the greatest is dead. Pan was the philosophic god of those days. Originally, he had been a Latin local god of the fields and the woods, a sort of midday demon with no philosophical or universal importance whatever. Only later, when they learned Greek, did they see that the name of the old Latin god, Pan, was the same as the Greek word pan, which means “all,” the universe. So they had new ideas about their old Pan; he became the god of the world. Then about the second century A. D., rumor spread that Pan the greatest was dead, Christianity had prevailed against him-the last conception of a nature god created by antiquity. And when the god is dead, it means the end of an epoch; therefore, the great emphasis laid upon that story.” (NZ, pp. 36-37)
53:53 - “Mrs. Crowley: I have thought a great deal about the meeting of these two wise men. It seemed to me to be the exposition of the whole problem at the beginning of Zarathustra. And I wondered whether one could explain it in another way besides the historical one, that Zarathustra is the representative of the dying and resurrecting God. The old wise man would be the spirit of nature, in the eternal, timeless sense, whereas Zarathustra would represent consciousness as a transforming reality. Then I thought it was an important point that he speaks of the imperfection of man, which suggests the idea that the spiritual values come and go, but man, as the animal, inherits that element which is eternal, his instinctive nature.
Dr. Jung: Yes, you are quite right. The old wise man in the woods and the old wise man in Zarathustra are one and the same thing.” (NZ, p. 44)
For more on the Death of God, refer to NZ, p. 38 ff.
Part Five: The Übermensch (57:40)
1:10:08 - On self-knowledge as escapism. Self-knowledge can turn into escapism, like everything can. People can turn anything into what is called a provisional life, a type of life that appears busy but is a sophisticated avoidance of what matters in the here and now. Dealings related to the unconscious are no exception to this problem. One can be bustling with ideas, aspirations, and claiming to be “doing the work” yet somehow never be there for the things that require immediate attention.
1:12:46 - “A coming attitude, a new spirit, should fill the human form and make over our hitherto prevailing world and culture. In Nietzsche’s mind, the Superman is a new type of man with such an attitude.” (NZ, p. 90)
For more commentary on the other “I love him” sentences, refer to NZ, pp. 83-90.
Part Six: The Last Man (1:13:11)
1:18:25 - “Lightning signifies a sudden, unexpected, and overpowering change of psychic condition.” (Carl Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, CW 9i, par 533)
1:19:46 - “[Dr. Jung:] The trouble is that he has to create the Superman. His first word is: I teach you the Superman, not realizing that he has to give birth to a Superman, that he is confronted with the task of creating the Superman. And what is the best proof that he does not realize it?
Miss Hannah: That he preaches it.
Dr. Jung: Yes, if he realized what a task he was confronted with, he would not teach it; he would keep it all to himself. You see, when one preaches such things, one practically says you ought to do it, but I am all right. But whether you realize it or not, you are confronted with an impossibly difficult task, perhaps really impossible, for who is courageous or bold or mad enough to suggest that he is capable of creating himself beyond himself, to assume that he is the carrier of a divine activity? That is too big.” (NZ, p. 55)
1:21:37 - “Then at the end of the chapter he says: “And now do they look at me and laugh: and while they laugh they hate me too. There is ice in their laughter.” That shows his attitude. He feels a tremendous split between himself and the collective man. You see, he no longer talks of the lightning. He realizes that there is a great split, and that he looks to them like a “mocker with terrible jests.” They take what he says as something comical, a sort of cruel mockery. The chapter ends with the recognition of an almost incurable difference between himself and the collective man of his time. Now, that is of course a critical moment. Here he simply gives up hoping to reach them by the lightning, that the lightning could kindle fire in them. He says that he feels them to be cold like ice. There is no warmth, no connection, nothing that would bridge the gulf. That is the key word of the situation, and in that moment the rope-dancer begins; in that moment the rope-dancer is bridging the gulf, going from one side over to the other on the thin and dangerous rope.” (NZ, p. 109)
