Backworldsmen

Once on a time, Zarathustra also cast his fancy beyond man, like all backworldsmen. The work of a suffering and tortured God did the world then seem to me.

The dream — and diction — of a God did the world then seem to me; coloured vapours before the eyes of a divinely dissatisfied one.

Good and evil, and joy and woe, and I and thou — coloured vapours did they seem to me before creative eyes. The creator wished to look away from himself — thereupon he created the world.

Intoxicating joy is it for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and forget himself. Intoxicating joy and self-forgetting did the world once seem to me.

This world, the eternally imperfect, an eternal contradiction’s image and imperfect image — an intoxicating joy to its imperfect creator: thus did the world once seem to me.

Thus, once on a time, did I also cast my fancy beyond man, like all backworldsmen. Beyond man, forsooth?

Ah, ye brethren, that God whom I created was human work and human madness, like all the Gods!

A man was he, and only a poor fragment of a man and ego. Out of mine own ashes and glow it came unto me, that phantom. And verily, it came not unto me from the beyond!

What happened, my brethren? I surpassed myself, the suffering one; I carried mine own ashes to the mountain; a brighter flame I contrived for myself. And lo, thereupon the phantom withdrew from me!

To me the convalescent would it now be suffering and torment to believe in such phantoms; suffering would it now be to me, and humiliation. Thus speak I to backworldsmen.

Suffering was it, and impotence, that created all backworlds; and the short madness of happiness, which only the greatest sufferer experienceth.

Weariness, which seeketh to get to the ultimate with one leap, with a death-leap; a poor ignorant weariness, unwilling even to will any longer, that created all Gods and backworlds.

Believe me, my brethren! It was the body which despaired of the body — it groped with the fingers of the infatuated spirit at the ultimate walls.

Believe me, my brethren! It was the body which despaired of the earth — it heard the bowels of existence speaking unto it.

And then it sought to get through the ultimate walls with its head — and not with its head only — into ‘the other world’.

But that ‘other world’ is well concealed from man, that dehumanised, inhuman world which is a celestial naught, and the bowels of existence do not speak unto man, except as man.

Verily, it is difficult to prove all being, and hard to make it speak. Tell me, ye brethren, is not the strangest of all things best proved?

Yea, this ego, with its contradiction and perplexity, speaketh most uprightly of its being — this creating, willing, evaluing ego, which is the measure and value of things.

And this most upright existence, the ego — it speaketh of the body, and still implieth the body, even when it museth and raveth and fluttereth with broken wings.