1:22:52 - “Now, Nietzsche speaks here of the last man who is not able to individuate, who has no chaos in himself and therefore no motive to give birth to a star. That would be the man who is completely exhausted, who is absolutely satisfied, and who doesn’t know of any further evolution.” (NZ, p. 108)
1:23:31 - “For in a letter of 4 October 1888, Nietzsche told Malwida von Meysenburg (1816-1903) that the “first book of my Revaluation of All Values”—by which he means the work known as The Antichrist—”is finished,” describing it as the “great philosophical event of all times, with which the hisotry of humankind will be broken in two halves ...” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Briefe: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, vol 8, 447)” [found in Paul Bishop, Jung and the Epic of Transformation Volume 3, pp. 10-11]
1:28:23 - “Nietzsche was the very reverse of a pessimistic thinker, or as Ledure puts it: “The fullness which manifests a joy in the future works by destruction and annihilation, by the appropriation of contradiction and war (in the sense that Heraclitus talks about it). It is the joy of destruction, Nietzsche affirms. This constant delight in becoming that involves the destruction of the present defines the tragic dimension of life and the human condition; its symbol is Dionysos” (Yves Ledure, Lectures «chrétiennes» de Nietzsche, p. 140).” [Paul Bishop, Nietzsche’s Writing Against Religion and the Crisis of Faith, p. 75]
1:29:10 - On grieving a religious epoch. A previous attempt of mine: Grieving the Father, https://dreamsanctuary.net/grieving-the-father/
1:30:02 - On idols and collectivism. When the transcendental fractures, it creates a multitude of competing tribes, each carrying a piece of transpersonal value. Without a unifying principle, we are left with -isms, capitalism, socialism, communism, Nazism, ... Despite their secular status, these collective identities behave like substitute religions: they arouse a religious fervour in their proponents and you’ll find them constantly at war with each other. See Edward Edinger’s Ego and Archetype, Figure 6-7.
1:31:12 - “You see, the man Nietzsche himself did not realize, when he said God was dead, that it meant that he would get into the mill, into the alchemical pot where he is cooked and transformed.” (NZ, p. 54)
1:31:23 - “[I]n that moment the rope-dancer begins; in that moment the rope-dancer is bridging the gulf, going from one side over to the other on the thin and dangerous rope. For the speech now ceases and the symbolic action begins. And the action will show what it means to Nietzsche to establish a connection between the Superman and the collective man-in other words, what individuation means.” (NZ, p. 109)
Part Seven: The Rope-dancer (1:31:27)
1:34:22 - “How do you understand the fact that the rope-dancer has begun his task while Zarathustra was still talking about the most contemptible of men? That is a bit of psychological causality. We must think of the whole procedure here as a process in one person. . . .
Yes, the sermon is getting thin, one almost feels it. First of all he doesn’t reach his audience; then, what he says is pretty thin because it is unjust. He really curses the man on whom he lives, the ordinary man. He lives on health for instance, and he is making just that thing in himself most contemptible. . . And then whatever one says is thin and ordinary, as if it had been emptied of libido. There is no power in it, or there is only willpower, that miserably small amount of disposable libido which constitutes the so-called willpower of man. It is as if pressed out of him by a concentrated effort of will, but it is not supported by the instinctive truth, by the deeper layers of his personality. They then begin to proceed by themselves, to become automatic; they appear in the ropedancer in an activity which is no longer Zarathustra’s activity. But the rope-dancer is also in a way Zarathustra himself. That does not mean Zarathustra as he is here in the book, where everything is split up into different figures, but it is a drame intérieur of the author himself. While he is talking in the form of Zarathustra, somebody else is going to work in the form of the rope-dancer.” (NZ, pp. 111-112)
1:34:40 - “Dr. Jung: Yes. You see the idea of bridging a gap is most characteristic for this affair of the Superman. And then, as Mrs. Crowley points out, the necessity of keeping the balance between the two sides.
Mrs. Bailward: Is it the balance between the opposites?
Dr. Jung: Exactly, it is the crossing from one condition to another, which is a symbol of the pairs of opposites, and the way by which one gets to the Superman. And the opposites are connected by the transcendent function; that is beautifully demonstrated by the rope stretched between the two towers. Of course, that the whole thing is in the air is characteristic too.
Mrs. Crowley: I think there is another reason for the symbol. Nietzsche is always referring to the bridge without a goal, and this is just a bridge: there is no goal.
Dr. Jung: Yes, he says man is a bridge between two banks. So the picture is very much to the point in every respect.” (NZ, pp. 117)
1:38:57 - On Zarathustra being dead. Paul S. Loeb has argued in his book, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, that Thus Spoke Zarathustra is constructed around the death of its protagonist, leading to the discovery of the eternal recurrence.
1:39:46 - “[T]he unconscious is also the land of the dead. . ." (Carl Jung and Aniela Jaffé, Jung’s Life and Work, pp. 251-252)
1:43:56 - “If a person has committed a deed consciously, the punishment reaches him externally. If he did it unconsciously and is unconscious of the moral consequences, the punishment reaches him all the same. For the unconscious knows everything. One must not deceive oneself about this. Even the animals and the plants know this. Whether a crime has been committed consciously or unconsciously is important for the civil circumstances—but not in and of itself.” (Carl Jung and Aniela Jaffé, Jung’s Life and Work, p. 382)
Part Eight: The Buffoon (1:44:23)
1:46:02 - “Now, here is a question by Miss Hannah: “When Zarathustra, in the last paragraph of section 9, says ‘I will o’erleap them that loiter and delay,’ is he not identifying with the jester and giving away again the whole positive meaning of the chapter?”
He is most certainly identifying with the jester there ; as Zarathustra, he is also the jester. You remember we made that out in our famous equation. He is the jester and he is destructive inasmuch as he is going to jump over the man Nietzsche, for that loitering one is the body he has buried.” (NZ, p. 204)
1:47:04 - “The so-called civilized man has forgotten the trickster. . .” (Carl Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, CW 9i, par 478)
1:48:58 - “Then when you have arrived at such a conclusion, you naturally begin to realize all the things that humanity in former ages used to think, that the god is very dangerous, exceedingly sensitive, most susceptible to any kind of offence.(I don’t speak of the Christian God now, but the god generally.) You must tread very warily in order not to disturb his peace, and you cannot cheat him; you must fulfil his laws, you have to observe all the necessary rites, you must be very ceremonious in the presence of god because he could take a terrible revenge. And it is a psychological fact that the self, the whole of man, is an exceedingly dangerous proposition. Every single individual believes in his own absolute importance, in spite of his weaknesses, his dullness, his unimportance; and we forget that through each human being that universal being is working and can produce the most horrible results. We should learn fear again. We suffer from fear in all sorts of phobias, but the reason that so many people suffer from phobias is because their fear is not in the right place. In the Old Testament, the very first principle is the fear of God. It has been overcompensated in the New Testament by the idea that God is love and one should not be afraid of him. But God is the one and the other. The New Testament is just a compensation for the terrible truth of the Old Testament that in the beginning was the fear of God. If you arrive at the idea that he is also benevolent, it is a sort of secondary experience. Naturally, it depends upon our attitude. We can assume, for instance, that if we fulfil the demands of the terrible god ; we don’t need to be afraid of him any longer; then he will give us his grace, he will be kind to us. Or we can assume just as well that God is a kind father provided we fulfil what he in his terrible form has demanded of us.
Now this whole aspect is lacking in Zarathustra because his god is dead. And then god appears in the place where one would expect him the least, and that is in the shadow.” (NZ, pp. 127-128)
1:49:52 - “[A]nd the buffoon is the part of the shadow that holds divine power, the power over death and life. If he chooses to jump over Zarathustra, he will do so and Zarathustra will be killed in no time, just in order to show Nietzsche himself that he is dealing here with a power as great as any god’s power.” (NZ, p. 128)
1:51:08 - “So the demoniacal power of this buffoon is due to the fact that, being with the shadow, it is activated by the superior power of the wholeness of the self.” (NZ, p. 124)
Part Nine: The Death of the Rope-dancer (1:51:12)
1:53:34 - “This is the classical passage in Zarathustra, the prophecy, the unmistakable anticipation of the final catastrophe, his madness, where his mind or his soul was dead long before his body. And during his madness he was utterly gone-there was absolutely no connection with him.” (NZ, p. 136)
1:54:35 - “[Dr. Jung: The] jester is equal to the shadow of Nietzsche himself, because Nietzsche himself is equal to the rope-dancer; and the shadow of the rope-dancer is equal to the jester. But the jester is equal to the shadow of Zarathustra, the conclusion we reached here (c) . Therefore, the end of our argument and at the same time the conclusion of the whole soreites is what?
Mrs. Baumann: Zarathustra is Nietzsche, or Nietzsche is Zarathustra.
Dr. Jung: Exactly. Nietzsche the man is equal to Zarathustra. Voila! That is black magic. We can write at the end q.e.d. You see, it means that this whole complication starts from the fact that Nietzsche is identical with Zarathustra, and it would not exist if that were not so. To put the thing in this form helps to keep the picture in mind; one needs such a complicated, magical argument. It is like higher mathematics. One cannot express certain functions or connections or conditions unless one makes a pretty difficult calculus: it is necessary in order to hold the whole argument together. One gets into these complications as soon as there is such an identity; the root of the whole thing is that Nietzsche is equal to Zarathustra, so the two figures are mixed together. Therefore all the trouble, the whole tragedy. And one can only clear up the peculiar interchangeable aspects of the figures in some such way.” (NZ, pp. 131-132)
1:55:03 - On the subjective level of dream interpretation. In some rare cases, the approach of “everything is the individual” is lacking because the unconscious also has an impersonal dimension. There are aspect that do not belong to the personal unconscious but to the collective unconscious.
1:56:30 - “I often have the feeling and I have experienced it: the dead stand directly behind us and are waiting to see what sort of answer we will give them and how we will respond to life.” (Carl Jung and Aniela Jaffé, Jung’s Life and Work, p. 252)
Part Ten: The Danger of Archetypes (2:03:10)
2:04:53 - “People would not see the archetype which Zarathustra represents, the archetype of the wise old man. Inasmuch as this archetype was obvious to them at all, it appeared only as a jester or a corpse, a being which would either make a man insane or kill him.” (NZ, p. 150)
2:05:28 - “Verily, a fine catch of fish hath Zarathustra made today! It is not a man he hath caught, but a corpse.” We must pay attention to this sentence. It is important, because later on comes the realization that he needs other people just because he has not caught a man. He realizes that he ought to have other people instead of that corpse. You see, if the corpse is himself, then he is dead really, and he has to replace himself by the other people he catches-or one could almost say, by other corpses. They must be, then, instead of himself; he hands over to others his human life which he should have lived. Therefore, he says that human existence is uncanny and without a meaning.” (NZ, p. 150)
2:05:53 - “[T]he rope-dancer is the human form of Zarathustra, Nietzsche himself as the human being. It is just that which explains why he cannot leave the corpse; he has to remain with it, to make the corpse his companion. Now, this is a pretty gruesome spectacle, I should say: that Nietzsche the man should be in any sense the corpse that accompanies Zarathustra, the corpse that is carried by him. This is in fact the gloomy aspect of Zarathustra, a cloud hanging over the whole book-Nietzsche being dragged along by that figure of Zarathustra-and it comes to the daylight here for the first time.” (NZ, p. 150)
2:06:43 - “You see, we could almost expect that Zarathustra, having watched the catastrophe of the rope-dancer, would be rather disinterested, because it would seem to have really happened outside of himself. He might philosophize about it but there would be no close or intimate connection between the rope-dancer and himself, unless it was the very near connection which we established in the former Seminar—namely, that the rope-dancer is the human form of Zarathustra, Nietzsche himself as the human being. It is just that which explains why he cannot leave the corpse; he has to remain with it, to make the corpse his companion.” (NZ, pp. 149-150)
Part Eleven: The Heavy Burden (2:07:17)
2:09:27 - “In the Mithraic mysteries, the cult-hero has to fight the bull; in the “transitus” he carries it into the cave, where he kills it. From its death comes all fruitfulness, especially things to eat. The cave is the equivalent of the grave. The same idea is expressed in the Christian mystery, but in a more beautiful and humane form. The struggle in Christ’s soul in Gethsemane, where he wrestles with himself in order to complete his work; then the “transitus,” the carrying of the cross, when he takes on his shoulders the symbol of the deadly mother and in so doing carries himself to the grave, from which he will rise again after three days[.]” (Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation, CW 5, par 526)
2:09:43 - “Miss Wolff: The bull which is killed by Mithras is a god, apparently a chthonic god. After he is sacrificed by Mithras, the world is created out of his various organs. The corn, the vine, and all the animals spring from them, and his soul becomes a celestial shepherd. And Christ is a god. He is the incarnation of god in human form, and he dies as a god. But with Nietzsche, Zarathustra is a sort of god, but he is not sacrificed, and he merely carries a corpse, the corpse of a very inferior man. So here the god remains alive, there is no sacrifice. Only the corpse of Nietzsche’s shadow, his own collective human side, is sacrificed, necessarily inferior because all values are concentrated on the superhuman aspect.
Dr. Jung: Exactly. The difference is that Christ carries the cross to his own execution. The cross is the instrument by which he will be killed. He will be killed by man and the god is sacrificed, while Zarathustra is carrying the body in order to bury it, merely.” (NZ, p. 159)
2:10:16 - “The archetype has its life in this world of consciousness through the fact that it appears in a living body, so the living body carries the archetype of the wise old man. But here it is represented as if the archetype were carrying the man, which is of course true inasmuch as an archetype is greater in size than the ego complex and therefore able to swallow it. And when the ego complex disappears in the archetype, man is the victim. He is injured, that is; his life is taken from him by the archetype of the wise old man. Now, if you take that as the symbol of a mystery cult, like those in antiquity, it would express the fact that man was sacrificed to an archetypal idea, or an archetypal spirit-which is true-and it would be at the same time a sort of admonition to the believers of that cult, as the killing of the bull, for instance, is an admonition to the believers of Mithraism. It meant: that is you; you ought to kill your own bull as Mithras the god overcomes himself in his animal aspect. Or as Christ is imitated in the Christian mystery. He goes to his own sacrifice carrying his humanity, dragging his humanity along to that divine sacrifice. And that is of course very interesting, and quite different from the Mithras or Attis idea. So here again we can say this is a sort of admonition: Let the Superman carry the ordinary man as if man were a corpse. You see, there is absolutely nothing of the Christian idea that the god is proceeding to his own self-sacrifice. Zarathustra is not going to sacrifice himself at all; he is going to live on. He is only going to bury the man, thinking that he is thus overcoming the thing which has been so reluctant, heavy, unwilling, too clumsy, too conservative.” (NZ, p. 161)
2:11:28 - “[Miss Wolff:] lt means to say that the way Zarathustra has just proclaimed of how to become the Superman is an unreal one. It is acrobatic, a sort of circus-stunt. It is a dangerous unreality, and therefore a catastrophe is bound to happen.
Dr. Jung: Quite. So it would be a symbolic demonstration of Zarathustra’s psychology; it is performed as a sort of symbol before the crowd. Under ordinary circumstances that rope-dancer would have gone across as he has often done, and it is merely that Zarathustra has made his appearance in the place this disaster happens. He is interfering with the rope-dancer by his presence.” (NZ, p. 114)
2:12:26 - “If Zarathustra remained in the town, that is, he would make such a fool of himself that he would be insane himself.
Now, is that really good advice? You see, I would say that if Zarathustra remained in the town, he would remain in collectivity, in human society. He might be found and killed, but also he might be able to convince people of his wisdom, and if he leaves the town he won’t be able to do so. At all events, Zarathustra remaining in the town would be forced to be conscious of his ordinary human existence, because those other people would reach him by his humanity, by the body, the corpse. And then he would soon be aware that he was not a man, that he was merely a fantasy or an archetypal image and not a reality.” (NZ, p. 164)
Part Twelve: The Grave-diggers (2:12:29)
2:14:16 - “They say first that the corpse he is carrying would be too unclean for their hands. That is an immense depreciation of the body. This carrion is only good for hell; it is what the devil would eat; and as the devil is the principle of utter destruction, this morsel is only good for utter destruction.” (NZ, p. 169)
2:14:58 - “For it is perfectly obvious that if Zarathustra succeeds, he will eat the body. You see, that is what we said before: he has overcome the body. But it is a sort of anthropophagous act: he becomes a carrion eater, like a sarcophagus. (The name of a coffin means the eater of flesh.) He becomes the sarcophagus of Mr. Nietzsche.” (NZ, p. 170)
Part Thirteen: Communion (2:15:00)
2:16:01- “[I]n the allusion made by the grave-diggers it first touches Zarathustra; then in the form of hunger it really comes to him. He says, rightly, that it overtakes him ; it has been behind his consciousness and then it catches him—suddenly he is made to realize that he feels very hungry. Also, it is anticipated when still unconscious in the hungry howling of the wolves.” (NZ, p. 168)
2:18:31 - For a psychological explanation of the blood of Christ, see Edward Edinger’s Ego and Archetype, Part III, The Blood of Christ.
Part Fourteen: The Burial (2:19:00)
2:20:19 - “Mrs. Baumann: Is that not contradicted by the next sentence? He wanted to protect it from the wolves.
Dr. Jung: But the wolves are the hunger. Those are the robbers and the robber is in himself in order that he, Zarathustra, can no longer eat the body. You see, Zarathustra is almost afraid of his own craving for a body.” (NZ, p. 179)
2:20:47 - “The tree first gives birth to man, and then it is the sarcophagus, as the earth is the mother that gives birth in the dawn of humanity-and in the evening is the sarcophaga: she eats the dead. . . The burial in the tree, then, has also the positive meaning of preservation of the body for a later rebirth.” (NZ, p. 190)
2:21:50 - “Carrying the burden is a motif from the mystery cults. It is called the transitus, which means going from one place to another, and at the same time bearing something; that of course is not expressed in the word transitus itself.” (NZ, p. 1397)
2:25:04 - “So this whole ninth chapter shows again the transformation of a human being into a thought, the transformation of Nietzsche into Zarathustra and the burial of Nietzsche the man. . . . [H]ere he becomes a ghost-being.” (NZ, p. 198)
2:26:16 - On Zarathustra not looking for imitators. It can be argued that the real purpose of imitating Christ was not to copy his life but rather to live one’s life with the same intensity as he did. Thus, to “imitate Christ” means to carry one’s cross as he did. It is to carry one’s individual task, under the necessity of wholeness.
“There is only a real problem when the problem comes to yourself-that you carry your own life. Christ really meant that each one should take his own cross, live his life to the bitter end. That is initiation. That is the way, not to perfection-we can’t be so ambitious-but to completion at least. And that is what Zarathustra meant: it is the kernel of his teaching. No matter about all sorts of pathological complications, this is the important message to our time. And mind you, the important message is never new; it has always been the truth wherever you touched it, and therefore you can say it is the oldest truth.” (NZ, pp. 200-201)
This is an old truth that is so frequently misunderstood that it must be periodically be reframed in a different way. See for instance the Prologue of The Red Book for the same idea:
“Woe betide those who live by way of examples! Life is not with them. If you live according to an example, you thus live the life of that example, but who should live your own life if not yourself? So live yourselves.” (Carl Jung, The Red Book, The Way of What Is to Come)
2:26:56 - “[Dr. Jung:] This is not well translated in the English text, but you get it in the German. Einsiedler is one man alone, the one-dweller, literally; and Zweisiedler are the two-dwellers. But that is not a real word, it is something funny in his style ; and that always indicates a secret thought behind, which did not come through properly. It is like queer things in dreams; a peculiarity or a disturbance of the image betrays the interference of a secret thought behind. You see, it would be enough if he said: “I am preaching to the lonely ones. They shall be my companions, for the lonely ones can appreciate my teaching. They are not satisfied and are seeking the Superman together with myself; as they are lonely, I am lonely, etc.” That would make a perfectly nice end to this chapter. But no, it must be: “Zwei-siedler”; there are couples apparently, two alone together. Of course one can have a romantic idea about it-he and she-but that is surely not what Nietzsche is thinking of. It must be two lonely people together. Now why the one and the two?
Mr. Baumann: Is it like Nietzsche and Zarathustra, the splitting up of one person?
Dr. Jung: No, there is a great problem behind. One alone would be good enough for Zarathustra, the lonely one, the anchorite; two is already society, a relationship. When I am one I am this man; when I am two I am another man. As soon as you are with somebody else you are different, you are the collective man. So he makes here the attempt at preaching to the collective man, the thing which he had just refused to do. He said he never would speak to the herd again. But here two of the herd come in; he cannot get away from it.” (NZ, pp. 216-217)
Part Fifteen: The Eagle and The Snake (2:27:00)
2:30:15 - “For instance, when Ganymede, the messenger of Zeus, is lifted up by the eagle to Olympian heights, it is the genius and enthusiasm of youth that seize him and carry him up to the heights of the gods. So one could say it was a spiritual, uplifting power.” (NZ, p. 18)
2:30:37 - “So whenever life means business, when things are getting serious, you are likely to find a saurian on the way. Or when vital contents are to appear from the unconscious, vital thoughts or impulses, you will dream of such animals.” (Carl Jung, Dream Analysis: Notes of the seminar given in 1928-1930, Lecture V)
2:32:34 - “[T]he snake is the representative of the world of instinct, especially of those vital processes which are psychologically the least accessible of all. Snake dreams always indicate a discrepancy between the attitude of the conscious mind and instinct, the snake being a personification of the threatening aspect of that conflict.” (Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation, CW 5, par 615)
2:32:44 - “The serpent symbolizes the mysterious numen of the “mother” (and of other daimonia) who kills, but who is at the same time man’s only security against death, as she is the source of life. Accordingly, only the mother can cure him who is sick unto death[.]” (ibid., par 452)
2:32:56 - “Just as Aion represents the libido in the “embrace” or state of death and rebirth, so here the cradle of the horse is the sea, i.e., the libido is in the “mother,” dying and rising again in the unconscious.” (ibid., par 426)
2:34:43 - In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche exclaims, “The fortunateness of my existence, its uniqueness perhaps, lies in its fatality: to express it in the form of a riddle, as my father I have already died, as my mother I still live and grow old.” This observation can be explained by way of the eagle-father, a spiritual revelation that has failed to prove its truth, and of the serpent-mother, the abundance of chthonic symbols that completes it and whose meaning will be revealed in the centuries to come.
Conclusion (2:37:12)
2:37:35 - On the end of the Prologue. For those who want more, there are still 1300 pages left in Jung’s Seminar on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra!
2:38:07 - “You say, “Now my argument was this: Nietzsche as a man disappears from the picture, we said, with the burial of the body, and that leaves us with Zarathustra, a disembodied spirit. He goes to sleep at the foot of the tree and awakens in the world of the collective unconscious. The sun would then be the midnight sun and the snake and eagle cease to represent instincts, and are symbols of earth and heaven, or nature and spirit, or Yin and Yang. The rest of the book would then be a record of a night journey under the sea. I can now see that this is an incorrect view because Zarathustra is attempting to present new values to humanity and a night sea journey would not deal with values, but experience of the inner world.”
That is exactly the case. Thus Spake Zarathustra is not a series of experiences of the inner world; there are very few of those. The book mainly consists of the thoughts and values Nietzsche develops from them, the experiences themselves being left pretty much in the dark. We don’t know exactly what he experieced, because he translated it right away into thoughts and values. Now, if it were a night sea journey—if Zarathustra were really a disembodied spirit, in other words—then a quite different book would have resulted. If it had been written at all, it would have contained that experience under the sea. But as a matter of fact, Zarathustra is not a night sea journey. It is written by a man, Nietzsche. Zarathustra is just not a disembodied spirit. If he were, Nietzsche would be confronted with Zarathustra, but he is identical with him; and that of course causes the whole trouble. Nietzsche speaks, yet Zarathustra speaks through the medium of Nietzsche; they are not clearly separated. You probably have read in my books, in “The Relations between the Ego and Unconscious” for instance, that one should make a difference between the conscious ego and the figures of the collective unconscious. If the archetype of the wise old man appears, then naturally the ego is just caught—one is always caught by unconscious contents. Then you find yourself in a peculiar alienated condition; you see things and say things and feel things as you wouldn’t before.” (NZ, pp. 219-220)
2:39:33 - “There were dangerous experiences; for those visions—that is also the material that destroys people. My earliest experience in this regard was Nietzsche. I saw this with him, how a man is destroyed by the plenitude. There is a fullness of power and of imaginative possibility contained in those images.” (Carl Jung and Aniela Jaffé, Jung’s Life and Works, p. 152)
2:39:50 - “I trust, dear Sir, that you will give this matter your kind consideration. It is something of supreme importance. For I am powerful enough to break the history of humanity into two parts.” (Herman Scheffauer, A Correspondence between Nietzsche and Strindberg)
2:40:02 - [He:] “Nietzsche, for example, has written a more than veritable book of prayer, not to mention Faust.”
[I:] “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.”
[He:] “Forgive me, but Nietzsche interiorizes man exceptionally well.”
[I:] “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.”
[He:] “But Nietzsche confers a precious feeling of superiority upon such people.”
[I:] “I can’t dispute that, but I know men who need inferiority, not superiority.” (Carl Jung, The Red Book, Chapter XIV: Divine Folly 98)
2:40:21 - “[Nietzsche] felt that he was called to mend a damage done in the remote past of mankind.
Of course such a feeling is most uplifting to an individual; no wonder then that Zarathustra was the Dionysian experience par excellence. In the latter part, that Dionysian ekstasis comes in.” (NZ, p. 18)
2:40:48 - “I knew from the very beginning that one would never be able to do that in the form as it was expressed in the fantasies. That sounds like prophecy and that I’m extremely averse to that. It’s the raw material that just flows out. But the whole person is simply not in that. For that reason, one must not overestimate the unconscious. For example, Nietzsche felt himself to be a whole person in his Zarathustra; he did not see beyond it. But I have always taken a critical stance towards it. I am, after all, not a poet-philosopher like Nietzsche who believes in his involuntary creation. I have always said: It is being spoken in this way, but it is not I who speaks. I only hear it, and I experience it as deplorably impoverished. I was simply pulled down into this stream, and I felt as if I were in it. But at the same time, I always preserved my capacity to critique it.” (Carl Jung and Aniela Jaffé, Jung’s Life and Works, pp. 176-177)
2:41:11 - “His identity with the north wind is of course the identity with Wotan, and that phenomenon is preparatory to bringing out whatever is ready, whatever is already mature. Wotan is a phenomenon like Dionysos who is also a god of vegetation; it means a sort of enthusiastic or ecstatic condition in which those things which are already in the unconscious reach the daylight.” (NZ, pp. 903-904)
2:41:33 - “Now this shrieking here, this whistling and whizzing, is the cry from the lunatic asylum. It is Wotan who gets him, the old wind god breaking forth, the god of inspiration, of madness, intoxication and wildness, the god of the Berserkers, those wild people who run amok. It is, of course, the shrieking and whistling of the wind in a storm in a nocturnal wood, the unconscious. It is the unconscious itself that breaks forth. This is very beautifully described here: doors fly open and out bursts that wind, bringing a thousand laughters.” (NZ, p. 1227)
See also Edinger’s review of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939.
Music and Soundscapes
03:55 - R. Strauss: Also sprach Zarathustra, Op. 30: I. Prelude. Sonnenaufgang, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RBnEhUtkCA
07:30 - Carl Gustav Jung - The Way of What is to Come, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh1LKZpjb7A
21:55 - Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra "There Is A Light" (from Kollaps Tradixionales)
53:55 - Black Swan "Dying Gods (Suite)" (from Aeterna)
1:23:33 - Anathema "The Storm Before The Calm" (from Weather Systems)
1:57:20 - The Smiths "I Know It’s Over" (from The Queen is Dead)
2:34:44 - Jeroen van Veen "Heldenklage, NWV 2" (from Nietzsche: Complete Piano Music), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gpLb4riY-Y
All use of audio under Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
